Is anyone else sick of the anti-NT bias?

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I haven't yet come across any great NT hatred here, but have seen it on other sites, and I agree it is pointless and harmful.

If we as Aspies hope to somehow express ourselves in the world, be understood, raise awareness of ASD, and make the world more accommodating and less disabling to us, what is the point of alienating NTs? We need to work together with them, to try to communicate with them in a way that they understand so that they may learn to understand us and communicate with us in a way that we understand. Barriers need to be broken down, not built up.

I just would like to able to use NT in a post, without automatically being attacked for not saying some NTs, or you're being biased and saying all NTs are like this. Well everyday people talk about people who are are on the Autism Spectrum as if they're all the same.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that you shouldn't try and understand people, just that blanket statements along the lines of "NTs are bad because they all suchsandsuch" are way too general an attack to be accurate.

I see so when someone talks about NTs in a negative way that's an attack. Yet everyday NTs talk about Autistic Spectrum people as if they're nothing more than burdens, that's not an attack?

I'm not suggesting that. For an everyday NT to talk about Autistic Spectrum people that way would of course be an attack, and wrong, of course, it just doesn't mean that reversing it and doing the same thing back has to be a good thing to do.

The NTs I know in my life are not like this. I imagine the majority of NTs don't even think about autistic spectrum disorders. Surely the fact that there are a few ignorant NTs out there doesn't taint the entire lot of them.

Just because there are homophobic straight people doesn't mean that gay people should therefore go round insulting all straight people. Why not just concentrate on the people who are prejudiced?

You know, my dad said to me the other day that I'd better not tell anyone else about my Aspergers because there was a court case where a guy with Aspergers murdered someone. Of course I told my dad that one Aspie murderer doesn't make Aspies as a whole a murderous bunch! Any more than a deaf murderer would make deaf people as a whole a murderous bunch.

Generalisations are really not helpful.

Wow someone around here just doesn't want to give up. Oh and FYI, not ALL people say that those who are under the spectrum are the same. Not all "NT"'s are closed minded and some are actually very nice. But funny enough there are a few of those who are under the spectrum who are just as close minded as many "NT"'s are *hint *hint*

I like what ephemerella said. I also think that a lot of the fighting over this particular topic is the result of people assigning a single motive to the behavior of a group when there is no single motive.

Also, some people seem to disparage any use of the term NT and this presents a problem. How can we even discuss something if the language used to describe it is prohibited?

Well someone around here enjoys stirring up the pot

Is this directed at me?

no.. and I am not naming names but its not you

I agree with you there, I don't think NT is the most accurate term in the world but it's certainly as good a piece of shorthand as any.

Oh, well I agree that it's not constructive to say NTs are bad. I also think it's not constructive to say "these kinds of NTs are good" and "those kinds of NTs are bad". I happen to like blue collar NTs better than white collar NTs, simply because they are more grounded in an objective reality and stand by their word and honor more. But the fact that their ethical behavior system is more transparent to me than the ethical behavior systems of white collar people (read: Wall Street, lawyers, politicians), doesn't make one entitled to say "blue collar people are good, white collar people are bad". Assigning value judgments to types of people is "divisive" talk and very destructive, IMO.

But I haven't seen anyone here do that to NTs. I have seen people do that to AS, tho, here on this board.

I saw one person on this board explain in detail why some AS people are "okay" (he said it was about half) while the others are "idiots with no theory of mind" and "not worth his spit". He had divided up the AS community into the ones who had more NT empathy and the worthless set of those who didn't. I think that is implicitly prejudiced against all AS -- by selecting a subset of AS prominent traits and demonizing them while saying those who weren't all that bad could escape being demonized -- he was implicitly demonizing AS traits (and those who didn't hide them well).

Similarly, in the past, there was a big split in the black community over the word "n****r". From late in the 19th century, "n****r" was used as a synonym for black people, then for black peoples' traits (socioeconomic, mostly, because ex-slaves at that time were poor and often homeless, uneducated and abused). Then, in the 20th century, "n****r" became a word loaded with all the negative traits one could find in the black community (along with any other random negative meanings people would assume it meant). By the mid-to-late 20th century, you had middle class and working lower class blacks trying to separate themselves from the stigma of prejudiced views of black people as all having certain negative traits. A dialog arose where some blacks talked about how there were good, hardworking, honest, and self-loving black people -- and that the ones who were not were "the n****rs". So the word "n****r" then started to be used by blacks and whites to separate the upwardly mobile blacks from the ones mired in ghetto culture and disadvantage. Needless to say, that schizophrenic view, which embraced the legitimacy of the use of the term "n****r" and the notion that it was okay to view a subset of blacks having these demonized, negative traits were contemptible was just a way to compartmentalize and validate toxic prejudice. The blacks who said, "that one is a 'n****r' and that one is not" were using divisive language to separate themselves from being an object of prejudice, while still buying into the whole system of prejudice. Needless to say, part of the backlash in the black community was to embrace the term "n****r" amongst themselves, and worse, to reject those traits that weren't in the loaded meaning of the word "n****r" as being anti-black. So it becomes a departure from one's black identity to study hard in school and get good grades, and be respectful, and so on. The embrace of the term "n****r" implied a rejection of that which it contradicted, and today black children in some neighborhoods can get beaten for working hard in class, getting "A's" and engaging in other behavior antithetical to the "n****r" stereotype.

The whole notion of classifying what AS personality traits are cool to demonstrate (high I.Q., cute funny fixations, happy childlike admiration of NTs) and what are not (resentment at getting bullied, communications mishaps, criticism of the delusions and mad schemes of NTs, stating blunt tactless opinions), to me is similar. We can divide ourselves into those who are good representatives to some narrow happy stereotype and those who are the losers and creepy AS who post incoherent rants, but in doing so, isn't that buying into the whole notion that AS is a demonized, shameful, "loser" thing to have and that those who display stigmatizing traits need to be whipped in line, shut up or repeatedly denounced?

I agree with you that to say "NTs are bad" is silly and wrong. But I've never really heard that here. What I have heard tho, is that AS people who have certain traits are "bad ones" and I think that that buys into the notion that it's not okay be act like a flaming AS. Just like those people who think it's okay to be Gay, so long as you're not one of the flaming Gays (i.e. you hide it well).

So that if you're AS and you're not doing the "I'm-a-happy-altruistic-naive-Wunderkind" dance, you're one of the "bad ones".

When AS people talk about NT traits in a negative way, they are "NT bashing"? You can talk about NT traits as if they are positive and good, or you can talk about NT traits as if they are bad, depending on your world view.

Who gets to decide that the AS fixation on their "special interests" is obsessive and dysfunctional, but the NT fixation on their social status and relationships is not? You can go to their literature and culture and find it full of condemnations of the shallow, superficial Ego-driven life that many people live, always trying to get attention, impress people and show up rivals. Religions and philosophical works and fairy tales are all full of material on how bad that is. But if WE talk about NT socially obsessive behavior, we can't talk about it that way?

We have to refer to it as normal and us as "lacking" and "deficient", even though many of us have a much richer inner life and meaningful relationship with reality than many NTs will ever experience (barring those who seek out convents and monasteries and meditate to try to become more like us?).

If you look at the religious texts, Buddhist teachings and other spiritual training, these are all geared to NTs being more like us -- more contemplative, less obsessed with social image and ego, more honest, more connected to a rich, immediate reality. While they look down on us as being "impaired" and "lower functioning", many of them are unknowingly chasing the rainbow to be like us... to get back to how they were when they were children. and the world filled their senses with colors, sounds, smells and immediate experience. Most of them will never get to experience reality the way that they did as children, the way we do, and they miss that in the shallowness of their social world.

It is okay to talk about aspects of the NT-world as being deluded, as being shallow, as being abusive or exploitive. The NT people who are most like us, their own monks and ascetics and meditators, see them that way too.

No, but they discuss our traits as if they were disabilities.

They aren't disabilities, just different. Being unable to disconnect your attention from something that you love and that fascinates you, can be viewed as an impairment, or it can be viewed as something that is not necessarily bad. How many NTs sit around trying to meditate, to achieve the state of fusion with a thing that we can?

But all the language used to describe AS traits are negative. "Obsessive, narrow fixations" and so on.

They don't explicitly say that we are burdens or bad, but the words used to talk about our traits does pretty much that.

The NT attention focus is easy to move around, yet it is shallow wherever it goes. Our attention focus is hard to move around, and it is deep in our areas of interest. They are two different attention styles.

But if we don't use positive, happy, adoring language to discuss NT traits, we are bashing them. So we can't say that NT's attention is shallow and boring. We have to say that they are normal and that we have "obsessive, narrow fixations".

We have to use positive, admiring language to discuss NT traits, and negative language to discuss ours.

In actuality the shallowness of NTs and the deep fascinations of AS are both nothing more than cognitive traits or behaviors, just two opposite ways of focusing on a subject. The NTs can focus on anything they want at any time they want, but only shallowly. AS can't control their focus ("ADHD") but have these deep, expert fascinations ("Obsessions"). When you call one way of being "normal" and use the language of deviation to describe the other, that language is loaded with value judgments.

What is offending people is not that anyone goes around saying NTs are bad, because I don't think people here have been saying that. I think what offends NTs here -- what they find surprising and uncomfortable -- is when some AS turn that around and use language that depicts their traits as normal and NT traits as pathological.

To continue the above example, that means some AS act as if having "special interests" is normal and fun, and refer to NT (and their attention and focus) as being "shallow and boring", and "like talking to 11 year olds" (e.g. from the thread about how people dump on AS people for knowing things in too much detail). That is what some people are referring to as "NT bashing", some AS using language that treats AS traits as normal and that describes NT traits in ways that step out of the "they're okay-I'm not okay" frame of reference.

Rule: you are always supposed to use negative, clinical language to discuss AS traits and positive, admiring language to refer to NT traits.

It's not nice to pick on someone's semantic pragmatic disorder. It's not hard to figure out what she means and why she would like to be able to use generalized terms as she does. If it's all about not liking how the semantic pragmatic disorder affects discussing NT behavior and traits, that's not something that can be fixed by criticism.