STOP THE SEGREGATION, A CALL TO ARMS

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Why are we talking about whether or not an aspie society can function? Snake hasn't even worked out how he/they are going to cover the cost of the following basic things:

1) an island
2) a large number of homes, and other infrastructure
3) providing the services that we usually take for granted (power, clean water, waste disposal etc)

The whole plan, if it is serious, is childisly naive. It would have to be the dumbest thing I've heard for a very very long time. Nations simply don't spring up as the result of some wild plans produced online.

If they were even half sensible in their planning, they would settle for starting a small community on a farm.

If they were as brave as snake321 claims to be, they would sort out whatever is wrong with their lives, rather then coming up with such escapist fantasies.

I'm starting to think they are serious, and aren't just joking, after I read their plans on AFF.

edit: sorry, I got a little carried away

This is a joke, right?

Honestly, guys, quit making everything black and white. NTs are not bad. Aspies are not necessarily good. Personally, I suspect that I would be miserable on an island full of ALL Aspies. I need people to be around, but my social skills aren't nearly good enough to strike up conversations. Also, outside of people with my particular interests, I would probably be very bored. Frankly, I don't really want to hear about your intense interests, just as I accept that you do not want to listen to me obsess over mine.

Also, I do not think a community of Aspies would necessarily be tolerant of eachothers' idiosyncrasies. I am just as capable, if not more so, as any NT of becoming highly annoyed by someone near me, say, tapping their foot over and over on the floor or waving their hands around or whatever. Moreover, I am not posessed of nearly enough tact to politely tell someone to stop without resorting to threats if they do not comply.

All of that is ignoring the fundemental point that NTs are not the f*****g antichrists. Some of the people on this board really need to sit down, shut up, and understand that stereotyping is just as bad when you do it as it is when it happens to you.

Hmmm, well I think a shrewder choice than an island would be some bombed-out, dead town where real estate is dirt cheap. Iowa, maybe? And then with initial financing we go in and buy a street or two of houses. We would need some kind of income-producing endeavor and be willing to live and share communally. I really don't know if I have it in me to share communally, I need an awful lot of autonomy and privacy, and I hate "working in teams."

I saw a documentary once about monks who own a farm and they produce eggs that are higher quality than average egg farms at a fraction of the cost. We would need something like that.

But as others have pointed out, utopian societies are always doomed to fail, so we shouldn't try to be a utopia.

As far as NTs, I think anyone who signs the mission statement should be allowed in, NT or not.

What is the mission statement?

If we organized as a voting block in said small town, we could take over the school board and have our property taxes lowered, among other things.

Okay... let's see. Responses to several people.

There are charismatic autistic people. I've met some. They may not have the standard non-autistic kinds of charisma, but there are other kinds, trust me, and they can do just as much damage if not contained and properly channeled and so forth.

There are such things as disability segregation, oppression, and even genocide, both in history and in the present. These things are not excuses, they exist. If you do not believe they exist, get yourself put in a long-term institution for awhile and tell me that, for instance, segregation doesn't exist. The idea that political views on such matters are merely misdirected personal feelings is one of the many not-so-lovely contributions of things like really bad psychoanalysis to society, and just as hard to take seriously now as it was in the 1970s journal article where one of the first autistic people ever diagnosed (by that time an adult) when a shrink described his viewpoints on various political matters as displaced aggression against his mother.

That said, having actually experienced disability segregation (not as hyperbole but as reality), I'm not really willing to go off and become a separatist. I have no illusions that disabled people of any particular kind are wonderful accepting people that I'd want to live around, or that doing this would actually change much of anything for us. I can just imagine people going, "Oh good, they're with their own kind, isn't that sweet, and now we won't have to deal with them."

Not that I mind the idea of lots of autistic people living together by choice, but I would not want it to be in a closed community like an island. Probably a town, like Deaf people have pulled off, would be better. And I'd probably only visit, not want to live there. Especially given that a large portion of the population there would be people in various stages of getting over their naivete and idealism.

In communities like that, what often happens is that people end up still trying to function as if they are in a mainstream society, but they're not, so a lot of things that are quite useful in dealing with day-to-day discrimination and stuff, get turned into petty hostilities and suspicions between each other, and it can get magnified quickly and quite ugly. I do not want to be living there right at the time when everyone is either discovering that for themselves or not discovering it and having it wreak havoc on everything.

And the possibility of things like cults and dictatorships popping up is very real and does have to be guarded against if you're serious about this kind of thing. I can think of several autistic people that I would find utterly dangerous in such a community for that reason.

Snake it sounds to me like you are saying people are being prejudice and treating you bad because you have AS. If this is so, then a simple solution would be to just not tell anyone you have aspergers.

That solution doesn't really work.

I mean, I could avoid telling people I'm autistic. I don't always announce it to people. And I'd still encounter every bit as much discrimination (personal and systemic) as if I disclosed it, because I'm still the same person, and the discrimination is not based on the label itself.

anbuend

I was most interested in your statement that you've known some charismatic autistic people. I may need to re-structure my world view, at least a little.

There doesn't seem to be much of a controversy over whether charisma exists, but as far as I know, which on this topic isn't much, I've gotten the impression that it's like what that supreme court justice said about pornography, "It's hard to define, but I know it when I see it." I'm not aware that anybody has tried to characterize what makes some people more charismatic than others.

I've kinda thought that charisma might be an extreme skill with non-verbal modes of communication. Hitler was obviously charismatic. I tried to read Mein Kampf, but I couldn't get very far because it was so damned boring. I understand that everybody in Nazi Germany had a copy, but hardly anybody had actually read it, for the same reason. Yet, when hitler talked in person about the same ideas, people were, to say the least, impressed.

Brigham Young was another example. There's volumes of books of his discourses, but even mormons never read them, and they have to make up excuses anytime the subject comes up for how crazy and dumb his ideas were, but he managed to rule in absolute power over a huge empire, with who knows how many wives, and most people under his rule thought it was great.

The list goes on, you know the examples as well as me. If these people are not operating by using non-verbal communication, which aspies at least are incapable of doing, do you have any idea what makes some people charismatic?

Autistic people are not uniformly incapable of nonverbal communication, which could be part of it. (In fact some of the diagnostic markers of autism, such as leading people by the hand rather than pointing, are forms of nonverbal communication, just very atypical ones.)

Although one of the most charismatic autistic people I know of, has virtually no standard-style nonverbal communication, but just seems to radiate an aura that causes many people to believe him (the ones who don't see through it). I know that's not a particularly scientific term, and the answer might come in what he does and how he does it in some subtle way that isn't standard nonverbal communication but may be, some pattern of how he does verbal communication and some vague pattern of his actions or something. Hard to tell. Certainly there's charisma about him online as well as in person. And same with several autistic women and a couple other autistic men I know.

One autistic woman that I know, used to sort of collect followers without trying until she realized she was very charismatic and toned it down a good deal. She's quite definitely autistic, too -- very much so, in fact, I know her well. But she had a way of attracting followers and fame and persuading people without actually trying. She did not like this, because it led to people not really questioning her or thinking critically about what she was saying, and she didn't find this good or logical or right.

As far as famous autistic people go, Donna Williams is highly charismatic, but fortunately does not tend to try to lead movements.

I have been spontaneously told by a number of non-autistic people (in unrelated instances) that I'm very charismatic in a pretty unusual way, but if I am, I have no clue how or what to do about it. (And certainly hope that I do not influence people in a bad way.) And I'm someone who lacks nearly all standard non-verbal communication (although I certainly have non-standard kinds), and also who doesn't speak.

What if you already live on an island and happen to like it a lot?

Sorry for running off topic on your thread, snake, but this is really interesting. Actually, I guess it isn't off topic, since there is obviously a risk of a utopia turning into a cult or a dictatorship.


anbuend

This is amazing stuff and all new to me. As far as I know, I've never been around any autistic people and only recently learned about aspergers. Your description of people seeming to radiate an aura, while being, as you said, unscientific, is an accurate description of how charisma seems to work. I have occasionally experienced things that I cannot explain in contemporary scientific terms, so I do not believe "unscientific" phenomena are impossible.

Do you think that people with other types of autism have the same limitations on non-verbal communication as aspies? I'm wondering if maybe they are distinct conditions and not actually points on a spectrum, since the non-verbal incompetence is such a central defining character of aspergers, on the same note, do people with other types of autism tend to have aspie style obsessive interests, or something comparable?

I was also interested in your mention of charismatic people you know having online charisma. This brought Martin Luther King to mind. Reading his writings brings about some of the same emotional responses as watching him or listening to him talk. This suggests that nonverbal communication is a less likely explanation.

Me, I come across as good as other prople in writing, I guess, but people who meet me in person almost universally dislike me, even if I'm saying exactly the same things. That's where I came up with the idea that charisma is non-verbal communication skill. I've been wrong before, so it won't be a new experience.

Maybe there would be a clue in how the woman you mentioned toned down her charisma, do you have any idea what it was she toned down?

By the way, I'm impressed that you and the two other people you mentioned were concerned that taking advantage of charisma cheapened the humanity of others. That's as rare as an arctic potato patch.

I'm not sure whether it is or not truly a characteristic even of those regarded as aspies though. Because, most of the definitions of what "non-verbal communication" are, are definitions centered around more typical people. I know of very few times (although there are some) when it's acknowledged in the literature that there are plenty of things that autistic people do show nonverbally even if they're not standard and not picked up on normally by most people. I definitely know some people regarded as aspies (based on the language thing) who have non-verbal communication that is simply so non-standard as to look non-existent by typical standards. But it's still there -- for instance tension is audible in their voices and visible in their movements when they are nervous or overloaded or angry.

Snake I just saw another post by you on Aspies for Freedom's website, where you told people who you felt were apathetic to go to Wrong Planet.com. So wasn't that a diss on this website? Did you really think that people wouldn't visit both sites? Oh, and by the way, nice Al Sharpton impersonation.