Tired of Middle-Aged "Adults" Acting Like Trolls on WP

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I agree a little bit with Starkid on a couple of the posters acting like trolls although I don't think the majority of them are middle-aged, per se. I do, however, think there is a lot of inflammatory political talk on the site and it's quite honestly an eyesore. It comes from all age groups and I'm surprised since I didn't think of Aspies as being as politicized as the NTs.

You actually expect something from people on the internet??? Whether they are 12, 22 or 52 an anal wipe is still an anal wipe...

I'm not looking to lecture or give anyone the impression that I know it all, far from it, but I have been involved in conversations like this a lot of times in the past few decades and here's my two cents worth. Your mileage may vary

I'm fairly old, I've been hosting and participating on bulletin boards and forums since it required a 300 baud modem and a transfer protocol like zmodem, look that up if you'd like a good giggle. Some things haven't changed much in the last 30 years, the most obvious of which is that even in the best of circumstances communicating through text only is a horribly imprecise process. As humans we learn to take in account body language, voice inflection, facial expressions, blushing, and a whole host of other cues in order to determine intention and meaning in a conversation. Take those out of the equation and understanding what a person means to communicate becomes very difficult. Add to that being on the spectrum and having problems catching all those cues in the first place and that adds another level of ambiguity to what others mean to say. Given all that, here's the best advice I can offer:

If you find you are insulted, offended, hurt, confused, etc with what someone has said to you, tell them. No need to be rude , or demeaning, or angry, just let them know. You'd be surprised how often that was not the intention of the person posting and they just came off that way because of phrasing. I've pissed off a lot of people over the years because I wasn't as clear as I would have liked and my post was taken in a way I did not intend. I would much rather be informed of the situation and have a chance to try to better explain myself than have someone else leave the conversation saying nothing and feeling insulted or abused by my words.

If you don't like something in life you only have two options, learn to live with it, or do something about it. If you can't work out the issue, then the only option that will give you peace is to truly learn to live with it. And, to that end, the only person you have control over is you. Sometimes in life we have to live with the fact that people aren't always willing or capable of coming around to our point of view or acting in a way we find acceptable. I've spent a good portion of my life getting over myself when I don't like the way things play out and I have no real control over the matter

That's pretty much all I've got, hope it helps someone

Haven't stopped in for a while, but it's amusing to see the same old melodrama continues to play itself out. I guess I'll stop back in the Fall.

I've been shocked at some of the bullying and derision I've seen on some threads. I honestly get scared by it, remembering being the object of bullying or ridicule in the past, even as a child. I want to think that other autistic people are safe to share challenges and experiences with - that there would be more understanding. And many of us certainly understand what it's like to be bullied, which really dismays me when I see it happening on this site. I get frustrated trying to express myself, but I can't imagine dumping anger on someone on WP or lashing out, knowing that we're generally more sensitive than average. And i wouldn't want to contribute to an environment where people are doing that to each other. Youth or age isn't any sort of excuse for not respecting others, neither is being neurodiverse. It's one thing to express disagreement with ideas, even extreme disagreement, but it's quite different to make that into personal attacks.

This is fun. We've had discussions about overhearing conversations and thinking it's about us. It's an aspie thing.

The plain text of the forum rules makes sense to me, and I pay attention to the plain text of posts. If I was going around attacking anyone, I would be getting warned not to, or worse. The last warning (informal) that I got was for calling a person's behavior tomfoolery. Since then, it's been all about the factual content of posts. If my inferences about the words you type bother you, come back with better info. I have shown the capacity to change my opinions. I will even forgive people for mocking my doing so, after trying to change them!

You don't do anyone any favors by confirming their persecution fantasies. Rebut disagreements with facts. If disagreement turns into insults against a person or group, report and ignore. The mods have done a good job of taking care of patterns of behavior, as well as individual posts, which matters a lot.

I've seen a few salty comments from them, but they're human. Nothing I needed to respond to with anything more than facts, and no moderation required.

I just keep in mind how often I have perceived things wrongly. It required learning to drop grudges. Carrying a real grudge is bad enough, but carrying a fake grudge based on a misunderstanding seems like a supremely futile endeavor.

Also, I guess I committed a social faux pas by not correcting an obvious misunderstanding where the word flailing was misread as failing. I really should have worked harder to figure out how to correct that. Any response to the entire post which revealed the misunderstanding seemed counterproductive at the time, and I quickly forgot the whole thing.

ETA: I guess I should have read all the way to the end. This is, in part, about me. The "undignified" comment that you made was against women speaking up for themselves. I found it classically sexist, deliberately inflammatory, and when it seemed to go unmoderated for some time, I spoke up. That attack has a long and sordid history, and we still see how pervasively it discriminates against women in the treatment of female Senators. It's crucial to institutional sexism, in fact. Perhaps I should have said that at the time; I suspect I did, in the rest of my post, after getting your attention.

Have all of us here forgotten what it actually means to be an "Aspie"? It means not picking up on nuances, direct (and, to those oh-so-sensitive N.T.'s, "confrontational") language, taking things literally, meaning what we say and saying what we mean, and a whole host of other things that "polite society" (i.e. N.T. society) deems to be "inappropriate".

Well, screw that! I'm not going to play by their sh***y rules, rules that they themselves just made up and which make no sense anyway. Now, I'm not suggesting breaking any of the rules that are specific to W.P., which are there for a reason, but at the same time I don't think we should start becoming hypersensitive to comments made that were only ever meant to be informative, and where there are no "hidden meanings" or "implications". If a thread becomes bogged down in an exchange of personal insults, then it should be (and often is) closed down, but "walking on egg shells" is something that I have just never been good at, so if anyone is "offended" by something I write here they should just keep in mind that my intention only ever was to express an honest opinion, not cause a fight.

Direct, literal language is all I know, all I ever have known, so don't try to "read" anything into anything I say here.