Two Fascinating Videos by an Aspie

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Here are two fascinating videos by a 25-year-old Aspie woman:

http://www.vimeo.com/176753
and
http://www.vimeo.com/168592

I found I really identified with her references to privately practicing how to engage in conversations under different scenarios.

Cheers,

Mark

Myth, huh?! ! ( from what she says on the video , quoting Barthes)

So it's not that the jewish people might have been the first organised aspies so much as that their change of role in human society since the holocaust means that their old role is vacant , and that ( the group of people being bounded by the term ) ASD'ers might be very fitted for it!! !! !! That in fact they/we are being actively fitted for it. Hence why so many muttering about genocide.It goes with the role!

How wonderfully she used her precision tools of language . Thanks for the link!

I have seen these videos before. I see myself in them..only I am alot more spazzy and emotionally immature...She seems alot older and more direct than me in her speech.

i also "fantasise" ( daydream/storytell) whole meetings, activities (with people), etc in advance; it relieves my anxiety and helps to throw up issues that I'm having about the projected event so I can work them through.
I knew that in that I was a bit bizarre ; is that what she means ?
Or does she just mean what i thought everyone does for interviews, thinking out questions and answers etc.

"It" ( this group identity on Autistic spectrum) is an interesting role; as someone else says on a thread, ASDers are an unusual group of " disabled" because half of us wouldn't be any other way. And there is both this sense of superiority to the rest of the population aswell as a sense of grievance and exclusion which , speaking as non-jewish person, is very much the "vibe" I get about the jewish people. This is NOT a criticism of the jewish people just a description of how I see them subjectively.

In the same way as the jewish people ASDers are not black OR white,man OR woman, not on the usual spectrums of dualities.A piece of grit in the usual smooth functioning of these .Being a challenge to the usual frameworks for imagining identity.
Being disabled but brilliant (! !! Sometimes!! ) is a mould breaking, usual-concept cracking oddness.

ASDers themselves keep trying to work out which group we belong to. The unfortunate or the blessed. We're like an exaggeration of the normal dilemma of life.

Are we to be pitied or envied?

Now that I've thought of the jewish people as parallel or similar group in that were perhaps playing the same role in society I can't get it out of my head. And Emilys reading of Barthe about names and definitions of identities functioning as myth seems to suggest why that may be. Society has myths; certain roles continue to need playing by somebody.

Do these roles ever get rewritten? ( tho personally i like the idea of playing the essential and important role which threatens the whole fabric of things!! ! )

Last edited by ouinon on 08 Oct 2007, 8:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't understand the Jewish references. I did not see her refer to that subject at all.

Cheers,

Mark

She wasn't that specific. However, my reading is that she has privately practiced types of conversation and (especially) body language in order to appear NT. I have done that myself.



I was born into a Jewish family (non-religious). For the most part, the only "place" where I have encountered Jews express this sort of superiority is on the Internet. However, I have also seen self-defined Christians behave similarly to other self-defined Christians (references to hell and damnation).



People are what we are. The rest is human categorizing.

Cheers,

Mark

No, she didn't mention jewish she mentioned myth and roles in society. And how words have uses to position and construct people , and how myth is used to understand and relate to world and position oneself and others etc.etc.
And I think this is a fascinating handle for looking at how two groups could seem the same if maybe act out same role ( tho' at different times)in the society.

Last edited by ouinon on 08 Oct 2007, 8:09 am, edited 2 times in total.

So it's weird that my impression of the jewish people includes their seeming to express superiority.

Because I agree with you that I have no memory of ever having heard a jewish person sounding off about being better than others.

Perhaps their age old avoidance of marrying with non-jewish gives that impression ?

Or their attitudes as recorded in the Old Testament,( unfortunately still widely available) , testimony to at least a past rejection/criticism of others manners,religions, cooking and eating habits, levels of cleanliness, closeness to God,and frequent reference to being chosen by God themselves, and so on. Perhaps this could now be seen as hate-speech , as it seems to systematically denigrate almost all those who are not part of the jewish people?!

Perhaps the christian church was very canny in continuing to include these old writings to paint a picture of the jewish as believing themselves to be superior.

Yes, have heard christian superiority battles but it just looks like people squabbling; for some reason I have been far more impressed by the jewish expressions of it.

As if it might be true!
Might this curious belief/impression of mine be because theirs was the first ID group for whom their identity didn't depend on living anywhere? They were perhaps amongst the first people to conceive of an identity located purely in the person ? Perhaps I have a tendency to believe in their superiority because they were the first to label people in this way?! §Just a question?

I loved her videos, they were so determined not to be hoodwinked into accepting an ID/group label without thoroughly examining its implications and meanings first, if at all!! !!

Last edited by ouinon on 08 Oct 2007, 9:26 am, edited 3 times in total.

I asked that not because I expect to know but because a lot of people don't like NOT knowing . It bothers them if can't decide. So a group which is disabled but whose members like being that way has potential to bother people.

I "fantasize" conversations constantly when I'm alone, I even mouth the words and do the correct facial expressions and gestures sometimes. I have to stop myself when walking and I think nobody is around, I slip into my mouthing an invisible conversation of how I would like something to play out, and years ago in school a girl I lived near said I talked to myself while walking home, and my brother said I'd talk to myself before getting to sleep. It's odd though how charming and witty I can be in my head to conversations I seem to be making up on the fly, yet how completely baffled I am by real life conversations. I got called ret*d today because I couldn't put what I was trying to say into speech and just came across as an idiot.

I think that the issue can be considered from more than one angle.

On the one hand, I was exhilarated when my psychiatrist diagnosed me with AS. I actually did not expect a diagnosis. (I was seeing him because an infestation of roaches, some crawling onto me while I was in bed, was keeping me up.) When I began doing some reading into AS, many of the descriptions fit.

My child psychiatrist had told me decades ago that his earlier diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia was incorrect. However, I then had no explanation for social awkwardness, etc.

On the other hand, to borrow a phrase, a person's life is not a label. While labels may help at times to put our situations into perspective, they cannot resolve our inner struggles. That takes work.

Cheers,

Mark

That is not as true anymore. Anecdotally, I would say that about half of the folks I know who have been born into Jewish families have married people who are not Jewish.



In Eastern and Central Europe, Jews were ghettoized for decades. (The term"ghetto" originated with Jewish apartheid and segregation). The ghettoization was, of course, forced upon these people - just as apartheid was forced on Black South Africans; and when people have been driven into separation, they tend to see themselves as different or unique. It is a part of the history of the Jewish people, and it came with many of them when they migrated to North America.

Cheers,

Mark

Sorry to go off topic for a moment....

The concept of chosenness is very likely *the* most misunderstood idea in Jewish theology.

I would be foolish to suggest that the idea has never been accompanied by chauvanism within Judaism, but that's because it appears to be simple and basic human nature to prefer one's peer group to those outside one's peer group.

But the "chosenness" idea is not itself the source of that attitude, because within Jewish thought and myth, the Jews were not "chosen" because of any particular inherent virtue of their own community.

In Jewish myth, the ongoing "choice" all has to do with the original Covenant between Hashem and Abram and his tribe and descendants.

The ancient world was naturally as diverse and prone to societal and institutional corruption as the modern world. Hashem was a bit disappointed that humans were so prone to complicating their cultures and generally turning away from compassion and social justice. Its previous tactic of solving the problem by killing off most of the "bad" people with a regional flood had obviously failed as a long-term strategy. That tactic was likely to fail again. Besides this, Hashem had realized it was a mistake almost as soon as he had done it, since He had immediately apologized to the little tribe of Noah and promised not to over-react in the future.

He first developed a prototype of a new mindful lifestyle in cooperation with the human Abram, a self-disciplined iconoclast he had noticed who wanted to break from his own people and become independent, and Abram's like-natured wife Sara, a princess who had not fit in with her own wealthy but corrupt family. Their growing prosperity caused their new tribe to grow exponentially, but the same old, same old problems kept cropping up yet again.

Eventually, Hashem decided that the new Way ought to be formalized. The strategy now was to devise a Code of Law, since humankind did already seem receptive to making up such codices for themselves, which would tend to influence its followers toward right behavior and right intention by imposing many disciplines on them which, He hoped, would force them to live mindfully and deliberately. (It is easy to see that Christianity plays on pretty much the same mythic themes, combining the original "cult of personality" strategy with a modified version of the "reward for fulfilling obligations" and the culturally-inserted and wildly popular "whee, martyrs and superheroes for the win!" theme, to achieve similar aims.)

At first, Hashem tried to jettison the Hebrews, who were mostly failing at mindfulness. One midrash (an informal Jewish myth which is not in scripture, sort of like a parable) playfully depicts Hashem as shopping Judaism about to various currently-successful tribal groups and societies, each of whom looked at the contract and rejected it. ("Wait, what? No adultery?! That's just absurd! We'll take a pass." "Say huh? No murder? How exactly do you expect us to get ahead in business if we can't eliminate the competition with extreme prejudice? Do you think we're stupid?") After playing the field, Hashem sighed and offered the contract to the currently-not-so-successful Hebrews, with whom He already had some familiarity. They accepted the Covenant after a bit of cajolement and became the Chosen people not because they "deserved" any special treatment, but because they accepted an offered contract and became bound by its obligations to live by certain disciplines and attempt to be role models.

In one sense, this strategy didn't go as well as hoped either, since the Hebrews almost immediately and perpetually backslid and repeatedly failed to prosper against other tribes and nations. But Jewish doctrine says that the Covenant strategy worked well *enough* for Jewish moral philosophy to influence surrounding societies in its region. Although Jewish dogma formalized into sort of a universalized monotheism, some rabbis have always held out that Hashem placed the "mindfulness, compassion, social justice" program within other (non middle eastern) cultures using their own cultural paradigms.

So anyway, for the Jews, "chosenness" is not intended to express notions of "superiority." But, as humans, we love to think of ourselves as better than others.

Also, the largest Jewish movement in North America, Reform Judaism, thoroughly rejects the idea that the Jews are a chosen people.

Cheers,

Mark

That's very interesting; thank you both for explaining so clearly where I was in misconception/ignorance. Appreciated.
What is even more extraordinary then is to think that it is non-jews who constructed this mythological role around the jewish people , and then allowed themselves to feel frightened by it, or intimidated , or angry at feeling their non-jewish selves to be inferior in comparison. Really weird .
Is that really possible? I knew that Hitler had created a bogeyman/scapegoat ( deliberately to serve his purposes or because he genuinely did see them in his paranoia as strangely potent creators of difficulties and degeneration) out of the Jewish "race" but I thought there had already been an age old tendency , of their own volition, to isolate themselves. To keep themselves apart. I had no idea that it had never been their intention. I believed that they had wished to conserve their purity etc!
Has the jewish people never kept itself apart deliberately then?
When did the non-jewish people begin their isolation/segregation of the jews ? What precipitated it?
But I think that this is why I thought of the link with people with ASD , because I'm believing I see similar movements/pressures to isolate a group, because there's a role to fill , at a time of crisis.
Because the walls for the "group" identity of ASD sufferers are being built right now. Well, built and taken down and built again and ...

To go completely off topic for tiny moment ! !!, that sounds AWFUL. Hideous.