Blog post comparing Aspergers and Psychopathy

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I would take it a step further and venture to say that the author is already prejudiced and bigoted. She now wants to share her "knowledge" with the rest of the world so no one else will be "damaged" by contact with people with aspergers. How benevolent of her. (Yes, you can cut the sarcasm with a knife.)

So many people compare Aspies/Very high functioning Autistics to Psychopaths. It is a common myth.

There's a difference, a huge difference, between not understanding that someone is suffering, and not caring about it.

Aspies don't have any less empathy than NTs. We might not realize someone is suffering, we might not understand why his condition is bad, but if we know he feels bad, we're just as likely as any NT to feel bad for him. Even if we don't show it the same way.

Unfortunately I think most people see not caring and not understanding as the same thing. If you don't understand you had hurt someone and don't understand their feelings, people see that as you not caring. If you are not aware of how you made someone feel and if it never occurs to you how it might make someone feel if you say or do something, you are uncaring. That is how people see it. But I see it as two different things while they see it as the same. It's like black and white for them.

That's because nts view caring as benefit. That is, nts expect immediate understanding and support. If you can't offer it, then you are of no use to them. They can be cold.

If a person doesn't understand, the person should be educated so he/she does understand.

If a person doesn't care, the person doesn't WANT to understand.

The thing is with many it's not that they don't understand, it's that they don't know how to express empathy. People with AS can have a very difficult time naturally using even the simplest facial expressions and vocal tones so others just assume they don't care.

I wonder where to we draw the line for when someone just doesn't care because how can we tell if they are incapable of understanding or if they have tried to understand and they still don't get it. How can we tell if someone isn't trying to get it? I even wonder if some people are really not capable of understanding certain things because that is like trying to explain algebra to me and I still wouldn't know how to do the problems so what if some things are just too hard for people to understand because it's too abstract for them? Which is the reason why people tend to say people are stupid or close to the ret*d range. Either their are not smart enough not get it or they just do not care so therefore they are choosing to be ignorant. If someone is not capable of understanding, does that mean they do not care?

The author cites an article which itself cites an article from a known hoax site.

As a hatemonger she deserves nothing but contempt. But it's clear from her shoddy research that she's not playing with a full deck, and so I also pity the poor fool.

That looks like a new "update" to her blogpost because that wasn't there when I started this thread. The news article she cited is on a website that is actually listed on the site that you linked to as a hoax news site:



http://www.fakenewswatch.com/fakehoax-news-websites

Anyway, to respond to what she says:



Actually, I dispute that everything she said on that post is the truth. I don't dispute anything she said about her personal experience but as I said in a previous post on this thread, she either doesn't check her own sources you she uses them rather liberally, appearing to quote-mine to paint ASD folk in the most negative light possible. Regarding what she says about someone trying to get her blog taken offline, that persona actually posted in this very thread, where I actually disagreed with his idea of contacting the site company that hosts the blog. Okay, moving on.



She then posts a snapshot image of a post in this thread. Wait, so the fact that I disagreed his idea of contacting the host doesn't count?:



The reason why I disagreed with it was partly because it was only one blog post while most of the rest of her blog was about avoiding psychopaths and, let's face it, people do get hurt by psychopaths because they tend to be people-users. So, I didn't want to destroy something that might of been helpful to other people in that regard.

The other reason is that from my own experience, the host is unlikely to do anything over one blog post and they might reply that they aren't experts or something like that. They would likely only do something about it if it directly threatens people or encourages harassment.

My problem with that particular blog post had to do with the fact that posting such inaccurate misleading information about Asperger's tends to harm the people who have it by creating and adding to stigma.



Oh dear, perhaps she should asked someone who lived in Wyoming if they had ever even heard of the "Wyoming Institute of Technology" because anyone who ever did a small amount of background checking or even has access to Google can pretty quickly find out that no such institute even exists:

http://realorsatire.com/witscience-org/

So, she's basically believing that there was a valid "scientific study" that was made by a fictitious institution which doesn't exist and is basically nothing more than hoax website that also wrote gems like an article claiming that scientists are trying to clone Jesus:

http://witscience.org/attempt-clone-jesus-underway/

and that obesity causes earthquakes:

http://witscience.org/obesity-impacting-earthquakes-in-us-experts-say/

Secondly, I can assure you that no death threats were made to anyone and if there were, I'd like to see a quote of a comment to that article where one was made. She only quoted the comment of the so-called author of the article, which given the nature of that website, being a hoax news site and all, was not entirely truthful. If you read any of the comments by aspies on that article, all I can see are people that were upset, quite understandably so, but not one death threat was made. The guy also claimed that this "research" would be published in the "American Journal of Medicine", so one would think that she would check her sources. Unfortunately she didn't because this is what journal officially said about the article:



http://amjmed.org/wyoming-institute-of-technology-aspergers-article-is-a-spoof/

At this point, we don't even need to silence her, not that I wanted to anyway, as quoting this particular thing already discredits her whole blog post.



Yeah, the thing about free speech is that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Just like she can post anything she likes about us in a blog post, we can also say anything we like about her blog post because that's our freedom of speech.



Okay, well I get that she was hurt by a psychopath and that the fact that she may of also dated someone with AS who didn't tell her that he had AS didn't help either but if she was really open minded about that then she would realise that her experience with someone with AS isn't necessarily the same as everyone else's.



Actually, she took a few quotes from Simon Baron-Cohen out of context. For example, she used a title from one of his books to call Asperger's a "zero-empathy" disorder whereas if you actually read his book entitled "zero-degrees of empathy", you'll find that the title is actually a misnomer since it actually says that both psychopaths and aspies have different kinds of empathy, the one being a mirror opposite of the other. Though in fairness, she did mention the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy later on her blog post but downplays it's significance. Despite that, Professor Baron-Cohen is actually not infallible. She also relies on a personal opinion of his where he responded to a blogpost reacting to his book in order to convince people that we're unable to know that we "don't have empathy". She doesn't realise, of course, that when we say that we have empathy, we're actually referring to emotional empathy which Simon Baron-Cohen's own research shows is true.



Everything including the new quote from a fake news site and the belief that there was legitimate by a fictitious research institution? Frankly, I honestly find it disturbing that anyone can believe that 92% of any kind of crime can be blamed on anything. That seems like a pretty high number even for something that can be shown to be connected to it. Also, the fact that most other research, including the meta study that she linked to as a source that examined many papers that did actually do legitimate research, found no such connection didn't ring any alarm bells? The fact that she would firmly stand by everything that she's written including the reporting from satire and hoax websites as though they're legitimate is why she's now completely discredited.

Most of that is about communication. If someone just doesn't understand, there you'll see that they'll become sympathetic once the issue is communicated to them so that they can understand, even if they appeared not to care before. If someone doesn't care, then they don't want to understand and they still won't care no matter how much effort is put into getting them to see the other point of view.

I have been reading Jon Ronson's " The Psychopath Test". Very illuminating on this subject.
Has anyone considered that as a group psychopaths are the aspie and autie's most clear enemy?

Psychopathy Checklist-Revised: Factors, Facets, and Items[12]

Factor 1

Factor 2

Other items


Facet 1: Interpersonal
Glibness/superficial charm
Grandiose sense of self-worth
Pathological lying
Cunning/manipulative

Facet 2: Affective
Lack of remorse or guilt
Emotionally shallow
Callous/lack of empathy
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Facet 3: Lifestyle
Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Parasitic lifestyle
Lack of realistic, long-term goals
Impulsivity
Irresponsibility

Facet 4: Antisocial
Poor behavioral controls
Early behavioral problems
Juvenile delinquency
Revocation of conditional release
Criminal versatility
Many short-term marital relationships
Promiscuous sexual behavior



We should learn about them as much as possible, and try to mitigate against them if we can.

I think we could be uniquely at risk from this type of person, more so than even NT's.

I think people are more likely to make this assumption if you can superficially present yourself as socially competent.

Yup. Not only that, but the claim of 92% of murderers having Asperger syndrome is a hoax:

https://www.elsevier.com/connect/hoax-b ... -to-murder

The blogger's got some serious retracting to do if she's honest; if she's not honest, then she'll just keep spreading the myth to justify her bigotry and hatred.

It appears she quietly removed the link to discussion of the hoax study. That's dishonest, too.

Is there some way to report this, since she won't respond to any comments from anyone with autism and can't be addressed about her ignorance directly? This is blatant hate speech and blithering idiocy. She is so misinformed, I feel embarrassed for her. Her parents and educators did a terrible job.

Well, it's a good job Aspies are so inhuman - indeed, unhuman - and so are people - sorry, creatures - whose thoughts and feelings and perspectives and experiences aren't worth taking into account, because otherwise the author would end up looking like a thoughtless, callous, unempathic, prejudiced, dishonest, closed-minded, piss-taking fool. And golly, wouldn't that tarnish her self-image!

More than anything, it's the tone. The superciliousness. It's someone wagging their finger in your face telling you off for something you weren't even thinking of doing.

Being told I don't understand my condition by someone who confuses their prejudice for 'the truth'. Being told I don't have empathy by someone who seeks to set opinion against a group of marginalised people. Being called a psychopath by someone who has no care for the damage her article and her self-importance may cause to innocent lives.

Christ, the ironies are infuriating. There's no 'in'. No way to reach her, to connect and talk and reason with her, so oblivious is she. There are, simply, no other perspectives but hers. Clealy, mindblindness can lead to cruelty.

ETA: Once more, it's the bizarre situation which is basically: 'Autistic people have no empathy. Let's be cruel to them!'. I consider I do have empathy. And then I look at the NT world, which apparently abounds in empathy, and I see the cruelties and the games and the connivances and the prejudice and the lying and the falsity and the bullying and all that 'normal' s**t, and I think, yeah, about that 'empathy' you were banging on about...