An (Urban) AS Community?

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Neurotypicals love to accuse us of having poor social skills. This may have some truth, but it turns out to be at least as important that those making the accusations have very poor Aspie skills. I do believe that we could thrive in communities built by and for us, but would have to be careful with any structure that would lead to Aspies owning Aspies.

http://www.democracyatwork.info/



For those who think they can discourage people from trying this by talking about non-existent funding, money is not the first step:
1. People – We could start by setting up a community center where people can meet and plan.
2. Compare skills
3. Write the business plan.
4. Now for the money. There are several options here:
A. Donations
B. Stakeholder investments
C. Grants
D. Loans
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/9/ch ... vely_owned

Once a business gets stable, it can pay into a fund that would help to start the next one.

There is a flip-side to direct income. That is living with stability on a low budget. http://repaircafe.org/


Back to the original debate, put me down for the farm.

The rural farm concept seems very similar to a commune.

I understand that there are still a few around. See
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/oldest-h ... ZEHjaGjU24

For the community center under item 1, are you indicating that this would have to be located near the future community?

I need to move away from the squeal. The city noise is .. Loud.

I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
I've been studying permiculture online.

I am bad at asking for money.
Good at not spending it.
I can read Aspie and NT emotions.
I'm good at resolving conflict.
At least, I was good but I am afraid to leave home now. Silly.

Can I help?

The Aspie Acres or Aspie Burg communities, but probably more so for Aspie Burg because it's a city, open doors for something called "bully tourism". Word is getting out that aspies are easy targets (read: convenient victims) for bullying and harassment, due to their difficulty with standing up for themselves. So, it's not impossible that there might be some unscrupulous individuals from Outside (a term for all geographic locates other than Aspie Acres/Aspie Burg) to come to the aspie community just for the cheap thrill of bullying the locals. It'll cause a lot of trouble for the aspies living there. This raises the question: how to we protect the locals from bully tourism?

Possible solutions for bully tourism:
* Concealed Carry laws, where residents can carry firearms on their person, much like in Texas (controversial)
* Trained police officers on every corner (very expensive)
* Public training campaigns to recognize symptoms of bullying (tourists can learn to disguise them and do more subtle bullying)
* Requiring visitors from Outside to carry tourism permits that any police officer can ask for (smacks of a police state)
* Time limits on how long tourists can stay in the aspie community (hurts local businesses)
* Banning tourists from all except specially designated tourist areas of the community (what about aspie tourists?)

What do you think we should do to prevent bully tourism from happening?

It's not controversial at all in this part of Texas.

With the known exception of football hooligans, I'm not all that familar with documented cases of "bully tourism".

If these hypothetical individuals are loitering, then that is the function of the local government's police powers to cite individuals who are loitering. If people are causing a disturbance, I would presume they would be asked to leave before they face citations.

While I see where your concerns are coming from, I believe that this issue relates more to local goverance.

I was talking about things like this. Two tough guys with two hot girlfriends are driving down Leo Kanner Memorial Drive (a fictitious street), and see a bookish-looking man gazing at the sky, rocking side to side, and fiddling with his clothes. So they start yelling insults at him, and when he turns around, they throw trash at him from the car. When the victim pleads "please stop bothering me", they reply: "What are you going do? Make us?", followed by whoops and boisterous laughs amongst themselves. When the light turns green, they drive on, and do the same to other pedestrians they see. They're able to time red lights just so, leaving victims unable to react in time.

They turn left at Neurodiversity Avenue, and pull into a city park. They approach a man playing chess by himself. "What's the matter, loser? Can't find anyone to play with?" "I like to play alone", the victim answers. "That's because you got no friends!", they yell back, and sweep off the chess pieces off the board onto the ground. As the victim leans over to pick up the pieces, one guy kicks him behind the knee. "Come on, weakling, punch!", the attacker's girlfriend taunts the victim. They all scoop up some chess pieces, wave them in front of the victim's face, throw them down a sewer grate, and run off laughing. Then they get back into their car and exchange a few high-fives.

Continuing on, they pull into a family restaurant serving American food. The place is almost vacant, with only one waitress working. They pretend to be polite at the beginning, to get the waitress to let her guard down. But then they lapse back into their regular personas. One guy says: "I'd like to order two breasts." "You mean fried chicken?" the waitress clarifies. "Sure, you're chicken if you're scared of me", he taunts her. This continues for over an hour until she breaks down in tears. They dump money on the table, and run off without leaving a tip.

So there you have it. In this aspie community of ours, how do we prevent visitors from engaging in behaviors like this? After all, as the word gets out about how aspies have trouble standing up for themselves, "bully tourism" like this could end up a serious problem.

The hypothetical situation that you present above could happen anywhere (particularly the later part, which is depressingly common). How do communities prevent such behavior? By arresting and prosecuting individuals who commit such crimes.

I used to live near an area where there was.....an individual who would ride his bike up to people and curse at them (note: lesser offenses than the example above). His description was passed to the local police, and bulletins were put out. Local citizens saw him, called the police, he was stopped and cited on a minor charge, and he was later indicted with and pled out to harrasment charges and was'nt allowed near the area as a condiction of his probation for years.

This is an implausible and unlikely threat. Why do I think that? Because there is no such thing as "bully tourism" threatening existing gay communities. Gay individuals, much like Aspie individuals, suffer bullying quite just as you describe. However, gay communities tend to be a haven from this sort of bullying. The bullies avoid the communities where the people they would bully individually are concentrated. If such a thing as "bully tourism" could exist, it would already be a problem in the Castro section of San Francisco as well as countless other gay communities.

What I suspect is happening is that people who bully a disliked subgroup do not want to go anywhere near communities of that subgroup lest people think they are actually trying to join. Or it may be that they just dislike being around such a density of people they despise. Gay communities are a flagship "despised community" and as such they model both the best ways to go about organizing such a community and also what problems are likely to arise. Since "bully tourism" hasn't arisen as a problem in gay communities, it is unlikely to arise as a problem in aspie communities either, since there is such overlap in what triggers bullies against gay or aspie people.

While I understand your point, I was getting at something else. Consider this: Why do people looking to commit armed robberies gravitate to states like Illinois, New York, Hawaii, and until recently, Wisconsin (now it's the nation's only Open Carry state). Anyone looking to commit armed robbery in those have nothing to fear; all law-abiding citizens are sitting ducks, ready for picking. Conversely, robbers are far less likely to point a gun at a random person on the street in states like Texas, Arizona, and Alaska, where Concealed Carry is allowed. Why? Because the victim will do the same back to them.

So I'd compare aspies to residents in No Carry states, rather than to gays. There is no widespread hate toward aspies as a group, like there is toward gays. People just bully whoever can't stand up for themselves, and aspies simply happen to be like that. So imagine this: word gets around about a community full of people who can't stand up for themselves. Surely, opportunistic sociopaths would go there in droves, just for the sheer thrill of bullying convenient victims. Much like criminals feel safer committing armed robberies in No Carry states than in Concealed Carry states. Scam artists would also make their way there, knowing how aspies are more trusting than the general population. That would need policing too.

So I still think the aspie community will need some sort of protection against bully tourism. But what? Concealed Carry? Heavy police presence to intimidate potential bullies out of doing what they do best? Barcoded ID badges for all tourists? Five-minute character interviews done at points of entry, conducted by trained interviewers? (El Al Airlines, an Israeli company, uses this method in its airports for passengers boarding its airplanes, and the interviewers are Masada soldiers, presumably NT.) It's not an easy answer.

I would expect that any AspieBURG community would be in an enviroment with functioning law enforcement and legal enviroment. Law Enforcement in such locations is presumably quite capable of dealing with the hypothetical situations offered above.

In the detailed hypothetical example offered above, the individuals commited at least 4 crimes even before they get to the diner, where they then wait for an hour, quite possibly in full view of security cameras.

I can see it being a lot like Tokyos Akihabara district only with legalized marijuana and being located somewhere in silicon valley or in San Francisco.

Re. bully tourism, you're presupposing that Aspies are defenceless and incapable of sticking up for themselves. Maybe they are, at the moment; if so, that's something that definitely needs working on, regardless of whether AspieBURG/Acres gets built.

But as AgentPalpatine points out, there will still be law enforcement, and I'm fairly certain attacking someone and throwing their chess pieces everywhere counts as assault.

Here is another idea... how about we start with AspieMatrix first?

We could create a business online and run it remotely as a team... then when we gain money and decide what we want to do we can take our business to a physical location and start building from there.

I am all for AspieBurg or Aspie Acres but I could see someone donating land before they donate a building.. but I could be wrong.. we wouldn't know until we tried. If we start an online business we could buy whatever we want though.

I think the key to making this work though is to look at people on the autism spectrum as a asset that no one is mining.... We need to get all these autism spectrum people and find their genius and it will make us all successful and benefit the world, too. Think of it like human bitcoining.. haha

If you're refering to Aghogday's "matrix" concept, his description does veer more towards what is taking place today, without a physical (offline) location. Given the amount of disatisfaction expressed here on WP alone, I'm not sure many people are thrilled with that approach.

The advantage of at least an early-stage AspieBURG is that it does'nt "rely on the kindness of strangers", in that it can be self-financed. It's a very competive world for donations, and it's a lot easier to get a donation when the donor sees that there is already something tangible taking place. To use a very relevant example, Arcosanti, which does exist, took years to scrape together the donations to build out it's (current) structure, but donations were much easier with a functioning location.

That example assumes one goes down the "non-profit route", which is not the only route available.