Remove hateful comments about Asperger's Syndrome

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http://www.change.org/p/deviantart-remo ... s-syndrome

I'm sorry, but why can't you just ignore it? Making a deal out of it will only give them power and re-enforce hateful comments.

I wonder what the WP members who have called themselves "socially ret*d" think of this.

I think his stupid and bigoted comments should be challenged, not censored. Censorship rarely solves anything.

that would be intresting.

am intelectualy disabled and get laughed off for suggesting the use of mentaly ret*d is incorrect as well as ancient and dehumanising[it was changed early last year in the DSM to ID] and the use of 'ret*d/ret*d' is wrong as it still is a throwback to our disability regardless of how people use it,despite that people still think our dislike of these slurs is political correctness designed to take away their rights [its not-we dont want it banned we want people to educate themselves on why it hurts us so they can make an informed choice on its use].
if people cant respect the dignity and welfare of highly vulnerable ID individuals despite the number of charities who have put forward massive campaigns to make the public aware of the damage [eg; special olympics,national autistic society and mencap have all campaigned against it] then am sure they wont care about a group of people being informaly described with 'socialy ret*d', many aspies refer to themselves as socialy ret*d as there isnt the same history,abuse and connotation as with 'mental retardation', its been used in films and tv programs to avoid the use of limiting characters by saying aspergers-overall will struggle to get people to see why it can hurt when there isnt widespread hate recognised against it.

as everyone says,its best to educate on the subject;not to censor,censoring never works it only gets the political correctness obsessives wound up about taking away their liberties and makes them do it all the more.
learn from the intelectual disability community and put forward exactly why this term hurts aspergan autistics,dont just say it damages;say why it does and how it does,if theyve got any concience they will listen and debate the issue sensibly.

as for deviantart in general,its a trolls playground now,its become like the yahoo answers of art, just avoid the site; personaly got off there after getting abuse by abusive snobs,its badly sockpuppeted as well.

i dont think its demeaning when its in a medical context, i.e. if its actually refering to someone who is diagnosed as having an i.q. under whatever, it is offensive when its being used as a insult and it is offensive to say people with aspergers are all ret*d whenit requires that you be of avredge to unussually high intelegence. see what i object to is more the implication that i am slow or that people like me are slow. i dont think people should haras slow people either, but its kind of like saying all black people are criminals or that all gay people are physically week and talk in high pitched voices. id also argue that people ussing the term "soccially ret*d" for themselves are being whiney little s**ts who dont understnd the diffrence between being socily akward and being a 20 year old man with the mental compacity of a 7 year old who may or may not ever be employed and its extremly self hatting, attention seeking,and reactionary. its kind of like a celebrity saying they have a harder life then a homeless person or something like that and thats what bothers me. the fact that they actually think there lives are that hard. i feel the same way when people like me get in fights with the parents of people like that. just because the drug companies want it to be the same thing dosent mean that you not having a girlfreind or making a racist joke is as big of a problem as what youve gone through. to me it seems like a bunch of well educated well off young people telling unstable families and the mentally disabled that there full of s**t or thinking about it wrong or something. its f*****g easy to say when your programing a computer at age 13, its not so easy to say when your a working parent raising a fairly severly mentally disabled child who may or may not ever be able to support themselves in life. not only that but it implies theres something deeply wrong with me that needs to be fixed or that a kid who can build his own computer or is talking about mortality in an intelectual way at a young age dosent have abilities other people dont have. aspergers isnt really good or bad as much as it is diffrent and i wish other people could understand that but i dont think they will. pretty much everyone ive ever told i had to explain it didnt mean i was giftedor ret*d or something and that i had a fairly avredge i.q. and that i want to and can be part of normal society and be treated just like anyone else.

Except it's not censorship -- The petition certainly isn't, it's a response to a bigot who's dumb enough to throw his stupid ideas into the public arena. If the site deviantart bans and blocks the guy, still not censorship, the site is privately owned, and they've every right to do whatever they want with it, including disallow access.

I wish AS people would stop believing that stupid ideas will go away if you ignore them hard enough. No, no they don't just magically fly away with the faeries, they easily propagate when ignored and left unchallenged.

Last edited by Moromillas on 14 Sep 2014, 7:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i agree, i think that its part of whats hurting us.

I signed that petition after reading the guy's comments. In one he says that Aspies "demand hugbox treatment instead of equal treatment" and that a lot of aspies "don't even try to learn to be functional members of society." The other one is, word-for-word, "Aspies are socially ret*d by nature...this one's a lost cause." The fact that I use deviantArt myself did influence my decision to sign. He seems like he might be an ass or a troll, but more likely an ass.

If they removed this specific person's comments, they would have to remove every person's comments that were unkind or trollish or derogatory to a general group or just harmful. So, like much of the internet, they would have huge gaps in content were they to go through and do this now.

DA is much better in those regards than a lot of other sites, I will grant, but there is still a lot of ignorant, trollish, inflammatory commentary. Making a petition and trying to pressure DA into removing this ONE person's commentary is hyperfocusing on one incident out of so many it's kind of an exercise in absurdity. It's not that I disagree with the principle. But to pinpoint in this way sort of defeats the purpose and makes it more about this one person rather than a larger issue. In this case I actually have to agrre with K Kelly and this statement to some degree:

...because this one person [and even the thread of comments, so include the two or three other people]- just a very very very small piece of what anyone would actually want to address. A drop of water in an ocean. It's a waste of time and energy to put together a petition for idiots like this.

It's a shame the bad always stands out more than the good. Giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, I would tell him not all aspies are that way and only some are and I am sorry he had a bad experience with them but please don't let some bad apples make him view all of them that way.

I feel everyone is entitled to rant about their feelings. Maybe he should have written, "I know people with AS who____" and then it wouldn't have sounded so bigotry.

Nearly everything on the internet has a halflife. Those comments will disappear entirely in a few years, and be obscure long before that. Taking out the user who wrote the comments is not effective, as the person can switch users to a new profile easily enough. Many sites like Deviant Arts have trolling as a part of their nature and an attempt to censor them will likely cause many of those ignorant fools to deliberately cause trouble.
The comments are very offensive, but it's probably best to not to do anything. You can't kill an idea like that.

So go on to deviantart and challenge him. Deleting his post from Deviantart won't change his opinion or the opinion of any other neurotypical bigot on there. Censoring opinions you don't like is the cowards way of dealing with them.

This sort of thing makes us all look petty and intolerant, and means people will ignore us when we complain about legitimate things.

The guy who posted the comments has no power over us unless we give it to him.

No, no one do this. If you're posting on his pages, and he has admin over them, he can just delete them and kick you off, there's no point. Better to do it on a different site, where that isn't going to happen, a petition site to voice your opinion works fine for that. I explained why it's not censoring. I'll try again. If the site deviantart does decide to do something, that's a business decision, not a government decision to censor things. It would be the same as someone spouting hate speech against, I don't know, latinos, at the local coffee shop. If that one guy doing that was driving away business and customers, or his actions are going to do that, the shop has every right to ban him and kick him out, I definitely would.

Wtf is this. Petty and intolerant? So, if I don't shut my mouth, when someone starts spouting hate speech, I'm intolerant, of that person spouting hate speech? Is that what you're saying?

No, this is where you're wrong, he has lots of power, he's able to put these bigoted ideas out there, to lots of people. He has the power to validate and propagate hate to any number of people.

Dude, it's a comment on a message board. Few people saw it and if left alone it would have been quickly forgotten about had the creator of the petition not drawn attention to it.

You need to pick and choose your battles, because otherwise you won't get anything.

I think you should read the thread I have started about the Autistic guy who got attacked and paralysed. Something like this puts a throwaway comment on the internet into perspective.