Aspies For Freedom

Have a lovely time at the beach!

I do know how hard it is to keep a clear mind when trying to follow an internet forum, especially when someone is upsetting people in more than one thread!

I also know how time-and-brain-consuming a family is (hubby and I, both Aspie, have five kids).

However, I am always polite and welcoming to new members (since I was one once!) and the vast majority of new members are nice and polite back. Of course, I am not the only member who is invariably nice to new people - in fact the only person I know who ever greeted a new member (just half an hour after he joined) in a rude manner and suggested he go elsewhere was Lucie1 on this thread. And her victim was only thirteen and never came back.

But Illusion never had the slightest intention of being polite.

He came onto AFF specificaly because it has a "no-discriminatory-post" policy and
accused all the minority groups on here of bullying! He posted links to hate sites and, as he has used the same name all over the internet, it was possible to find out that he really is a neo-nazi, holocaust denying, racist heterosexist - unless, of course, this is a front that he has been hiding behind on every site he has ever visited or been banned from (including Wikipedia).

His hate speech wasn't confined to AFF by any means, or even to one thread. Several threads had to be locked because of his antics.

Like this, you mean?

I'm probably out of line here, but I think there sometimes IS a justification for getting stroppy.  If someone calls me a deviant or a delusional primitive, or tries to tell me the holocaust didn't happen or that a rape victim was "asking for it", I reserve the right to not be polite back, but to rip them a new orifice or two.  Yes, I should just report it, but I pity the mods round here sometimes - they must log on sometimes to get a stream of a dozen people each having reported the same dozen things.  The problem with the peaceful way is that, in my experience, it leads to being a doormat.

If you're going about your thing - whatever your thing is - it's nobody's business but yours.  So if someone starts hanging *** on it, yes, you have every right to be stroppy.

Only if you're running around screaming that everybody with differing views is a delusional primitive and/or going to burn in hell (and no, DogBrain hasn't done this, I'm using the hypothetical collective "you" here) should you expect to cop a serve.

I'm just a little confused why someone who had a go at me for poor self restraint because I asked for an 'ignore' button is now suggesting people have to pass some sort of test before they can join.

And here comes the other argument, WHAT is said versus HOW it's said.

It's wrong for me to tell off a Nazi revisionist stroppily, but OK for GuessWho to tell me, allegedly politely, I'm not saved and going to burn in hell?

Not at all.  Just remember that your freedoms stop where others' start... we all have the right to follow whatever religion we like, as long as it doesn't lead to hurting ourselves or others, without being told we're wrong, deluded, primitive, or unsaved.  

Personally, I AM unAmerican.  I'm also unBritish, unCroatian and unHatian, to name a few.  I've not travelled much  

What suggestions?  That we're a bunch of anti-American censorship freaks?  yeah, that went down REALLY well.

1.We don't.

2.Please - don't.

Well, yes, I think converting people is not the job of this board, so it should be possibly okay to talk about religion but not to try to convert people to your religion.  

(And yes, I'm religious, it's a big part of my life, but I don't believe in trying to force other people to have the same religion I do, especially not by scare tactics.)

It's good to see you here again Anbuend.  I missed you yesterday.

Well - I've probably missed you more than that, but it was yesterday that I realised it, and thought - I wish Anbuend was here!

That is exactly true -- just as I could if I wanted to be neutral towards racism because I'm white, but choose not to be neutral towards it.

But the thing is, when you're part of a group that is not disadvantaged by a certain kind of oppression, it's really easy to fall for lines of "reasoning" that support that kind of oppression.  And since it's what surround us, it's also even somewhat easy (just not as easy) to buy those things if you are the target.  

There are entire organizations of women who support sexism (see "Ladies Against Feminism," which while it claims to simply be just against feminism, is also very much for certain forms of sexism), for instance.  There are disabled people who think that disabled people are better off dead.  There are even Jewish neo-Nazis (I wish I was making that up), and tons and tons of KKK members who are mixed-race.  There's all kinds of internalized oppression and self-hatred possible for any group, and all levels, from minor internal conflicts of various kinds to joining hate groups against the group you're part of.

That said, it is a lot easier not to see how it hurts certain kinds of people, if you're one of the people who benefits rather than one of the people who loses out.

It's also hard to see sometimes if you're a member of one oppressed group but not another.  I've seen poor white people blame black people or latinos for their own class-based oppression.  I've also seen more subtle things, like (mostly white) disabled people who think that racism is "over" but ableism isn't.

Yeah.

I actually did talk to someone once who viewed the KKK that way, and it was really unnerving.  I've also found that a lot of white people who'd never say anything racist in public, will say a lot of things in private.  (And I think because I was white and wasn't one for telling other people's secrets, I used to have a lot of people confess directly to me how racist they were.  It always unnerved me.)  It's like Obama talked about in that speech he made about racism -- people will say all kinds of stuff when they don't think that the object of their prejudice is watching.  And he's seen it from two sides, because he's half-white and has spent a lot of time as family around entirely white people, who didn't count him as one of the people they were saying these things about.

What I want to know is why hate speech towards people with intellectual disabilities is not apparently banned here as well.

Also, I agree that people who think a certain kind of discrimination is dead, are either not targets of it and therefore can't see it for what it is (sometimes even if they're perpetrating it), or else are people who have been targets of it, but have more privilege than usual for that group, and so think that their individual example negates the overwhelming amount of oppression that is still there.  For instance, a lot of times people will say, "There's no classism in America, I was born dirt poor and now I'm middle class, if other poor people aren't able to do this (or jumping up and down with excitement about doing this, for that matter) then there's something wrong with them, never their circumstances."  Or sometimes a black person who has gotten a lot of individual advantages will claim that racism is gone because they themselves are rich and powerful.  

(Not to mention autistic people who have jobs and think the rest of us are just lazy and that any autistic person can get and maintain a job... hmm.)

But... yeah.  It's a complex thing, but definitely, oppression is often invisible to people who benefit from it, even people who do things to perpetuate it might not realize that's what they're doing.  It's sort of like the way a person can hurt other people without meaning to or noticing at all -- only on a huge and wide and complicated scale.

And I'm sorry that you have been personally attacked, not only as an autist, but for your stance on autistic issues and neurodiversity.  The amount of animosity leveled towards you from the curbie camp is disproportionate and says something about thier own inability to come to terms with issues, than it does about you btw.

Last month, I thought there might have been a way forward to rid the hostility between the curbies and the neurodiversities.  Each side thinks the other is set in thier ways on not on the look out to make peace, and yet - sometimes people have hope.  Sometimes they trawl through the science looking for that little glimmer.  Well - my little glimmer was a pipe dream and unsupported by the science, but I think I'll let that little flame of hope live on for a while longer.  

Maybe it's like a black man waiting for whites to *get* racism?  Thinking - one day it *will* be different!  One day...

Max ISN'T saying you're racist or homophobic.  He's saying the racists and homophobes aren't out to get you.  And I haven't seen him call you any names, either.  He's described how he sees your actions, but he hasn't said "you are a X".

Now, would you PLEASE stop it?  This thread is going to turn into yet another 40 page episode of people ripping each others heads off when we should actually be trying to work together.

I don't see anyone posting about banned members.  There WAS a big blow-off of steam in the two or three days after Lucie was banned, which I think was largely healthy and allowed a lot of very, very angry people to get the emotion out of their system harmlessly, but that's died down now.  Yes, there are still Winter jokes but they're not likely to go away - the whole situation was just so bizarre that it's going to go down in AFF legend and in ten years time the words "No, I'M Mark Winter" will probably still get a laugh.

So, Atypical, how about it? MOVE ON, as you said.  Stop rubbing people's noses in what they did while they were angry, yet expecting us to give you the benefit of the doubt because you've got so much other stuff happening in your life.  I've got a shitload of stuff happening in my life, too, and so do most people, but online nobody else knows about that.  All we know about each other is that we choose to type out and post.