12-15-2005, 11:28 PM
For crying out loud, someone please start circulating stories of abuse against Aspies to the press. Please. They think a handful of murders somehow makes us demons? Wait until we make them take a good look at themselves.
12-15-2005, 11:28 PM
12-15-2005, 11:59 PM
Maybe, but this whole "Oh, by the way, he has Asperger's Syndrome" is exactly what they did to the schizophrenics and such in the 1980s. We are being demonised. Unless we take a stand, we can expect our children and grandchildren to be bullied and spat upon as they grow.
12-16-2005, 12:48 AM
Even in cases where an Aspie commits a criminal act of some sort, it is so severely unlikely that such crimes are motivated solely by Asperger's Syndrome. It's disgusting how they are trying to paint us as psychopaths.
12-16-2005, 10:35 AM
Excellent idea, Wolfy. But do not forget to remind them of how much abuse we suffer on a day-to-day. We must get the word out there that where normies love to paint us as criminals and miscreants, the reality is just the opposite.
12-17-2005, 03:50 AM
Emailed to the Mirror:
Quote:
Let me tell you a little story.
You have a boy, he starts school when he is about six years old. He can already read at what you jokingly call an adult level. He can draw and write in crude shapes, but at school, you find he has great trouble with gripping pens or pencils. He has difficulty in grasping objects, and gross motor skills are slow to develop. After his first year, a chronic problem in following instructions occurs. He does things in a predefined pattern that only he can explain, and he lacks sufficient knowledge to do so. His teacher takes to abusing him (and yes, it is abuse), shouting at him from less than an inch away until he cries, and so forth. The previous year, this same teacher had taken to taking him out of his own class at random and shouting into his ears until he cries. Then recording the results for him and his class to laugh over.
The child makes a vow. If ever he encounters this teacher again as an adult, said teacher will learn not to do what is basically the equivalent of poking a snake.
For the rest of your child's schooling, this abuse does not diminish. It increases. After a few years, it does not matter if your child was across the grounds from an incident other children complain about and say he is responsible for. The school contacts you and tells you it intends to send your child home every time something is reported about him. In an act of betrayal of the highest order, you allow this. Children start making up things about your child. This continues until your child is almost in his teens until he finally says enough is enough, and he begins striking teachers or other staff. By this time, he feels he has noone he can turn to in his struggles, and pretty much wants to die. The Education Department files him off into the too hard basket, and he struggles through years of rehabilitation programs and psychiatric counselling that expend years of his life for no apparent gain.
Fast forward a few more years. During a rehabilitation program, a psychologist tells your son and you that he has Asperger's Syndrome, a pervasive developmental disorder that should have been diagnosed before he started school. He is now in his later twenties. In his effort to make up for the time he has lost, he tries to find help with psychologists or the like, bringing them a theory that fits the facts rather than the diagnostic dartboard that just about every Aspie of his age remembers. Aside from proposing to waste more of his life, they attempt to make him believe he is imagining the diagnosis, or flat-out consider him an unperson. In a world where a disorder that has all but destroyed this man's life, the Hippocratic Oath of first, do no harm, feels especially meaningless.
Then he gets to reading all these delightful stories that try to paint him and his fellow Aspies as monsters simply because they are Aspies. Stories like Kieron Smith et al. Inspector Donnellan, have you considered the possibility that you have the wrong guy? Or that he might in fact just be a human being, rather than the subhuman you vilify him (and by extension all Aspies) as? Your case against this man is entirely circumstantial. DNA on trousers, huh? When he found the body in the first place? Wow, colour me convinced. To quote a statement I made to the other Aspies I regularly speak with, the Great Wall of China could not stop the crimes made against me because of my Asperger's Syndrome from drowning out the few crimes I have committed against others, often in an attempt to just get them to stop exacerbating my very real symptoms.
Speaking as one of many neurologically divergent individuals, not only does the emphasising of Kieron's status as an Aspie (which I am not totally convinced of, either) by the media smack of discrimination, but so too does the behaviour of the police. I am stronger, and a better person, than the normies who work in the Liverpool Police Department and the UK Mirror. Because I am an Aspie.
You have a boy, he starts school when he is about six years old. He can already read at what you jokingly call an adult level. He can draw and write in crude shapes, but at school, you find he has great trouble with gripping pens or pencils. He has difficulty in grasping objects, and gross motor skills are slow to develop. After his first year, a chronic problem in following instructions occurs. He does things in a predefined pattern that only he can explain, and he lacks sufficient knowledge to do so. His teacher takes to abusing him (and yes, it is abuse), shouting at him from less than an inch away until he cries, and so forth. The previous year, this same teacher had taken to taking him out of his own class at random and shouting into his ears until he cries. Then recording the results for him and his class to laugh over.
The child makes a vow. If ever he encounters this teacher again as an adult, said teacher will learn not to do what is basically the equivalent of poking a snake.
For the rest of your child's schooling, this abuse does not diminish. It increases. After a few years, it does not matter if your child was across the grounds from an incident other children complain about and say he is responsible for. The school contacts you and tells you it intends to send your child home every time something is reported about him. In an act of betrayal of the highest order, you allow this. Children start making up things about your child. This continues until your child is almost in his teens until he finally says enough is enough, and he begins striking teachers or other staff. By this time, he feels he has noone he can turn to in his struggles, and pretty much wants to die. The Education Department files him off into the too hard basket, and he struggles through years of rehabilitation programs and psychiatric counselling that expend years of his life for no apparent gain.
Fast forward a few more years. During a rehabilitation program, a psychologist tells your son and you that he has Asperger's Syndrome, a pervasive developmental disorder that should have been diagnosed before he started school. He is now in his later twenties. In his effort to make up for the time he has lost, he tries to find help with psychologists or the like, bringing them a theory that fits the facts rather than the diagnostic dartboard that just about every Aspie of his age remembers. Aside from proposing to waste more of his life, they attempt to make him believe he is imagining the diagnosis, or flat-out consider him an unperson. In a world where a disorder that has all but destroyed this man's life, the Hippocratic Oath of first, do no harm, feels especially meaningless.
Then he gets to reading all these delightful stories that try to paint him and his fellow Aspies as monsters simply because they are Aspies. Stories like Kieron Smith et al. Inspector Donnellan, have you considered the possibility that you have the wrong guy? Or that he might in fact just be a human being, rather than the subhuman you vilify him (and by extension all Aspies) as? Your case against this man is entirely circumstantial. DNA on trousers, huh? When he found the body in the first place? Wow, colour me convinced. To quote a statement I made to the other Aspies I regularly speak with, the Great Wall of China could not stop the crimes made against me because of my Asperger's Syndrome from drowning out the few crimes I have committed against others, often in an attempt to just get them to stop exacerbating my very real symptoms.
Speaking as one of many neurologically divergent individuals, not only does the emphasising of Kieron's status as an Aspie (which I am not totally convinced of, either) by the media smack of discrimination, but so too does the behaviour of the police. I am stronger, and a better person, than the normies who work in the Liverpool Police Department and the UK Mirror. Because I am an Aspie.
I think it is time to go to war.
12-17-2005, 05:09 AM
Maybe I should have included something in the email about normies telling me what I made or what I really said?
I mean the following: it is time to go to war. Flood every newspaper with letters about every case of autie/Aspie abuse that comes our way, for starters. And I mean flood, like they will absolutely drown in this information. If they want to shift the focus to us being murderers or rapists by default, let's shift it right back. Direct mailing runs of letters like the above to civilian houses, you name it.
I mean the following: it is time to go to war. Flood every newspaper with letters about every case of autie/Aspie abuse that comes our way, for starters. And I mean flood, like they will absolutely drown in this information. If they want to shift the focus to us being murderers or rapists by default, let's shift it right back. Direct mailing runs of letters like the above to civilian houses, you name it.
12-17-2005, 05:40 AM
The first step to winning a war is always to make your enemy feel ambivalent about fighting. In this context, enemy means the soldiers you are directly confronting as well as those who support them. If you get in enough normies' faces and say "these people they are demonising, for all you know, they could be your children", they will stop feeling like fighting.
12-17-2005, 11:09 AM
Unfortunately, nothing in my experience tells me that it is possible to get anything out of a normie without beating them into submission. My own goddamned mother had to be threatened with a carving knife in order to be made to treat me with respect.
With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that I do not feel the abusers are a minority. I feel that they are a majority, or at least a significant number.
And I think the idea that the normies are willing to listen to us is proven laughable by the idea that when we state "hey, we are being neglected to death", we are ignored, while when these morons say "he's a killer because he's an Asssssssspie!", they listen.
Sure, there are few of us. Have you ever seen the science fiction miniseries called V? In the final reels, a Jewish man makes his wife read a letter from his father to a resistance leader who has come asking for their help. The letter basically says that the only way they are going to defeat the alien Nazis is to band together, offering what support to one another they can or whatever, until they overwhelm the enemy. By making ourselves a society unto ourselves, we can outshine these inbreds.
I think experience has shown that potential supporters and allies need to be horrified into helping us. When I talk about how I can paint a scale model with life-level detail to parents of Aspie/autie children, they are falling asleep. When I tell them "if you love your children, for *&^! sake get them out of this town", they listen.
With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that I do not feel the abusers are a minority. I feel that they are a majority, or at least a significant number.
And I think the idea that the normies are willing to listen to us is proven laughable by the idea that when we state "hey, we are being neglected to death", we are ignored, while when these morons say "he's a killer because he's an Asssssssspie!", they listen.
Sure, there are few of us. Have you ever seen the science fiction miniseries called V? In the final reels, a Jewish man makes his wife read a letter from his father to a resistance leader who has come asking for their help. The letter basically says that the only way they are going to defeat the alien Nazis is to band together, offering what support to one another they can or whatever, until they overwhelm the enemy. By making ourselves a society unto ourselves, we can outshine these inbreds.
I think experience has shown that potential supporters and allies need to be horrified into helping us. When I talk about how I can paint a scale model with life-level detail to parents of Aspie/autie children, they are falling asleep. When I tell them "if you love your children, for *&^! sake get them out of this town", they listen.
12-17-2005, 04:22 PM
What would you rather? Do you know how upsetting it is to be told "don't tell anyone this story" when it happens to be true? You think you know terror? You think any people who want to be crybaby about what I tell them know terror? Well, I look around and I see a bunch of people who recoil in fear at the history I have to share with them because they could never survive it. Let's see if you could survive having some woman-thing picking you up by the ears and screaming into them until your entire world turns black, then having everyone tell you you are imagining it. Or not to talk about it.
You bombard me in news stories like these and expect me not to tell people that they live in a world where violence solves 90% of their problems? What about my painful imagery? Why do you not give a damn about that? For people who complain about curebies every day, you sure act like them a tad too much.
You bombard me in news stories like these and expect me not to tell people that they live in a world where violence solves 90% of their problems? What about my painful imagery? Why do you not give a damn about that? For people who complain about curebies every day, you sure act like them a tad too much.
12-18-2005, 05:46 AM
At the risk of sounding trite, you've got to work with what you've got to work with. In your case, your imaginative mind, your technical knowledges, your special interests, and the insights you've gained from your life experiences. That's a lot of worthwhile stuff.
12-18-2005, 08:05 PM
How does such a discussion happen?
(I'm still pretty new to online forum etiquette and procedures.)
(I'm still pretty new to online forum etiquette and procedures.)
12-18-2005, 11:11 PM
Can one say what they think here, or in some other appropriate place on the public forum? I feel uncomfortable giving an opinion behind Iron Man's back, so to speak.
12-18-2005, 11:34 PM
Okay, now I've got to think through what I think--I guess I'll start by rereading the forum rules. Thanks
12-19-2005, 04:59 AM
Okay, first I want to say that I respect whatever decision Amy and Gareth make with respect to banning or not banning Iron Man. Second, that I am submitting these comments without knowing what others have said elsewhere, so some of this could be redundant. Third, Iron Man, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that I’m posting here because I think you have the right to hear my opinion. And most of it you’ve already heard from me before.
------------
Several of Iron Man’s posts throughout the forums, but especially in this News and Media forum, violate the rules set up by Aspies for Freedom and, in my opinion, basic civil discourse. In essence, because of the way that he’s been treated, either intentionally or misguidedly, by people in his life, he’s prepared to wage war against what he calls the normies, and he is abusively critical of Aspies who are advocating moderate approaches to social change. Without knowing what is in Iron Man’s heart, mind and soul, it is difficult to know how exactly to interpret his comments. For example: Does he believe everything he’s saying or is he writing for dramatic effect? Is he getting anger off his chest as a therapeutic exercise, or is he fuelling more anger within himself? Fact is, those of us reading his words don’t know his motivations, and it’s not our role here to figure them out. We can listen, and offer sympathy and support for the difficulties that Iron Man (and for that matter anyone posting here) faces and has faced, but we can’t fix his problems and make his life better. It is my belief, just my personal opinion, that Iron Man ultimately has to heal the wounds to his soul himself, and that he has the resources and strength within himself to do it. I hope for this to be true. And I think that in certain ways, participation in Aspies for Freedom can help him, which is one reason why this discussion is problematic.
But, since we don’t know Iron Man’s motivations, we get to focus on the behavior, which is, to use that wonderful therapy-ish word, “inappropriate.” Stuff like: threats to perpetrate violence on other people or himself and gross negative and insulting overgeneralizations being in my view the worst examples. While one hopes that people reading this forum would have the discernment to realize that Iron Man’s views are his alone, and not widely shared by the other people posting on the forum or the organizers of AFF, I don’t think this is something we can count on. He is, unfortunately, exemplifying in his written word some of the very behaviors that he thinks the newsmedia is unfairly attributing to Aspies. This is REALLY not good. In my opinion, a lot of the writing comes across as the rants of a seriously disturbed person. (I could get into a long digression about models for how social change occurs, but I’ll save it for a different post.) Basically, bottom line, Iron Man’s current “beat them into submission” strategy is not the Aspies for Freedom philosophy, as stated by Amy and Gareth.
So what to do?
Because this is a potential community of support for Iron Man, and because many of his calmly and rationally expressed ideas are worth listening to, I hate to ban him outright. But I also don’t think it’s right or okay to allow the sorts of posts that have gotten Iron Man banned to continue. The best option I can think of is to forbid him to post to any of the forums that non-members have access to, for, say, a month, during which time he would be given the opportunity to express his views in a way that does not violate the goals of AFF. People could give feedback on any content that seems problematic or offensive. After a month, the issue could be revisited.
To Iron Man, I would say: present your arguments in a logical, dispassionate, non-abusive manner. Try and step outside of your own pain, and your fantasies of revenge against those who have wronged you, and view matters from a broader perspective. You don’t have to agree with me--rather, your disagreements will seem a lot more cogent if you take care with how they’re expressed.
------------
Several of Iron Man’s posts throughout the forums, but especially in this News and Media forum, violate the rules set up by Aspies for Freedom and, in my opinion, basic civil discourse. In essence, because of the way that he’s been treated, either intentionally or misguidedly, by people in his life, he’s prepared to wage war against what he calls the normies, and he is abusively critical of Aspies who are advocating moderate approaches to social change. Without knowing what is in Iron Man’s heart, mind and soul, it is difficult to know how exactly to interpret his comments. For example: Does he believe everything he’s saying or is he writing for dramatic effect? Is he getting anger off his chest as a therapeutic exercise, or is he fuelling more anger within himself? Fact is, those of us reading his words don’t know his motivations, and it’s not our role here to figure them out. We can listen, and offer sympathy and support for the difficulties that Iron Man (and for that matter anyone posting here) faces and has faced, but we can’t fix his problems and make his life better. It is my belief, just my personal opinion, that Iron Man ultimately has to heal the wounds to his soul himself, and that he has the resources and strength within himself to do it. I hope for this to be true. And I think that in certain ways, participation in Aspies for Freedom can help him, which is one reason why this discussion is problematic.
But, since we don’t know Iron Man’s motivations, we get to focus on the behavior, which is, to use that wonderful therapy-ish word, “inappropriate.” Stuff like: threats to perpetrate violence on other people or himself and gross negative and insulting overgeneralizations being in my view the worst examples. While one hopes that people reading this forum would have the discernment to realize that Iron Man’s views are his alone, and not widely shared by the other people posting on the forum or the organizers of AFF, I don’t think this is something we can count on. He is, unfortunately, exemplifying in his written word some of the very behaviors that he thinks the newsmedia is unfairly attributing to Aspies. This is REALLY not good. In my opinion, a lot of the writing comes across as the rants of a seriously disturbed person. (I could get into a long digression about models for how social change occurs, but I’ll save it for a different post.) Basically, bottom line, Iron Man’s current “beat them into submission” strategy is not the Aspies for Freedom philosophy, as stated by Amy and Gareth.
So what to do?
Because this is a potential community of support for Iron Man, and because many of his calmly and rationally expressed ideas are worth listening to, I hate to ban him outright. But I also don’t think it’s right or okay to allow the sorts of posts that have gotten Iron Man banned to continue. The best option I can think of is to forbid him to post to any of the forums that non-members have access to, for, say, a month, during which time he would be given the opportunity to express his views in a way that does not violate the goals of AFF. People could give feedback on any content that seems problematic or offensive. After a month, the issue could be revisited.
To Iron Man, I would say: present your arguments in a logical, dispassionate, non-abusive manner. Try and step outside of your own pain, and your fantasies of revenge against those who have wronged you, and view matters from a broader perspective. You don’t have to agree with me--rather, your disagreements will seem a lot more cogent if you take care with how they’re expressed.
12-20-2005, 02:06 AM
I guess Iron Man will have to decide whether or not the benefit of posting here outweights the sacrifice in his self-expression that he'd need to make.