04-02-2007, 04:56 PM
04-02-2007, 05:00 PM
can someone tell me what its says youtube does not work on the computers her at school.
04-02-2007, 05:10 PM
she's beautiful, clearly autistic and as she says, while disagreeing with the low-high labels, is classified as non-verbal, low-functioning. she is in her house and has rigged a voice activated program to speak her words for her. she is answering a recent statement about by the cure camp (sorry, still catching up on who is for what here...someone fill in) basically refuting their stance that only high-functioning ACs are rallying against cure. She is going on record to that we have "low labeled" people who exist as well, and are against cure.
her hands follow her words like she's directing a symphony and her gorgeous fat-cat comes in on cue for her to nuzzle, demonstrating that she is, indeed, aware and attached. lovely, lovely, lovely.
her hands follow her words like she's directing a symphony and her gorgeous fat-cat comes in on cue for her to nuzzle, demonstrating that she is, indeed, aware and attached. lovely, lovely, lovely.
04-03-2007, 12:56 AM
I've seen this before, and I really like how brave she is to speak to people the way she does about what she feels is wrong.
I also like the way she stims, too. It's cool to watch.
I've also seen her website, http://www.gettingthetruthout.org , which I think is a website everyone should see.
I also like the way she stims, too. It's cool to watch.
I've also seen her website, http://www.gettingthetruthout.org , which I think is a website everyone should see.
04-04-2007, 04:35 PM
Addendum: If you are diagnosed with PDD-NOS, Asperger's, CDD, or Rett's, it is correct to say "I am autistic". Autism is the larger category which all of those fit into. I suppose you could also say "I have a pervasive developmental disorder", but that's clumsy and practically labeling yourself as defective, so it's no wonder few people say it that way. "Autistic" makes more sense.
04-12-2007, 06:58 PM
Hi,
My name's Anna Salamon, and I'm a friend of Amanda's since childhood. (I figured I'd introduce myself by (full, legal) name, because there're enough conspiracy theories running around. I'm a real person, working toward a Ph.D. in philosophy of science at UCSD. You can check by Google.)
Amanda and I met at nerd camp in 1993, when we were both twelve years old. I approached her because someone told me she was "crazy", pointing her out as the one twirling wildly and continuously at the edge of the outdoor dance they were holding for us. We were on the same hall, and when her (relatively) popular roommate wanted her out of the room for their slumber party, I maneuvered to get her to sleep in my room, and so we stayed up talking and met. (And if anyone's looking for a scandal: yes, she talked, she walked, and she was out at nerd camp without special assistance. If that is what it takes to create a scandal, a scandal it is.)
It feels odd to chop up memories in search of diagnostic criteria for autism. But, for what it's worth, she stimmed. Her reputation as "crazy" was in part for the twirling, and also for "staring at walls" while zoning out visually. Her social skills were bad, but not so glaringly awful as to penetrate through my own twelve-year-old geekiness. She talked a lot about a few social phenomena that stuck out to her but I had not noticed, notably "Squeaky", an aspie-ish (in retrospect) teen that she winced defensively at and felt self-conscious for. Mostly our conversation was abstract; I was thrilled, after the closed-in-ness of elementary school, to finally find someone who would "talk about ideas" with me. We talked about Conformity and Anti-conformity (willfully appearing different, as another attempt to mask oneself) and Nonconformity (which was good, but difficult and rare). We talked about Escapism and Anti-escapism, and the difficulty of ever really Meeting another person. She lent me the Tao Te Ching.
Again: That summer and the next, she talked about "reality breakdowns" where sensory processing stopped working, and "escaping shapes". Her skin would get hot and prickly from overload. She experienced "shut down" at least once, lying there in the grass unable to respond. She talked about having trouble with language, like Mrs. Who from "A Wrinkle In Time", who had trouble assembling language and tended instead to quote people who'd said things close to what she meant. She made a collection of pointers to herself, slowly and over many years, by showing me particular books and songs. So if anyone cares to pick over her life and our friendship to tally up positive and negative "fits various autism criteria" points: before ever hearing about autism, she had autistic sensory troubles and autistic echolalic language. And, like many unusual teens, she made some attempt to willfully appear different to mask the ways in which she was inadvertently different.
I called and emailed Amanda intermittently for the next few years, through her year at an early entry college and the succession of psychiatric hospitals that followed. Her page in my address book is filled with the crossed-out numbers of mental institutions. Every few weeks I'd call her parents, be given yet another number, and then reach an Amanda who was sometimes so drugged she afterwards didn't remember the conversation. To whoever speculated about "a few days" in a psychiatric hospital: it was years. And while I'm not into comparing gradations of Hell, the flashbacks I've watched her go through since then sure don't make the institutions look pleasant. Neither do the nights I spent sitting with her to help her not kill herself afterwards.
I'm not sure what else to say about our past. We have a lot more experience together: several visits, six weeks' attempted attendance at UCSB during which we crashed and burned together; a year living near one another in California in 2001; other visits and phone and email. We grew up together; I watched her fight her way through fear and language barriers and psychiatric behavior modification and stereotypes to speak more and more of the truth. I have no doubt at all that she is a person of integrity. Noetic points out that Amanda hid herself in stereotypes as a teenager: fair enough. But who the heck didn't hide as a teenager? Who the heck wouldn't have been insecure at 14, without effective language, believing they were "crazy" and having no models for what an adult like them might be like? Weren't most of us insecure at 14 without any of that help?
I've seen her work painstakingly to speak the truth and to act rightly, in stressful and dangerous situations. I've seen her gain increasing awareness of how to do so, increasing understanding of and governance of herself. I don't know. I'm sure we're all suggestible, a little, and maybe the hypochondria and attention-seeking that some people speculated about is something many people can be prone to. Distancing yourself from a stigmatized group (e.g., schizophrenics) can be easy too. I could picture any of these of Amanda as a teen, or of myself, or of many people I know. But I really cannot picture it of Amanda now. And there is absolutely no way she is "acting" in the sense of pretending that she stims, enjoying being waited on while lollygagging on the internet all day, etc. It seems demeaning to need to pick over someone's life or testify to their "authenticity" in this kind of detail, but yes, she stims, and has as long as I've known her. And, yes, her loss of skills and inability to work, or feed herself, are real. It was not for CNN that she starved (lost weight precipitously) in the months before she got services. And many of her health conditions have worsened since then. (The required change is also be less drastic than you might think: see Amanda's recent post about stilts.)
A few general comments in response to the discussion (some of which have already been made by various people): I haven't heard Amanda claim to speak for others with LFA or anything else. Mostly I've heard hoards of parents asking her to explain their children to them, while Amanda repeated that she had never met their children. I have heard Amanda offer some general thoughts about autism and human rights and adaptive technologies that might be broadly useful to people with LFA (and other autism), and it is true that she did not proclaim in bold letters at the top "I used to occupy a different sociological category than your kid, and so if you follow stereotypes you should disregard the rest of the page". Her history was around but was not the focus of her writing. You may be right that this was a tactical and theory of mind error, but there's a long way from that to willful deception.
As to representativeness, autistic people come in many shapes. It seems to me that autism should be allowed many faces in the public media, rather than trying to pick out a few autistics as "representative" and hiding the rest.
Regarding "authenticity" and speculation in general: autistic people vary. Not everyone immediately resonates with everyone else, and that that doesn't mean the people they do not resonate with are fake autistics. Not everyone has the same mannerisms or other small traits as everyone else, and that doesn't mean the people without those mannerisms are fake autistics. Even the subtle patterns of movement can vary: there is more than one way to mix voluntary and automatic movements in stimming, especially when you throw in movement-modifying health conditions, or emotions, or the knowledge that whatever you do is going to be broadcast and microanalyzed across national television. Or attempts to use automatic movement patterns, in various ways, to communicate with world and others (as in In My Language). (It is also hard to form solid theories by speculating from a small number of details, just in general. After Amanda wrote Getting The Truth Out, people deemed that site faked based, among other things, on the alleged cost of developing black and white photos.)
More generally, it seems to me that we should be cautious about making definitive statements about who is and is not autistic or about what someone's life must be like based on some small part of them. For one thing, such caution is more respectful to the individuals. For another, such caution breeds a better community. When disagreement with a person's views or tactics can be tangled into a discussion of whether or not a person is "really" autistic, it is easy to get stuck picking at each other. Ditto when a person's membership in the autistic community can be retracted based on personal conflicts, or deviation from someone's pet stereotype. A norm of caution would make it easier to focus on work that matters, such as changing the outside world.
My name's Anna Salamon, and I'm a friend of Amanda's since childhood. (I figured I'd introduce myself by (full, legal) name, because there're enough conspiracy theories running around. I'm a real person, working toward a Ph.D. in philosophy of science at UCSD. You can check by Google.)
Amanda and I met at nerd camp in 1993, when we were both twelve years old. I approached her because someone told me she was "crazy", pointing her out as the one twirling wildly and continuously at the edge of the outdoor dance they were holding for us. We were on the same hall, and when her (relatively) popular roommate wanted her out of the room for their slumber party, I maneuvered to get her to sleep in my room, and so we stayed up talking and met. (And if anyone's looking for a scandal: yes, she talked, she walked, and she was out at nerd camp without special assistance. If that is what it takes to create a scandal, a scandal it is.)
It feels odd to chop up memories in search of diagnostic criteria for autism. But, for what it's worth, she stimmed. Her reputation as "crazy" was in part for the twirling, and also for "staring at walls" while zoning out visually. Her social skills were bad, but not so glaringly awful as to penetrate through my own twelve-year-old geekiness. She talked a lot about a few social phenomena that stuck out to her but I had not noticed, notably "Squeaky", an aspie-ish (in retrospect) teen that she winced defensively at and felt self-conscious for. Mostly our conversation was abstract; I was thrilled, after the closed-in-ness of elementary school, to finally find someone who would "talk about ideas" with me. We talked about Conformity and Anti-conformity (willfully appearing different, as another attempt to mask oneself) and Nonconformity (which was good, but difficult and rare). We talked about Escapism and Anti-escapism, and the difficulty of ever really Meeting another person. She lent me the Tao Te Ching.
Again: That summer and the next, she talked about "reality breakdowns" where sensory processing stopped working, and "escaping shapes". Her skin would get hot and prickly from overload. She experienced "shut down" at least once, lying there in the grass unable to respond. She talked about having trouble with language, like Mrs. Who from "A Wrinkle In Time", who had trouble assembling language and tended instead to quote people who'd said things close to what she meant. She made a collection of pointers to herself, slowly and over many years, by showing me particular books and songs. So if anyone cares to pick over her life and our friendship to tally up positive and negative "fits various autism criteria" points: before ever hearing about autism, she had autistic sensory troubles and autistic echolalic language. And, like many unusual teens, she made some attempt to willfully appear different to mask the ways in which she was inadvertently different.
I called and emailed Amanda intermittently for the next few years, through her year at an early entry college and the succession of psychiatric hospitals that followed. Her page in my address book is filled with the crossed-out numbers of mental institutions. Every few weeks I'd call her parents, be given yet another number, and then reach an Amanda who was sometimes so drugged she afterwards didn't remember the conversation. To whoever speculated about "a few days" in a psychiatric hospital: it was years. And while I'm not into comparing gradations of Hell, the flashbacks I've watched her go through since then sure don't make the institutions look pleasant. Neither do the nights I spent sitting with her to help her not kill herself afterwards.
I'm not sure what else to say about our past. We have a lot more experience together: several visits, six weeks' attempted attendance at UCSB during which we crashed and burned together; a year living near one another in California in 2001; other visits and phone and email. We grew up together; I watched her fight her way through fear and language barriers and psychiatric behavior modification and stereotypes to speak more and more of the truth. I have no doubt at all that she is a person of integrity. Noetic points out that Amanda hid herself in stereotypes as a teenager: fair enough. But who the heck didn't hide as a teenager? Who the heck wouldn't have been insecure at 14, without effective language, believing they were "crazy" and having no models for what an adult like them might be like? Weren't most of us insecure at 14 without any of that help?
I've seen her work painstakingly to speak the truth and to act rightly, in stressful and dangerous situations. I've seen her gain increasing awareness of how to do so, increasing understanding of and governance of herself. I don't know. I'm sure we're all suggestible, a little, and maybe the hypochondria and attention-seeking that some people speculated about is something many people can be prone to. Distancing yourself from a stigmatized group (e.g., schizophrenics) can be easy too. I could picture any of these of Amanda as a teen, or of myself, or of many people I know. But I really cannot picture it of Amanda now. And there is absolutely no way she is "acting" in the sense of pretending that she stims, enjoying being waited on while lollygagging on the internet all day, etc. It seems demeaning to need to pick over someone's life or testify to their "authenticity" in this kind of detail, but yes, she stims, and has as long as I've known her. And, yes, her loss of skills and inability to work, or feed herself, are real. It was not for CNN that she starved (lost weight precipitously) in the months before she got services. And many of her health conditions have worsened since then. (The required change is also be less drastic than you might think: see Amanda's recent post about stilts.)
A few general comments in response to the discussion (some of which have already been made by various people): I haven't heard Amanda claim to speak for others with LFA or anything else. Mostly I've heard hoards of parents asking her to explain their children to them, while Amanda repeated that she had never met their children. I have heard Amanda offer some general thoughts about autism and human rights and adaptive technologies that might be broadly useful to people with LFA (and other autism), and it is true that she did not proclaim in bold letters at the top "I used to occupy a different sociological category than your kid, and so if you follow stereotypes you should disregard the rest of the page". Her history was around but was not the focus of her writing. You may be right that this was a tactical and theory of mind error, but there's a long way from that to willful deception.
As to representativeness, autistic people come in many shapes. It seems to me that autism should be allowed many faces in the public media, rather than trying to pick out a few autistics as "representative" and hiding the rest.
Regarding "authenticity" and speculation in general: autistic people vary. Not everyone immediately resonates with everyone else, and that that doesn't mean the people they do not resonate with are fake autistics. Not everyone has the same mannerisms or other small traits as everyone else, and that doesn't mean the people without those mannerisms are fake autistics. Even the subtle patterns of movement can vary: there is more than one way to mix voluntary and automatic movements in stimming, especially when you throw in movement-modifying health conditions, or emotions, or the knowledge that whatever you do is going to be broadcast and microanalyzed across national television. Or attempts to use automatic movement patterns, in various ways, to communicate with world and others (as in In My Language). (It is also hard to form solid theories by speculating from a small number of details, just in general. After Amanda wrote Getting The Truth Out, people deemed that site faked based, among other things, on the alleged cost of developing black and white photos.)
More generally, it seems to me that we should be cautious about making definitive statements about who is and is not autistic or about what someone's life must be like based on some small part of them. For one thing, such caution is more respectful to the individuals. For another, such caution breeds a better community. When disagreement with a person's views or tactics can be tangled into a discussion of whether or not a person is "really" autistic, it is easy to get stuck picking at each other. Ditto when a person's membership in the autistic community can be retracted based on personal conflicts, or deviation from someone's pet stereotype. A norm of caution would make it easier to focus on work that matters, such as changing the outside world.
06-12-2007, 03:48 AM
Sorry to come to this thread really really late, but wanted to add a few comments. And thanks Anna for writing all that.
AnnaSalamon Wrote:
A few general comments in response to the discussion (some of which have already been made by various people): I haven't heard Amanda claim to speak for others with LFA or anything else.
I also don't view myself as LFA. That's a category I found myself written about in in my medical records, and I was pretty shocked. The time during which I had that label, was a time when I was actually quite a bit better at some things than I am now.
The reason I don't view myself that way is because I don't view anyone as a unitary functioning level. I think it's simplistic and dangerous. I think that people have different combinations of abilities in different areas at different times, and for different durations of time. And this is simply too complex to shove people into two categories over, no matter how you draw the line.
I do discuss myself as someone who has worn that label though, because I think the label is misleading about everyone it is given to, and thus when I discuss myself that way I am not saying "The label is correct" but rather "Here's what they called me, but here's who I actually am," sort of thing. If that makes any sense.
I have also presented myself in a very stereotyped way, at times, as a calculated attempt to show that anyone can be stereotyped in certain ways if you take the most pathologized elements of their life and draw a certain picture with them. My intent in doing this is not to contribute to the stereotype but to show how people manipulate stereotypes about people, and what could be behind the stereotype that people can't see through so often. You can make anyone look tragic and so forth if you choose the right parts of them.
Quote:
Mostly I've heard hoards of parents asking her to explain their children to them, while Amanda repeated that she had never met their children. I have heard Amanda offer some general thoughts about autism and human rights and adaptive technologies that might be broadly useful to people with LFA (and other autism), and it is true that she did not proclaim in bold letters at the top "I used to occupy a different sociological category than your kid, and so if you follow stereotypes you should disregard the rest of the page". Her history was around but was not the focus of her writing. You may be right that this was a tactical and theory of mind error, but there's a long way from that to willful deception.
Agreed. I don't always say anything about which category I might or might not have been put in at some point.
The odd thing is though that I've noticed in response to some of the slander that's been going around, it's only the people who've first known me in the past couple years who've really been startled by some of this stuff. I think at some point I stopped talking about a lot of my past and started trying to get on with my life, and plus there's a lot of unpleasantness in my past that I don't always want to think about.
People who've been in the autistic community with me longer have kind of responded to this stuff with a shrug and a "so what, uh, didn't we know that stuff already? how can anyone make a scandal of something we already knew?" response. It was in places like the autistic community that I really worked through a lot of this stuff, talked about it over and over with people who already knew me, tried to figure out what had happened, how to describe it from the inside rather than using other people's words and other people's perceptions of me. (My initial attempts to do this were incredibly clumsy, I seriously talked about this stuff for years.)
I also came from a part of the autistic community that I think is different from the part that is here. There were a large-seeming number of people who were going through the same form of skill loss I was. One of them saw me freezing in place at a convention in 1999 and even explained the whole thing to me, she experienced it too and so did at least three or four other people in the room with us that night. They taught me how to handle it and led me to the paper my psychiatrist read and said basically "Oh that's what you've been doing so long" and so forth. And it was from them I learned that this was relatively normal in some segment of the autistic population.
And that place was run by someone who had experienced this and was experiencing this sort of thing, so it was not a big deal. The people there were often people who like me shift around a lot, look different day to day, have different skills day to day. At least that's how I remember it. So I was not unusual in that regard or out of place or anything. It was taken as part of the normal way of things.
And I think in other parts of the autistic community it's not part of the norm and I sometimes forget that. Because I started in that one part of the autistic community where that and many other aspects of my life were not unusual. And there were many people who had once spoken and now didn't, or didn't as often, or didn't as often and then eventually didn't. And two other people who used wheelchairs for the same motor issues I have. (CNN got the reasoning for that one totally wrong, they took my reasoning for why I wished I could lie down for the interview and used it as a description of why I used a wheelchair.) Ones that started in puberty just like mine. And these were people I knew and my first exposure to online autistics so this was just not an issue.
And so in addition to actual fear and shame about certain aspects of the past, there was also just the fact that some things I didn't see a need to mention, I thought everyone already knew, I did not take into account that recent people might not know and might form weird conclusions and might get mad at me when I didn't fit the conclusions they thought. It gets exhausting to give my whole history to everyone I meet, wondering which parts are being left out that they could find suspicious. And also feels like an invasion of privacy at times, like why should I have to give a full history every time I talk to someone instead of just being myself as I am now without having to explain all the time?
I did by the way give a full history to CNN, and gave them a lot of information that got highly distorted somewhere on the way to fitting me into the story. They have to fact-check really thoroughly in order to cover their own butts, so they have seen more of my records than anyone I've met on the net has. They even called the psychiatrist who diagnosed me as a teen to make sure he existed. And they've seen brain scans and records of diagnoses and misdiagnoses and so forth. They met my case manager and talked to both him and me about the schizophrenia diagnosis and stuff (another thing that has seemed to become scandalous to some people yet is well-known to anyone who's known me in the autistic community for very long at all because of my incessant talking about it). If I wasn't for real they wouldn't have done the show.
And yeah Anna is right. I was starving for awhile and there sure weren't any video cameras around then to capture that or give me any attention. In fact there was nobody. There was just one woman on the phone and some Internet people on mailing lists and stuff and me trying to survive. If I'd wanted attention I'd have probably left the house more. I wanted food. And a minimally sanitary house. And to not keep peeing on the rug. And a lot of other vital things I worked for all day and couldn't manage. I got services because I was in serious danger despite working my butt off (in private, mind you, no public spectacles there, and very few people knew at the time how bad it was for me because I was afraid they'd put me in an institution again if they knew), not because I thought it'd be cool to not have to do any work. (In case anyone's wondering the problems with that sort of thing are largely with the amount of perceptual work it takes, not with some mysterious thing called executive function. I simply can't juggle that amount of information about my environment and my body and what I need to be doing all at once, it all breaks down really fast.)
I couldn't navigate the system at all, it was a Center for Independent Living and later my parents who got me services. I got IHSS which meant I got food again sometimes. And even with not enough food (but more food than I'd been getting) I got fat really fast: The whole reason I'm fat is because my metabolism shifted from prolonged hunger, so if anyone wants to poke fun at that just be aware of the experiences you're poking fun at (not that it's okay to poke fun at anyone for it, but anyway). I weigh 195 pounds now on a fairly normal diet of food that most people think is healthy anyway (well, when I'm not on prednisone, prednisone makes me eat like a bottomless pit). I am more concerned with eating healthy and exercising as much as health allows and stuff than I am with weight numbers anyway.
Anyway that's kind of a ramble but I wanted to fill in some of the details and motivations involved in the stuff Anna discussed. And I'm glad she came here and said something because it's really weird having your life picked apart detail by detail by people who don't actually know the details. It's made me really aware of how much I don't know about other people when I criticize them, and I'm at least attempting to be more careful. Also made me aware how when a person is disliking or distrustful of someone, suddenly innocent things become bad things and motivations get added on that don't exist. And trying to be more careful about that too. (I've already read people's apologies and stuff too so thanks for that, I'm not looking for that, just trying to fill in more information way after the fact.)
06-12-2007, 03:56 AM
As for Donna Williams, that entire radio show looked to me like a bunch of school bullies getting back together to laugh at an autistic person and misinterpret her every action. It turns out that the "teacher" of hers was merely someone who thought Donna was in her class as a kid but she was actually thinking of some other girl. Only some of the students were even people she'd heard of before. The ones she'd heard of before were people who in Donna's books definitely fell under the category of not-nice people. I remember thinking, "Why would a bunch of people tell each other someone's secret and then laugh about it?" And I remember thinking that some of the things they saw as proof that she wasn't autistic, actually seemed like proof of lack of social skills to me (like when she went and sat in the middle of the front row, or when she insisted that a child just hadn't worked as hard as her, I've seen those things in other auties before), but they were interpreting socially unskilled stuff as something else entirely, making it into kind of a catch-22. And sometimes getting things upside-down, like when she tried to stop passing for NT they'd start saying she was pretending to be autistic, which I know a lot of people who've had that one happen to.
Someone I know online said that Norman Swan did another show on Asperger's that portrayed it so badly and wrongly and as if autistic people were dangerous, that she had problem at her job with people thinking she was going to assault their children.
But basically she understands too much about being autistic (whatever else I disagree with her on) to be anything but autistic in my book, and I like Anna have found the dissection of public auties for "are they really autistic?" sorts of things distasteful since long before anyone tried it on me. It's just a form of gossip and it doesn't help anyone.
Someone I know online said that Norman Swan did another show on Asperger's that portrayed it so badly and wrongly and as if autistic people were dangerous, that she had problem at her job with people thinking she was going to assault their children.
But basically she understands too much about being autistic (whatever else I disagree with her on) to be anything but autistic in my book, and I like Anna have found the dissection of public auties for "are they really autistic?" sorts of things distasteful since long before anyone tried it on me. It's just a form of gossip and it doesn't help anyone.
06-12-2007, 03:57 AM
Oh and, I literally did not know my hands didn't count as "in front of my eyes" until someone on this thread pointed it out. Seriously. I experience quite a wide field of vision as "in front of my eyes".
06-12-2007, 04:08 AM
I'm glad that you're posting here, anbuend. I've been observing the many sane things that you have to say over the past weeks. Your writing is a good reminder that one doesn't really know what somebody is experiencing, so drawing inferences can lead to erroneous judgments.
06-12-2007, 10:34 PM
Also the reason the sound and the video don't match up on my videos always, is because I record them separately. I put the communication device speaker next to the microphone and record that. Then I put that over the top of the video's sound.
The day I made the one with the toy cat it was because my friend had sent it to me a few months ago and I didn't know what to put in the video so I thought I'd just sit at my computer desk and show her how I had been using the cat (which is an amazing one because all the textures are just right for holding and it's very useful for staying oriented in confusing situations, I'd been carrying it all over and sleeping with it, it's perfect and I was trying to show my gratitude). I recorded the video separately from the audio so nothing would've matched up emotionally or anything.
The day I made the one with the toy cat it was because my friend had sent it to me a few months ago and I didn't know what to put in the video so I thought I'd just sit at my computer desk and show her how I had been using the cat (which is an amazing one because all the textures are just right for holding and it's very useful for staying oriented in confusing situations, I'd been carrying it all over and sleeping with it, it's perfect and I was trying to show my gratitude). I recorded the video separately from the audio so nothing would've matched up emotionally or anything.
06-12-2007, 10:40 PM
(Also if you want to know how I interact in realtime with real people around and not terrified by cameras, I'm in the audience of this lecture and towards the end there's a lot of me and Phil and some other people in the question and answer session. That's more how I usually am, more expressive and stuff. I just can't get some of those things going without people around to trigger them, and other times the sort of people they are inhibit me.)
06-16-2007, 05:19 AM
Anbuend, I'm sorry that you feel that your weight is something that you need to justify or explain. I know that many prescription drugs, such as ones used to treat severe asthma and auto-immune conditions, and also some psychiatric drugs, have substantial weight gain as definite side effects. Some people also appear to be genetically destined to be thin or large, and many of us also have limited opportunities to get out and exercise due to family or work committments or disadvantage. There is also interesting and convincing evidence that chronic sleep deprivation may be a major factor causing the so-called "obesity epidemic", possibly because mentally exhasted people tend not to move about as much as those who get enough sleep. There is even a theory about an excess weight-causing virus. I believe there is something very unfair about they way society is currently obsessed with "fat people", as it seems to me that many of the most disadvantaged and stressed people in society are among the ones being harassed.
06-16-2007, 02:11 PM
Lili, there would be nothing wrong if it were the psych drugs, but it wasn't the psych drugs, if it was, I'd have said so. (I did experience weight gain on psych drugs, it also (a) wasn't this much weight, and (b) was lost afterwards without any effort on my part.) There's a known cause in my case, basically an exaggerated form of what happens to yo-yo dieters, only from starvation in my case rather than deliberate dieting. I agree though that nobody should have to justify their weight.
With regards to the rest of that stuff... I've read many books by autistic people over the years. Pretty close to all of them are so heavily influenced by the popular writing on autism at the time that it has a major distorting effect on the finished product. Donna's books are no more extreme than usual in that regard, and less extreme than some. And if you'd bothered to read further you'd know that she doesn't blame her autism on abuse despite overwhelming pressure from others to do so. Much of the time she was the target because she was autistic, not the other way around. At any rate, if you're going to go after Donna for influence by psychoanalytic crud go after Tom McKean and a few others as well, and then go after the huge crop of Frith and Baron-Cohen influenced authors who came later.
If not having a full date and place of birth is a problem on Wikipedia, then you will find very few autistic people listed on there who have both. Even Temple Grandin has a date but not a place, many people have only years, and a few people (including me) don't even have that. Nobody notified me that if my exact date and place of birth were not on Wikipedia then I must not exist, or that I was required to provide those. Donna has an extensive amount of genealogy on her website for a non-existent person though.
You might consider that some people know the origins of that nasty little radio show better than you do, as well. And they're ugly. Very ugly. Not something worth perpetuating. Her own father wrote in support of her after that thing aired. Public slander is not the sort of thing you should perpetuate unless you're dead sure you're in the right, because of the amount of damage that's done. And simply not liking what someone writes or having vague "feelings" that it isn't real or is influenced by other writing, isn't good enough reason given the amount of damage it does -- there are a lot of people who I absolutely can't stand, people I think are very harmful, that I would never do anything like this to, and you seem to be doing it for less reason than even that. Maybe someday you'll be the one facing that crap in public without a name pulled from a song title to hide behind, and find it influencing your job prospects among other things, and realize that gossip isn't just an idle pastime.
With regards to the rest of that stuff... I've read many books by autistic people over the years. Pretty close to all of them are so heavily influenced by the popular writing on autism at the time that it has a major distorting effect on the finished product. Donna's books are no more extreme than usual in that regard, and less extreme than some. And if you'd bothered to read further you'd know that she doesn't blame her autism on abuse despite overwhelming pressure from others to do so. Much of the time she was the target because she was autistic, not the other way around. At any rate, if you're going to go after Donna for influence by psychoanalytic crud go after Tom McKean and a few others as well, and then go after the huge crop of Frith and Baron-Cohen influenced authors who came later.
If not having a full date and place of birth is a problem on Wikipedia, then you will find very few autistic people listed on there who have both. Even Temple Grandin has a date but not a place, many people have only years, and a few people (including me) don't even have that. Nobody notified me that if my exact date and place of birth were not on Wikipedia then I must not exist, or that I was required to provide those. Donna has an extensive amount of genealogy on her website for a non-existent person though.
You might consider that some people know the origins of that nasty little radio show better than you do, as well. And they're ugly. Very ugly. Not something worth perpetuating. Her own father wrote in support of her after that thing aired. Public slander is not the sort of thing you should perpetuate unless you're dead sure you're in the right, because of the amount of damage that's done. And simply not liking what someone writes or having vague "feelings" that it isn't real or is influenced by other writing, isn't good enough reason given the amount of damage it does -- there are a lot of people who I absolutely can't stand, people I think are very harmful, that I would never do anything like this to, and you seem to be doing it for less reason than even that. Maybe someday you'll be the one facing that crap in public without a name pulled from a song title to hide behind, and find it influencing your job prospects among other things, and realize that gossip isn't just an idle pastime.
06-21-2007, 06:31 AM
This thread is a bit confusing to me, as I'm not exactly sure who's alleging what, but I do have one question--what does "AC" mean (in this context)? I know AS=Asperger Syndrome, ASC=Autism Spectrum Condition, ASD=Autism Spectrum Disorder (which I don't use), but AC is new to me. Autistic Condition? Something else that's probably obvious but that I'm to addled in the head to recognize?