Aspies For Freedom

I think until the school administrators annihilate the free expression of insults in school, the students will have to either internalize the insults or fight them, probably literally.

They should never learn to quit fighting.  If they get to 22 and/or college graduation and they can't have self esteem, it could be a job or relationship problem.

But mano a mano, hand to hand, no weapons.  
I guess since you can't guarantee that, I take the physical confrontation thing back.

Sticks and stones break bones, but words eventually break the spirit.  Then your battleship is sunk God knows how long.

We need more teachers say, they can't keep up with your mind, if they can't beat you, they're beating you up inside outside or both.  Play up the bullies-are-inferior-inside thesis.  Play up the idea that happy people don't spread unhappiness.  Unhappy people do, misery loves company.

It seems to be a sharp divide because I know quite a lot of Apsies who simply fought back so hard nobody'd go near them, while others who were simply incapable of harming others.

Which is strange brcause it suggests that empathy for other people is NOT an aspie trait, or is over-emphasised. Like the original poster is clearly willing to draw blood and inflict great pain on anyone threatening him. While I was completely incapable of dealling pain, and always found it easier to just get beaten until they got bored than to try and fight back (Which'd result in a whole lot more of a hurt for all parties involve,d whereas I could take a lesser punishment on all our behalfs)

I'll never forget Waldorf, Maryland (and to a smaller extent, school in La Plata, as the Emotional Adjustment program was administered in schools in the county seat of Charles County, La Plata, hit by a tornado some years ago).

School violence would have been bad enough, but myself and a classmate were molested in separate incidents by neighbors older boys.

I told a counselor later, who regretted I had not told him within seven years.  Statute of limitations.

Is there a backstory on Freddie Krueger?  Wonder if he was picked on in school, molested.  Certainly if Freddie was trying to get back at his classmates, he picked their most vulnerable point.  

With apology to the people of Waldorf, I have wondered, occasionally, if the best use for my neighborhood would have been an aboveground nuclear test range.

In all honesty, I accept my former high school classmates only on a case-by-case basis, not blanketly as I might for grad school.  It was a little hard to tell friend from foe, and it did hurt my friendships while in school.  I think I realized that the smart kids were OK.  They, like me, were simply trying to bust their butts to make it into college (I was trying to get into Shepherd College, now a university, and I did, and graduated)

I bought Jodee Blanco's Please Stop Laughing At Me and started reading it.  I loved the dance scene close to the end, when Jodee's date came to her defense, and asked Jodee's tormentor if she was a hooker (dressed close to it) and if he could call her for a friend's bachelor party.

I'm sure the man who prayed to God to be delivered from the flood was thinking like a victim.  
1.  He didn't evacuate when the radio told him the hurricane was coming or the dam was ready to blow
2.  He passed up the boat
3.  He passed up the plane
4.  And so on

I think perhaps God's answer to a suitable mate (for me, I mean) is the specific dating service E-Harmony, and perhaps seeing if God would work outside those channels was a mistake.

Something else about successful people.  We know that getting revenge is not a rational option.

A. Probably what kept me from going Columbine at Thomas Stone High School was
1.  As soon as Dad retired from Federal employment, and we sold the primary residence, we would permanently relocate to the vacation property Dad picked, before I was born, for that ultimate objective.
2.  And then I would go to Shepherd College.
3.  Friends and teachers on my side.  One of my tormentors insulted me in Spanish class and I hit him.  The instructor took my side right away so he did absolutely nothing.  She later called me a scholar and a gentleman.  I never saw what's-his-name again after that school year, maybe he dropped out.

B. And I have been angry in later years at
1.  The frequent occupational discrimination between 1996 and 1998, when repeated interviews in the specific field of applied social research failed.  The most rational theory was summed up in the blog <http://hatingautism.blogspot.com/2007/06/neurodiversity-sells-out-one-of-its-own.html>

2.  Of late, with respect to dating, I have alternated between
   a. poor self-esteem from the logical fallacy of
        (1) I am diagnosed with Asperger
        (2) Adult female strangers do not commonly initiate communication with me
        (3) ergo, the Asperger means I am unworthy of their attention

        it is much harder on my own time, but it can even be hard at work, though I have noticed why, thanks to wikipedia.org.  
       (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/falling_upward: Falling upward is romantic attraction based on the superior qualities of the other person.  We have an entire conference planning group.  As a sociologist I suggest that attractive, sociable, intelligent, and usually female staff in front-line human-to-human contact is no accident.  I feel a heck of a lot better at Gold's Gym when a female counter clerk/attendant seems to notice me.
       (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nerd: this was based on the article as of March 2007.  
            (a) popular culture frequently depicts nerds as "lovelorn" and seeking women "above their status"
            (b) moreover, the culture depicts such behavior and a negative reaction from the woman and/or others present as comic relief (emphasis mine)

       Look here, I work in a very progressive office environment.  We probably don't believe in such things.  In any case, we say nothing, and keep feelings out of business, as we should, as even positive feelings have no place at work.  
       But I am suggesting that the Men of Honor reasoning holds true here, too
  
     Leslie W. 'Billy' Sunday (aka God, played by Robert De Niro): " Why you work so hard, boy?"

    Carl Brashear (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.): "Because they tell me I can't have it."

C.  But there is limited recourse or none at all
     1.  Employment discrimination: EEOC can only punish cases of occupational prejudice that can be demonstrated.
     2.  Romantic discrimination: You're screwed, my friend.  You have no recourse, not of law, or of God.  Even Almighty Yahweh the Father, Jesus the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit have no power over one person with free will saying "no".  Because God built free will into people (to answer spiritual skeptics who would say God made them love Him, or because they feared God would ______ ).  You only have the cold comfort of knowing that free will is a coin with two sides:

          (a) the freedom to discriminate or be prejudiced, even when you are wrong, or
          (b) to make a correct decision with no bias

and knowing that people are in one camp or the other.

The perps probably thought if we were too trusting of their intentions, which they knew to be wrong, it made what they did OK.

My type? - For the record I've never asked for anyone to intervene, and I know "your type" you just get off on finding excuses to fight people. A bully by another name, instead of picking fights with kids minding their own buisness you use the excuse of "helping" someone to beat someone else up.

But if the real world worked like that - one guy punches someone, so you get someone else to punch them harder; the entire world would decend into mutual self destruction.

Why don't you take your personal feelings of superioty and shove them up your... well use your imagination. That entire post was just a directed attack >:O

It is true that there are some people in this world who have bad things happen in their lives due to their own foolish choices. It is also true that more people should take responsibility for their own actions. However I would like to point out that it is often school policy or police policy to punish both parties in a fight because both were fighting and therefore both were in the "wrong".

I would also caution against a sweeping blame of victims for whatever happens to them. It tastes of a certain cold mentality and arrogance that leads to thinking such as:

* Women who are raped “deserved” it by being dressed that way or in that part of town or outside at that hour or should have fought back more.
* People who are poor deserve it because they must not want to work.
* Abused children deserve it because all they should behave or tell or run away and punishment never did you any harm.
* People who get sick should have taken better care of themselves.
* The store clerk who gets shot shouldn’t have been working in that sort of store.
* The Jews deserved their fate because they should have fought more or not been Jew.
* People starving in India deserve it because they don’t eat cows.
* Victims of hurricane Katrina deserved it because they shouldn’t have been living near water and God was punishing the homosexuals.  
* People killed in car crashes should have been better defensive drivers.
* Soldiers killed in war deserve it because they shouldn't have been fighting.
* Amish and Quaker people deserve to get taunted and beaten up because they should fight.

People who blame victims often do so because it makes them feel more insulated that something similarly ugly will not happen to them and be beyond their control.

I agree wholeheartedly! Well said Silky

One observation:

In order for people to be able to fight back (on a consistent basis I mean), they have to have experience of fighting back working.  That's an experience that, despite fighting back quite vigorously at times, I did not have for a very long time.  And when it did happen, it was not in a physical fight, but rather I filed a complaint against a case manager (he was threatening me with "more restrictive living environments" for refusing to allow a staff person in my home who had made potentially fatal medication errors in front of witnesses and not demonstrated any capacity to avoid doing so in the future) and it worked.  Having experience of it actually working is vital.

Someone who knows that his aggressor is just looking for an excuse to do far greater damage and also knows he can't win?

Take this scenario, a small kid in playground is approached by 4 kids much bigger than him. The 4 kids start pushing him too and for between them shouting "You startin'?" - a few things can happen here.

1. They continue to push him around until he falls over, they give him a swift kick and walk off having gotten bored.

2. He forcably frees himself from the shoving by pushing one kid out his way, that kid then screams "You started it!" uses the physical contact as an excuse, and punches him in the face, he goes down (The kid is afterall twice his size) and all 4 kick and punch him til they get bored.

3. He forceably slugs the aggressor in the face who reels back, the 3 other kids now lay into him and beat him even harder than they would've done normally, *and* he has to see the headmaster for assaulting another pupil.

4. He tries walk away, whereas one kid kicks him in the small of the back so he goes down, then walks away before anyone notices.



Believe me, I tried every option and all of them turned out for the the worse - trial and error proved (for me) that #1 was the most effective option, well if I wanted to get out my childhood alive.  I wasn't wrong either; the year after I left a kid at the school had to be rushed to intensive care after being strangled til he stopped breathing.

Also if aggression makes for stronger character, and being bullied makes me more likely to become a bully in later life - how come one of my tormentors at school far from becoming an upstanding and strong willed citizen, ended up on public television after being court martialed in the army having been videotaped beating up Iraqi kids?

At the last year at lower secondary there was some a few physical incidents. The guy who did it apparently just wanted me to fear him, which I really just didn't want to :p . I considered some self defense stuff but he had only actually hurt me physically once, the other times there was mainly just threats when he didn't get the things he wanted or just wanted to show dominance.

... that stupid prick decided he should take a piss at me in the gymnastic warderobe's shower, he apparently knew that all the audience that were watching weren't going to do anything about it. I remember I said "-I wish I saw a your head shattered. Sounds like a sweet thought there and then but there's a problem with saying things like that.

Another angle I was thinking over is that traits which I assume make a good fighter are among traits that make a good dancer or athlete.  Those being physical coordination/agility, good balance and the ability to anticipate the moves of the other person. Some people are just not going to have abilities in those areas.

The anticipating the moves of the other person is where I generally get stuck.  I can sometimes anticipate them but rarely know how to counter them.  I have not to my knowledge ever won a physical fight, but then I have rarely fought anyone one-on-one, either.  It's generally been four-on-one or more, with me as the "one".  (I don't get into fights anymore.  I mean when I did.)

Now I see why Ryuuijin left, and I find his reason to be quite justified, IMHO.

I won't say anything else so as to not provoke another meaningless war, as I've been in my fair share of those.