Posts by Kracklite
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
There is actually ASD all over this.
I just a little ambivalent about this. On one hand, as I quip to people, I don’t suffer from Asperger’s, I enjoy it – it’s the rest of you that I find insufferable.
A bit more seriously, alluding to the nature versus nurture debate (that leads very, very quickly to a face/palm, followed by a head/desk)…
One, everything that is automatic for neurotypical people has to be manual for me – but consequently I think about it more than you, so there. A lack of empathy is not inevitable, on the contrary, we aspies often appear to withdraw because other’s emotions are all too apparent and we just can’t read them in real time. I feel most for people when they present their experiences to me as narratives, rather than trying to read their faces and tone of voice.
Two, genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger – or not. A corollary of that is that the condition manifests itself differently in each individual according to both the influences that they have been subjected to and the strategies that they have evolved in order to function. It is not easy to separate the condition itself from the strategies used to cope with the condition in a particular environment.
Three, Assange’s own personal history could well force him to assume modes and strategies of behaviour that are congruent with ASD without necessarily being “organic” ASD.
Four, and which is what disturbs me, the delightful folk at T’ Standard are all too happy to plaster the label “psychopath” on anyone they don’t like. Now, I have no objection to finding cognitive subspecies of humanity everywhere – it’s fun at least – but my ears metaphorically prick up when labels are used as alternatives or euphemisms for essentialist moral distinctions. Now that’s not happening here, but it certainly happens in the aforementioned sewer. “Schizophrenic” is already often used for hypocrisy or what an existentialist would call bad faith, so even if psychopaths seem unambiguously “bad”, I do have to say that I’ve known people who display psychopathic behaviours who have been both bad, conscienceless swine and others who have been a hell of a lot of fun to be around (provided you don’t loan them money or expect their schemes to come to anything).
I’ve no problem being identified as a member of a cognitive subspecies. As Peter Watts likes to observe, maybe we’re undergoing a neurological equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion to cope with the pressures of accelerating technology.
I quite like the way Aspergers seems to be quietly shaping the modern world.
That might be so... but I venture that the monks who illuminated the Book of Kells shaped the pre-modern world long before the later generation of geeks who went into computing were doing it... Watts places his bets with the psychopaths, as they seem to be more fertile (in the short term at least). My issue is with the possibility that this awareness that there are fundamental differences in some people’s cognition and behaviour may lead to an essentialist fallback or default that makes neurological categories into moral categories. To repeat my point above, what’s automatic for neurotypical people is manual for me and therefore I’ve had to devise strategies, that work in a synergy between my nature and my circumstances – and in the end they make the synthesis that is me. Neurology is not destiny.
Anyway, I’m not saying that such simpleminded thinking as I have seen elsewhere is happening here, but please keep it in mind when following through with the implications…
-
Seconded - terrific.
-
OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to giovanni tiso,
They're competent and friendly if you properly follow the proper protocols.
-
Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Sacha,
And in the Onionverse...
-
Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The Protocols of the Elder Ones of R'lyeh? Why choose a lesser evil after all?
Semirelevantly, this vid which may add to the horror or the perverse pleasure of the Stuffoids:
-
Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Andre Alessi,
-
-
Oh, the eighties. I miss them. (OK, not the gelled mullets and bubble skirts, but...)
And where would we be without Max?
-
Zang tumb tumb!
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
That, I think is the crux of it, a point that Angus is missing. Perhaps, I might venture, he is doing this deliberately, considering his avoidance of directly answering questions that looks like bad faith. Does he deny that torture occurred, does he deny that the President of the United States enjoys the rank of Commander in Chief, does he deny that Harry Truman famously has a plaque on his desk reading “The buck stops here”, does he deny that…
…oh, sod it, the strange, postmodernistically recursive “he said so, but he didn’t mean it even if it did happen he didn’t order it because he said it for campaign purposes and didn’t mean it even if people did it after being told to do it in…” is giving me vertigo. Moebius, Rieman and Klein have nothing on that kind of inversion. God (even if it hates being called that) couldn’t sort it out. What a pity Jacques Derrida’s dead, I’d really like to know his interpretation of that line of argument, if only for amusement’s sake.
Ahem, anyway, indeed there has been hatred directed at GWB, just as there has been hatred directed at Obama, and maybe even the amounts have been comparable in degree, but not in quality. Condemnation of ethnicity and faith (and based on paranoid fantasy as well), thinly disguised as hatred of “terrorism” (yeah, like my Muslim students are constantly blowing themselves up – it really disrupts the tutorials to no end, I can tell you) is hardly justifiable, but the condemnation, even hatred of war crimes and their perpetrators is surely of a different order. To claim an equivalence is naive at best, and to aggressively pursue it as a point of argument looks a lot like disingenuousness and bigotry.
Is that extreme for me to say that? Well I do have to ask if being a Muslim is the same as being a war criminal. That equivalence has to be established if the comparison is to have any validity (also, proof that evidence of equivalent value supports these claims would also be nice). To me it doesn’t, and to attempt to do so is repulsive.
Sometimes moral condemnation is justified, sometimes it is not. That is the difference. Is that clear? Is that in a short enough sentence, with words of few enough syllables?
Oh, hang on, it’s “socialist” now. Right, well, I think we’ve come up with a new sport. It’s rather like rugby in that there’s a field and there are goalposts, but the difference is that the goalposts are running all over the place and you have to chase them.