Both sides are equally appalling to me, and both are subject to the same social forces that constrain thinking in such ways.

This “aspie liberation” culture is no such thing as it seems to deny what is essentially autistic by virtue of being part of a binary set of thinking, a reaction rather than a revolution in thinking. Antithesis rather than synthesis if you want to get Hegelian about it.

There were people who were different and despised who were not “aspie” but aspification culture has no place for that. Aspification culture is setting itself up as its own straw man. I see herd mentality amongst a class of people who deny they can possibly be subject to it.

The belief sets of aspification mentality seem to be formed from the same clinical stereotypes as the curebies and give the curebies all the ammunition they need.

I feel it is so bad that there are outright attempts to rewrite history like Stalin did, to write difference out of the picture except the difference that leaves some autistic people as “not us” in the Aspie glory trail of mythical superheroes created from dubious biographies.

I am definitely feeling tonight, that there are some here amongst us who are not so much promoting diversity as creating a new normal and woa betide you if you don’t come up to the specification.

“Hey look at Larry over there, we can’t let him be one of us, he is way too wierd and would show us up”.

*nods* And people’s attempts to establish “aspie solidarity” with me based on a diagnosis have always rung false and hollow to me. I get really irritated when people start doing the “fellow aspie” thing with me and it’s inevitably people who identify with that particular stereotype/personality-type and think I must identify with it as well: computer geek, socially indifferent, hyper-rational, logical, etc. None of those characteristics particularly apply to me, actually, which is not to say anything against people who do identify with the stereotype, except that I think there’s a certain danger in assuming “I respond to every situation with logic; therefore, every conclusion I draw must be reasonable and based on logic.” (Which is essentially the same as “I am a good moral person, therefore I can do nothing that is not good” with a different hat. And we’ve had enough of having our minds twisted around and backwards by “logical” types to automatically be suspicious of anyone who believes in the absolute logic of their own thought processes.)

…oh, and it’s ‘special’ when let’s-all-be-aspie-together types try to forge solidarity with you on the basis of the assumption that you’re irritated by emotional expression, or similar things. Not that we haven’t had people try to manipulate us with lots of overplayed crying and pleading and so forth, or insisting that their feelings justify everything, but making the a priori assumption that I see something illogical in, say, people having emotional reactions to major disasters, and that I would feel kinship with anyone else on the basis of that, is… peculiar, to say the least. (I might not show my emotional reactions in the way most people would, in this culture, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.)

It’s… well, similar to both the “I am a high functioning aspie, but the low functioning autistics need a cure and/or to be made high-functioning like me” and “Can’t you high-functioning aspies who are happy with yourselves just as you are understand that some of us are too severely afflicted to ever be happy with ourselves and need to have a cure” lines of reasoning. In that we’re being portrayed as playing an equivalent role to that of the “high-functioning aspie” and lectured about “you can’t understand the plight of those who are really suffering and REALLY NEED TO BE INTEGRATED.” (Again with the “you never really suffered” assumption. How does anyone think they can possibly tell from someone’s online presentation whether they have ever “really suffered” or not? And we’re being assumed to have some kind of fanatical anti-integration stance which we don’t actually possess at all.)

We should probably make this same topic into a separate entry in our journal, someday. “Functionalsystemification”? Hm, that’s a little awkward…