Ivan

If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s best to look for the sort of people who are into that sort of thing. They seem to far outnumber people who come at ideas the way I do, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find them. They are even more densely-packed than usual among academics, particularly in fields like ethics or philosophy.

…to tell the truth, I think this touches on why we’ve been so shy about posting about certain subjects in our Livejournal. We want to write about certain things in particular and make those posts open to be read by the general public, but LJ and similar services, at times, seem to harbor a lot of the types of people who will run by or pop out of lurking and begin shaking you down on the technicalities while demanding an unassailably perfect ideology and set of language definitions from you. (Even the more scientifically-minded people in here regard this as futile, also: “it works in the laboratory because the laboratory does not reproduce the real world.”) There are places– there are places we’ve been in, online– where one can’t even make mention of what are usually considered to be “weighty philosophical topics” without being pounced on and torn apart by the very ideologically inclined, and those who are *not* prone to or good at making enormous, all-encompassing ideological mechanisms in their heads are simply bullied into a corner with semantic games by those who do. And a fair portion of them consider it a mere intellectual exercise (at best; or, at worst, all in a day’s fun, in the cases where it borders on trolling) to rip apart anything which is not universalized and precise enough to meet their standards of a “proper” philosophical or moral view. Or looking for loopholes, or claiming that certain of your views can “logically” be extended to ridiculous extremes which almost no real person would ever, in practice, agree with, etc, etc.

I really wish that there were some way to denote, up front, clearly, that one doesn’t do ideologies, and is not interested in entering into debate or discussion with people who insist that every viewpoint must be grounded in a broad, detailed and categorizable ideology rather than in observation of reality and perception of patterns over time, besides simply saying it over and over again.

I like Zakkie, so I’ll probably just agree to be agreeable. Seriously, I do not come across a genuine Spectrum elitism. What I come across is elitism directed at our “LFA” friends, if you will pardon the term. And, this elitism is really not in opposition to NT exclusionism, but a cousin to it. In some ways, the two partner together.

Personally, I have always been in favor of alliances with non-elite NT’s. I think that a broad approach will get us more than a narrow approach. To get what we want, we must be willing to shake up hierarchies, not perpetuate them.

I am glad that you see Quantum manifolds in your head. However, if any of you have disdain towards others on the Spectrum, then I do not consider you a fellow “Aspie.” That is harsh, but you can change it by mending your ways and your thoughts.

All the best,

We hate language too at times because things like tone of voice……..how a word is used in a sentence……..hidden meanings and other complete abstractions…………get in the way of comprehension.

I love reading this blog because so often I come across things and start thinking……..”I’ve thought of/can relate to this, and this, and this, and………etc.”

For the long posts I have to watch out for hyperlexia….but for the most part, I dig it. Really.

Ivan

Camp A: “I think there should be hierarchy among people, and it should look like this.”

Camp B: “I think there should be hierarchy among people, and it should look like *this*.”

Camp Amanda (for lack of a better name :P): “I don’t think there should be hierarchy among people.”

Really. Not middle ground. Not the same thing at all.

The “what does equality mean?” debate is a very complex one, with a whole heap of different dimensions – it’s probably not going to be possible to work out how to apply the term to real life experiences without narrowing it down to a specific area. In any case, it doesn’t really apply here.

Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like people that aren’t sure what the word “equal” means in this context would find it easier to think of the first group as “people who advocate rights and support services”.

Because extreme is defined as anything or anything extremely different from what’s normative and what’s normative varies as much as it’s subject to dualism (autistic vs. neurotypical, the Forces of Good™ vs. Forces of Evil™, whatever).

Polarized views/people usually do increasingly mirror each other in important ways. We see this in political parties, the “Culture War,” the abortion debate, religions, atheism vs. religion arguments, and things autism related. It’s a known phenomenon associated with dualism and with it people miss many processes and choices from here to there — it interferes with varied explorative discourse, cognition, and respect for others.

People are more comfortable with mediocrity and fuzzy middles because polarized sides each aim for a new normative fuzzy middle magic bullet approach that encourages both intellectual (EQ-IQ) mediocrity and superiority complexes, and only some complexes (“ours”) are okay. Civil rights and all aside, the problem isn’t that we’re not equally advantaged or disadvantaged; the problems lie more in the dysfunction of taking sides when reality can count higher than two, hence ranges like the autism range than are **part of** the range of human existence.

Speaking of dysfunction, yes, people should focus on ethics/virtues, but that is an area that has the most ‘noise,’ historically. That is the area we kill each other over the most. That is one of the trickiest areas in human emotional-social intelligence. Its roots also lie in dualism and historically people of different faiths are taught to identify by faith and see virtues, character, and ethics as religiously/culturally proprietary and normative, the result being that those who do not believe, think, or act in normative ways are often viewed as lacking virtues, character, and ethics and there you have that dualism and superiority complex with resulting marginalization…again and again and again.