NT weaknesses

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Ok, this a thread to turn the tables around. Many NTs speak of Aspie weaknesses, lack of empathy, bad nonverbals, etc, but let's turn it around on them and deflate their egos..

1.) Empathy. Seriously, they claim to be empathetic? Really, then how come there were people like Mugabe and Hitler in the world?
2.) Social understanding. Then why in this country(USA), 55 percent of all married couples divorce, there are 102,000 sucidies a year, 30 percent of "families" are single-parent, 40 million people live as singles all the way into their 40s, and how come there are 12,160 murders a year?
3.) Social status and being concerned with this. This narrows their world and understanding.
4.) Intelligence. How come the general mean of intelligence went down the toilet lately?
5.) Very little intelligence. For example, people talking about things like sex, sports and celebrities, but never about say the meaning of life, the comets and where they orginate, the implications of mathematics on humanity, the implications of geography on human sociology?
IN other words, the NT word "shallow".
6.) Menaingless lives. As you might have seen in a previous thread of mine, most people are born, go to school, go to work for 40 years and then retire. Nothing of permanent and tangible value for posterity is accomplished
7. Social conventions which creates xenophobia to those people who don't follow them
8. Groupthink and peer pressure. This one should be self-evident.


By the way this is not a list written in stone. You can agree to disagree, make amendments, additions, continuations, and so on.

Tell me what is your opionion the NT's greatest collective weaknesses.

I often wonder how NT's survive at all. Their entire social network is built on lying to each other and never saying what you really mean. They all surely know that they're all lying to each other, which makes it redundant.

And if you don't play, if you tell the truth instead of lying, you're considered in the wrong?

So I'm sorry, no, that dress doesn't make your bum look fat, your bum takes care of that all by itself!

Your list of NT traits is so horribly stereotyped it does not deserve a thoughtful response.

You discovered that there's a downside to every positive humans perceive. That's correct for all humans, including autistic people who share most of these downsides of advantages you named too. That's just how it is, nothing is all good or bad and everything depends on circumstances.

But, to my reading of it, he's not talking about every single person, but rather taking all of society in general, and that always involves stereotypes. Stereotypes are real, true and valid, otherwise they wouldn't be stereotypes.

So the point of coming up with a list is to make us feel better?

Funny, most of these are evident on worldplanet in varying degree's as well. We must all be NT, (Or perhaps they are all descriptive traits of human beings in general)

I would say the point of making such a list is to highlight that it's not all a bed of roses being NT either, and maybe we should stop thinking of ourselves as disabled, stop sitting around complaining about the terrible lot life dealt us, get off our collective asses and realise that we're perfectly normal, we're just not NT, we're autistic.

/\ Yes it is the point, amazed it took that long...

NTs are by no means ideal people. We all know this. They're just the majority & therefore get to make the rules.

I don't know whether you don't or do mean to say that fantasising all's well helps with head-banging, inability to function when routines are broken and inability to talk.

Autism isn't like 'oh, I'm shy, I change that because I believe in myself so much' it's like 'oh, I'm sight-impaired, even when I believe in my eyes so much I still can't see'.

Also, about stereotypes.

About PDDs you must know that there are differences between the diagnoses of PDDs as well as the autistic spectrum. Grave differences. That's why stereotypes don't exactly help anyone, neither does the use of 'we' to explain needs and abilities when there is no common basis between two or more people.

That's where stereotypes comes from. 'I'm like this, someone else is like this, so you all must be like this too.'

This doesn't work for the autistic spectrum, not even for the category of AS.

Do you self-injure, may run into cars, start humming or screeching in public places? (All things some of the kids, of the teens, of the adults with AS do.)

Yes? No? Other autistic people do due to their autism. And they can't stop with it, unlike others who have the same label, yet won't do this or did but learnt to cope. And they're perfectly normal like all other people and not disabled, yes?


I mean, yes, they're normal too if you ask me. Everybody is, but people usually don't go by my definition of normal, meaning everybody is cool and okay no matter what they can do or can't do. Disabled perhaps, impaired, but deserve respect and not less than others, sure.

I worked for years in 1 to 1 care with children and adults with far more profound autism that I display. I've seen stuff that would make a lot of people very scared for a long time.

I believe that a considerable portion of the more harmful aspects of autism are a result of years of mistreatment. If you try to force someone to "get better" or "normalise", against their nature, there's going to be a backlash. We need to change how we view autism and start encouraging it as a different way to explore and experience life, instead of trying to force us to do it someone else's way. My dad tells me a similar thing happened in his memory, when children who were left handed were forced to write with their right hand, to the point of having their left hand tied to their chair to prevent its use.

Instead of trying new drug therapies, why not see what kind of a difference it makes moving to the country? Maybe autistic people aren't built for city life, they're not designed to be crammed into classrooms and given time outs and forced to carry around ridiculous bits of card with a picture of a sandwich on it.

My main job when I worked in care was working 1 to 1 with a young autistic guy, who was feared by everyone who had ever worked with him. He listened to nobody, spoke only other people's words, drove his carers mad by his constant humming/singing and was generally quite a violent and frightening young man. Now I'm not claiming to be any kind of genius care worker, and at the time I wasn't even aware of my own autism (this is actually how I found out), but I watched him, and I seemed to be able to relate to his reactions to things, I actually found his humming to be quite calming, and was able to relax and be myself much easier in a room with him than I could in the staff room, and very quickly after I just let him be autistic and I was just myself too, and suddenly he wasn't violent anymore. Then, when there was nobody else around, just him and me, I got to hear his words and not other people's. We could communicate without words too, and we'd confuse the hell out of the other workers, because one of us could just look at the other and make them laugh, and they always felt left out of the joke.

I'm well aware of the sticky end of autism, and i've had the cuts and bruises and bites and broken noses to prove it. But I'm also aware that you reap as you sow, and our medical "professions" have a great deal to answer for.

Maybe there was some sarcasm and hidden meaning in there, but the original post came off sounding very much like an NT bashfest.

At some point we should realize that we probably have more in common with our NT brethren than not. Maybe we express ourselves quite differently and those differences have been magnified by society, but it doesn't mean that we are fundamentally different.

Don't lose sight of the fact that some of your traits may, in fact, be very typical for people in general and not just typical for those on the spectrum. I've seen a bunch of WP threads that start off with "Does anyone else experience X this way?" to which a bunch of people post in the affirmative. Some then may go on to tie this particular trait to ASD. In fact, it may just be a broader cultural or human trait.

The thread that comes to mind is the "I have difficulty crying" thread, which was started by a male. It is generally known that it is not culturally acceptable for adult men to cry except in extreme circumstances. Sure, AS may displace some of appropriateness of knowing when you "should" be crying and therefore exacerbate the perceived condition, but it's certainly not uncommon for men in general to have difficulty crying. I've also heard many put forth "I didn't cry about 9/11" as an example of not being able to feel or express emotion. Frankly, I know of very few people (AS, NT, or otherwise) who actually cried.

It's tempting to distance yourself as much as possible from a world which rejects your personality, principles, and values. And by all means, evaluate your traits and tendencies with respect to AS traits. Don't forget, though, that you might just, in some ways, be a typical person.

I'll remember, as long as you remember that you, me and every other autistic person out there may well be fundamentally different from neurotypicals, and there's something we're meant to be doing, a role in the world we're meant to be filling, and we're not, because we're all sitting whining because we're not normal and oh poor us, isn't it a tragedy.

Sure, forcing anyone to become someone else isn't right. It's disrespectful, violent and cruel no matter if it's about changing someone's sexuality, wishes and hopes or autism.

There are actually several people of the spectrum who report similar things as you. That they could interact - not necessarily in a typical and commonly considered normal way such as by words - with others on the spectrum intuitively and/or much easier than with non-autistic people. Some report to just have an easier way to talk with another on the spectrum, some say they got in contact with another on the spectrum by such things as small gestures. Alas, additionally to these differences there's also the people who cannot do such and find it no easier or harder to interact with others on the spectrum. I always thought these variety is pretty interesting. I'm of the party who doesn't have any good connection to others on the spectrum. I understand the kids's symptoms, but there's no secret communication or strong 'mutual sympathy' I noticed and I get along with them the same way as with other kids with and without disabilities.

I do not think that disabilities and impairments are discouraging. They are in the minds of people because of their cultural upbringing and emotional attachment to words which sure has it's advantages, but that understanding of this particular terminology strikes me as awkward and problematic personally. I don't understand a disability or an impairment as something bad that marks failure on my or another's person. It's just a word to describe that someone or something hinders me and needs changing so that I become enabled and that describes that an ability of mine is lacking and that I can't use that to do what everyone does but need to find another way.

I think it's wrong to demonise words because they'll always come back to haunt you and then you got to push them away and against others who are then hurt. Better change the understanding of words to say, hey, it's cool the way it is, nothing bad for any of us many people with autism, MR, emotional disorder, PDs, physical impairments whatever who're different and that say we got to find other sometimes better ways than others because a few of out abilities are missing or lacking.

I do however not think that the harmful aspects of autism are a result of mistreatment? I'm not sure what you mean here though. I understand under 'aspects of autism' the symptoms and behaviours that arise no matter environment. If somebody with autism becomes intentionally violent, anxious, suicidal, goes 'crazy' out of frustration that's a behaviour that every non-autistic person under the similar mistreatment that they could not fight effectively/at all would show too, I think. I personally do not think these are aspects of autism, but results of living with it under problematic circumstances.

Though I know it can get problematic when one and the same behaviour you can often just look at (especially in kids) from the outside can be either a direct result of one or a combination of autistic symptoms as well as the result of anxiety, frustration, emotional disturbances as a result of a situation in someone's life. Taking head-banging for example, there are so many causes for it, some directly resulting form autistic symptoms or it is a symptom (under motor mannerism) but they can also be an expression about the communication difficulties as well as 'just' a result of emotional problems, violence someone has experienced and other sorts of maltreatment.

wooo-hooo NT-bashing thread! and it's not even locked yet!

QFT