Wake up people! There is no such thing as Aspergers.

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I think it's relevant the way he can't handle most of the replies and hides behind somebody else's ideas - "don't call me stupid, this guy said that!". So in the end he lets the more articulate ouinon to "fight his battle".

Ad hominen.

Even if junior1 is a "troll", this is irrelevant to to validity or not of his ideas.

^ Lab Pet's fainting couch.



Incidentally, I did have a therapist appt yesterday...I was warned about this very sort of thing.

I feel asleep in the front room, now it's tomorrow & this thread is still here (jet lag from Daylight Savings). Which, admittedly, gives me some giddy excitment, much like watching a car wreck. Agreed that we are in fact posting on a troll thread but it's *almost* irresistible. I feel as if I've eaten too much ice cream.

Lab Pet did forget the original premise....I shall revisit OP since this is becoming tangential.
Oh, right: Asperger's isn't real. That is, it's imaginary. Lab Pet shall keep this in mind during my next appt.

Last edited by LabPet on 10 Mar 2009, 10:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

I can't help but hear Styx in my head.

"Haven't we been here before?
Footsteps lead down
To the note on the door
That says
I can't stay here any more..."

The argument is not that what you are, or what you experience, is imaginary, but that the term itself is a social construct, invented to "diagnose" a group of people who are experiencing exclusion/difficulties in our society as suffering from a disorder, ( and thereby justify the exclusion/discrimination).

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The argument is circular, ouinon. If the social construct was created to justify the marginalization, how did the marginalization start?

Which supposedly came first - diagnosis, or discrimination? If discrimination, then assuming "autism" doesn't exist - what started the cycle? Where did the discrimination come from, if the factor being singled out isn't actually there?

It's easy to hypothesize anything one likes - but one must then subject it to logical rigor, and see if it holds up. This one doesn't.

For that matter, under this hypothesis, I should have experienced no significant marginalization in my youth, as the diagnosis did not exist until I was in my thirties. This turns out not to have been the case.

That is an interesting question. The "marginalisation" definitely came first, followed by "justification" by medical science.

I believe that the exclusion began with a number of factors; the invention of national public school; modern diet aswell as the increasing use of chemicals, ( both of which may have put our hyper-sensitive systems under pressure and produced "sickness behaviour" which tends to elicit alternating aggressivity/hostility and nurture from other members of the group ), aswell as increasing noise from the car, and the increased pace of change/loss of roots in the 20th century.

I don't know. But between the 20's when the worst that most AS/Aspergers people would have been accused of was introversion, ( apart from the small minority who were put away in asylums as "mad" ), and the 50's, something happened to the old attitude, towards the Asperger type, the men at least, which was that we were eccentric, odd, mild-mannered, absent-minded, with a tendency to forget to eat or sleep, and to desire solitude etc, ... and became criticism, impatience, intolerance, and systematic bullying/abuse/hostility.

I think that school and the modern diet/environmental "noise"/stress were the biggest factors.

NB. "Sickness behaviour" includes depression, anxiety and/or irritability, lethargy/inertia/fatigue, brain-fog/cognitive impairment, loss of interest in/retreat from socialising, and if it carries on for longer than a certain time period will "automatically" provoke exclusion-reactions by other members of the group because in the wild such behaviour attracts predators and is a danger to the group.

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Sorry, I didn't realize you were changing the topic. Silly me.

I'll be sure to just ignore your posts in the future.

Interesting perspective. School is where I was the outcast, because I was different. And I think that people's lifelong dislike of things "different" begins in school, where they are almost "taught" this behavior.

Since my greatest difficulty with AS has been the overwhelming odor of fragrance and cleaning products, I could agree with you about the chemical part, were it not for the fact that fragrance has been around for millenia, and in nature for tens of millions of years at least.

Certainly it was quieter way back when, you could be right about that, too

That's alright.

I haven't changed the topic, ( which is probably why you didn't notice me doing it ), but what makes you now think that I did?

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Agreed!


But they were not petroleum-based scents. Whereas most industrial perfumes involve/include either petroleum or alcohol, ( or both ).

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Not too long ago I'd have opposed the OP, now I'm not so sure. I don't believe the condition called "Aspergers Syndrome" is anywhere near as concrete as the conditions called "Measles" or "Broken Leg". Never will be.

My current feeling is that the extreme cases of Autism that the media pick up on possibly are real disorders. Aspergers has little to do with these, and is merely 'introversion' rebranded. More specifically the symptoms we know as 'Aspergers' are the result of what happens when innate introverts (which is NOT a disorder in any way) are forced through their formative years to mix in an extrovert dominant culture. Aspergers as we know it today may well disappear as a syndrome in 10 or 20 years.

Quieteness, thoughtfulness, thinking before action, enjoying intellectual activity over social activity etc etc are not disorders or negative character traits in any way. These are part of our normal nature and part of our environments underlying scheme of diversity. However, they do become negative traits, such as social anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, as a result of (mainly) early childhood experience.

MRI scans etc can show differences between brain functioning, but cannot prove who is 'normal'. For one, pick any two people and you will get different results. Who then judges which is the normal result? #

It's been stated so many times here, I'm surprised at the outcry: AS is a normal aspect of neuorodiversity. Having AS alone does not make anyone weaker, inferior, less able to survive than anybody else. It's a difference, not a disorder.

We have a lilac bush outside. I suffer when it goes into bloom. it's not petroleum or alcohol, it's fragrance.

That may be the result of your "tolerance bucket" being chronically close to overflowing because of other, more constant, environmental factors, such as diet, or petrol fumes, etc.

The theory is that our body can handle a certain amount of "stress" before overloading, and that many people would not react to "fleeting" environmental factors if their immune-system was not already challenged by other, daily stressors.

I am not saying that must be the explanation in your case, just that intolerance/allergy is known to work like that. And that if you cut out something you are exposed to everyday you might not react to lilac anymore, and might experience other benefits too.

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Am wondering whether you think I changed the topic because I drew a parallel between Aspergers and black people, women, and homosexuals, groups which most people tend to think "exist"?

But that is why they are good analogies, because in fact those labels are as oppressive, inaccurate, and artificial/"unreal", as Aspergers.

Do you think that humans only come in two genders, ( that people really match one of the two options )? Do you think that race is one long continuum, with blackest at one end, and whitest at the other? Do you think that sexuality is only a question of who we want to go to bed with, and if so that people fit onto a line between totally their own sex, to only ever the other, with no other variants of equal importance?

If you do then I understand why my drawing a parallel between Aspergers and women, homosexuals, and black people, might have looked like changing the subject, as if I had admitted that there were such a thing as Aspergers.

But I believe that there are many different genders, that people can not be categorised, ( in any meaningful way ), by race on any continuum, and that it is a sad sexuality which could be divided up into who you have sex with. The terms "woman", "black", and "homosexual" are social constructs, tools of social control, like aspergers, just older.

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I agree. I think/hope that in 50 years the terms Aspergers, Autism, and Autism Spectrum will have become as useless/meaningless and outdated as "possession".

It's partly a social phenomenon, social/environmental pressures making certain behaviours visible, because unadapted to changed conditions, only some of which, or none of which, might be experienced as disability under different pressures.

I think that research is gradually going to move the debate, and the "diagnosis", away from the behavioural, ( discrimination against which is a social bias ) and towards the metabolic/chemical processes which make some people vulnerable to current environmental stress, and that this will cause the label to break up, as it becomes obvious that many different vulnerabilities cause the more serious ( so often associated/co-morbid ), problems, and that these are not restricted to "AS".
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Last edited by ouinon on 10 Mar 2009, 1:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.