We are evolution-not them.

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The parents (and I am one) don't need to be gods bowing to no one. The parents need to be strong in the face of social pressure to give their kids certain therapies the parents think will be ultimately detrimental. In my personal experience, this social pressure didn't come from other parents but came from healthcare professionals. It is my NT nature to draw strength from banding together with other people so I had to choose very carefully which group to band together with to resist the healthcare professional pressure. My chosen group is the Parenting subforum here at WP. Standing against is necessary. Standing alone is not.

Well yeah, I enjoy doing that. I just like doing that. Some of you like Pokemon, some of you like trains, I like bullying others.

Hmmmm... I'd say this thread is starting to get nicely roasted. *throws sausages onto grill*

Used to believe in AS supremacy, but then I saw it as self-delusion. Finding and engaging in Autism communities on-line cured my arrogance.

Not here you don't.

I don't believe in autism supremacy because I understand evolution and I don't think we're better than other apes. I do think we can understand things better than nonautistics.

I can strongly relate to the part of the OP that wants to rebel against what is an apparent unquestioned assumption on the part of authorities and others that s/h/we should change to be more like what is 'normal'. I too feel that I largely reject a lot of social norms because I cognitively disagree with them rather than because I am somehow born deficient in that area. This matter is currently of personal importance to me in developing the self-esteem, self-confidence, self-identity that will enable me to get what I want out of life, and I thank you for your encouraging post.

You don't like gender roles? Then Fine! Get your stupid ass in the kitchen and get me a beer and make me a sandwich before I smack you! </twisted humor>


I've had a serious discussion with etiquette about autistics claiming to evolve into a master race more times than I can remember. Rather than have a battle of wits with the unarmed, there's nothing really to do with such people than poke fun at the idiocy. I don't see how these supremacist people expect further this claimed evolution when all their girlfriends and ex-girlfriends have surnames of either JPEG or MPEG.

i hear ya, we are not stupid, i understand alot of general human reactions, not just in conversation but how people act in general. just from observation alone, but yet i don't understand it enough to describe it accurately, or discuss it accurately.

did any of you see that 60 minutes episode, they did some kind of medical scan on an aspie, to find out what was different about her, they were trying to figure out why severe autistics can't talk much.

they found out her brain stem, basicly looked like a plant growing in her head. even the doctor that saw the scan says he never saw that before. but i want to get scanned, maybe there would be an answer to the chaotic thoughts i have or a reason why i have them.

Do you have a link?

Anne Coulter is making sense, cover your heart!

i'll see if i can get one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YN78GBl6zU

i couldn't find a video with just the part i was referring to, it's toward the end of the video. i was shocked, i watch alot of medical shows, never saw anything like it, i bet my brain stem looks a bit like that.

wow, a lot of people with aspergers will never be able to be independent, If natural selection was still relevant we would have been wiped out.

Natural selection is still relevent but the time scales are quite large. I've heard the argument many times that modern medicine has rendered it irrelevent (argued in general, not this thread) by allowing people to survive and reproduce who would have died 100 years ago. But natural selection works over many, many, many generations- not half a dozen. And sometimes the things that don't seem to confer any survival advantage at all suddenly confer an extreme advantage if the enviroment radically changes (punctuated equilibrium theory). What these things would be are unpredictable.

Many people have wondered why homosexuality persists in the genome despite how it obviously doesn't confer any reproductive advantage. The theory that makes the most sense to me is that many people who are not gay are nevertheless carrying DNA that in certain combinations would make somebody gay and they may be close or distant relatives of people who actually are gay. The reproductive advantage can come from the concentration of resources when somebody who is gay and childless uses their own resources to help the survival of others who are not gay but carry certain DNA codes. Maybe something similar happens with autism. It confers no reproductive advantage to those who are actually autistic but those who are not autistic but carry certain DNA fragments get a survival advantage from some peice of technology or pattern-finding insight autistic individuals have had throughout history.

Of course it may all turn out to be a moot point and punctuated equilibrium will level most of us and the survivors will be 10 million lucky people carrying what everybody thinks is currently a meaningless mutation, junk DNA.

In any case, I think the whole anthropomorphic idea of evolution somehow striving towards a goal that the OP has (and he isn't alone) is incredibly incorrect.

I never said that any of it was intentional. Most parents *don't know* how to handle their autistic kids properly. Most of them try their very best to be as loving and caring as they can *in an NT way*. A lot of them also take advice from healthcare professionals who do even *worse* things out of a fundamental misunderstanding of how autism works.

So, to mirror your statement: How many NT parents on here, have a f-ing(*) clue what they're talking about when it comes to actually *understanding* their autistic children, and not just needlessly sacrificing?

What I'm saying is that if there were therapies where the *parents* were taught how to interact with their child, on their level, then the children would have a much better chance of becoming vocal and independent. (I recently read a study about emotional reciprocity where they actually tested such parental instruction, and it showed remarkable improvements).

Basically, these parents need proper guidance, and not that brainwashing ABA BS that most professionals are pushing. And what they definitely don't need is Autism-Speaks like exclusion of the opinions of autistics.

*) Swearword inserted because it needs to mirror the statements being replied to.

One such therapy is Stanley Greenspan's Floortime Play Therapy

http://autismweb.com/floortime.htm

The goal is child-led interaction. It isn't intuitive for NT adults so parents do need to be taught how. Guidance for any NT parents who come to WP also comes in the form of an e-book written by WP's own Tracker. He's a poster who isn't a parent but he is an autistic adult who spent (and still spends) a lot of time in the Parenting subforum giving advice to the parents. He put together an e-book full of advice for NT parents of AS kids that is far superior to what any healthcare professional ever told me. This e-book is available in the Parenting subforum by a stickied link.

Here's Tracker's link

http://www.asdstuff.com/welcome.html