Why do NTs turn nasty ...

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Postperson, I would appreciate it if you stop with the assumptions. My comments have be relatively objective, and seeking clarification - I have accused you of nothing. No rules have changed, only the existing rules enforced to deal with changes in behavior on the site.


M.

Well I am seeking clarification on this matter for myself and other members. DW has indicated some kind of agreement between moderators exists in that you apparently intend to issue cautions but not banning for apparent heretical activities here. As I have already stated to you (to other readers: I have had some little private correspondance with 2 mods on this matter and asked them to discuss it in a public sphere so that we may all understand the issues and where the line is to be drawn) - I don't accept that the alleged rule of attacking groups here is relevant because NTs are a group/pack/hive species and NTs as a group is going to be a subject that comes up. Some people will have negative experiences on this matter and will thus be considered to be 'attacking groups'.

If you have come to some agreement on this matter amongst yourselves, I think it's appropriate that you share that with the people you intend to impose it on.

It is a 'new' thing in that previously it hasn't been considered an issue, I don't recall people ever being officially cautioned or warned on this matter. As such, it represents a change in direction.

The point has been clarified, Postperson - attacks on groups of people, or individuals, is against site rules. Whether you 'accept' it or not isn't the point here; you accepted the site's rules when you created your account. There is a difference between talking about being treated poorly and attacking the person who did it - and the latter is not permitted on WrongPlanet. Just because someone with a tattoo robbed you doesn't make all tattooed people thieves... yet this is the logic that seems to being applied here. There is latitude given, and no one has suggested banning people for their attacks unless they continued to do so after being warned and repeatedly or extraordinarily violating the site's policies and terms of service. In fact, most of the furor you have raised with me has been the result of a public request to tone down rhetoric and focus on the situations instead of the people. No one punished, no great agenda other than a desire for civility. You are welcome to continue expressing your displeasure, but your question has been answered.


M.

Doesn't that create a situation in which people will actively seek to be banned?

How so?


M.

For the record, what I've posted here is my impression of how the group thinks, based on responses to particular situations. I've pulled that together and concluded the various moderators are pretty consistent. It's not like there has been a vote on this. Although I'm inclined to think that we should write it all up and sign off on it, just to make sure there is no confusion. Mak draws the lines very carefully and, I believe, quite appropriately. The difficulty right now is getting it effectively conveyed to the members. We seem to each be individually stumbling on that a bit; or, at least, I know I am. In theory, its not a change in policy, because the concensus draws firmly from existing terms of service. But if it is a change in practice, I guess that will be a matter of opinion.

As to your question about NT's taking over, I think the simplist way to prevent that is in making sure the mod group stays pretty much AS. I am the only more or less NT mod this group has had, to my knowledge, and I'm not looking to increase that. I keep as a mod mostly to parenting, which as a board needs to be understanding with NT's. As long as the moderators don't start inviting NT's right and left to become moderators, the controlling voice here will always be AS, in my opinion. There are no guarantees for anything, but people like me come here to experience your neighborhood, and have no desire to change that. If I can help and that help is wanted, great. If not, I didn't come here looking to help; I came here looking to understand, and that is probably true of all our NT members.

Well, that's more along the lines of what I was looking for here, I think that's been a problem across the board the practice of non autistic people are appointed to controlling positions of autistic organisations.

I guess the other things that bother me about a larger NT presence are that I don't like the whole 'self narrating zoo exhibit' thing of having an audience, whether they are positive or negative about it, I wouldn't undertake public speaking about autism for that reason. It feels like a form of work to me when done for the benefit of non-autistics. So I wonder, since they have better access to paid work than we do, what 'work' are they doing for us?

I class myself as NT'ish, coz I dont know if im normal, or am quallified to diagnos myself as NT. I Certantly dont think I am higher ranking than my AS husband, in fact I regard him as higher ranking.He is far more intelligent than me. I know he would never hurt me physically, and the emotional hurt is due to AS, not due to him.
I enjoy "Hurting" him by pulling a hair from his ankle, or picking a scab off etc. It's not malishious, just attention seeking behaviour.
We are trying hard to work things out after recently discovering he has AS afer 14 years together.
This site has enlightened me, and I am trying hard to understand AS and am far more understanding of his ways now, and how I can support him, and know when to shut up and disapear for a while.
I therefore feel I have been unfairly judged, guilty without trial.

Vee
still wishing for a spell checker

Just realised I posted it im hubbys log in. oops

i'm glad your fear of violence and your lack of emotional whatever has been assuaged here. it must be nice for all the couples and the people with kids here, after all, they're couples, they're potential double income and the only autism funding I'm aware of is for kids. you've really hit the jackpot here!

i however am an single adult. no kids. I don't have access to the sorts of funding, sympathy or workplace or wider support those people do.

it would be terribly predictable of people to now characterise me as 'bitter'. but hey that's what they do.

For you and Willmark...
I have yet to read all the posts after this one, but I'm responding before I forget, but I said everybody's experiences are different. I'm not trying to start a peeing war on who got bullied the worst growing up. How about I say it this way....

NON AS People deal with/respond/react/have different feelings about bullying very different than AS, so don't come on here acting like you can empathize when you can't. It just seemed like you acted like because you experienced it and you reacted different that (and I'm interrupting myself to say also maybe not you two exactly, just some of the old posts I saw on this thread), Aspies are wrong for reacting their way, but that's what makes Aspies different is that Aspies will perceive things differently and then respond differently. Unless you are Aspie, you can't possibly 100% empathize with one. (That came out funny lol).

Part of the problem for AS is that they have to deal with social rules...you can't say that or you can't do that without insulting people, and sometimes they aren't even told the social rules and don't understand that they are insulting people, so this is supposed to be the place for them to come and not worry about all those social rules. Now regular society is coming in here demanding these rules be placed here too screaming they understand where we are coming from when they don't. If you understood what it's like for an AS to be bullied, you wouldn't be arguing a lot of things you are arguing. Maybe you are right though. This is the internet, and it's in your world too. Everything is in your world. Aspies I guess are not permitted one of their own outside of trying to understand your world unless they actually go to another planet.

I haven't read the posts after this, but I kinda hit this earlier in the thread.

NT really means Neurotypical...what is neurologically normal to the human species. So it's another word for people, but a way to define people as people being normal as opposed to all diversity involved with people. You can have very great conversations about NTs that way like the herding instinct. I didn't realize it existed until I saw threads on here talking about it, and now I'm consciously using that concept in my life and it's helping me out a lot.

The word is often misused, and I'm one who has misused it, but I'm just saying.

I know what you are saying about trends, and I can see it being a possible future for this site if nobody takes control to stop something like that. I just wanted to give you assurance that you were making sense to someone. Assumptions or no assumptions, you made sense to me.

This is a public forum on the internet.

You are participating in a self-narrating zoo exhibit regardless of whether NTs contribute or not. Anyone can visit this site and read what you write - one doesn't have to be a member to scroll through every single one of your comments.

Basically, you have become a public speaker about autism. The only way to avoid it is not to post.

And, PP, I just wanted to add that the relationship between NT and AS can be reciprocal, if you allow it to be. I am here to learn from you, first and foremost, and have no desire to take over. But if you want to know how an NT thinks - why we do what do, say what we say - I think most of us would be more than happy to provide honest insight. That is the 'work' we can do for you.

Just understand though that NTs is a different realm than your average discrimination. I don't know if you are reading my posts, but I think to analyze what is considered normal is helpful, and sometimes it's helpful to attack that mentality. NT's aren't supposed to be real people in my mind as much as the paradigm of people. If you look at all the "hate speech" that takes part on here, much of it really does in context seem to attack the paradigm rather than a group of people. Even the original post in this thread seemed to convey that to me as you will also see many posts and other threads on "what people say is normal is pretty nasty" as opposed to "people who don't have AS is nasty." I'm sure the person that wrote that has a friend or family member they love dearly who is not on the spectrum, so I don't see it as an actual hate speech. It's obvious to me that the post seemed to portray a lack of hope more than hatred. I don't think that's as obvious to someone who takes it for face value, and in my experience, you will misread a person with AS if you take them at face value.

I think what would benefit this forum is to publicly post the definition of NT since it seems to be our word and it seems to have more than one definition on here. I think it was intended, by looking at the word, to mean that which is neurologically typical to the human species to also mean, a model of what society considers normal. I also think in context you see it misused as a new definition of people who aren't on the autistic spectrum or also people who have no diagnosis (such as BiPolar wouldn't be considered NT in some context, and in others it would). I've been guilty of the catechresis myself as when I first came on here, I didn't know what it was and assumed it as that until people clued me in with other posts, and even then, when someone else misuses the word, I tend to follow suit as part of my herding training (so to speak hehe).

So, if WP correctly defined the word, or safely came up with a better word for that definition of the model for society, I think we'd be better, and then the mods can more easily spot when someone is actually trying to hate a group of people vs someone trying to hate the world of normalcy. It's funny how my friend can walk into a bar and say "People suck" and everybody is like, "Tell us about it." I walk in and say the same two words, and everybody is like, "Who are you to say I suck?" This is what we are dealing with, so it's more than just a kkk member going on and on about how the black man married his daughter. In other words, excuse the pun, it's not a black and white issue but one massive gray area.

You don't seem to realize how devaluing your attitude can be. Sure, this is your forum, and I am not it should not be a place that you can vent your frustrations, but you seem to think you are the only person can know what it's like to be you. I too have a hidden disability that makes communication very difficult, but it happens to not be the same disability as yours, therefore I cannot know how you feel. You have a right brain weakness, I have a left brain weakness. We are totally different so I have no right to speak to your problems right? God your poor little me attitude is so annoying. I have sensibility issues too. I had no friends growing too, and very few now. Once when I was in Middle school, a couple of dudes jumped me during lunch break and knocked me over and broke my glasses and bloodied my nose. After that my Mother insisted that I make an appointment with an assistant principal to demand that something be done about this behavior. When I went the dude said to me, "This is just a part of growing up. Why didn't you gather a bunch of your friends go get back at them?" I knew then that I was on my own in this, since I had no friends to go gather. But I'm not an Aspie so I can't know how you feel. I give up. If you are determined to hurt badly, be my guest.

There's nothing particularly Aspish about the behavior people are complaining about. Individuals from one group get hurt by individuals from another group. Individuals from first group band together and engage in hate speech against group B. Pretty standard behavior anywhere, anytime in human history.

On your second point - enough Aspies on WP, ironically, especially those who engage in hate speech, condemn NTs about their discriminatory behavior to make me find it very difficult to believe that anyone on WP doesn't know that prejudice and discriminatory behavior is unacceptable social behavior. I mean it's only the subject of the vast majority of the threads on this forum...The real difficulty here is not lack of knowledge that discrimination is bad, but the inability of a lot of people to apply what they expect from other people to their own behavior.

While I have pointed out the effects of engaging in this sort of behavior on external reputation I think an even more important reason not to engage in it is self-respect. May be I'm just a weirdo but I don't think I could with a straight face, condemn prejudice and discrimination, if I engage in it myself. The contradictions would mean that I couldn't respect myself.

Another reason why I oppose this sort of behavior is because in my mind it is illogical. The cost-benefit ratio of hating other people is simply too low (in fact negative most of the time) for me to justify it as an efficient use of my energy and time. I mean I have thought about holding an eternal grudge against members of my family for all the emotional abuse as a kid, but doing a cost-benefit analysis it just wasn't worth it. The only exception is if say you were a politician wanting to use other people's hatred to gain power. But otherwise the costs (time and energy wasted, lack of self-respect, reputation lost, destroyed relationships etc.) outweigh any benefits. Not to mention I suspect the benefits would not make me happy (according to previous case studies i.e. my own and other people's experiences) which sort of negates the reasons for doing it.