johnrobison wrote:
You know, Tony Attwood had a good insight into people like this.
He said you can draw a bell curve for social intelligence, just like the one for traditional IQ. We Aspergians are down there on the left bottom. We get along well with our own kind, on the bottom left. We can also get along really well with the denizens of the far right bottom - the "emotional geniuses," if you will.
Most of humanity lies in the middle of the curve, and they do not understand, or care to understand, those of us at the fringes. We are too far from the norm for them.
I think Tony is right. Those are the guys that tell jokes about us over pitchers of Bud, and write about us in stories like that. I'd just let it go. They do not understand us, and we don't understand them. We do our thing, and they do theirs.
Honestly John, we have to live in the society where they spread their bile.
Just doing their own thing and ignoring discrimination was not the solution for other groups victimized by bigotry and prejudice. These people get to vote, get to influence our political leaders, and influence the wider community who in turn vote and influence our political leaders. One journalist recently claimed people have a right to know if their Prime Minister has AS because she assumes that this makes us less fit for such a role solely on the basis of a characteristic that we did not choose to have and which is not necessarily correlated with lowered performance in a Prime Minister.
These people influence how much ridicule and humilation is dumped on us, and the extent to which formal legislative discrimination against us exists. We cannot afford to just ignore them least we turn around and find we are forced to wear stars of autism in public places. How we are perceived publicly matters, both to our emotional well being and to our inclusion and legal rights within a community of beings who have shown time and time again how easily and readily they adopt viscious, abusive and even genocidal behaviour when encouraged to view a sub-group of humans as less than (human).