Do you think we should have our own country?

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Why do you need a rich person to step in and build it for you? Are the poor Aspies unable to do anything for themselves?

Seriously, not being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is a good indication that you're unable to run your own country. To put things into perspective, if a 100 individuals contribute £1k each annually, that's an annual pot of £100k. You could buy about 20 acres with that in the UK, and the following year you could begin to put in infrastructure. A few years down the line and it would be ready to occupy. Perhaps it could start out as being an autism retreat.

If you want to set up a de facto state, however, you need more land than that, and a lot more isolation. Perhaps an Alaskan or Canadian island is an option, ideally with city status (hey, Disney own their own city...). It has to be a decent size - a good few kilometers at least. You're looking at over a million dollars easily, probably closer to 10 million. The state of Alaska sells land for about $0.5/m^2; at that price, each square kilometer would cost you $500k. Possibly you could get a much lower price, since you're buying in bulk... still, budget $10M for the land, so you get enough for farmsteads and woodland and well as the town itself. If you're willing to wait several years to accumulate the cash, you're looking at $2.M/year, which means you need 1000 people putting in $2.5k/year on average. Possible? Yes, if they're sufficiently motivated.

If you can acquire a 20 km^2 island with an income of $2.5M/year, and persuade the appropriate government to grant you city status, there's a lot you could do. You'd need an airstrip, obviously, but it needn't be fancy. Set aside half the land for farmsteads and rent it out to Autist farmers, which would increase the revenue. Say, a rent of $0.01/square meter would net £100k a year for the city funds...

I never said that. I highly doubt though that unless a benevlovent philanthropist puts his weight behind this endeavour we will be able to muster the investment money needed to by adequate land, much less the infrastructure to run it. Its nothing to do with ability or political eptitude, its just the nature of the beast.

Besides I thought one of the raison d'etre for starting an autistic country is to have a land where we would be valued for our talents and input, not our ability to conform to the neuro-elitist economic Taylorist X-Factor zeitgeist of Neurotypical society.

Again, ability to run a business is a poor yardstick on ones ability to lead a country. They are entirely different entities. Moreover I would hope 'Aspergia' to be a democracy, not crony-capitalistic like so many nations under the NT hegemony.

If we are just meeting for the sake of meeting we don't need a micronation for that. If we're serious and want our own autonomous society we'll need a hell of a lot more that £100k. We will need the money to buy the land plus sufficient start up capital to keep the nation economically self sufficient. Of course the business savvy will be necessary for wealth generation but we will need the morally responsible in government to honour our original motives.

Ugh too cold. So little to no chance of attracting any tourist revenue either.

Can't speak for everyone but I'd prefer somewhere with a temperate climate and preferably not too many natural disasters, mosquito borne diseases or predatory or venomous indigenous species of wildlife. One of the Azores or Canaries, for example. If we moved there in sufficient numbers maybe we could even lobby the Spanish or Portuguese governments for autonomy and nationhood.

You think you could persuade the Spanish to give you autonomy? Good luck with that, no-one else has succeeded recently.

Besides, those places are just too hot. I'd much prefer somewhere nicer, like Canada or Alaska. Plus the land is cheaper, and you don't get pesky tourists as much (I highly doubt an Autist nation could cope with having a load of tourists).

If there's no-one capable of running a business in the government, I doubt that governments ability to be fiscally responsible.

The point is, we have the funds, they're just spread out at the moment. Again, it all depends on what you want to do. I never said we could do it on £100k/year (although...), I said it would be more like two orders of magnitude more than that. But getting hold of $10M - enough, I should think, to found a small town - is still viable given a large enough pool, say 500. You don't need a single rich donor, you need a few rather wealthy ones. Or several dozen moderately wealthy people. Or several hundred people on an average income. Or a few dozen thousand people in poverty. As Martin Luther King said...

Once we have a few dozen square kilometers and a town, we can campaign for city status. Once we've got that, we'll have enough autonomy for our purposes at that point. Perhaps the founding population will be 50 people. It doesn't matter. Once we have our city, more people can move in and the town can grow to accommodate everyone who contributed to the project. Perhaps it will never be recognised as an independent country. I'd still rather have de facto sovereignty than de jure.

As an aside, who's up for simulating an Autist state online, to see how it would go? Maybe it won't lead to anything concrete, or maybe it will lead to Autist enclaves. It's worth a try.

Why not? The UK managed to take and mantain sovereignty of Gibraltar, more or less through sheer Migration. Now Scotland is on its way to acheiving autonomy from the UK.

The temperature is something we will never all agree on and with undecided modes of breadwinning industry those 'Pesky tourists' may be needed to keep the fledgling aspergian economy healthy. Tourists gravitate towards warmer climates, that is just a fact.

Personally I would take warmer but not excessively hot climates, the cold just depresses me.

Fiscal responsibility and entrepreneurship aren't mutually inclusive.

Its possible to be sensible with money but be an awful business person.

The problem is when you take money from people who already have next to nothing, you are asking them to give up an essential tenant of their existance. Many people in poverty, autistics included are in a position where they have to choose essentials. Especially so in America where there is no universal healthcare.

I think a guiding philosophy ought to be 'from each according to ability, to each according to need'.

It would need to be fully autonomous as a country or it would betray the original purpose. What is the point in having an autistic homeland if NT's control our border and have the power to decide who can and can't go there? Or had a headlock on our pursestrings and budgeting capacity?Can you imagine the outcry if the arabs had the power to control who can and can't move in and out of Israel?

I think theres already an autistic virtual state on second life.

Although i've always thought that virtual communities are bad at simulating IRL ones.

Since when did the government tell you who could and couldn't go on your land? Or tell you what you can and can't do with your money?

Something called 'Immigration policy'

For the sake of argument, If the 'city of Aspergia' was set up in the United States then ultimately the federal government would have say over who can or can't enter it, autistic or not.

Surely the idea is to provide sanctuary for all autistics, regardless of the willingness of a NT host government to issue entry permission?

Civic budgets are nearly always dependent on national budgets.

If you want your own country, you need sovereignty.

If you want your own country, you need an economy.

If you want your own country, you need a system of government.

I still think land takes precedence over all of those.

Land is useless without everything else.

Okay, don't call it a city, call it a homeowners association, or a holding corporation. Rent the houses and land out to the citizens. The budget is the money raised from the rent, and anyone on the land without permission is committing trespass. You're still subject to the laws of the host country, but you're still possessing a great deal of sovereignty.

Alternatively, you could always see if some of the tribes are willing to enter into a 99 year lease of land, complete with their sovereignty over it...

Spain doesn't have Gibraltar because they don't want to enter into war with the UK. I doubt they'd be worried about entering into war with "Aspergia".

You can't really build a proper economy on tourism, and I highly doubt Autists make the best tour operators. Unless you wish to run the tourism business separately to fund your government...?

Who said we need to tie our economy in to the rest of the world anyway? Maybe we should implement the tools from Open Source Ecology and 3D printers, and only trade with the outside world for what we can't make ourselves...

Land without sovereignty, economy, and governance is just land, and nothing more.

I think the problems of setting up the government and economic systems are far more pressing than finding the land.

Build the state first, then find somewhere to locate it. Even if you don't succeed in building a nation-state, you've now got a very big lobby group... which can use it's private military to "encourage" states to treat Autists like actual human beings...

Is anyone actually interested in constructing a territorial Autist micronation, rather than going off into flights of fancy about what it would be like if we had one? I'd quite like to see a thousand - or hundred thousand - parastate entities setting up their own private cities and sidestepping the laws of the host country in an Agorist manner...

Bonus points if their inhabitants are 3rd sigma or further from the average, so they can bud off and form their own bell curve, their own normal. It's boring living on a monorace world.

Finding unity among Aspies would likely become the first obstacle to overcome.

I think we all can agree we need a series of safe haven places that treat autistics like human beings. We could set up a series of communities and as we get more money eventually figure out where we'd like to live. There are plenty of cheap places to live here in Alabama and we already have a huge population of autistics. So it should be fairly simple to set up a system of figuring out how to get more of us in different communities where we already have a strong presence so we can start clumping together and working to get better treatment by NTs .

This poll makes me incredibly sad.

Cause that's really what we need- more segregation...

The "us and them" mentality of WrongPlanet really gets me down sometimes.

Yeah, it's like a religion...