Anti-cure Cowardice?

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Your view is one of what I think would be widely considered in science, medicine, academics, and politics (the art of social organization) to be profound irrationality. And your view appears to also fall into one or more of the categories I provide in my original post, none of which you have addressed in any way.



IT led to nothing ... YOU led yourself to it. Psychological again is your approach.

And you provide some examples about this. Here you accept and promote special education for autistic persons. This acceptance and promotion is consistent with the desire for a major treatment to overcome the entirety of autism. The pro-cure or pro-major treatment approach is AN EXTENSION of the pro-special education approach. Special education entails treatment to OVERCOME AUTISTIC IMPAIRMENTS AND SYMPTOMS, and efforts to develop a major treatment or cure are done for the purpose of FURTHER overcoming autistic impairments and symptoms.

Well I don't want to not be who I am. If that offends someone who does not want to be the way THEY are, hmmmm.... frankly I don't give a flying f**k....

Arrogant? If you think that, again... idc.

WHY?

Partially because I'm an Aspie, granted. I've referred to us a "Nature's little noblemen, forever at the 4 year old stage where everything is MINEMINEMINEMINE and it's all about MEMEMEMEMEME". We're completely self centered. So? I'm not "social". Well I'm perfectly social with those who want to talk to me about things I find interesting. My observation is NT's are exactly the same way. If they want to talk about sports and you feel organized sports are a complete waste of space... they aren't very social either. If they want to talk about rap, and you like listening to everything BUT rap and have a violent reaction if someone tries to bust a rhyme, they aren't very social are they? WE'RE not that different... duh. Or they want to talk about their "personal relationship with Christ" and you want to throw yourself from the Sears Tower rather than listen to one more SECOND of it... is it arrogant to tell them you really don't want to discuss such things and would they please stop, or should you lie to them and plead a sudden case of diarrhea?

I understand there are people out there hurting because they have not been able to accommodate the NT world the way I have. I understand that there are people suffering daily from conditions that need treatment. Treatment is not a "cure", it is a treatment. I have no objection to someone relieving their pain, whether that's physical or psychological. Hell, if you really feel, that if you were relieved of your physical hurts, if you were able to take in and process sensations without screaming from the intensity, if you were able to breathe and walk and speak, when you wanted to, if you had ALL those things and you STILL want to be "cured" of autism... you want to change your brain, then by all means, be my guest. Unless someone pours a few trillion dollars into it, which at this point in time appears to be a very unlikely chance, I see no way in HELL that anyone will be able to rewrite and rewire an established neural network. Barring the old fashioned and always popular lobotomy of course... again. Be my guest, but leave my invitation in the trash. I want to be who I am. If you don't, then change if possible. If impossible, you have to find a way to live with that, or to paraphrase a character from "Dead Like Me", "you go away, peanut... you go away and you never get to want anything again...".

I will NEVER object to people getting appropriate medical and psychiatric care to make their lives the best we can accomplish. I think we should be getting that in the United States under a National Health Plan. I'm willing and able to pay my share, and to pay more for the people who have nothing to get coverage too. It makes me sick to my stomach to see people who have to defer or go without treatment completely. To see families forced into bankruptcy because their medical bills exceeded their insurance cap (usually $1 million US dollars). A preemie newborn with just a FEW medical issues can rack up a bill like that in most hospitals in as little as a month. I will NEVER object to my brothers and sisters on the spectrum who need treatment for conditions that arose from our shared heritage. But I will never surrender my core "person" so that I can "be just like everybody". Damnit I KNOW you're lonely. Here's a newsflash SO ARE THEY. NT's have ALL the problems we do, just in different ways. The major difference I can see is they are judged NOT "on the content of their characters" but on how high they can claw up on a social status ladder. I listened to two mothers conversing about their teenaged daughters once, and one said "Well, you know my daughter was a cheerleader last year, dated the captain fo the football team... we moved and in the new school she didn't even make the cheer squad, that's real hard on her, going from being somebody do you know... being nobody...".

I was horrified. Had her child had her brain removed? Had she had her limbs amputated?? No, she just wasn't a cheerleader, it didn't change the PERSON, it changed the status, and that was more important to them than her daughter's character, or personality, or self worth as a human being... I would rather have my children be good human beings, live by a code of ethics, give help to those who need it and accept help when they need it in their turn... from what I can tell they're well on their way. Never having "been on a sports team" never having played that status game at all. I'd rather have them be Aspie's than some gang of thugs, I mean high school football players... By no means are all NT's driven by that, but the ones who end up RUNNING things are... Rather than the content of their character, we have leaders who managed to beat down all their opponents on the way up.

Goddess help us... no wonder we suck...

You, also, haven't responded to any of my original post. Instead, as with anbund above, you wrote long emotional personally oriented posts, which is fine, but avoiding of my original post. You write with a loud voice, and like anbund, you try to talk over others with a louder voice, but in doing so your approach is only psychological.

Regarding your view of what a cure is, it is not quite right. A cure is a treatment that leaves the person intact but removes the adverse symptoms. Your view of a cure is based on FEAR, it seems, as I explained in my original post.

Well, you present a good argument, but I think I disagree
"Reasons for the rejection of the idea of a cure.

(1) There is, and has never been, a treatment that significantly impacts our core symptoms of autism/Aspergers. (I consider this kind of treatment to be a "major treatment"; and for other treatments that do not impact the core symptoms of autism/Aspergers in a significant way, I'd consider them either "not treatments" or "anecdotal treatments" or "minimal treatments "

(Many with autism and many neurotypicals tend to focus on the issue of a cure for autism, and express differing views about this, though it would seem that one important step before this issue has relevance, and importance, is the issue of a major treatment, and, there has never been a major treatment).


"Due to the lack of a major treatment, there has been no basis for many with autism and many neurotypicals to say anything (whether positive or negative) about the issue of a treatment or cure for autism. That is, in the absence of any major treatments, many find themselves left with the alternative to reject the idea of a major treatment and cure, and reject any efforts directed toward developing a major treatment or cure. The rejection is psychological. The idea of a major treatment and cure is rejected because there has never been any."

If you didn't want a hotdog, would you go out and buy one? No. Many feel they are happy the way they are, so they don't seek to change it. Those who pride themselves in autism probably wouldn't accept a "cure" based on that pride. A lot of money goes into research that could be put to other uses, and those who feel autism shouldn't be cured feel that finding a cure is a waste of money

"Many persons who have been imprisoned for most of their lives, such as 30-50 years, gradually become dependent on the prison walls, and have no need or interest in leaving, are frightened to do so, and will reject doing so. At first they hate the walls. Then they get used to them. Then they depend on them."

This is true, I function fine as I am. Outside of these "walls", who knows. But No one can say if being inside of these "walls" is ultimately a disadvantage. What if most of the problems come from the fact that the world isn't designed for us?

"(2) All people with autism and Aspergers have never experienced anything different than autism and Aspergers, and as such, many find they do not have a sufficient basis to accept the idea of a major treatment or cure, nor efforts made in developing both. If, hypothetically, autism was acquired between 10 and 15 years old, then there would be a basis for all with autism and all neurotypicals to say they would like a treatment or cure that restored their prior level of functioning. In addition, since we have never experienced anything different, many with autism and many neurotypicals will reject the ideas of major treatment and cure as things that are aimed to not treat or cure, but rather, change the very nature of autistic people into something different than what they are. That is, they no nothing different than autism, and as such, will consider any treatment to be a threat to their very persons (identity, personality, self, mind, thought, emotion, beliefs, ideas, dreams, desires, goals, abilities, life style, etc)."

Well frankly I believe that autism is a big part of who I am. This alternate perspective and manner of thinking certainly bears advantages. And no one can say for sure that neurotypicalism is better over all. Perhaps there are great parts of me that I've always taken for granted, but never attributed to autism, because, like you said, it's all I've ever known.

"(3) Lack of courage, and cowardice. Many autistic persons and many neurotypicals, due to some or all of the factors mentioned above, and likely other factors, have at the core a lack of courage to be open to possibility that a major treatment or cure would be beneficial for many or most with autism. Instead, many with autism and many neurotypicals fear the idea of a major treatment or cure, conceiving of them as things that will change their person hood so dramatically that they will cease to be who they once were. A consideration based on intense psychological cowardice and speculation. And a lack of courage to be open to other possibilities."

I'd say it's more pride than cowardice. The whole "I'm proud to have an ASD" thing is a flag to wave, if you see what I'm saying.
Fear is undeniably at least part of it though. But maybe we have something to be legitimately afraid of.
They have found ways to detect Down Syndrome in pre natal scans, which encourages selective abortion. What if the same thing happened to autism?

"(4) Anti-social psychological aggression. Many with autism and many neurotypicals will move beyond the ideological rejection of the possibility of a major treatment or cure, to personally demeaning, threatening, mocking, and libeling people and organizations who are devoted to the possibility of autism treatment and/or cure. This conduct arises from the above discussed considerations, and likely others, and seems to be a further psychological step beyond the more passive ideological rejection."

While I'd say some of that comes from different reasons, like the ones I mentioned, it makes sense. However, I don't see exactly how that fits into the argument exactly. I mean, yeah people act fanatically. Is this, to display that the movement against the cure is irrational? Because of some fanatics who hassle curbies? Not everyone is like that

"(5) Depraved indifference. It seems reasonable to consider those who refuse to take part in the possibility of major treatment development as people who are engaging in depraved indifference about their own well being, or the well being of their children, etc. A distant speculation: Hypothetically, if a major treatment was developed, and it was rejected by many parents of autistic children on the various bases mentioned above, it would seem reasonable to consider the parents to be committing the crime of depraved indifference to human life. On the other hand, if hypothetically the major treatment caused, as many speculate out of psychological fear, autistic people to radically change in nature as people, to the extent that their former selves, personalities, identities, etc, were no longer present, then it would seem obvious that this major treatment would be rejected with good basis by medicine and those with autism and neurotypicals."

It would be their belief, not indifference. It could only be indifference if the same parents would not cure their child of a disease that was incontravertably a horrible disease.

All in all, it comes down to whether or not you think of autism as a bad thing, or whether or not you think the best cure is tolerance.
The things you talk about, are existing factors, but most of the fanaticism you see is autistic pride and alternate beliefs.
What influenced these beliefs and this pride, might connect with your ideas on some levels. But there is a lot of good stuff about autism, and that's the main factor.

Is that a Shawshank Redemption quote?

I have been researching aspergers for 3 years and been working on a method to cure myself for the last 2. Three months ago I decided the method was ready enough to be tried and indeed i reached normality on january 14, it took me less than three months. then i fought hard to go back into aspieness (i achieved that in 2 days) for exactly that reason, when I turned NT all the things I have ever done stopped making sense, all my plans sounded stupid, everything in my room was worthless, all i thought was girls and dancing and getting tattoos and chatting with strangers. I became what i had hated all my life, it was so scary, it felt like i killed myself and put someone else in charge of my body. It does change the "person hood" like you said, aspergers is pervasive, it's like an old cancer, it has spread everywhere to the point that it is directing your tastes, your opinions, your dreams for the future, your career, your relationships, everything.

Thanks for this thread, i've had this topic in my head for the last couple of months and i've come up with a very good reason not to cure asperger: if you cure everybody from all their differences... you are stopping evolution!

If it were possible to treat the core disadvantages without destroying the positives, that might be good. But the concept of completely turning an ASD person into an NT person seems like a bad idea to me, because advantages and alternate perspectives would be lost. Great discoveries have been made due to alternate ways of looking at things, so autism is valuable to the world.
What also worries me is how we would get to a cure
Due to the whole eugenetics/bioethics movement, I think it threatens us as a race (this comes back to my pre natal abortion argument).
If you're trying to cure something, then you are treating it like a disease, and there are a lot of negative factors that spawn from it being known as a disease. If someone thinks of themself as "disabled", it can sometimes be an excuse to be angry at the world of fail at life.
And that cure money could be going towards acceptance, which I think is the ideal reality.

Last edited by TheMidnightJudge on 25 Jan 2008, 10:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Some of us type NT just because it's shorter, by the way, not meaning anything disparaging by it (although I think a lot of autistic people have come to be very elitist about it, and I've often spoken out about anti-NT elitism where it's existed).

And it's not almost-elitist. It is elitist. It also seems more common to me in younger people and people who've just learned they're autistic. (There are major exceptions in both directions obviously.)

I've often seen a particular kind of thinking that drives me rather batty, but is rather common (and I'm sure I've done more than my share of engaging in it at times).

It's where as soon as people realize that things are not a certain way, they decide it must be the exact opposite of that way.

Like a conversation I had with someone once:

Her: You hate me.
Me: No I don't hate you.
Her: Oh yeah right. Well you obviously don't love me though.
Me: No, I don't love you.
Her: Then you hate me.
Me: NO I DON'T HATE YOU.

I think that a lot of people go straight from thinking they're inferior, to deciding they're superior.

I also think that over time a lot of people figure out there's middle ground, where you value yourself as you are but you don't think you're inferior or superior to anyone else.



Very true, and I get sick of the "we're cool because we're intellectually gifted" stuff as well, given that a lot of people I like and respect very much are intellectually disabled, and I despise intellectual elitism.



I would say that noticing finer details of things than usual is a known autistic trait, because autistic people have the ability to drop the filters (and sometimes difficulty raising the filters) that people (both autistic and non-autistic) use to block out excess information. So we perceive things at a higher resolution. That doesn't make us better than anyone else (and it's a skill that leads to numerous difficulties, just as the ability to keep such filters up is a skill that leads to numerous different difficulties), but it's a skill currently believed by science to be part of being autistic.

Gaining valuable insights is not a specifically autistic trait. All people can gain valuable insights.

Gaining certain types of insights, and gaining them in certain manners, is almost certainly more common in autistic people, because our perceptual systems let in more information, and we seem to be doing higher-order thinking in areas of the brain that are considered to deal with perceptual things such as pattern recognition -- a trait that we have more strongly than non-autistic people, although it's likely they have it to a lesser extent too. This is also something that explains far more of autistic people's supposedly "paradoxical" abilities than other science previously has, so it's quite probable too.

Gaining other kinds of insights, and gaining them in other manners, is common in other types of people. Which insights and in which manners depends on which sort of person is being talked about.

But all of this said...

I've got a real problem with people seeing that some people say "Autistic people aren't defective, we're better than other people," and then denouncing anyone who doesn't support cure as an elitist.

I've also got a real problem with people seeing that some people say that autistic people do in fact have abilities that most non-autistic people don't, and assuming that we think autistic people are superior. That seems to suggest that superiority and inferiority ought to be decided on the basis of what abilities people have, for one thing. It also seems to suggest that if one sort of person tends to do better at one sort of thing, then this doesn't acknowledge that the other sort of person can't possibly do better at some other sort of thing. Autistic people do have skills that are pretty unique to autistic people, and these skills have in fact been the basis of many theories about autism, because they're more consistent than our deficits. Non-autistic people have different skills. Nothing is earth-shatteringly wrong about this.

And all of this... it really ignores the real work that some autistic people, and in fact many other disabled people, have put into explaining why we don't want people to see our particular body (including brain) configurations as a tragedy, or as something in need of curing. And this has included people with quite severe conditions, such as Harriet McBryde Johnson. It ignores the complexity of our viewpoints, and it insists that the voices that have always out-shouted our own voices are right just by sheer numbers and loudness. It ignores the love and care that we have put into coming up with and explaining these viewpoints, and in refining them over time as we have gotten older. It steamrollers over years of commitment and contemplation, and renders these things nonexistent.

Most people don't know, unless they have read a lot of what I've written, or unless they were among the handful of people to come to my house during that time, that most of my first articles about autism not being a horrible thing, were written when I was near starvation level due to abysmal self-care skills. I didn't know until long after I'd written them that the same was true of some other writers I had read. People don't know that because they don't expect that. They expect Maslow to reign supreme -- and he doesn't. People don't know the amount of work that a lot of us who are anti-cure, put into helping with each other's survival. And the reason we do that is because we've been there. We've been in situations where we've been (this list isn't common to all of us, nor is it all common to me, but I've heard all these stories again and again) unable to survive on our own, or starving, or mistreated, or abused and threatened by caregivers we depend on for our survival, or ignored by service systems, or dealing with movement disorders that somehow only autistic people seem to get or to care about, or too traumatized by unwanted "services" to try to get the real effective kind, or unable to communicate and wanting to know how, or trapped within other people's version of "helping" and/or "curing" us, or unable to figure out why to want to communicate but needing help with something else, or thrown out on the streets by our parents, or driven to homelessness and/or prostitution by lack of job options, or desperately lonely, or driven to severe self-injury while too exhausted or starved or seizure-addled to stop it, or diagnosed as intellectually disabled or schizophrenic or both, or in desperate need of medical attention but unable to recognize it, or bullied, or institutionalized and wanting badly to get out but having lost all hope of the possibility so trying to deaden ourself to it, or any of a number of other things... and we really do our best to help each other out.

Sorry for the long list. I mean to say that we're not some sort of special species of autistic that's immune to suffering. We just have a different outlook on why we have suffered (when we have -- there are some lucky ones who haven't). And a lot of us, in addition to helping each other out who are in this movement, also help out people who are not involved in it, or who disagree with us, or are too young to be much involved with it. (Contrary to popular belief, autism doesn't destroy compassion. It's an autistic person who saved my life at one point, with a great deal of sacrifice in her own at the time.)

And basically, when all of us who are against cure are just stereotyped as... being all twisted up inside to think this stuff, not knowing or caring about or even having met certain kinds of autistic people (let alone been them), not caring for anything else other than our own self-aggrandizement, not even associating with people who disagree with us... that stuff really gets old. And it's not true. Even of some people, that I know some people would swear it was true of. And we're not all separated from non-autistic people either.

And it does us an enormous disservice when:

1. Some autistic people run around claiming they don't want a cure because they're better than NTs, and/or making really derogatory comments about "low functioning" autistic people, or even "non-aspie" autistic people.

2. Some other autistic people run around pointing at the people in #1 and using those people to characterize all the rest of us (especially when a lot of us spend at least as much time telling the people in #1 that they've really got it wrong, as we do trying to explain to other people that we're not all doing what people in #1 are doing).

I would suggest, at any rate, reading some people like the following people:

Jim Sinclair
Jane Meyerding
Joel Smith
Anne C.
Larry Arnold
elmindreda
Larry Bissonnette
Michelle Dawson

What we all have in common is that we're autistic and don't want a cure, nor do we think we're superior to non-autistic people. Beyond that, we have various life experiences, different labels on the autism "spectrum" (including autism, AS, HFA, LFA, PDD-NOS, and sometimes several of those at different points in our life), different beliefs about a lot of things, etc. But we're not really anyone's stereotype of what autistic people who don't want a cure are like. Oh, also, I think every single one of us on that list has additional conditions besides autism, for whatever reason. And about half of us have been in institutions that I know of, time periods ranging days to decades. Etc etc etc. Lots of differences. But same viewpoint on cure, and same lack of sense of superiority over other sorts of autistic people (and in fact the most recent item on the final blog I linked to includes a mini-rant about people who think that way).

elan_i wrote:

Immaterial since I am arrogant.

It all comes down to opinion, and opinions are like as*holes, everyone has one and they all stink.

I AM arrogant, I kind of enjoy it. Once I get my volcano lair and minions... now THEN you'll see some REAL arrogance...

What was the method you developed? Or you could PM me if you'd like.

Within disability politics, my views are well within the mainstream, and most disability scholars and disability rights activists would agree with them completely. (Hmm... there's politics and academics.)

I work with a scientific team at a major university that does not consider me even slightly more irrational than any other human being. (Hmm... both science and academics.)

A different research team, which takes into account the most actual data about autistic people (and disregards the irrational assumptions often made as a result of that data), is also in agreement with most of what I have said. (More science and academics.)

My psychiatrist and doctors view me as rational in my views on this, and one of my doctors has in fact wanted me to present to a group of other doctors he works with. (Lots of medicine in there.)

And a surprising number of parents of autistic children find my views far healthier than the cure-at-all-costs view, given how irrational you seem to think it is. (And that's just regular people from all walks of life.)

Additionally, my views come in part from having a family history in which people within living memory considered people like me to be completely normal, and the sort of assistance necessary for us was not considered "special" in any way. You have not addressed that possibility whatsoever, probably because you've never heard of it. (More regular people who've actually lived this.)

It's quite possible that you simply don't understand the basis for my views, but I don't want to assume anything the way you have rampantly done about me.



I have not addressed them because they are not valid, and I have found that engaging in discussions in which I individually address points like yours leads to further amateur psychoanalysis on their parts, and I have no intention of degrading myself for you.



Actually, one of the known major causes of suicide is not knowing a way out of a really bad situation, and not being able to envision a future way out. That last part may be part of my own thinking that was flawed in some manner, but it was certainly not for lack of trying. This is why gay people, disabled people, institutionalized people (even taking into account people who are not institutionalized for depression), and prisoners all have higher rates of suicide than other people do, despite the fact that none of the sorts of people in those situations are intrinsically by way of who they are more prone to suicide than anyone else.

Given the age I was, additionally, most people at that age are highly irrational and volatile emotionally. Therefore, whether I'm right or you're right, it'd be nice to set things up so that autistic people of that age are not tempted in that direction by lack of options being presented to them.



No, I don't. I promote teaching of all people that is consistent with what sort of person they are. Special education singles out a division between disabled and non-disabled people in this regard that I do not happen to believe in. I do not believe in special education.



I have no desire for a major treatment to overcome the entirety of autism.



No, it's more like the pro-cure, pro-major-treatment, and pro-special-education approaches are all extensions of a single approach involving a purely pathological and medical model of disability in general, as well as a totally lack of examination of the basis for what's considered the non-disabled norm in any particular society (despite the fact that it varies from society to society, something I know firsthand).



Yes, it usually does, which is why it's certainly not what I support.

You might've missed the part where I said that function was more important than form. Meaning, if it is not right for an autistic person to acquire speech, for instance, then they ought to find some other way to communicate (and in fact young autistic people already do, which seems as much a trait of autism as any other communication-related trait), whether or not it looks "normal". (And "looking abnormal" seems to be the criteria for what's a "symptom" and what's not when it comes to autistic people.)

You might've also missed the part where I describe how the way autistic people move, rather than a "symptom", is a natural adaptation to the way autistic brains process information, and that there is no need to "overcome" it unless it's actually harming someone (which is relatively rare).

You might've also missed the fact that everyone (at least everyone who's being remotely efficient) uses their strengths more than their weak areas, and that there is no need to classify most people's weak areas as symptoms, therefore no reason to classify autistic people's weak areas as such either.

Education shouldn't be called treatment just because the person is educated differently than most of those defined by a society as normal. Nothing I described was treatment, except medical treatments, which I made pretty clear were not "autism treatments" and shouldn't be described as such (except under the current very obnoxious system where you have to call it "treatment" in order to get a communication device, which is like calling the bicycle you ride to a far-off job "treatment" for walking too slow to be able to get there on time).



Yep, and, as said before, that's not what I'm up to, because I don't consider autistic traits to be symptoms, and I don't consider "overcoming autistic impairments" to be the major focus of what I was describing. Nor would I consider "overcoming autistic impairments" to be either treatment or a cure if a person figured out a way to do so, any more than I consider it a treatment or a cure for a slow runner to train really hard until he manages to run in the Olympics despite having originally not been too good at it.

Cure means removing something (considered to be a disease/etc) entirely. Autism is not "the adverse symptoms of autism" (and I already got into why "symptoms" isn't the right word). Autism is the brain configuration that leads to the pattern of strengths and weaknesses autistic people have. Cure means the person no longer is autistic, therefore no longer has this brain configuration, and no longer has this pattern of strengths and weaknesses (and has neither the strengths nor weaknesses -- current research shows that the weaknesses seem to be caused by a particular strength, for whatever it's worth).



My personal views of a cure are based on distaste for the entire way of viewing people that says that everyone outside a certain norm is pathological and ought to automatically have to be brought back into it. And my personal reason for not addressing your views is a combination of time pressure, lack of desire to be further psychoanalyzed, and the fact that I know the results would not be worth the effort involved, and given those circumstances, I would rather state my views from my worldview than from yours, and let my worldview be judged by others on its own merits rather than by the merits of your own.

I find it kind of telling, by the way, that you view things from such a medicalized light, that you consider people describing our experiences to be "psychology". It's probably more accurate that we're just describing experiences that don't actually fit into your list of experiences, to show that there are in fact other experiences in the world than the ones you have described. Your attempts to force-fit our experiences into your already-existent categories aren't valid, as we have already said that we are not in any of those categories.

Last edited by anbuend on 25 Jan 2008, 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You have not discussed why you think they are not valid. Your mere statement that "they are not valid" is worthless. A mere psychological denial to address them. Your approach is psychological on many levels, and persistently psychological. And you also appear to not have the intellectual capacity to address my original post, and also lack the courage to attempt to address my original post, and also the psychological aggression to denounce it as invalid with no explanation. The easy way out.

Also, what do you mean by "valid"? Do you mean that they express thoughts that are not understandable? This is what is usually meant by 'valid', and as such, you're obviously quite wrong, and I think to the other readers of WP it's quite clear that your approach is, therefore, very psychological. It's like bickering with a child who says "YOU'RE WRONG, I'M RIGTE" "Ok, well why am I wrong? "YOUR WRONG, I'M RIGHT. "Ok well why". "YOUR STUPID, YOU SAY STUPID THINGS, YOUR WRONG, I'M RIGHT.

You appear to start with your psychological goals, and then use tactics to try to convince others of your goals.


What kind of scientific team? Clearly not one that is involved in standard autism treatment development to impact the core symptoms of autism - the severe deficits and impairments of core human capacities (communication, emotion, thinking, sensory). Is the scientific team you work with in the medical sciences, such as neuroscience?



What "different research team"? Isn't it important to provide support for what you claim?

I find your long posts almost entire emotional and psychological in nature. And very vague. And avoiding of my original post. You seem quite obstinate ... and upon reading something you don't like, turn your head away and start spewing your same-old-story song that your write in obsessive length, with vague personal accounts, strange essentric terms and phrases, and you seem to think you're doing something intelligent with your strange vague phrases.

Last edited by elan_i on 26 Jan 2008, 1:33 am, edited 3 times in total.

My statement that they are not valid is not worthless. I know why I have done things, and I know that I have not done things for the reasons you suggest. Therefore your views are not valid.

If I tell you that you did something because you thought you were a butterfly, I would be perfectly well expecting for you to say that this were not valid, and describe why you actually did them, rather than to describe in detail every feature of a butterfly's anatomy and the difference between yours and a butterfly's.

I would also expect it to be completely absurd for me to then turn around and tell you you're vague, emotional, and psychological, for saying what your reasons actually were.

As I said, my views are rooted in actual experiences in the real world, as well as various kinds of disability-rights analysis. Maybe you ought to read said disability-rights analysis.

Your views on why we do things are the ones that seem psychological (i.e. based in the practice of psychology and psychoanalyzing others, using incessant psychological terminology, etc) and emotional (you list all kinds of emotions and defense mechanisms we are supposed to have used in order to come to our conclusions). You are extremely demeaning and pejorative in your assertions about other people. Our refusal to respond directly to your accusations is an assertion of our actual humanity and of who we are and where our views come from.

You have made assertions about who we are, and what our experiences of the world are. We have responded with our real experiences of the world, and who we really are. You are the one choosing not to accept that, and attempting to force-fit our experiences into little psychologized boxes, and in fact insisting that we take your views of us seriously, even though you clearly are off in left field. And you continue insisting you know what we're thinking, which is very strange indeed, but very characteristic of someone with Psychiatry Disorder or Staff Personality Disorder.

It's irrelevant that you have "done things" "not for the reasons" I suggest. This has nothing to do with my original post. I don't discuss why people have done things, but instead provide explanations and ideas.

My explanations in my original post are provided as general explanations, and as such are not about what YOU yourself think. They are ideas, not reports of what YOU do and think.

Your response that they are "invalid" because they do not apply to you, is highly egocentric. You appear to think that general ideas can be invalid, themselves, if you yourself don't hold them. At most, wouldn't it be best for you to say they are "invalid for me"? This would show modesty, and also give admission that you're avoiding the explanations/reasons/ideas themselves, because of your self-centeredness, which is fine, but which should be made clear.

You quote fragments of other things I've posted here, and miss the overall ideas advanced at my original post. In college we learn to work hard to understand the ideas being formulated. We receive poor grades for reading material and saying "I don't believe it so it's not valid", and are embarrassed.

Last edited by elan_i on 25 Jan 2008, 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nice of you to come out from under your bridge.

Why not campaign to cure left-handedness while you're at it? Or freckles? Or red hair?

I get it, you're in very long manners calling me stupid, cowardly, and aggressive. Name-calling won't make your point.



"Real." "Applicable to the situation."



Nope. They're not incomprehensible. They're just not remotely applicable to my own reasons for doing things.

If I were to call you a cat, this would not be a valid statement.



"Approach"? I'm trying to explain why I do things.



No, I start with what I want to say, and then find a variety of ways to say it and ways to illustrate what I mean by it.



Odd, most people I talk to don't.



Nope, explaining why there is a big wide world outside the realm your original post tries to confine people into. My goal was not to explain "This is why I was not X, this is why I was not Y, this is why I was not Z," but to show what I really was, rather than say what I was not.



Obstinate == don't agree with you no matter how many capital letters you use, I take it?



Okay, so I'm strange, obsessive, eccentric, and repetitive, and I go on long enough to bore people? On this board? Why are you surprised?

What I have, is an extremely different path to language than most people have. As you know (if you've read a lot of my posts), I came to receptive language later than expressive, and expressive was first echolalic. This means that to this day when I make language I have to cobble together phrases. One reason I go on at quite a lot of length is to ensure that if I didn't get it right the first time, then I do get it right the second, third, and fourth time (especially since I can use entirely the wrong words sometimes), and also to include more details that other people might find repetitive (because they see the details as all the same thing, whereas I see them as assorted differences, the differences might be so slight that only I see them).

I also developed thought completely independent to language and that is another reason that the way I express things doesn't look the same as people who developed a more language-symbol-thought system earlier.

But you probably know all that (since I've said all this before), and just want to get a jab in at the way I (have to) communicate.