asperger intentional community

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contrary to what many think, i tend to believe that an aspie community would tend to work beater then an NT one. NTs have to train to ignore each other, we ignore people more naturally.

experience from wintering Antarctic researchers

http://scicom.ucsc.edu/scinotes/0001/crazy.htm

Many autistic people find it hard to ignore people. The more people around the more overload or anxiety. That is why so many autistic people seek out ways to be alone even if they like people.

A tangent, but I don't understand how anyone who can write as well as you do gets labeled "low functioning". Is that by professionals, or just random people?

Professionals. I have seen it happen to better writers than me with huge vocabularies. Probably has to do with the rest of my skills and some aspects of my appearance. Low functioning is not a valid label so you can't expect it to make sense. Most nonprofessionals don't know the words low functioning but certainly pick up on me as extremely different and often assume I can't think. And my "adaptive skills" (ability to take care of myself basically) pretty much bottomed out on a test of that so perhaps that is why sone professionals have said it. I tend to find it written in my records after the fact but have also had the occasional comment like when I was hospitalized for an emergency physical condition and heard one of the professionals tell another that I had the cognitive functioning of an infant. And even when I could talk some of the time I remember doctors being openly shocked when I said anything.

Unfortunately I lack the skill most people use to make that instant judgement of high or low functioning. So I have only been able to piece together why I so often attract that label. I have suspected that people aren't detecting a genuine drastic difference between two types of people but rather a combination of a small set of superficial traits. They then think those traits indicate something wider about the person when they really don't. Hence the fairly high number of good writers I have known who have been mostly labeled low functioning. (It seems that writing skill has little to do with that snap judgement and many of us have had writing treated as a savant skill even though in a nonautistic person it would just be considered a skill.)

Well, there's a difference of interpretation here. In my opinion, its just secondary generated anxiety, not hardwired, or part of autism in any real way.

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They dedious you are ret*d from your facial expression. Just tell, them you are not ret*d, you have weird facial expression because of your autism, and you get labeled ret*d often.

I think the most frequent mislabelement its ... "narcicistic". They think you look down on them with contempt. I'm getting that one, even if people don't know the name. Its not about anything i said, simply looking them the wrong way. Tell them also that other autistics are labeled "narcissistic" by the same mechanism.

What do you find less bad? Being labels a moron, or a sociopath. What a choice.

Both Autscape and Autreat are predominantly aspie, but they indeed welcome people from all parts of the spectrum. Thank you for clarifying this.

I don't think you can make a community work with a lot of Aspies and then a lot of NT females. As a general rule, that's going to be a huge clash.

What do you do when one person stims in a way that overloads another person? How do you handle PR?

I wouldn't join a community without a church unless there were a very good reason. So keeping all metaphysical beliefs private is not a law I would follow.

What about finding the land?

What about Aspies who want to do jobs which keep them in a specific geographical area?

What if the location you choose is a turn-off?

And even if you find a hundred, even if you have enough space for everyone, even if no one's complicated and precise ritual ever conflicts with anyone else's, even if there are no fights (among a blunt group of people with varied opinions and no tact, this is highly unlikely), even if everyone likes everyone else... what do you do when your Aspie traits become amplified to the max, and are seen as the most important thing about you? Maybe it's not a problem in the community, but at some point you need some interaction with some outsider.

Besides, clumping up, you make yourselves a target.

I don't like the idea of living in any type of planned community. Sounds very close to an institution. Sure, you'd be free to leave, but the only acceptable thing to do with that freedom (to me) would be to exercise it.

I like having NTs in my life, and I like not having a bunch of people thrown together just because of neurological wiring. If you take a bunch of NTs, that won't work either. Especially if this crosses a great many cultural divides. (And near whose home would you put it?)

I'm only scratching the surface of why I don't like this idea, though, to be quite frank, I have considered it myself, but even then, I don't envision it the same way you do.

Also, I have morals. They happen to be similar to some NTs' morals, and although I'm not on a crusade to force you to follow them, being polyandrous would violate them. (Maybe if you intentionally tried to entice the male Aspies with low sex drive, and the female Aspies with high or at least normal sex drive...)

Much better would be this plan (though I don't fully advocate it, either; I think there's a reason we're rare, and it's the same reason there's more cake than icing):

Go onto Members Only on this site. Determine which town is move-to-able and has a suitable climate.

Still on Members Only, with everyone sworn to secrecy, agree that a large number of you will move to this town on a predetermined, slow schedule.

As the town's demographics change, make it more Aspie-friendly.

Watch as your success snowballs out of control.

This seems to be a dead discussion but I came across it while googling 'Asperger's Intentional Community" and it led me right back to Wrong Planet which I only discovered a few days ago.

I was searching the topic because I have long had an interest in Intentional Communities as an option to find a more comfortable society in which to live. It has only been since my self diagnosis of Aspie that I realized where this desire comes from.

So, YES! I believe it would be an excellent idea! It would of course involve the participation of the highly functional but I see no reason why an egalitarian Community of us couldn't be a very strong sanctuary AND educational space for aspie's and NT's alike.

I also have a strong suspicion that the majority of folks who do already live the Community life are probably somewhere on the Autism spectrum themselves, and most likely unaware of it.

TedMart, welcome to WrongPlanet.

I don't think more than one or two of the previous posters are on this board anymore. I know for a fact that they arn't discussing aspies communities, because I put up the last two threads on the topic.

Also, this particular thread might not be the best for your particular thoughts. What often happens in "community" and "nation-state" threads is that the OP lays out an increasingly detailed thought process, which has the dual disadvantages of being both unfeasable (too expensive) and unreasonble. This particular thread hit that mark very quickly.

Another issue that trips up these discussions is that we come from different cultures. To refer to our three biggest posting areas, the UK is not quite Canada, and Canada is not quite the US. This has real consequences when dealing with political and social issues. Even the choice of words must be very careful to work across national and cultural lines.

As the creator of most of the recent threads on this subject, I encourage your interest, and I welcome you to contribute to other threads on this topic, several of which are in the first 2 pages of this "Politics, Activism, and Media Representation" forum.

I stopped reading at "NT women for demographics". Doesn't sound like a community I'd want to be a part of.

I don't like the idea tbh, it will probably become over run by supremacists