Well This is Depressing

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No, what invokes ire is the air of superiority you carry around, as demonstrated in this very post. You appeal to "science" whenever it supports your viewpoint, which generally seems to be based around you being better than other people, but ignore it when it doesn't, which is a grievous error- cherry picking is no better than ignoring science altogether. You frequently insult people by claiming that the issues they have are because they are lazy or because they won't stop complaining.

For the record, Mr Savage is arguing from a position on the scientific fringe. He is also not qualified to make statements on this issue as none of his degrees are in psychology, neuroscience, or another relevant field. Similarly, Professor Stephen Hawking or Professor Lord Robert Winston are not qualified to make authoritative, controversial statements on autism despite being world leaders in their respective fields.

That is why I never listen to talk radio.

That pretty much describes it. Most folks seem to "get it" quickly, but sometimes an unexpected emotional response "comes out of left field", and I either have to abandon the thread or try to patch things up.

I should qualify - that's how it appears from my perspective / viewpoint, as it sounds otherwise as though I'm speaking for others. Before I started posting myself, I had quite negative emotional reactions to some of your posts which mirrored some of the reactions I see regularly from other WPers.

I adore the written word as a form of communication, because (a) I can finish what I'm saying without being interrupted (You can probably surmise that I'm occasionally a little fond of the sound of my own voice) and (b) I can check and edit it down for clarity and precision - even then I can still ramble over the hills and far away before getting to a point!

Do you think if you put a little more flesh to the bones of your initial pithiness, you might have to do a bit less abandoning or patching up?

I shall have to continue this tomorrow, as it's 01:25 here and as I actually feel sleepy, I need to take advantage of it, lol.

There appears to be no enforced social penalty here on WP for making what Fnord fairly accurately describes as "unexpected emotional response". I've had threads where it becomes fairly obvious that to continue with my previous line of commentary would be met with responses that have little to with fact, and everything to do with factors that are well outside my control. In those cases, it often serves the community better if there is no response at all.

<* Heavy Sigh *>

You're right ... on to other topics, then ...

I just want to note that as someone who finds it very hard to pass up statements that appear to me to be completely incorrect, and given I have argued with Fnord on past occasions, that I did not actually respond to his post about Michael Savage.

This is because what he wrote was strictly literally correct, and I didn't see him state that Savage was correct.

Anyway, that's all I have to contribute here, since it seems we've come not to praise Fnord, but to bury him.

Aha..... No penalty, but reward? we're all people, by which I mean bald monkeys with gadgets and leisure time, and a shared emotional reaction is a form of crowd "bonding" or, dare I say it...."belonging"? - Think (for example) football match, where you can be one with a group of complete strangers, sharing joy and disappointment in huge affective surges as part of a social (tribal?) group.

Now, this is NOT to denigrate or insult those who react in this manner, because it's a natural reaction to "this monkey is not/appears to be not like us" which is at root an evolutionary survival mechanism. Drive out the monkey who is different because the status quo, and therefore potentially the survival and/or breeding quality of the tribe is affected. This can apply to a larger tribal sphere, or to part of a smaller group with which we identify within that sphere - "don't pick on my friend"

We all have our emotional triggers, some of you will have seen me go crazy-ape bugsh*t on a thread I started for a specific purpose which was temporarily derailed by a "rogue monkey". An emotional reaction is not "wrong" per se, it just "is". Manipulation, whether preventing, guiding or polarising that emotional reaction could be regarded as a skill or art. The difference between a communicator and a manipulator is in whether you use that skill for "good" or "evil".

Affective emotion is a stress of sorts, many of us on the spectrum, myself included, don't do stress magnificently well, which kicks off all sorts of stuff wired into our survival circuits, bypassing cognitive reasoning.

Does that make any sense at all? Or am I just talking out of my hat? lol

Well, should there be a penalty? What if the emotional response is to precisely what you said? What if the emotional response is also grounded in empirical fact? I've noticed that often people (and I mean people of all neurologies here) will denigrate or at least devalue emotional responses, and even claim that the presence of emotion itself mitigates any merit the associated argument has.

I have on numerous occasions been accused of expressing excessive emotion when I have disagreed calmly with others. On another forum, I have been lectured that brains that function like mine (and like many autistic people's) are not properly human and disposed toward evil, and when I tried to respond to this in a rational fashion, I was accused of trying to start drama and being too emotional and too personally close to the topic to be objective about it.

I remember posting a thread on this forum in which I pointed to research that indicates that emotions are a vital part of human cognition, and that they are present even before one is aware of them, and the responses were intriguing, to say the least - at least a few respondents rejected any possibility of such a thing applying to them, even though it applies to everyone. And in this case, if they were truly without emotion, they likely could not have expressed a preference in the first place.

At its most basic, however, even a communication that is almost entirely emotional carries content. There is a reason people react strongly to certain statements or kinds of statements, and that their responses may not be strictly factual does not mean there is no validity to their responses. The trick - and this is harder for many autistic people than for others (it's definitely harder for me) - is to be able to perceive what the content is through the emotional reaction.

^^BANG ON!! +1!! Beautifully put.