Political exploitation of personal suffering

Page 3 of 4 [ 49 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4  Next

Mona Pereth
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 11 Sep 2018
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,810
Location: New York City (Queens)

16 Jun 2021, 10:35 am

To techstepgenr8tion: I'm totally lost. It's hard for me to figure out what you are even talking about here, at all. Among other sources of unclarity, the above post contains too many pronouns and not enough nouns to make it clear what the pronouns are referring to.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
It might just be the timing and sequence of events as I experienced them but it's really tough not to see this as a knock-on effect of the 2008 financial crisis,

What are you referring to as "this"?

What do you see as "a knock-on effect of the 2008 financial crisis"?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
It's the aggressive ersatz nature of it

Unclear antecedent again. Aggressive ersatz nature of what?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
that suggests that it's largely unconscious

Yet another unclear antecedent. What's "it" here?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
and to the degree that it's conscious it's being shaped much more successfully by cynical actors.

Who are the "cynical actors"?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Also to the degree that people have taken this up but can't even put their fingers on the right targets (like a culture where Darwinian game theory is seen as the best solution for everything or runaway Pareto distributions) they can't focus, or find leadership who would focus, on grappling the actual problems - which makes it sound like it's head-locked, tapped out, and coopted by the same forces they set out to fight in the first place.

What do you see as the "actual problems"? What do you see as non-"actual" problems, and on what basis do you dismiss the latter as non-"actual" problems?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I look at the people who are pushing the momentum in this

What people? (And, again, and what is "this"? Same "this" as before, or another "this"?)

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
and I wouldn't trust them to define autistic, what it is to be autistic, or to try and tell us what an autistic identity is let alone what an autistic voting block is.

Are you referring to anyone in the autistic community here, or just some outsiders who might conceivably see themselves as potential allies?


_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
- My Twitter / "X" (new as of 2021)


techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,150
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

16 Jun 2021, 11:05 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
What are you referring to as "this"?
What do you see as "a knock-on effect of the 2008 financial crisis"?
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
It's the aggressive ersatz nature of it

Yet another unclear antecedent. What's "it" here?

This/it = the 2019 and later wokeism church militant. Meaning now we're at the start of what appears to be a fledgling imperial religion - what circumstances lead us from fifty years of steady progress toward equality to something that needs to turn the tables or recontextualize themselves as a racist in need of reeducation based on their skin color. It's a new/different animal.

Mona Pereth wrote:
Who are the "cynical actors"?

People who get 11K a pop lectures from companies whose risk assessment tells them that getting a certificate of having had them there makes them less likely to get sued. People who wrote books about how their mind works and projected themselves onto everyone else who shares their skin color. People whose solutions to problems seem to ignore win-win and aim for zero-sum.

Race with the above people isn't the issue, it's that every race has people who can lick their finger, stick it in the air, tell which way the wind is blowing, and figure out how to grift a living at other people's expense. Darwinian game theory in part selects for people like this, and particularly so when there's all kinds of upside for it and little in the way of tangible punishment (much like it selects for Madoffs on Wall Street if they can privatize gains and socialize losses in perpetuity).

Mona Pereth wrote:
What do you see as the "actual problems"? What do you see as non-"actual" problems, and on what basis do you dismiss the latter as non-"actual" problems?

- Black family net worth, stuck horribly close to zero because there's been no way to get escape velocity from history.
- Cycles of poverty reinforced by circulating damage.
- The ability of trans people to find restrooms in public spaces and at work.
- The ability to come up with some kind of economic system where the central thesis is if you can step on someone else's head you have infinitely more right to exist than they do and they have no right to exist.

Basic things that you would want everyone to be able to depend on. One of those odd moments of agreement I'd have with AOC - it would be ideal to see urban areas with suburban policing, the trick is figuring out what it is that makes that possible and my guess... rather sadly... low income forces fast life strategy, violence for status, honor culture, all kinds of things which then make it nigh impossible to have suburban policing.

When I see people say, with dead-pan seriousness 'Defund the police', or clarifying for those who couldn't take them literally - 'Defund the police means defund the police', that's damn near saying 'We want more dead poor people'.

Another, awe-inspiring move, is to consider things like timeliness, hard work, worse - STEM, as part of 'whiteness'. I can't help but sense that the problem there is self-explanatory. Of course, if I really want non-white people to have no hope of competing with white people - I'd be all in on promoting that.

When solutions to problems make zero sense, and even actively harm the people they're supposed to help, it's a signal that these 'solutions' are technically doing what they were supposed to. I often think we're a bit too quick with our generosity with incompetence, a bit like it takes a special set of motives to leave an open can of kerosene by a space heater with a big home owners insurance package at hand. When certain people are always or far more often than not 'wrong' and yet they keep amassing power - it's a really good signal that what they're saying their aims are and what their actual aims are have little congruency.

Mona Pereth wrote:
Are you referring to anyone in the autistic community here, or just some outsiders who might conceivably see themselves as potential allies?

The combination of non-autistic busy bodies who'd love to consolidate power by using us as well as those they'd cherry-pick for that purpose.

Maybe to frame my whole concern in a big picture sense (may or may not be repeating myself here) - it seems obvious that with mass movements, as in politics in general, the cream doesn't rise to the top. What rises to the top are people who are good at winning zero-sum games. At best you get Guy Debord's spectacle consuming it (with corporate America and even the CIA eating up wokeism - that's already here), at worst you get ressentiment and Girardian scapegoating turning into bloody revolution.


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


Mona Pereth
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 11 Sep 2018
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,810
Location: New York City (Queens)

16 Jun 2021, 11:52 am

slam_thunderhide wrote:
I think I am largely in agreement with this.

It seems obvious to me that if you have an elite class that cares little for the masses they rule over, then one way for them to tighten their control would be a divide and rule strategy of encouraging an ever expanding list of identity groups to fight against the masses of ordinary people (in the name of "securing their rights"), all the while ignoring those same elites - and that this quite accurately describes what we see in the US and to a lesser degree throughout the West.

Just because a strategy makes sense to you doesn't necessarily mean that said strategy is in fact the primary thing that's actually happening.

It's true that elite "leftism" tends to downplay bread-and-butter economic issues. It's also true, as far as I can tell, that the Democratic Party establishment strongly prefers "moderate" candidates who won't rock the boat too much on economic issues. And it's certainly possible that some elite folks have the motive you've described.

Nevertheless, the elites are not the originators of today's various civil rights movements. I know this from my own personal experience of having been involved off-and-on in the LGBTQ+ rights movement over the years, and from reading up on the history of various civil rights movements.

These movements, and all their major subgroups, all started out as grassroots groups. The well-funded stuff came later.

slam_thunderhide wrote:
With respect to autism, two things I have noticed spring to mind.

Firstly, whenever I check social media, I see that an unusually high number of left-wing accounts are run by people who have self-diagnosed themselves with autism along with two or three other neurological or psychological conditions and, usually, some strange new gender /sexual identity. I would be fairly confident that several of these autism self-diagnoses are inaccurate, and that several of these people would be better able to address their personal issues in a society where people were not encouraged to think that by adopting these various identities they were somehow "fighting the powers that be". Also, I think there is a danger that this trend will undermine the credibility of autism as a diagnosis.

I think what you are seeing here is simply that people who are already comfortable being out of the closet as LGBTQ+ people are also much more likely, than other autistic people, to be comfortable being out of the closet as autistic people. More generally a person is already comfortable with being a public freak in one way is much more likely than most people to be comfortable with being public freak in other ways as well.

This doesn't mean they aren't genuinely autistic, but it does mean they aren't representative of all or most autistic people. Due to Facebook's "real names" policy, people who are openly autistic on Facebook are a highly nonrepresentative sample of autistic people.

slam_thunderhide wrote:
Secondly, when I browse WrongPlanet, I see a high number of people who buy into this sort of stuff, which I find fairly disillusioning. It's as if some people on the spectrum think that just because they are (naturally) one of society's outsiders, that they're supposed to automatically identify with every other "outsider identity" they ever hear about, no matter how astroturfed it is.

Which "outsider identities" do you believe are "astroturfed," and on what basis do you believe that?

slam_thunderhide wrote:
As to the people on this thread who seem to think that it's the masses

I didn't say "the masses" (of people in general). I did say "grassroots" (non-elite members of the minority group in question).

When a marginalized subculture grows sufficiently large and becomes sufficiently well-organized, local politicians and other local leaders notice, even if the mass media aren't yet paying huge amounts of attention.

slam_thunderhide wrote:
who have forced the powers-that-be to recognize all these "oppressed groups" that we'd barely heard of a few years ago -

Just because you "barely heard of" them a few years ago doesn't mean that they didn't exist.

If you're referring to transgender people, for example, that's far from new. See, for example, Wikipedia's Timeline of transgender history and GLAAD's Transgender Visibility Timeline.

slam_thunderhide wrote:
rather than the powers-that-be imposing this stuff on the masses through academia, the media and politics - well, I just find that naive beyond belief.

You've seized upon what seems to you like a logical explanation based on your political beliefs, but you evidently have not studied the real history of these things.

Also, I would hazard a guess that you do not live in a major city of the kind where these subcultures have existed for many decades. (Or, if you do live in such a city, you haven't been paying regular attention to local news.)

And you've evidently never marched in a LGBTQ+ Pride parade -- or held in your hands a list of all the many mostly-grassroots organizations marching in said parade.

Nor, in all likelihood, did you ever personally know the individual who originated the very idea of what at first were called Gay Pride parades: Brenda Howard (who was a close personal friend of mine back in the mid-1980's).


_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
- My Twitter / "X" (new as of 2021)


Last edited by Mona Pereth on 16 Jun 2021, 1:01 pm, edited 7 times in total.

funeralxempire
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Oct 2014
Age: 39
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 25,184
Location: Right over your left shoulder

16 Jun 2021, 12:06 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
NT college kids who are worked up over saving the world shouldn't advocate for ND people, instead ND people as a whole and as more specific communities should advocate on their own behalf to the greatest extent possible.

The trick would be figuring out what it looks like for ND people to do things like set up co-ops and see what outward-facing models work. At least in the world as it presently stands the trick is ensconcing ourselves as an economic entity and we'd have to figure out what suits us well or what it takes to set up Cleveland model endeavors.


I'd argue that's the goal of most social self-advocacy groups and generally a lot of hostility towards groups of these nature that comes from outside is motivated by hostility towards that group.

If most x people are hostile towards x Speaks there's a good chance it fails to speak on their behalf appropriately. If most y people are hostile towards x Speaks (unless most x people are too) there's a good chance it's out of hostility and not alliance.


_________________
"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made... and they won't even admit the knife is there." Malcolm X
戦争ではなく戦争と戦う


techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,150
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

16 Jun 2021, 12:23 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
I'd argue that's the goal of most social self-advocacy groups and generally a lot of hostility towards groups of these nature that comes from outside is motivated by hostility towards that group.

If most x people are hostile towards x Speaks there's a good chance it fails to speak on their behalf appropriately. If most y people are hostile towards x Speaks (unless most x people are too) there's a good chance it's out of hostility and not alliance.

There are some things that distort that process:

1) The adaptive strategy most people, in general, seem to take which is 'play along to get along'. it gets as bad sometimes as 'I'll salute whatever flag you life on the pole so long as I have a job, a roof, and three square meals for me and my kids'.

2) The ability to play the game of 'We - as the official press organ of x group, declare that x group is anarcho-primitivist and all in support of x group wave the black-and-green block, any y who doesn't is anti-x and any x who won't is either not authentically x or has internalized phobia of x'. It's a transference in that case where black and green block politics (and likely extinction of most of humanity) doesn't have a proper connection with x group but someone was able to leverage the narrative into that.

This is part of why I'm much more partial to GameB type egg-headed wonkery. In that sort of conversation it's so geeky, so cerebral and complex systems oriented, that grabs for power tend to really stand out because the tone and tenor of it is so orthogonal. A lot of the time when people are making grabs for power the main goal is for other people not to see it, and the best of all worlds for hiding grabs for power is a world where communication is so distorted by grabs for power that very few people have strong basis for agreement on what they see (it's part of why the crappy popular kids in school were so good at bending reality to their will - making sure anyone who had a problem with it would know that they'd be taken out into deep astro turf and drowned). Putting these things in geek essentially forces the conversation to be about solutions and problem-solving, even forces cynical actors to contribute at least something positive if they're to be in the conversation at all, IMHO it helps make the whole thing self-auditing and self-correcting because it's in a certain kind of cadence and structure where unstable departures from that rather than new branches indicate that something's going wrong.


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


Mona Pereth
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 11 Sep 2018
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,810
Location: New York City (Queens)

16 Jun 2021, 12:46 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
When I see people say, with dead-pan seriousness 'Defund the police', or clarifying for those who couldn't take them literally - 'Defund the police means defund the police', that's damn near saying 'We want more dead poor people'.

Another, awe-inspiring move, is to consider things like timeliness, hard work, worse - STEM, as part of 'whiteness'. I can't help but sense that the problem there is self-explanatory. Of course, if I really want non-white people to have no hope of competing with white people - I'd be all in on promoting that.

I think part of what's going on here may be simply that the Black Lives Matter movement is currently dominated by immature kids. Hopefully more grown-ups within the black community will find the courage to speak up against this foolishness soon, while at the same time endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement's legitimate concerns.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
When solutions to problems make zero sense, and even actively harm the people they're supposed to help, it's a signal that these 'solutions' are technically doing what they were supposed to. I often think we're a bit too quick with our generosity with incompetence, a bit like it takes a special set of motives to leave an open can of kerosene by a space heater with a big home owners insurance package at hand. When certain people are always or far more often than not 'wrong' and yet they keep amassing power - it's a really good signal that what they're saying their aims are and what their actual aims are have little congruency.

Who, specifically, do you think is "amassing power" from the mis-steps of the Black Lives Matter movement?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Mona Pereth wrote:
Are you referring to anyone in the autistic community here, or just some outsiders who might conceivably see themselves as potential allies?

The combination of non-autistic busy bodies who'd love to consolidate power by using us as well as those they'd cherry-pick for that purpose.

Maybe to frame my whole concern in a big picture sense (may or may not be repeating myself here) - it seems obvious that with mass movements, as in politics in general, the cream doesn't rise to the top. What rises to the top are people who are good at winning zero-sum games. At best you get Guy Debord's spectacle consuming it (with corporate America and even the CIA eating up wokeism - that's already here), at worst you get ressentiment and Girardian scapegoating turning into bloody revolution.

If a subculture is sufficiently well-organized, there can be more and better safeguards against abuses by leaders and would-be leaders.


_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
- My Twitter / "X" (new as of 2021)


funeralxempire
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Oct 2014
Age: 39
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 25,184
Location: Right over your left shoulder

16 Jun 2021, 12:53 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
This is part of why I'm much more partial to GameB type egg-headed wonkery. In that sort of conversation it's so geeky, so cerebral and complex systems oriented, that grabs for power tend to really stand out because the tone and tenor of it is so orthogonal. A lot of the time when people are making grabs for power the main goal is for other people not to see it, and the best of all worlds for hiding grabs for power is a world where communication is so distorted by grabs for power that very few people have strong basis for agreement on what they see (it's part of why the crappy popular kids in school were so good at bending reality to their will - making sure anyone who had a problem with it would know that they'd be taken out into deep astro turf and drowned). Putting these things in geek essentially forces the conversation to be about solutions and problem-solving, even forces cynical actors to contribute at least something positive if they're to be in the conversation at all, IMHO it helps make the whole thing self-auditing and self-correcting because it's in a certain kind of cadence and structure where unstable departures from that rather than new branches indicate that something's going wrong.


It also has a strong tendency to eat itself constantly and achieve nothing material.


_________________
"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made... and they won't even admit the knife is there." Malcolm X
戦争ではなく戦争と戦う


techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,150
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

16 Jun 2021, 1:06 pm

Mona Pereth wrote:
I think part of what's going on here may be simply that the Black Lives Matter movement is currently dominated by immature kids. Hopefully more grown-ups within the black community will find the courage to speak up against this foolishness soon, while at the same time endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement's legitimate concerns.

They're going to be forced to as far as I can tell - even at the risk of getting doxed, excommunicated, etc. - because the price of inaction will be intolerable.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Who, specifically, do you think is "amassing power" from the mis-steps of the Black Lives Matter movement?

On one hand you have the Robin DeAngelo types amassing money. On the other you have corporations who can lip service all of this without paying their employees of any race a dollar more. It was a trip hearing Rhyd Wildermeuth, after talking quite a bit about Marx, anarchism, etc. also getting on to something Eric Weinstein said (really Pia Malaney's observation) that part of the democratic party throwing labor under the bus is that it was too expensive but what they could bestow without giving anyone anything exactly was group pride and celebration.

Mona Pereth wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Mona Pereth wrote:
Are you referring to anyone in the autistic community here, or just some outsiders who might conceivably see themselves as potential allies?

The combination of non-autistic busy bodies who'd love to consolidate power by using us as well as those they'd cherry-pick for that purpose.

Maybe to frame my whole concern in a big picture sense (may or may not be repeating myself here) - it seems obvious that with mass movements, as in politics in general, the cream doesn't rise to the top. What rises to the top are people who are good at winning zero-sum games. At best you get Guy Debord's spectacle consuming it (with corporate America and even the CIA eating up wokeism - that's already here), at worst you get ressentiment and Girardian scapegoating turning into bloody revolution.

If a subculture is sufficiently well-organized, there can be more and better safeguards against abuses by leaders and would-be leaders.

I think anyone attempting to do that will have quite a battle on their hands and will find that the people who have it going off the rails want it that way and won't give up without a fight. TBH I'd love to see those in favor of pulling it back to principals succeeding, I just feel like I'm still living in a world where most people have game theory blindness and don't see it until bad actors have the drop on them.


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,150
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

16 Jun 2021, 1:12 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
It also has a strong tendency to eat itself constantly and achieve nothing material.

What I'm noticing is such things tend to grow in a rather slow-burn capacity but once something hits that galvanizes them it turns into a network of people who have resources and know who to contact about what. It's sort of like watching Bret Weinstein seeming to talk into the ether about Covid and vaccines for for over a year and then, at a given point, have the inventor of the mRNA vaccine on, have several podcasts with prominent figures, and you then find out that they've got plenty of ties with people now who have contacts in the FDA. A recent ClubHouse they had actually showcased some of the political firepower they've amassed.

I'd really love to see that sort of galvanizing of 'adults' be able to take the system away from the wannabe late-Roman tyrants, sycophants, and sociopaths that we have at the helm. A lot of that growth is only possible because it takes place in seeming spaces of irrelevance where the gated institutions figure that giving them no mainstream air time should be enough to make sure hardly anyone has heard of them. In a place like CCP, OTOH, it would be much harder.


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


carlos55
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 5 Mar 2018
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,779

16 Jun 2021, 1:44 pm

HacKING wrote:
As somebody with autism myself, I dislike seeing the whole left wing intersectional crowd often claim autism as part of their list of oppressed groups. Generally I dislike the oppression heirachy these people push because it still perpetuates an oppressive mindset it just takes the current pyramid and reverses it. And as the old saying goes, two wrongs don't make a right.

So when I see autism lumped into this it bothers me for the same reasons I dislike that whole concept, except in this case it's personal. I don't think there's anything wrong with advocating for yourself and I do believe autism (and some of the other groups these people include in their coalition) do have their own unique challenges, I believe the way they go about the advocacy is regressive.

The reason I believe it is regressive is that the whole ideology is largely pushed by journalists, corporations, politicians, and entertainment industry juggernauts. All of these people are interconnected and there is significant mingling between them. They're basically an elite class that all mutually benefits from drumming up social outrage so that the politicians they've aligned with will win so they can dish out paychecks and favors to corporations and those corporations can dish out paychecks to others. It's almost like multi-level marketing all funded by taxpayer dollars.

It doesn't help that this ideology is attached to policy that gives government significant power which in turn helps perpetuate the interests of this elite class. The plot is this- The media, corporations, and Hollywood cook up incendiary narratives for a list of special groups for they want to get votes from exploiting that emphasize an oppressor vs oppressed heirarchy. This weaponizes genuine pain and suffering of people in a manner that incubates hatred, and of course with all the intense emotions related to these topics, people either rationalize or overlook entirely the more overly authoritarian policies they want and if that doesn't do it they'll create a moral panic around the issue.

This mixture of personal suffering, false empathy, moral outrages, and resentment churns out what are essentially acolytes to this ideology; people that adhere to every single position the elite class puts out there from their massive bully pulpit of cultural institutions. They can't think for themselves or break off from it because this ideology has taken the place of actually coming to terms with their personal suffering. Their pain has been successfully exploited by the elite class.

This initiative by the elite as some of you know has been a massive success and some of you might even be affected by it yourself. I want you to know if you adhere to this ideology- I do not hate you. I am not invalidating your suffering as part of a disadvantaged group. But I personally believe you have fallen into a snare that promotes authoritarianism and hatred and I believe there are other solutions that are far better for society.

Unfortunately, I fear that no alternative solutions will be adopted because this is what the elite wants, and it seems people are just going to keep falling for it as we march towards authoritarianism. Anyway, let me know what you think of my thoughts.


The concept of political victimhood generally arises out of a motivation to avoid confronting difficult issues by falsely distracting attention to something else much easier to blame, also attack is considered the best defence as the saying goes.

The thought process - My problems are not the responsibility of myself or others like me to solve but are caused by someone else or deep-rooted persecution among society against those like me.

Of course, with invented persecution it has to be never ending since to solve would mean the end of their political purpose and inevitably power in the artificially created group.

With autism its quite simple, neurodiversity as a paradigm, (not literally different brains) is largely about viewing autism as a different type of human as opposed to a medical disorder.

So, the reason why an autistic person finds it difficult to get or maintain a job is because of NT oppression.
“NT`s hate us, they really do.”

So, for example discussion that most employers like a factory manager couldn’t care less what goes on in one of their workers heads - all they want is someone who turns up on time, does what they are supposed to do and efficiently is suppressed from discussion.

Also suppressed is the fact that someone`s neurological makeup might make them a poor worker, since having a poor memory, being easily distracted and making mistakes may make them less efficient to NT`s or those with other disabilities.

It’s not the factory manager`s fault (he has a business to run, he`s not a charity) or even the autistic employee, it’s their autism that’s to blame but to confront such an idea is too difficult a problem, runs contrary to the idea that autism is a harmless difference much easier to say the factory manager doesn’t like autistic people.

It takes advantage of the vacuum that exists in science in reaching a consensus on what autism is & what drives it. The good news - one day soon these questions will be known and many of these ND views will end up untenable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controver ... y_paradigm


_________________
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."

- George Bernie Shaw


Mona Pereth
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 11 Sep 2018
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,810
Location: New York City (Queens)

16 Jun 2021, 4:32 pm

carlos55 wrote:
So, for example discussion that most employers like a factory manager couldn’t care less what goes on in one of their workers heads - all they want is someone who turns up on time, does what they are supposed to do and efficiently is suppressed from discussion.

It's not "suppressed from discussion." Problem is, most jobs these days are not like the factory job you described above. Many workplaces have become increasingly difficult for autistic people, e.g. "open office" floor plans. (Thankfully the COVID crisis turned many such jobs into remote-work jobs; it remains to be seen how long this will last after the COVID crisis is over with.)

Worse, the whole process of getting a job, in the first place, has become much more difficult -- especially for autistic people, but also for everyone else too, at least here in the U.S.A. It has become increasingly necessary for people to become super-excellent sales people just to get a job of whatever kind. The job market has also become much more invasive of people's privacy, with lots of ordinary folks needing to advertise themselves on LinkedIn, thus exposing themselves to all of the hazards but none of the perks of being a movie star.

What's needed, IMO, is a radical re-structuring of the job market generally, in a way that will make it easier for people in general to find jobs -- and ALSO make it easier for prospective employers to get stuff done in a reliable way.

IMO what's needed is for "service workers" generally, especially professionals, to be organized into professional/occupational service firms similar to law firms. Most employers could then hire the firms rather than hiring individuals directly, at least for services outside the employer's own field of expertise. For example, while it makes sense for software companies to hire programmers directly, it makes less sense for a company that is not primarily a tech company to take on the headache of building its own tech team, e.g. to manage the company's website and phone apps.

carlos55 wrote:
Also suppressed is the fact that someone`s neurological makeup might make them a poor worker, since having a poor memory, being easily distracted and making mistakes may make them less efficient to NT`s or those with other disabilities.

I don't think anyone ever denied that some of us are too impaired to hold down any kind of job.

carlos55 wrote:
It takes advantage of the vacuum that exists in science in reaching a consensus on what autism is & what drives it. The good news - one day soon these questions will be known and many of these ND views will end up untenable.

Not likely soon, at least for most kinds of autism. Not likely until a LOT more is known about the human brain in general.

Much more money has been poured into brain conditions that are unambiguously diseases, such as Alzheimer's, with very little result so far. The workings of the human brain are still, to a large degree, a deep mystery.


_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
- My Twitter / "X" (new as of 2021)


ASPartOfMe
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 34,245
Location: Long Island, New York

16 Jun 2021, 5:17 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
The “wokes” are not reactionaries, they are revolutionaries with an Orwellian bent. they want to completely redefine understanding of American history with the goal if replacing American institutions. The Orwellian part is what you describe redefining and weaponizing language for not only mind control, but control period.

You're probably right about a fair percentage of them. There are also flanks and particular thinkers/authors like Ibram X Kendi who seem to be more on the reform route although it's radical reform - eg. adding a fourth wing of government to clear all bills passed by congress for their racial equity impact. There's also the puritan busy-bodies who want to be their brother or sister's keeper who are being mobilized, although I can't deny the likelihood that these were tapped equally well with Leninism/Stalinism and Maoism. Then there are the white social-climbers trying to climb to the top of the stack of white people by stepping on heads more vigorously than anyone else.

The video above is actually interesting because it's a couple gay left-wing intellectuals and magicians actually criticizing IP from the left. I find that I actually resonate with all sorts of left-wing criticisms of the current system whether from Chomsky, Hedges, Zizek, etc. as there's a lot of signal in what they're seeing but at the same time I'd tend to agree with Daniel Schmachtenberger that there's likely no historical system that would help us and we're really looking at the need for something new. I really like the idea of 'anthropic' capitalism, where the economy serves humanity and the richness of culture and civics rather than humanity being repurposed to serve the algorithms of economy, that probably sits somewhere to the left of neoliberalism and to the right of social democracy. It seems like so many of the problem's we're dealing with are seeing that the neoliberal promise to build wealth in the 3rd world, get incomes above 5K per year individual income for those countries to be well-off enough to have fall in birth rate and even have the capacity to implement and abide by environmentalist policies that would do things like save the rain forests from slash and burn farming or the need to collect wood to make a living, but the downside of this sort of neoliberalism is that the west rushes head-long toward neofeudalism.

It really seems like, at root, the problems we're grappling with center on an economic story. This is part of where we actually need a left in the US that cares about the working class. The Democratic party seems to have traded labor for celebration of group status because the later doesn't cost anything.

Adding a fourth wing of government not answerable to other branches of government, and that can overrule other branches of government is not reform, it is revolutionary because if that ever comes into actually, the constitution would be useless.


_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman


Fnord
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 May 2008
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 59,750
Location: Stendec

16 Jun 2021, 7:05 pm

ASPartOfMe wrote:
Adding a fourth wing of government not answerable to other branches of government, and that can overrule other branches of government is not reform, it is revolutionary because if that ever comes into actually, the constitution would be useless.
Historically, there were four "estates" in Europe:

"Zeroth Estate": Actually, The Monarchy, which included the king and the queen (or Emperor/Empress).  This "estate" was not answerable to other branches of government, except when the Pope issued a decree.

"First Estate": The entire clergy, traditionally divided into "higher" and "lower" clergy. Although there was no formal demarcation between the two categories, the upper clergy were, effectively, clerical nobility, from the families of the Second Estate.

"Second Estate": Traditionally divided into "Nobility of the Sword", and "Nobility of the Robe"), the magisterial class that administered royal justice and civil government.

"Third Estate": All of those who were not members of either of the above and can be divided into two groups, urban and rural.

Later Addition:

"Fourth Estate": The press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues. Though it is not formally recognized as a part of a political system, it wields significant indirect social influence.

Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it does illustrate that the Nobility was not (usually) answerable to anyone but themselves.


_________________
 
No love for Hamas, Hezbollah, Iranian Leadership, Islamic Jihad, other Islamic terrorist groups, OR their supporters and sympathizers.


funeralxempire
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Oct 2014
Age: 39
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 25,184
Location: Right over your left shoulder

16 Jun 2021, 8:55 pm

Isn't the Fifth Estate part of the Forth Estate? :scratch:


_________________
"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made... and they won't even admit the knife is there." Malcolm X
戦争ではなく戦争と戦う


carlos55
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 5 Mar 2018
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,779

17 Jun 2021, 7:51 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
carlos55 wrote:
So, for example discussion that most employers like a factory manager couldn’t care less what goes on in one of their workers heads - all they want is someone who turns up on time, does what they are supposed to do and efficiently is suppressed from discussion.

It's not "suppressed from discussion." Problem is, most jobs these days are not like the factory job you described above. Many workplaces have become increasingly difficult for autistic people, e.g. "open office" floor plans. (Thankfully the COVID crisis turned many such jobs into remote-work jobs; it remains to be seen how long this will last after the COVID crisis is over with.)

Worse, the whole process of getting a job, in the first place, has become much more difficult -- especially for autistic people, but also for everyone else too, at least here in the U.S.A. It has become increasingly necessary for people to become super-excellent sales people just to get a job of whatever kind. The job market has also become much more invasive of people's privacy, with lots of ordinary folks needing to advertise themselves on LinkedIn, thus exposing themselves to all of the hazards but none of the perks of being a movie star.

What's needed, IMO, is a radical re-structuring of the job market generally, in a way that will make it easier for people in general to find jobs -- and ALSO make it easier for prospective employers to get stuff done in a reliable way.

IMO what's needed is for "service workers" generally, especially professionals, to be organized into professional/occupational service firms similar to law firms. Most employers could then hire the firms rather than hiring individuals directly, at least for services outside the employer's own field of expertise. For example, while it makes sense for software companies to hire programmers directly, it makes less sense for a company that is not primarily a tech company to take on the headache of building its own tech team, e.g. to manage the company's website and phone apps.

carlos55 wrote:
Also suppressed is the fact that someone`s neurological makeup might make them a poor worker, since having a poor memory, being easily distracted and making mistakes may make them less efficient to NT`s or those with other disabilities.

I don't think anyone ever denied that some of us are too impaired to hold down any kind of job.

carlos55 wrote:
It takes advantage of the vacuum that exists in science in reaching a consensus on what autism is & what drives it. The good news - one day soon these questions will be known and many of these ND views will end up untenable.

Not likely soon, at least for most kinds of autism. Not likely until a LOT more is known about the human brain in general.

Much more money has been poured into brain conditions that are unambiguously diseases, such as Alzheimer's, with very little result so far. The workings of the human brain are still, to a large degree, a deep mystery.


While I agree some things are helpful to autistic people like home working for example, there is still only a minority of the most functional autistic people able to hold down a job.

In fact these accommodations inc covid home working may in fact remove the fig leaf of victimhood to reveal the neurological reasons why many of us struggle to hold down jobs.

At the risk of veering off topic you say

Quote:
IMO what's needed is for "service workers" generally, especially professionals, to be organized into professional/occupational service firms similar to law firms. Most employers could then hire the firms rather than hiring individuals directly, at least for services outside the employer's own field of expertise. For example, while it makes sense for software companies to hire programmers directly, it makes less sense for a company that is not primarily a tech company to take on the headache of building its own tech team, e.g. to manage the company's website and phone apps.


That would simply transfer the recruitment process to the contractor company, since different contractor companies would compete with one another on service so would choose what they thought were the best employees.

Worse we already have that in the UK at least in the form of temp jobs where workers receive very little employment rights with no sick pay. Employers can hire and fire at will with practically no wrongful dismissal rights.

Even worse is the so called fake self employed jobs favored by construction and taxi firms, where workers have no rights at all.

Many of these type of jobs are in the junk section of the job advertisement section next to adult entertainers and telesales jobs make a million before lunch ads selling on the phone.

So be careful of importing / promoting that kind of thing in the US if you don’t already have it of course.

https://worksmart.org.uk/work-rights/at ... employment


_________________
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."

- George Bernie Shaw


slam_thunderhide
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 5 Dec 2014
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 307

18 Jun 2021, 11:31 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
slam_thunderhide wrote:
I think I am largely in agreement with this.

It seems obvious to me that if you have an elite class that cares little for the masses they rule over, then one way for them to tighten their control would be a divide and rule strategy of encouraging an ever expanding list of identity groups to fight against the masses of ordinary people (in the name of "securing their rights"), all the while ignoring those same elites - and that this quite accurately describes what we see in the US and to a lesser degree throughout the West.

Just because a strategy makes sense to you doesn't necessarily mean that said strategy is in fact the primary thing that's actually happening.

It's true that elite "leftism" tends to downplay bread-and-butter economic issues. It's also true, as far as I can tell, that the Democratic Party establishment strongly prefers "moderate" candidates who won't rock the boat too much on economic issues. And it's certainly possible that some elite folks have the motive you've described.

Nevertheless, the elites are not the originators of today's various civil rights movements. I know this from my own personal experience of having been involved off-and-on in the LGBTQ+ rights movement over the years, and from reading up on the history of various civil rights movements.

These movements, and all their major subgroups, all started out as grassroots groups. The well-funded stuff came later.


It doesn’t matter to me how these LGBT-type groups started, the question I am interested in is why are their causes given so much publicity. Why are the sexually abnormal interests of a tiny minority given such prominence while the economic interests of the far larger number of regular people are ignored? How can anyone possibly think this is “people power” in action?

I mean, US embassies throughout the world have even started flying the LGBT flag alongisde the US flag during pride month. Is this more democracy and people power in action? Does anyone seriously think the average person wants to see this sort of thing? No, the main reason the US officials loudly proclaim their support of “gay rights” is that “gay rights” is a moralistic justification they can use for interfering in other countries and influencing their populations, just as they use it to divide and control America’s people.

Mona Pereth wrote:
slam_thunderhide wrote:
With respect to autism, two things I have noticed spring to mind.
Firstly, whenever I check social media, I see that an unusually high number of left-wing accounts are run by people who have self-diagnosed themselves with autism along with two or three other neurological or psychological conditions and, usually, some strange new gender /sexual identity. I would be fairly confident that several of these autism self-diagnoses are inaccurate, and that several of these people would be better able to address their personal issues in a society where people were not encouraged to think that by adopting these various identities they were somehow "fighting the powers that be". Also, I think there is a danger that this trend will undermine the credibility of autism as a diagnosis.

I think what you are seeing here is simply that people who are already comfortable being out of the closet as LGBTQ+ people are also much more likely, than other autistic people, to be comfortable being out of the closet as autistic people. More generally a person is already comfortable with being a public freak in one way is much more likely than most people to be comfortable with being public freak in other ways as well.

This doesn't mean they aren't genuinely autistic, but it does mean they aren't representative of all or most autistic people. Due to Facebook's "real names" policy, people who are openly autistic on Facebook are a highly nonrepresentative sample of autistic people.


Your opinion on this is no less speculative than mine. What I do know is that young people are very suggestible, and easily influenced by what the media presents to them as cool (including things like drug-taking and other forms of degeneracy). So if we have a society that glorifies freakishness, it seems likely that we’ll see more young people embracing it, when they would probably live quite normal lives in a saner society. Also, I know that a large numbers of normal people are fed up of all this victim culture, with all these groups demanding concessions and issuing demands about how they should be addressed, and I feel that autistic people (who actually do need support) will feel the force of any backlash against it.

Mona Pereth wrote:
slam_thunderhide wrote:
Secondly, when I browse WrongPlanet, I see a high number of people who buy into this sort of stuff, which I find fairly disillusioning. It's as if some people on the spectrum think that just because they are (naturally) one of society's outsiders, that they're supposed to automatically identify with every other "outsider identity" they ever hear about, no matter how astroturfed it is.

Which "outsider identities" do you believe are "astroturfed," and on what basis do you believe that?


Transgenderism would be the obvious one. Intersex conditions are real (and people who have them deserve support), but transgenderism is not. As several experts (the honest and brave ones) have said, people who think they are a different sex to what their chromosomes and their biology say they are need psychological support, not surgery. A high number of people who have the surgery come to regret it. And yet morally clueless leftists support this stuff and lash out at people who tell ths truth about it.

Mona Pereth wrote:
slam_thunderhide wrote:
As to the people on this thread who seem to think that it's the masses

I didn't say "the masses" (of people in general). I did say "grassroots" (non-elite members of the minority group in question).

When a marginalized subculture grows sufficiently large and becomes sufficiently well-organized, local politicians and other local leaders notice, even if the mass media aren't yet paying huge amounts of attention.

slam_thunderhide wrote:
who have forced the powers-that-be to recognize all these "oppressed groups" that we'd barely heard of a few years ago -


Just because you "barely heard of" them a few years ago doesn't mean that they didn't exist.

If you're referring to transgender people, for example, that's far from new. See, for example, Wikipedia's Timeline of transgender history and GLAAD's Transgender Visibility Timeline.

Yes, I’ve already heard plenty about Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute. Transgenderism wasn’t any more real back then than it is now.

Mona Pereth wrote:
slam_thunderhide wrote:
rather than the powers-that-be imposing this stuff on the masses through academia, the media and politics - well, I just find that naive beyond belief.

You've seized upon what seems to you like a logical explanation based on your political beliefs, but you evidently have not studied the real history of these things.


Your assumption about me is pretty much back-to-front. It was mostly through reading about “these things” that I formed my political beliefs. Before that I was a liberal. Clearly I have read different books from yourself. And I think if I quoted from some of these books I’ve read there’s a good chance my post will get removed.

Mona Pereth wrote:
Also, I would hazard a guess that you do not live in a major city of the kind where these subcultures have existed for many decades. (Or, if you do live in such a city, you haven't been paying regular attention to local news.)


I’ve lived my whole life in London, England. Is that a major enough city for you?

I follow US politics fairly closely because developments in the US often warn me about what new forms of cultural degradation I can look forward to in the UK two or three years down the line.

London has had a gay subculture for a long time, and it's been pretty much a matter of common knowledge and indifference to most local people. It's only in recent years with gay pride flags showing up everywhere that people are starting to wonder what on earth is going on.

Mona Pereth wrote:
And you've evidently never marched in a LGBTQ+ Pride parade -- or held in your hands a list of all the many mostly-grassroots organizations marching in said parade.


You’re quite right that I’ve never marched in a LGBTQ+ Pride parade. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not mad keen on the idea of people walking round in broad daylight semi-naked or in fetish gear while children are watching. I don't know if the early parades were like this, but photos I've seen suggest the modern ones often are.

Mona Pereth wrote:
Nor, in all likelihood, did you ever personally know the individual who originated the very idea of what at first were called Gay Pride parades: Brenda Howard (who was a close personal friend of mine back in the mid-1980's).


As I say, I am far less interested in the question of how things like Gay Pride parades originated than in the question of how and why LGBT issues have been given so much support and publicity. So your name-dropping is not really relevant.