I'm more familiar with the horse's ass diagnosis than the Asperger's one. You use a word that I find very interesting: "outrage". I find it interesting that yo

I'm more familiar with the horse's ass diagnosis than the Asperger's one. You use a word that I find very interesting: "outrage". I find it interesting that you don't seem to conceive of a middle ground between "clinical lack of emotion/empathy" and "emotion completely overwhelming everything else". You're right that my emotional response (yes, there is one) is tempered by the relative social distance between me and the victim. This is, of course, normal - otherwise, we wouldn't even blink over a somewhat-thwarted sexual assault attempt, as we would be far too focused on the daily atrocities of the world that routinely dwarf it in magnitude. Your phrasing was that, "perhaps... you think the victim wasn't really part of your community or worthy of defending". This is, indeed, a person I have barely heard of before now. She is a good bit further removed from my social circle than the metaphorical next-door neighbor you sprinkled throughout your comment. My strong emotional reactions are the property of the more inner concentric circles of my social graph. Perhaps yours reach more outwardly in the graph, and that's fine. I would caution you, however, about doling out psychological diagnoses simply on the grounds that one's emotional reactions do not strictly coincide with The Neilk Standard.