21 ms·

Ribbonfarm called this a couple years ago: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-guide-to-the-new-culture-wars/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com

• ethbr0 6y ago
  Honestly asking, what's the difference between someone being neurodivergent and just thoughtless / mean / an ass?
  • wmf 6y ago
    Whether they can control it?
    • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      Then why would someone choose to be an ass - or generally choose to be unlikable?
      • nostrademons 6y ago
        It's usually a matter of priorities. Neurodivergent/autistic people are usually unaware that what they say could cause offense: they lack either the emotional capacity to feel those emotions themselves, or the ability to empathize and predict that other people will feel them. Assholes know, they just care about other things more. They might throw their coworker under the bus for a promotion. Or they'll sexually harass women because 1 out of 10 times, it gets them laid. Or they care more about being right than being diplomatic. Or they stop paying rent because there's an eviction moratorium, even though they could, because it saves them money and their landlord has no way to enforce agreements anyway. Or they sell drugs to children because they want money. Or they cut people down because it makes them feel big in the moment.
        • gotostatement 6y ago
          Not to derail the conversation but I find it amusing to put sexual harassment in the same sentence as not paying rent
          • monsieurbanana 6y ago
            And this is why nothing can ever be safely said on internet without putting huge disclaimers everywhere. "/!\ I do not mean to liken sexual harassment to rent default /!\".
            • gotostatement 6y ago
              Yeah I mean, it's not exactly a huge leap of logic based on reading the post. If it's a misunderstanding, that's just one of the perils of written communication, and this gives the author a chance to reply. The societal role of rent/landlords is an active political issue, far from consensus, so it's not just a nitpick to jump in on the implication. Noone is being cancelled
          • nostrademons 6y ago
            I find it amusing that I can't tell whether you mean sexual harassment is dramatically more serious than not paying rent or not paying rent is dramatically more serious than sexual harassment. Both examples - really all of the examples other than "selling drugs to children", which is from Breaking Bad - are taken from real-world conversations with people that basically said "What a jerk!" The person complaining about their non-paying tenant basically accepts sexual harassment as how the world works. The person (people really, it's a composite of a half-dozen or so conversations) complaining about the sexual harassers would likely find nothing wrong with a tenant skipping out on rent. Both are women, though a generation apart.
            • gotostatement 6y ago
              not worth getting into the nitty gritty but I'll just say that I mean sexual harassment is dramatically more serious than not paying rent
      • jjoonathan 6y ago
        Stallman was defending a friend and, by my reading, logically correct in the narrow point he was making. Anyone can sympathize with those priorities. However, he chose to place them above social realpolitik like "don't touch sufficiently radioactive subjects" and "almost nobody has time to dissect your argument so you'll win or lose the optics game on fuzzy associations alone." To be principled in this matter was to be antisocial. Most of us, myself included, would drop the principles in order to get along with everyone else, but that's not how Stallman rolled.
        • danielheath 6y ago
          I agree, but I'd note that Stallman was head of the FSF in part because he would never drop the principles no matter what the stakes.
      • yakaccount4 6y ago
        I think there are a lot of people out there that enjoy being an ass. You can even be rich by being an ass, like the Fox News anchors.
        • adamrezich 6y ago
          or the CNN anchors
          • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
            CNN is not comparable to Fox News like that.
            • ulucs 6y ago
              Yes, I've never heard of Fox News blackmailing someone because they made fun of them
        • ethbr0 6y ago
          The people you're thinking of are Fox News personalities or opinions. They do have a straight news org that isn't terrible, but they blur the line and fail to disclose when you're watching opinion and when you're watching news.
      • marcus_holmes 6y ago
        Some people roll that way. Their childhood (or genes) gave them a personality that enjoys conflict, or that only feels good about themselves if someone else is feeling bad, or enjoys hurting people. It's most clearly visible in griefers in online games, because the social consequences of griefing are minimal. Some people are just plain nasty. But I don't think that's what's happening here. And I think it's ridiculous that it's been interpreted this way.
      • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        making oneself likeable to people one doesn't find particularly likeable themselves is a lot of work, the people who are labeled neurotypical are often jerks to the people who are labeled neuroatypical so why not use one's gifts as a neuroatypical person to be unlikable in return. on edit: explanatory, not recommending
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • spurgu 6y ago
      Or even being aware of it?
  • chabad360 6y ago
    One is someone with a diagnosed mental health disorder(s), and one is just that: an ass.
  • stickyricky 6y ago
    One is a personality trait and the other is an anatomical or physiological deviation from normal human development.
  • etrabroline 6y ago
    >thoughtless / mean / an ass This is precisely what people with autism tend to be like because of the difficulty people with autism have empathizing with others and seeing things from other people's points of view.
    • Avshalom 6y ago
      I know a lot of autistic people and they're all scrupulously kind and emotionally intelligent. The idea that autistic people are assholes is an artifact of every other gamer on the internet self diagnosing themselves with aspergers in the 00s and then using that as an excuse to be un-introspectively cruel to each other.
      • SilverRed 6y ago
        Autism is very different for everyone who has it. No one is saying that autistic people are assholes, but that stallman may not see or understand how his comments are taken or why people will get upset when the comment is factually correct.
        • Avshalom 6y ago
          Literally: >>thoughtless / mean / an ass >This is precisely what people with autism tend to be
        • howinteresting 6y ago
          Speaking as an autistic person, that really does not matter. Even though I don't believe in free will, I do believe that a functioning society requires people with power (like RMS, in his capacity as a free software leader) to be held responsible for the harm they cause regardless of how neurodivergent they are. What about all the other people who were excluded from the movement because RMS was an ass? A common human fallacy is to overindex on the contributions of assholes, while ignoring the potential contributions of those who were excluded by their actions.
          • 6y ago
  • Sophistifunk 6y ago
    Wether or not you like them.
  • rossnordby 6y ago
    The 'neurodivergent' umbrella covers a much wider set of things than just 'degree to which the person is perceived to be a jerk'. The perception of jerkitude is usually a side effect of something else complicated. For example, take the DSM5 criteria for ASD, one type of neurodivergence. Here's just a single factor: Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication. (From https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html) A formal diagnosis of ASD would involve a number of these factors. As you might imagine, if you stack enough things like that on a person, it'll tend to be noticed, even when they're trying to hide it. In the context of being mean, upon being told that they were being a jerk, a person with ASD might think "ah shit, not again" or maybe "wait what, no I wasn't, it doesn't make sense that they'd be offended by that" or something along those lines. The nuances of the behavior and the motivations behind it will tend to be a little different than in a 'neurotypical' perceived as being a jerk.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • spiritplumber 6y ago
    "Does wearing this thing make me look fat?" "A bit. If your goal is to look thinner I'd try that other thing instead." Is this a neurotypical person being a butt, or an autistic person trying to be helpful? Answer: yes.
    • orthoxerox 6y ago
      It could be a neurotypical Dutch being themselves. Societal norms vary from culture to culture, even within what we call the western world.
      • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        also a Dane I think, frankly it seemed polite.
        • dgellow 6y ago
          I'm Swiss (from a French-speaking canton), that seems polite to me too.
        • ejolto 6y ago
          Also Scandinavian and I agree with you. Also Americans lying about these things are often seen as being fake and thus rude.
          • enriquto 6y ago
            As a southern European, I concur that US-ian fake politeness is quite disturbing.
            • ethbr0 6y ago
              As a southern American, I'd chalk a lot of it up to our multiculturalism. There are different parts within the US, where you'd get different answers to that question, almost always! But I'd say suggestion and (to use the southern term) social grace is one of the most nuanced and culture-heavy forms of communication. In that it assumes a lot of shared culture between you and the other party. As least down here, with > stranger, < intimate partner, you'd get a "No" in all cases, but the words attached to the no would also differ almost 100% of the time in the "No, but..." case. And I imagine most of those cues completely disappear cross-culturally.
  • esja 6y ago
    Intent.
    • eyelidlessness 6y ago
      As a neurodivergent person, intent is the most frequent source of conflict for me. Where I mean well but say the wrong thing almost always sits at the bottom of the well of what goes wrong between me and my people I care about. Intent isn’t enough. Listening, caring, and having intuition for what people need is a much larger task than abstract care and empathy.
  • skissane 6y ago
    What counts as "neurodivergent"? Just ASD? What about other psychiatric diagnoses? A lot of "non-autistic assholes" may have other diagnosable conditions, for example narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) or antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Are NPD or ASPD "neurodiverse" or "neurodivergent"? They are probably partially genetic, just as ASD is probably partially genetic.
    • eyelidlessness 6y ago
      Other commonly classified neurodivergent diagnoses are ADHD and OCD (which along with ASD commonly overlap). They don’t have much overlap with personality disorders (which do have a lot of overlap among that category).
      • skissane 6y ago
        > Other commonly classified neurodivergent diagnoses are ADHD and OCD (which along with ASD commonly overlap) What makes those diagnoses "neurodivergent" and the others not? Why aren't other diagnoses "neurodivergent" too? How exactly do we define "neurodivergent"? (And why is that the right definition to use?) > They don’t have much overlap with personality disorders (which do have a lot of overlap among that category). There is a lot of overlap between the disruptive behaviour disorders (DBDs) – oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD) – and ADHD; so much so that ADHD is sometimes considered a DBD along with ODD and CD. And there is a clear connection between CD in children and adolescents and ASPD in adults – indeed, a child or adolescent with CD can follow one of two trajectories, either their conduct problems resolve with maturity and they become law-abiding pro-social adults, or else the child/adolescent diagnosis of CD evolves into the adult diagnosis of ASPD. So there is definitely a connection between ASPD and ADHD. A child with ADHD (even without comorbid CD) has an increased risk of developing ASPD as an adult – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24284138/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24284138/ Some researchers consider ASPD to be a neurodevelopmental disorder – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29401045/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29401045/ – which is the same category that ASD and ADHD (and sometimes also OCD) are put in. There is also a lot of overlap between ADHD and BPD (Borderline personality disorder) – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739390/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739390/ There's also overlap between ASD and BPD – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590952/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590952/
  • eyelidlessness 6y ago
    If you’re honestly asking, it’s a rude question as stated. But if you’re sincerely admitting you don’t understand the difference, the difference is this: Many people (including myself) have difficulty with certain social cues and expectations. Many of us can be offputting or come off as overly direct or disrespectful. Where we diverge is when and how we address that fact. Do we (only) lash out and expect the world to accommodate our conclusions, or do we (ever or readily) reflect on that conflict and try to live in some kind of shared world? Obviously what I’m describing is a spectrum, not an absolute. But if you’re trying to understand whether someone on the spectrum is a jerk, your answer is “how much do they use their social faculties to navigate sharing a world?” Which is pretty much the same measure as anyone not on the spectrum.
    • Aloha 6y ago
      Agreed. I've spent a lifetime learning a rulebook by trial and error that everyone else just seems to know. It's absolutely maddening then the rules suddenly change for no discernible reason, often with little warning and grave consequences with no second chances for screwing it up.
      • eyelidlessness 6y ago
        I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner. Just want to say I’ve felt this, most of my life. I wish I had more to offer than this but: you’re not alone, and I hope knowing that will be as helpful to you as it’s been to me.
        • Aloha 6y ago
          Thank You! This whole post, and another comment I made on this thread was super affirming, its nice to know I'm not alone. It's why what people call 'cancel culture' scares the snot out of me, I'm deathly afraid I'm gonna say or do the wrong thing, and not really have a way to respond to it, and pay some sort of heavy toll. I'm okay with free speech having consequences (its the only way to ensure we can actually have speech mostly free of government regulation). I just wish those consequences were not applied for things deemed ex post facto (often by decades) to be violations of social norms. But there is a certain amount of mental exhaustion from having to filter everything I say outside of some very very narrow circles, lest I say something that could be deemed in the future to be 'problematic'. The larger issue I see, is our current focus on peoples actions in the past is it leaves no room for personal growth or to change views, it if anything hardens people views and perspectives - if someone gets no credit for getting better about something (like use of pronouns, or whatever else), there is no incentive to improve.
  • brigandish 6y ago
    By separating intention and action. Everyone can be perceived as thoughtless or mean or an arse by anyone else for any action, but we also know from experience when we've been the "baddy" that we may have had good intentions, even the best. I'm sure you also know of times - I know I do for myself - of times you've knowingly and purposively been an arse. There's the biggest difference.
  • greatartiste 6y ago
    There can be a very fine line. A few years ago I worked with someone who was a bullying objectionable arse especially to younger staff. Eventually it all caught up with him and with HR breathing down his neck he managed to acquire a Asperger's diagnosis which was his get out of jail free card. A colleague of mine called it 'medicalising c*ntishness'.
    • bjourne 6y ago
      Asperger's syndrome doesn't exist as a diagnosis anymore because the diagnosis was dropped in DSM-5. When it existed, I can assure you, it was not something you just acquired like a toy in a box of cereals.
  • caddemon 6y ago
    I think there's another factor here not mentioned by other commenters - it is possible to be both neurodivergent and an ass, but it can often be a lot easier to discover that a neurodivergent person is an ass. Neurotypical assholes will usually be pretty good at controlling their public image. So even if we suppose that cancel culture somehow has 0 false positives (which I highly doubt), it's likely that many more neurodivergent assholes will be "caught" than neurotypical ones. Which feels functionally very similar to profiling IMO, and practically means we are probably not catching the more "dangerous" assholes. Because it's a lot easier to ignore an asshole view if you're aware of it.
  • everdrive 6y ago
    Without being too trite: intent. Sometimes people think I'm being awkward or uncomfortable, but mostly I'm tripping over myself trying (and failing) to find the right things to say. People expect that you can read them, and read the situation in real time. I can't (although usually I can gather how it's all gone wrong once the moment has passed -- a double-edged sword.)
  • screye 6y ago
    warning: super anecdotal I have found the difference to be willingness to reflect or to what extent they are trying. A lot of my socially clueless friends (can't speak for if they lie on the spectrum) are delighted when I offer them a new set of rules that were previously invisible, instead of insulting them for not 'getting it'. They love being told what the lines between mean&blunt or curt&concise are. They can work around context well too, as long as it is explicitly laid out to them. Mean people (adults) are usually one of: 1. Neuro-diverse people who don't know they are mean 2. People with insecurities they are trying to work on 3. People with insecurities they refuse to acknowledge #3 is not worth it. #2 can seek help using traditional means. #1 needs some training wheels and personalized instruction to work their way up to socially well adjusted. Think of it as a person with a learning disability.
  • WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
    Intent and justification. Intent is the easier one to understand. Neurodivergent often don't act with the same intent that someone being an asshole does. Two people tell you that you shouldn't be eating that cookie. One is intending to be mean an to hurt you. The other cares about you and means the message in the best interest of your health, not realizing it will hurt. With time and some prompting they can be led to understand how the message would be interpreted and realize it is hurt and stop, but it happens much slower and is often too little too late. Justification is the harder to understand or empathize with possibility. Due to the previous issue impacting every area of life, often resulting in a significant decrease in quality of life and a significant increase in emotional pain, some will lower the extent they empathize with others. It is harder to explain because people think of their own times being hurt by others and think how they had the option to just do better than was done to them and rise above, not conceptualizing what qualitative differences occur when a pain goes from a short term event to a life long occurrence. One further problem is that justification is only sometimes deemed appropriate by society. The differences in what are deemed appropriate differ strongly enough I'm hesitant to list examples because many will consider just making the comparison as a very asshole move. I am not at all clear if this consideration is in good faith or not.
• Aloha 6y ago
  It's like this, I've spent a lifetime learning a rulebook by trial and error that everyone else just seems to know. It's absolutely maddening when the rules suddenly change for no discernible reason, often with little warning and grave consequences with no second chances for screwing it up. I see people clamoring for a safe spaces and I wonder where I can find such a thing? (To an extent I can find one at sci-fi, anime and furry conventions are mostly safe spaces for people like me, it's just jarring when I need to leave)
  • sterlind 6y ago
    I relate because I've been there, I think. Before I transitioned I had pretty strong ASD and couldn't figure out how to answer simple questions like "what's up?" or if I should wave to someone I've met twice if they're 15 feet away walking towards me. Transitioning did something to my brain chemistry and let me read social cues nearly overnight, but I got friends by delving into the LGBT community. Maybe furry cons is a good approach?
    • Aloha 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure you'd find yourself at home there, we also have a large trans/gender non-conforming contingent in the community.
    • exikyut 6y ago
      Wh...a. Transitioning fixed your social cue perception?! That is incredibly fascinating. I'm not even sure how to classify that... pragmatic psychological function (oookay that's probably not a thing), neurobiology, or what else. IMO this is a gigantic breadcrumb for Something™. The question is what the axis point was, and what got fixed as a result. Cooool. I am very curious what else shifted that you'd be happy to share.
      • Aloha 6y ago
        Not the poster, but I too am curious about their thoughts, however I have some of my own. Men and Women experience socialization in fundamentally different ways, because of this I suspect the changing hormonal balance reawakens pathways not used normally, basically. In addition, you basically have a chance while transitioning to relearn socialization from scratch basically, with those new pathways awakened.
• 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
  It’s been going on for a while already. Some years ago there was a case where a woman in Melbourne called out a man for harassing her on public transport. Turns out he was autistic and was outgoing to everyone. His friend had to post on Facebook to stop people sharing a video of the autistic man. Helen Pluckrose also posted on Twitter a similar story. A man she would help checkin on because he was autistic would get complaints from women for harassment. It was a suggestion from his therapist to help him socialise.
  • happymellon 6y ago
    Not that long ago there was that Twitter thing where a woman posted a picture of a guy brazenly checking out her top. Turned out he had a lazy eye and is daughter had to step up to defend him. Quick to judge and make a scene unfortunately.
• Rule35 6y ago
  It's the law of maximum outrage. What justifies more third-party outrage victimology? That an ND {of some intersections} was unfairly expected to know the rules, or that a rude {same intersections} was making {some other intersections} uncomfortable. Harsh truth, but an easy rule for NDs to follow. Anything you say in public will be judged for its potential. If someone can get points for making it sound bad, they will.
• noobermin 6y ago
  Some of this is good but I don't understand what China on the map has to do with anything. It also isn't mentioned in the article at all... I'm pretty sure China cares little about American political correctness wars.
  • throwaway894345 6y ago
    China likes to portray America as a racist country (see the fourth installment of the comically overt propaganda series Ip Man on Netflix), but beyond that I’m not sure.
• throwaway894345 6y ago
  > Most applications of political correctness focus (at least on the surface) on defending a marginalized group against the verbal attacks of a privileged one. I dispute the idea that PC is mostly defensive in nature; rather it seems to be overwhelmingly offensive, targeting people who frequently aren’t even in advantaged groups themselves. I would also suggest that Jews are treated pretty badly by the PC folks, as are Asians (although #StopAsianHate in the wake of what appears to be a non-hate-crime has been a convenient bludgeon).
• john4532452 6y ago
  Its important to emphasis one thing about Ribbonfarm. The author wholly supports for Hindu caste system. This is where his arguments come from.
  • pratio 6y ago
    Do you have a source for this?
    • john4532452 6y ago
      One source i can show is from his blog post https://web.archive.org/web/20210202083240/https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/11/10/king-ruinous-and-the-city-of-darkness/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210202083240/https://www.ribbo... > As thoughtless teenagers, we made crude SC/ST jokes. Here’s one: at a urinal in a government recruitment center, there is a line marked on the wall with the note, “if you can pee above this line, you get the job.” This was unnecessary considering the dalits commiting sucide after joining IIT or other elite colleges due to harrasment from the Brahmins community students. Even if you give the benefit of doubt on this one simply as telling a story, look for the next quote. > .. but I am enough of a free-speecher to acknowledge that it has a right to This... This is the mindset of the upper caste Brahmins. They don't want the reservations based on caste but at the same time they don't want it to go away, simply because it provides birth entitlement at the cost of the other castes. It does not matter he is an atheist. Even the founder of Hindutva philosophy is an atheist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayak_Damodar_Savarkar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayak_Damodar_Savarkar whom these modern educated caste supporting intellectuals admire. That blog post is quite long, If you read the entire post you get the impression that after all caste system is not bad, just the implementation had gone wrong. In fact any one who says caste is not that bad especially in USA, it is very likely they are from upper caste brahmin community.
• kmeisthax 6y ago
  The thing to note is that the worldview of social justice advocates is not "advocate for all oppressed groups", it's "advocate for all oppressed groups up to intersectionality". At least in America, we used to go through phases of, say, black power groups being kinda sexist, and women's liberation movements being hella racist. This poses a unique opportunity for people who oppose both: just use one to harm the other. For example, the founder of Planned Parenthood was willing to advocate for themselves in the language of eugenics, so if you hate abortion rights, you just constantly bring up all the awful things they said about black people. There's nothing stopping you from switching tactics a day later and complaining about, say, a BLM riot that winds up shutting down a Planned Parenthood clinic. The social justice advocate's response to that is intersectionality: a defense mechanism of not engaging in advocacy that would benefit one oppressed group at the expense of another. They're not always great at this - some social conflicts are just difficult to actually make judgments on (e.g. Israel/Palestine). The thing is, though - I doubt "drop the autistics" is going to pick up steam in social justice circles. Autism, and neurodivergence in general, tracks very well with queer sexual orientations and gender identities. Social mores intended to enforce rigid gender roles and heteronormativity simply don't work on people who can't parse them. (The contrapositive of this is why there's a huge push for non-gendered children's toys.) Ergo, it's very unlikely that you'd see the social justice left tear itself apart like this, and more likely that you'd see people arguing that "drop the autistics" is bullshit. I'm also going to point out that, as an autistic person myself, the stricter speech rules of the social justice left aren't terribly difficult to parse. The prior eras of social mores were far stricter because we didn't see them as coercive and thus didn't question their power, and it's somewhat troubling that people don't view it as an improvement from what we had before. It's sort of like how people coming from proprietary software sometimes argue that the GPL is non-free because it has some restrictions that don't conform to the unstated mores of proprietary licensing. Much of the reaction people have to these speech rules comes from two different places: 1. The people reacting to these rules are neurotypical, and used to invisible speech rules enforced by people with a common cultural heritage such that they wouldn't disagree on their unstated rules. 2. Many people in the social justice community are autistic (see above) and also had a hand in writing the rules. Of course, if people who can't parse social cues write the rules of a society, those rules are going to be explicitly stated rather than inferred. In other words, the problem isn't that the social justice left is going to throw out neurodivergent people, it's that the social justice left is autistic, in cultural control, and writing the new rules of society in a way neurotypicals don't understand. (Side note: #9 is a conflict that's been brewing in the back of my head for a while now. I love P2P tech but think the entirety of cryptocurrency has been a dead-end full of scams.)
• asoneth 6y ago
  Specifically in the case of employment I'm all for erring on the side of asking employers to be as accommodating as possible. But there are cases where someone's disabilities/attributes reasonably restrict what roles they can perform. For example, airlines don't employ pilots with extremely poor vision or flight attendants who are too large to fit through the cabin. Someone who relies on a wheelchair may have difficulty becoming a firefighter or a first responder and someone with Tourette's syndrome might have difficulty getting a job as a spokesperson or announcer. My understanding is that the above constraints are not illegal discrimination (in the US) because the disability/attribute impacts that person's ability to successfully perform key job functions. Maybe extreme PC-warriors take issue with that, but I think most people would agree that these are reasonable constraints. With respect to neurodivergence it seems dependent on whether it impacts someone's ability to perform their core job functions. As per above we should ask employers should be as accommodating as possible, so I believe an errant joke or comment shouldn't result in anyone being "canceled". But if someone is chronically incapable of processing social cues and/or has trouble interacting with coworkers or customers without triggering HR complaints then they may need to find a different role that doesn't require as much interpersonal interaction. That's unfortunate for the person in question but it doesn't seem any more discriminatory than an airline reassigning a pilot whose vision is failing.
• Rule35 6y ago
  The article mentions the Damore incident but doesn't capture the essence of the war. It wrongly draws many self-aware groups whereas it's really two, marxists and lulzites, fighting a war for territory on top of everyone's homes, randomly causing a bit of allegiance to whoever was winning in their area. Gamers aren't a coherent group or right wing in general (think of the ages...) but "their side" (the side trampling on them) is anti-left, so the gamers were lumped together and drawn on the right. The 'Autism Spectrum' is the most "centrist" I've ever seen, but because the left uses them to launch its attacks from they're drawn as 'left territory'. Specifically, the Neuro-divergent group isn't an active group, kind of by its nature. ND people on the map are more of a victim pool who just get picked on because they're easy to maneuver into mistakes. Like the whole Damore incident was Google saying "Does our HR policy look fat" and only James was tricked into engaging. He was more a convenient scapegoat to hurt to consolidate their power than he was an ideological enemy. Certain groups have all-or-nothing ideological traps laying around everywhere and I think it's that these groups, like armies using landmines in areas with children, are especially harmful to societal non-combatants.
• silver-machine 6y ago
  > When applied to autistic or neurodivergent individuals, however, PC norms work to disadvantage an already disadvantaged minority against groups that are both larger and often more economically and culturally free. are you saying that the undergrads that Stallman harassed at MIT are more economically and culturally free than he is? Are you saying that we should give a pass to bad bosses who turn their subordinates lives' into a tower defense game?
• lyssa17 6y ago
  This is honestly such a disappointment. I used to appreciate your thoughts on a lot of issues and particularly loved that you were in the intersection of haskell and harry potter fanfic. Venkatesh Rao is generally contentless and writes long winded tracts that don't actually make any kind of coherent argument for what they're saying. Do you really think Stallman's long history of sexual harassment is because he was too gosh-darned oblivious to realize he shouldn't be doing that? This isn't exactly "Oh he maintained eye-contact for half a second too long and the thought police are after him" territory jfc.