BaronVSS
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AUTISTS: THE LAST OPPRESSED CLASS
(For the purposes of this post, I am defining an autistic person as someone who has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition, or could qualify for an autism spectrum condition diagnosis should they given access to the correct services. The disaster spiral trainwreck that is the self diagnosis movement and the widening of the definition of autism to be completely meaningless, I might write about at another time.)
The modern anglospheric society operates off the belief that there are oppressed groups and oppressor groups. It is stated that oppressor groups have high rates of economic and social success, while the reverse is true for oppressed groups. This is often referred to as the progressive stack, with some oppressed groups being more oppressed than others. To alleviate this disparity, oppressed groups are allowed to seek reparations from their oppressor and demean their oppressor in public spheres, while the reverse is not tolerated. There are many examples of these groups: Women are oppressed by Men, Non-white People are oppressed by White People, Gay people are oppressed by Straight people, Non-english speakers are oppressed by English speakers, and so on. However, there is one group to whom this opressed definition might apply, but receive no recognition, appreciation or restitution from society bottom text.
Autistic people have utterly awful life outcomes. They have very poor employment rates, with many being unemployed or undermployed, even if they are level 1 autists in possession of college degrees. The suicide rate is abysmal, with rates being 9 times in excess of neurotypicals and over half of autistic people having considered suicide throughout their lives. Autistic people also experience heightened rates of social and even sexual abuse.
Despite this very strong case for a place on the progressive stack autists have no place whatsoever on it, or indeed recognition that they even exist in wider society. I do not recall the last time there was a front page article on my country's news outlet about anyone with my condition. I do not recall there being any support or preferential treatment for autists in regards to accquiring economic and social capital during the time when I was seeking employment, in comparison to programs that fast track and support women and ethnic minorities, for example. Support for autistic people is very limited, and only meaningfully exists in the early stages of childhood. This support is not provided to allow the child to feel comfortable in their skin, but to minimise friction both with neurotypicals and with the school and work systems. Even behaviours that are not directly harmful to the autistic person themselves or to neurotypicals, such as stimming, are heavily discouraged.
For most opressed groups, the responsibility for the easing the disparity is put upon the oppressor group. For example, men are expected to validate the fear that women feel due to the difference in physical strength in situations such as being in an elevator, or walking alone at night, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. It may depress an individual man to feel that he is and can only ever be a threat, but this feeling is not validated and he is told to Get Over It. In comparison, the autist is expected to adapt to social norms and behaviours that they do not innately pick up and instead learn manually, in the same way that Sideshow Bob learned that there was a rake there by walking into it except this time the rakes are invisible. It is the autist that has to mask, the autist that has to conceal their interests, the autist that has to pretend to be someone other than who they are.
Obviously, this is terrible. How then, are autists to get onto the progressive stack and get the sweet government funding necessary to improve these awful outcomes? The first task is to create an original sin for neurotypicals that devalues their accomplishments whilst providing avenues to redistribute their social and economic capital to autistic people. White privilege, male privilege and so on are all forms of this and it would not be difficult to create a similar privilege checklist for neurotypicals, but to get into a position to enforce this belief on the rest of society would be far more difficult. Autists, estimated, make up roughly only 2% of the global population against a neurotypical 98%, compared to the 13% of African Americans vs White Americans and the roughly 50%/50% sex split among men and women. Moreover, autists are not naturally grouped or forcibly segregated into one place in a way that men, women and ethnic groups are, so they cannot easily band together and overcome oppression they face.
If we were able to overcome both of these issues, there is another large problem: NTs innately do not like autists, finding them to be offputting and thus wishing to interact with them less based on thin slice judgements. You can argue that there are similar innate dislikes against other oppressed groups, however these groups usually have something that endears them to their perceived oppressor in some form, whether these are biological urges or moral spooks about kindness and human unity, or contributions to society in the form of food or entertainment and so on. There are no moral spooks that encourage being nice to the weird asshole in the corner, even if they haven't done you any real harm. Obligations to do the neurotypical social dance run much deeper than any other aspect a human being is othered by.
Lastly, autism is still seen as a male coded thing, and oppressor/oppressed heirarchy is the strongest where it relates to men and women. There are some autistic people who are able to hyperfocus on useful things, and thus can channel their abilities into a lucrative career. However, these careers are usually in something like software developement, research or other high value STEM careers due to their innate rigidity, which are currently the target for cooption by various diversity movements due to their high status and outsized influence on the world we live in. These positions are likely the only place that a neurotypical will not only encounter an autistic person, but an autistic person in their element who may not be masking (and I suspect this lack of masking is one of the reasons that autists in these roles are being targeted.)
Meanwhile, female autists are more heavily socialised into following neurotypical norms and thus present in a neurotypical manner, so they do not register as being autistic. Hence autists are either invisible or irritating to the oppressed/oppressor sensibility and general notions of social status, and must be removed. Where NTs have not met neurotypicals, their perception of the condition is usually influenced by piece of shit media like Rain Main or the Big Bang Theory, where most depictions in the vein of "Guy who punches himself in the head" or Sheldon Cooper."
I do not find the casting of the Velaryons to be much of a diversion from what you describe. Valyria, a region with a mediterranean climate, somehow managed to produce and maintain consistently an overwhelming percentage of white albinos mixed with the odd 100% black person. This makes the Strong Boys story point farcial, three children, all white as snow? In a way it's worse than RoP and Wheel of Time and the other shows that cast randomly until certain demographic percentages are met and pay the setting exactly no mind, House of the Dragon wants you to believe that Valyrians can be any race so long as they have white hair and then make a point of identifying Criston Cole as being dornish based on his skin tone.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
I used to hate them, now I admire them for their consistency. The Tankie doesn't hate on pharmaceutical companies one year and get Pfizer tattoos the next. The Tankie doesn't overlay the flag of whichever country experienced an atrocity over his avatar on twitter every month. The Tankie just hates. If you have values that are in contradiction with his, he will openly advocate for your harm, but then at least you know where you stand with them. Other internet users? Who knows.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
FWIW the larger subreddits are all controlled by a relatively small cabal of uberjannies who use automated banlists. For posting a nonzero number of times on LockdownSkepticism and CoronavirusCirclejerk I got banned silently from posting in places I'd never even been on or heard of.
BaronVSS
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2mo ago
He was banned for only ever posting about the Hock. His reddit account is still active, so clearly he hasn't gone into the woods to his death.
Ultimately, I don't think the origin of the virus really matters.
There are two popular scenarios for the introduction of COVID into the world.
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The commonly accepted scenario, where the virus emerged in bats consumed at a wet market in Wuhan.
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The commonly disparaged scenario, where the virus was the product of activity occuring in lab near to the wet market in Wuhan.
If scenario 1 is true, China deliberately withheld information about the virus from the WHO in the first month of the pandemic. This was information that might have been of benefit to other world leaders in planning health strategies.
However, those world leaders spent the first few months encouraging behaviour that would directly contribute to the spread of the virus, before u-turning and banning not only intimate contact with strangers but also contact with those close to you for months at a time. If China had co-operated and released full information, would they have acted upon it?
If scenario 2 is true, then as you say a handful of the world's elite aided and abetted an extremely dangerous practise that produced a pandemic, then tried to mitigate it by one-upping each other in terms of damaging hygiene theatre. With the introduction of the vaccine (which I would like to point out that governments were doubly lucky in that it came out incredibly quickly and did not have terrible repurcussions when they decided to inject into literally everyone), WEIRD nations were offered an out and everything that was done to you should be forgotten.
I note with interest that only the US media has produced articles to the effect of requesting an amnesty for actions taken during the pandemic. This is mostly a product of the US having a significant anti-lockdown political movement in the form of the republicans. In most European nations measures had bi-partisan support questioning the measures is an extremely fast way to make yourself a pariah.
In both scenarios, the public demonstrated that they could be mostly cowed into submission with threats of mass death several orders of magnitude greater than observed reality and readily available bread and circuses, which very happily dived into. Some have taken to being a Nietzschean Last Man with incredible devotion. If I was someone like Biden or Johnson or Xi or whoever I would not be remotely afraid of the man in the street, or at the very least I would re-evaluate just what exactly would drive him to rise up and overthrow me, because everything I've done to him so far barely got a peep out of him. I might even release COVID-like viruses all the time for fun.
The Tories are "right wing" in the sense that some of their prominent members make statements countering the current humanist consensus. Any policy that is remotely right wing, such as the Rwanda programme, is either neutered on implementation by the Civil Service or withdrawn beforehand by government members on the left of the party, fearing negative comments in the press. Speech is valued by the public far above action: Boris put the UK under three separate lockdowns and was about to do a fourth, stopping only due to innate weakness and a rebellious backbench. However, this is not remembered: what is remembered are his flippant comments about letting the bodies pile high. This is how the perception of a supposedly right wing government comes to be.
Amusingly, the newly returned Cameron is entirely to blame for having actual Conservatives in his Conservative party, rather than Lib Dems wearing blue coloured ties. He made a point of freshing up his party's image during his premiership so it was no longer perceived to be "Pale, Stale and Male." He was in such a rush to do this that he failed to vet many of his new entries to ensure they were Blairites and so you end up the party of today where ethnic minority women, such as Badenoch, Patel and Braverman have the strongest opinions.
If we are not: why is that? Other voluntary organizations come under pressure to diversify, all the time - see "knitting too white," "hiking too white," etc. Would our church not qualify because it's too small? Because it isn't a business? Because we do not have any status to award? Because we have no social media presence?
The purpose of that attack is not to ensure that the recipient changes their ways and transforms their community to be a pluralistic collection of races. The purpose of the attack is to chastise and lower the status of the recipient in that moment by implying that they have a stank of Racism that can never be quite cleaned. Had you perhaps say a dozen or half a dozen non-white members, the attack line would then become the traditional jab that some of your best friends are black.
Ask these people for solutions to this and you will not get any immediately actionable goals. At best you would hear abstract targets like "tackling structural racism" or social rituals like "having uncomfortable conversations" with no real explanation as to how to get to these goal or what the result of an uncomfortable conversation is supposed to be. I do not recall who said it now, but the best line I have ever heard on this is that there would be no real difference in material outcome between someone reading out a Land Acknowledgement and someone reading out John Wayne quotes on a stage.
BaronVSS
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4mo ago
A thought experiment that is somewhat too large for the small scale questions thread.
Picture for a moment that a first world, rich, western nation decides to implement an open borders policy. Anyone who lives in a foreign nation can, at any time, apply for and receive permanent residency visa and be entitled to work and live in this country. There are no upper limits on the numbers of the people that may settle in the country using this method of entry.
However, there is one restriction. Only women and girls are permitted entry. Y chromosome owners are not permitted entry through this system and the fullest force of the law will be unleashed against any man who is found to be illegally within the country.
This approach should, theoretically, neutralise right wing arguments against open borders. These arguments either have an economic basis (a vast surfeit of labour will decrease pay and bargaining power for domestic workers) or a social basis (large amounts of unmarried, low skill men will cause unrest, violence and buggery). While the labour disruptions remain, a critical mass of unsettled women is unlikely to fuck shit up in the way that a critical mass of unsettled men are. Indeed, if we look to the current debate around migration in europe, there is an undercurrent of violence and hostility present in predominantly male migrants that wouldn't be the case if they were mostly female. The Ukranian migrants generated no such disruption because they were majority women and children.
Assume for the purposes of this argument that the male only border control is fullproof and has no workarounds. What are the effects of this open borders system? Are there any consequences I have not forseen?
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
Why then, would they mention it? Is the political persuasion of the killer's grandfather the most important topic here?
Due to wider economic changes, Homer Simpson's lifestyle and achievements are no longer feasible for the rate of effort that he puts in. One thing I didn't point out in the above post is that men now face vastly increased competition for all the signifiers of male success from not only women in their labour pool but also globalisation. Had he been born 20 years later, Homer would have turned into Lenny or Barney.
BaronVSS
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2mo ago
I disagree. Quite strongly infact. For the most part autistic people are largely treated like children due to misconceptions about what it actually is, unless they mask to a near perfect neurotypical standard. When you mention to people that you are autistic, people automatically assume that you are some screaming, severely obese manchild who punches himself in the head and rubs his own shit on the walls, and whatever wins they make are done under fake self. Getting onto the stack can only an upgrade at this point.
Masking actively hurts autistic people. It is not the case that you learn to mask enough and you manage to permanently graduate into being an NT, with all the privileges that come thereof. It is an exhausting, miserable slog where you are constantly watching everything you say and do, where you are perfectly aware that no one around you likes you for who you are and if you make one misstep all your signifiers of success will desert you. What is the point of enduring a ceaseless uphill struggle for such people? I have only ever felt happy and liked around my autist friends.
The "best version of yourself" seems to be what is of most utility and least discomfort to neurotypicals, not what would allow someone like me to live a happy, fulfilling life.
Female autists seem to have a very... rosy view of what being an autistic man is actually like. It is widely stated in their spaces that we are not punished for our transgressions against NT norms, that we receive early intervention and support and generally live happier lives. Personally, I did not receive a diagnosis until I was 10 and received no help from any government institution until I was 23, and this help I received purely because I had crashed out of uni and entered a multi year NEET torpor, and the reason for this is that I spent all of my childhood and and teenagerhood being bantered to death because I wasn't even given the support I talked about in the OP.
If they expect any kind of help outside of an academic environment, they will be bitterly disappointed. Those male academics long ago learned to shut their pie hole.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/clearpill-yourself-on-gaza
Moldbug weighs in on the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine show and the excessive reactions of westerners to it.
You need to turn off your feelings because you are a mother bird feeding a cuckoo. Once you look at the cuckoo, it is obviously not related to you. Where did your actual eggs go? What happened to your real empathy? It’s gone. Write it off. Your first job is to somehow get that thing out of your nest.
BaronVSS
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10mo ago
The disproportionate attention paid to the worst of the incels have clouded the fact that most sound men have a negati
I believe this paragraph is unfinished
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
I found the railway wording funny, but that's just me.
BaronVSS
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4mo ago
I wasn't actually thinking of that when I wrote this. My mind was more on the potential for reduced violence.
I am not as hopeless as Sam. The existence of ex-muslims in western nations, many of whom stand firm in their beliefs despite risk of ostracisation/decapitation at hands of their family, friends and wider community gives me some hope.
The main problem is that young people originating from a muslim background in Europe face both internal pressures from their own community to behave and act a certain way, and external pressure from the white lumpen majority who perceive them to be encroaching on their territory. In addition, many are poor as they come from very religious, very poor rural stock, compared to the middle class educated types that the US gets, and so are more susceptible to extremist views than otherwise. Moreover, the god-is-dead post industrial society gives you no greater aspirations to work towards, since deciding that something is a greater aspiration necessarily privileges one thing other another, and doing is in contravention of the "everyone's a winner" mentality of the modern day.
Between these problems, it is not suprising that many young people go balls deep into their religious heritage: they feel have no other choice. Given the behaviours of states during the pandemic, I would say that they are completely capable of of crushing theist behaviours and thought underfoot by drowning them with Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc. Our lawmakers don't even try.
BaronVSS
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8mo ago
The post is fake. Reddit users write far more than they need to on their story, including useless details that a real person being bothered by their problem wouldn't include. However, it appeals to a real, observable phenomenon: a dude is worth as much as his stacks of paper.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
Sneer clubs are inevitable. Moreover, sneer clubs are an evolutionary trait. You will notice that every single community that gathers around a particular topic in some way ultimately forms a consensus that ostracizes or expels nonbelievers. This is so in order to form tight, cohesive groups that remain together under stressful times. You cannot place your trust in someone who would abandon you or even side with someone that is threatening you. Non-rationalists respond positively to sneers, increasing or maintaining status in a group. This is pleasurable for the human being. Why would it ever stop?
As I have so often lamented after small talk laden parties, yes, it really is all just vibes.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
The desparation of groups to see a mass-murderer wind up belonging to the other tribe inspired me to dream up a mobile app that you could use whenever such an event was occuring live. It would allow you to bet on the identity and motivation of the perpetrators of mass murder events while they are breaking news. The odds would be based on collating data from every media headline atrocity that has occurred in the past 20 years. Imagine the odds on this guy.
Some might call it crude, but I would argue that this is no worse than the wink nudging that occurs on reddit or twitter whenever such an attack occurs.
I do sympathise with you. I experienced what you are experiencing now during the lockdowns. Almost everyone in my life was in support of them and spoke very highly of them, blind to the effects they were having on me. I am still dealing with the issues now.
During that time, whenever the topic of conversation came up I came up with situation appropriate lines to shut down or move the conversation on. When I couldn't do that, I drowned them out with loud rock music. Ultimately, you aren't going to convince them and the only real solution is to wait for this nonsense to exit the news cycle.
(Has it really been 7 months?)
I don't know what else there is to talk about. The outcome of the war, whatever that may be, has been decided by now by people with significantly larger dicks than ours and novelty of combat between two near-peer nations has worn off. I assume that, when the news is reporting the war, the Ukranians are making progress, and when the news goes dead silent on the war then the Russians are making progress.
I care primarily about the personal impact: that I get to suffer inflation and energy scares due to my government's (or indeed, every western government's) complete and total aversion to energy security. As for morals, the ultimate moral of life, learnt most bitterly in the years before, is that the strong do whatever the fuck they want to the weak, and the weak suffer and invent slave moralities in order to pretend that they are not suffering.
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