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You had me nodding along on the first paragraph around fairness and genuinely confused on the next one about seething. Revenge is such a base human feeling that isolating it to "Autists" is misattribution. Human's live for watching their outgroup suffer. We go watch mal-doers get tortured in the square and sell popcorn for it. It isn't "Autists" watching trashy reality TV or feud porn. Blood-feuds and honor killings are not Autist-coded. The jews cheering on Jesus's crucifixion weren't just the local gaggle of "Autists"
Autists in the Internet sense are known for their inability to comprehend feelings and to model other people's motivations. The Internet autist will try to logically analyze some expression of hatred, not even understanding that it was meant to show hate, never mind they themselves hating someone else. "Autists" hating politicians is the opposite of this.
I'm not sure I understand the connection between your first and last points?
EDIT: my brain moves faster than I type and I forget to type out important words
Internet autists (actual clinical autists are irrelevant here) don't hate politicians. They don't even understand hate and tend to think that every disagreement is just something that can be settled with pure logic. An Internet autist's reaction to a politician who breaks the rules would not be to hate him for breaking the rules, it would be to try to calmly and gently inform him that he's breaking the rules in the belief that once he realizes that he's breaking the rules he will surely stop.
(Of course Internet autism is on a spectrum, no pun intended. There are people who are bad at modelling others but who at some point will hate them anyway. But that's not because they're autists, it's because even autism only goes so far.)
Ahh yes the Quokka effect. The innocent belief that if you just show people the error in their ways then they will correct because the only reason they made that error is because they were unaware they were making it in the first place.
I do think the parent comment is touching on something in regards to an extreme sense of fairness being inherent to Autists, and the violations of that fairness being very triggering. But you also have a good point here in the inability of Autists to model uncharitable behaviors online and assume a base level of "something". I'd say its probably a level of development, as Autists are forced to reckon with the wider outside world, I think an anger at the unfairness develops including a souring of the "Quokka effect"
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It was probably poorly worded. My point wasn’t that revenge is limited to autists, or that mob mentality around this kind of thing as in your last example isn’t real. It’s that there is a specifically autistic catharsis around someone who was perceived to be ‘getting away with it’ apparently no longer ‘getting away with it’. To the victim or even observer this may be indistinguishable from ‘you hurt me, I hurt you’ revenge but I think there is a distinction, it’s more about the rigidity of the underlying rules. This is why I think autists are drawn to clear cut extreme ideologies like corporatist fascism or communism that define enemy classes and establish strong rules for the in group and out group.
I think you're more right than wrong. My normie coworkers point out the absurdities of the unfairness in our immediate environment all the time. But there's never seethe or resentment. Just passive acceptance of the fact that things are this way and there's no avenue to do anything about it short of home visits with a shotgun. Anything else is just signaling low status. 'Someone has to do something about this!' is the kind of cringe that gets emotionally unregulated teenagers hooked on 'KONY 2012'. It's too juvenile in its earnestness and sincerity for adults to buy into.
Same goes for black on white crime or the ethnic cleansing of white South Africans. No one normal wants to wallow in that crap, or even hear about it. You need a bit of 'autism', for a lack of a better term, to get past that hump of emotional negativity and look at things in a larger systemic context. And it's in that larger systemic context that the real resentment starts building, as ones understanding of scale and scope of the crimes and the consequences become larger and larger.
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No, just regular catharsis.
Autists are drawn to extreme ideologies because they have a logical consistency that makes sense in a theoretical framework, but fails upon contact with the messiness of real life.
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