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Notes -
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."
We live in a neurotypical society.
As one of those people diagnosed with Asperger's before it was rolled into ASD, I will volunteer the suggestion that the baggage of autism just isn't politically-useful at the moment. At most, you'll get already-progressive people who identify as such without seeming to experience the very real deficiencies that come with the condition; this is different than it being a truly salient component of identity.
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Autism = male may yet change. In academia, a lot of women I know have embraced autism as an identity (along with ADHD) and talk a lot about it, especially when explaining why they are falling short of being Hyper-Achieving Boss Bitches, and why they should have special accommodations. (Female) autism seems to be more acceptable as a public explanation of shortcomings than anxiety or depression, even though the latter are presumably more widespread. In contrast, I don't see male autistic academics talk about it at all in even semi-public forums e.g. Facebook.
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.
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I think you're right. I have a friend in academia who's been trying to convince me that I'm actually autistic rather than my previous diagnoses of anxiety and depression. And I'll admit that it would be nice to have that diagnosis instead, even though I don't think I'm autistic, and certainly don't fall far on the spectrum if I am. Autism just feels like a more tangible/acceptable disorder than simply saying depression/anxiety. Though my friend seems more into the idea of it being an identity for me than anything else.
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Men don’t win points for having a disadvantage labeled.
Neurodiversity is all the rage these days, but there a giant penis-sized asymmetry for how such labels work out for women vs. men in being perceived.
“What a loser” vs. “oh you poor thing” is the default response, because biology is real and our instincts have us value men differently for showing weakness, even when it’s not fair.
Yeah, pretty much. The fact I am alive solely because of technological excess and slave morality is really quite unsettling to me.
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Autism has extremely high overlap within the LGBT community:
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_and_LGBT_identities
Given the extremely strong overlap between autism and the entirety of the QUILTBAG grouping, I would expect that autism would be the next on the list after or alongside late-stage transgender rights campaigning.
That is from Wikipedia which is by default unreliable on social topics (and the cited sources seem no better at first glance, though I don't have access to the full contents) so I can't help but wonder: how much of that apparent connection is just due to the fact that wokeists like to LARP as both LGBTQ+ and autistic?
Is there any study that doesn't just rely on self-identification, and explicitly acknowledges the difference between “I'm a male who has had penetrative sex with multiple other males” and “I identify as pansexual online because heterosexuals aren't cool anymore and to be fair I do occasionally jerk off to femboy porn though all my crushes are on girls”? And the difference between nonverbal autists and people who claim to have Aspergers after scoring 17/20 on a test they found on tumblr?
Overall I suspect that the most prominent members of the LGBTQ+ community are only mildly autistic at best, if for no other reason than that it's still a social community.
In any case, I think it's a mistake to assume that the woke are natural allies to autists. Look at how much criticism an organization like Autism Speaks gets from the woke left for (very sensibly imo) saying it would be nice if autism could be cured. To the woke, the idea that autistic people might struggle in social situations is an unfair prejudice that ”neurotypicals” hold about autistic people.
And I think this tendency towards self-identification as fashion among the woke leads to less understanding, because it creates a false impression of how debilitating these conditions can be.
You say it's unfair that the police arrest you because you didn't realize the woman you met on the bus was deeply uncomfortable while you were talking at length about your favorite anime? Well, that sounds like a load of crap. My friend Ayden is a transman who suffers from self-diagnosed autism, dyslexia and OCD, and yet
shhe has never been arrested for something like that, so it sounds to me like you are using your autism as an excuse for your toxic male behavior.More options
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Autism's a weird subject since the diagnosis gets thrown around super liberally for any sort of 'does not play nice with others' psychological diagnosis, and it's such a wide spectrum.
My mom used to work at a private school dedicated to let's say 5th-10th percentile intelligences. Not the absolute lowest rung, but the one above it. The vast majority of her students had diagnoses for Autism (along with whatever myriad difficulties they had) and were essentially incapable of functioning above a 4th-grade level. When that bloc is contributing to the statistics, it's very hard to be successful on the aggregate. Without going into the amount of criminals or ne'er-do-wells hit the psychological diagnosis arena and get 7 different things assigned, one of which is invariably ASD. These people are already on an atrocious course and further drag down averages. It is my belief that if diagnosis was a firmer line and was universal, that the gap would be a lot smaller.
The most 'successful'/able-to-cope Autistics are also unlikely to ever pick up a formal diagnosis, especially if they're presently older than mid thirties. I'm diagnosed with what was Aspergers. My dad is a very successful engineer who is 99% to also get diagnosed (and indeed self-diagnosed after I received the diagnosis) if he ever had occasion to pursue it, but as he's now in his mid 70s, retired and in no need of psychological assistance he's unlikely to ever get his autism certificate.
I feel like you are picturing the 'average autistic person' as a FANG developer who struggles with dating/social contact but is otherwise able to get some benefits out of the quirk in their brain chemistry. This is a person who's like 85th percentile.
One my (deeply unpopular) autism related views are that the elimination of Aspergers as a diagnosis and the folding of all similar conditions into vague levels has been an absolute disaster. Normies have a slightly less uninformed idea of what Aspergers is, even if their idea gravitates towards Sheldon Cooper. Meanwhile, if you say the world Autism they will automatically assume "Guy who punches himself in the head and screams", regardless of any attempts by the establishment to reband Autism away from this thought.
I agree with this, but the Aspergers diagnosis got banded about willy-nilly so it kind of had to be hauled back (plus the culture war tones, I guess)
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Agreement on this. None of us in my paternal family have (so far as I know, it may be different for the current generation of children) formal diagnoses of at least Aspergers (before that was folded into the Autism Spectrum) but there are undeniable signs of something like that scattered all through, going back generations. I've done online "test yourself" quizzes and come out as "probably autistic", so while self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, I think I probably have something.
I'm nowhere near as high functioning in a FANG job because I have no maths skills. I can get by with literacy skills (and the slight obsessiveness over details that comes with the package), but I have no social skills (and hence can't 'network' my way into anything), and while support would be nice, it's way too late in the day for that to make a meaningful difference to me now (back from the age of six? oh yes, but no use crying over spilled milk). I'm not a success by any metric of any area; 'but at least you have friends, you have this, you have that' - nope, no, none of it. I liked the Covid lockdown in my country because you want me to stay indoors, don't go out, don't gather in groups, don't socialise? I do none of that already, I am not suffering the deprivations other people complain about. For once, the world was running the way I liked it (no noise! no crowds! no having to pretend to care about chit-chat and small talk! no interacting with people for more than the tasks we need to do! stay in my shell? bliss!). Which brings me on to:
Yes, we do, and that's just a fact of life. While there should be support and accommodation, autistic people also have to learn how to adapt to the wider world, as best they can. If the majority of people are right-handed, things are set up for the right-handed. If over-exposure to sunlight gives you sunburn and skin cancer, you can't demand the right to walk about naked for twelve hours a day under the desert sun. Learn to cover up and put on sunscreen.
Ironically, in view of everything, I've ended up working in a place that deals with children with additional/special needs, and that includes autism. They're pre-school aged, and part of the care is helping them pick up the skills that will help them integrate when they go on to kindergarten and primary school. It is about helping those kids feel comfortable in their skin, because they do suffer otherwise, either locked in their own isolated little world or rigidly sticking to a set routine that cannot deviate in the slightest or else the child has a full-blown meltdown. It's not about turning them neurotypical, it's about doing as much as can be done. Maybe that's not a lot, maybe they'll never be able to integrate and function, but leaving them be is the worst thing you can do and it's a disservice (as I said, I wish there had been something when I was six, maybe my life would not have been such a failure if I learned better how to pretend to be normie). And some are severely disabled, like the cases of "will literally beat his brains out against a wall so has to wear a helmet 24/7" teenager encountered in another job. It's not one-size-fits-all, Hollywood Crazy (which just means quirky) nice view of "smart, high IQ, maths nerds autistics who work the big paying jobs in software engineering that give you normies the high economic value society you enjoy".
This is the way it is. Fire burns, water is wet, society is neurotypical, and that shouldn't be changed. Accommodation and support yes, "I'm (self-diagnosed with, or even officially diagnosed with) Such-And-Such, I get to do what I like and no consequences and you have to cater to my every whim!" no.
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Mmhmm.
I spent a couple years at a private school which was designed for autistic integration. Maybe 10% of the students had a pretty severe disability. Some of them worked through the social skills, the emotional development, and so on. Presumably they get to engage with society. Others...they will spend their whole lives with significant reliance on their caretakers. These were all kids with loving parents and enough of a support network to pay private-school tuition. Not everyone has that.
Exactly. That's essentially the environment my mom worked at (albeit essentially purely aimed at the bottom 10% of your cohort), and a positive outcome of a 12 year education at that school was 'capable of holding a shelf stacking job or consistently contributing on government subsidized work for the lesser-abled and moderate sociability'.
I had a friend like that at high school. Basically stuck at an 11 year old's level of mental development, though he was more like a 5 year old at the start of high school. (Adolesence seems to have done him a lot of good.) With a ridiculously good family and presumably some government help, he's been able to hold a steady job through all of his adult life, a very happy long-term romantic relationship with an autistic woman, and enjoy a diverse range of interests (biking, video games, anime). Many non-disabled young men don't do so well.
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The members of the stack are chosen specifically because (1) they were discriminated in the past, and (2) attitudes toward them have changed. Politically they make an effective bludgeon because insulting them makes conservatives look terrible. There's definitely support in some circles for autists, like on college campuses and discord circles, and these are the same groups genuinely worrying about ageism, ableism, and so on. It has no utility in politics because conservatives lack a reputation for treating autists poorly (even though they do, like most people). It would be nice if universal equality was the actual driving force in progressive politics but it's really not.
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By whom? The people I’ve seen insist on this term are not progressives, but critics interested in scoring rhetorical points.
Say I argued that Christians rely on a “religious stack.” I could probably come up with a half-decent ordering. Surely Christians tend to prefer Judaism to Islam, or insular Amish sects to rival missionaries, or spirituality to atheism. But it would be foolish to use a placement on this list—which I had just created—as an argument for Christians to do something differently. The model might be descriptive, but it is very much not prescriptive.
If progressives don’t pick their causes according to a stack, your strategy is dead on arrival. You will never gain mainstream support by fitting yourself into a model which the mainstream doesn’t use.
Here ya go, babe. And that's just three seconds on Google. First time I ever heard the term was, as described in another comment, in relation to the Occupy protests from one of the social media posts in their favour.
This was my experience as well. The term "Progressive Stack" became popular IIRC during the Occupy Wall Street protests, being pushed* as the correct way to create a hierarchy in whose voices got heard first in these intentionally structure-less organizations. I had never heard the notion that this was actually a term of denigration by critics, but perhaps it's not too surprising, since that criticism tends to get leveled at many terms that some progressives choose to label themselves when other people start associating those labels with the underlying characteristics of the actual thing that the label is pointing at (obvious examples being "woke" and "social justice warrior").
* There's a very common conspiracy theory among leftists that Occupy Wall Street and/or aspects of it were intentionally sabotaged by progressives inserting their identity politics into it, as a way to sow division among people of different demographics within the working class. The fact that some seem to believe that the very term "Progressive Stack" is a term of denigration that critics imposed on the people pushing it makes this conspiracy theory funnier to me.
I've heard a somewhat different version of this, in that it was deliberate, it was done to "gatekeep" out portions of the working class, and that it was done knowing it could prevent the movement from attaining its goals, but that such "sabotage" was not the intended goal, merely a possible — and acceptable — price to attain the actual goal: to keep out Fascists. Because anyone whose position on the economic political axis would put them on board with Occupy Wall Street's goals, but whose position on the social/cultural political axis would cause them to oppose things like the "Progressive Stack" enough to be "turned away" (as opposed to at least holding their nose and putting up with it) is thus in the Fascist Quadrant of said political plane.
It was 2008, not 2016, no one was hyperventilating about "fascists" back then.
I left the united states for years, plural, because I believed Bush was going to declare himself dictator for life. I acquired that belief from a steady diet of blue-tribe media.
Neutral question: Has it occurred to you that, with the sides changed, you are still overreacting now as you were back then?
The thought does occur. On the other hand, I can go back and read my posts back to 2015, when I was quite the reasonable moderate, and observe a process, not simply a straight swing from one extreme to the other.
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Damn... I was as permanently online back then as I'm now, and as blue-tribe as I am anti-blue now, and somehow never got the impression this sort of talk was anything beyond run of the mill bitching at politicians.
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I remember left wing folks going on about the threat of "fascists" in America when I was attending college in Southern California in 2000-2005. The person who described this theory to me was a left-winger who did so approvingly, arguing that the failure of OWS due to the Progressive Stack was a good thing for the left, as compared to the alternative.
I suppose these people didn't show up out of nowhere...
But did they do so post- or pre-Trump?
Pre-Trump — IIRC, in 2014. This same person held that Bush II's "compassionate conservatism" made him a Fascist, because it too is "economically 'left-wing' but socially 'right-wing.'"
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I don't know about intentional sabotage, they seemed to manage that pretty well on their own. Though I have no doubt that there was entryism by much more radical left groups hoping to steer what at the time seemed like it might blossom into a popular movement in the 'correct' direction. But given that they allowed obvious grifters, petty criminals, and the crazies off the street to wander around and demand stuff, and the frazzled volunteers who started out all starry-eyed about community direct action by The People got a hard lesson in being taken for a ride, I don't imagine it needed too much of a push to knock the blocks over.
But yes, "well I never heard it and none of my friends ever used it, so it must be the horrid right-wingers are to blame!" is funny 😁
What 07 failed to mention is that the conspiracy theory goes that the radical entryists were given an opportunity to do so by Big Business, who were scared of how loud OWS's megaphone proved to be.
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The original term comes from the activist playbook deployed at Occupy protests and designed by intersectional academics. The idea being that the more oppressed someone is (the more oppressed group markers they possess), the earlier their voices should be heard. There's plenty of video and articles that describe the process and show it operating at the time.
The second life of the term is as a description of the underlying philosophy of intersectionality by its opponents, who critique it for essentially creating a privilege hierarchy in the name of abolishing privilege hierarchies.
Like "woke" and basically any other descriptor for the ideological cluster intersectional feminism belongs to, it originated as a self descriptor and was discarded as soon at the opposition freezed it as a label (to borrow Alinsky's phrasing). This is of course a typical post-structuralist tactic, much like the redefinition of racism and other forms of linguistical warfare that attempt to manipulate the enemy's frame of understanding of the world by manipulating the language the enemy uses to describe the world.
Now if we turn to this term as analysis and descriptor of progressive ideology, I think it's fairly accurate. It predicted the formation of such internal interest groups as "BIPOC" and, ostracism of gay men and Jews as well as the underlying justification for all these. When you see Black feminists say that black men are the white people of black people, they are appealing to intersectional ideology and enacting the behavior described by this label.
But it predicted justification, not what would have to be justified.
So long as progressives truly believe in intersectionality, the progressive stack model will be accurate. Because the process it is named after was specifically created to manifest intersectional ideology into the world.
The question is then whether they actually believe in intersectionality and are moved by its ideological precepts, or are merely political agents using the ideology to organize and justify preexisting political interest regardless of contradiction. And it is my strong belief that almost every single political movement that has ever existed is the latter, and not the former.
If alliance with autists is politically advantageous, they are oppressed neurodivergents. If war with autists is preferable, they are incel nerdbro oppressors.
Well, I guess I learn something every day. I'll concede that actual protestors were using this actual term to describe their procedure.
I don't think we disagree that it was useless, even then, for an outsider. There was a post a while back about--I think it was "the cool kids don't have to ask." They've read the room and have a feel for the consensus. Then and only then can they refer to the stack.
Why? It's a very good descriptor of what their philsophy is about, especially for an outsider following more classical ideas of equality, and wondering why certain demands are being made of him.
We've been through this dance of pretending a term applied to this ideology is somehow not useful so many times, from Cultural Marxism, through Political Correctness, SJW, Woke, CRT, and now apparently Progressive Stack, regardless of whether the term was an ingroup, or outgroup designation, or how many citations you can pull to support it, that the only conclusion can be that the actual objection is there being a term at all. If you disagree Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.
An outsider can not and could not have walked up and said “here, I am higher on this stack than you, so let me speak.” Progressives settled on a consensus for that stack before ever showing up to a protest. The OP’s approach wants to change that consensus, and it’s not going to work.
Well, I'm not sure about it being "useless", I did hear of a few successful attempts at fending off entryism by utilizing the stack, though you're probably right that adding new entries to it as an outsider is going to be too obvious, and won't work.
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Of course not, why would they? Autists don't have a place in it because the progressive stack isn't real. Leftists care about some minorities more than others, but not because they have an a priori commitment to "the stack" or any particular stack. They appear to care about "the stack" because its an effective weapon, both against the outgroup, and against the in group as a purity check.
They don't care about autists in the stack for the same reason you don't see the women's march boycotting Exxon for not having enough women on its roughneck crews. They don't care about the stack, they care about power. Adding autists to the stack doesn't gain them any power, so they don't care.
Further, leftists are not naturally aligned with autists. Leftists care first and foremost about eliminating distinctions, which requires absolute conformity of behavior. If that means insisting that men are literally women, you had better say so. Obviously, Autists are disinclined to play along, assuming they are even able to recognize the game in the first place. As James Damore found out, no one actually wanted serious, scientifically-backed suggestions for improving female participation at Google, even though he was specifically asked to provide such suggestions. They wanted everyone to practice parroting back the party line as part of the humiliation ritual they built into the promotion structure.
Also, I support @somethingsomething on this. Being a part of the stack is not desirable.
Edit: James Lindsay actually just released a piece on the leftist conception of ablism. The academic term for this is Disability Studies. They already consider being abled to be an original sin. They just don't care about autists.
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Nick Land discussed this in "The Dark Enlightenment":
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Lots of people aren't on the stack. People with fetal alcohol symptom, the ugly, the short, people in wheel chairs etc..
I highly recommend the essay Biological Leninism. Basically, the left is a coalition of people who naturally resent society and are in the bottom of it. The left finds people who will never be able to seize power and promote them to middle managers. The left's coalition is obese black women in a boardroom with Iqs of 100 when everyone else in the room has an Iq above 120. They would never be there in any other society and will therefore be loyal to the current system since they are entirely dependent on it. At the same time they won't actually take over the power structure.
Autists are either too autistic and therefore too incompetent or they are highly skilled autists and will not conform to social pressures and may even take over the power structure.
The disadvantaged groups that get on the 'stack' all have something in common: their qualities act as tribalistic signifiers, which in turn provides a basis for political coordination. This might just be an outgrowth of human evolutionary history, where apes gathered themselves into tribes and warred against rival tribes, mirroring our present political circumstances not by accident but because of the encoding of behavior into genes. We are witnessing the modern potential of ape-evolution.
Mental and psychological disabilities are not close enough to the tribal dynamic to serve as signifiers in this way, so they are not adequate, in the same way, as a basis for political organization. To the extent that policy is made to take these things into account I would say that it's probably driven by higher mental processes and philosophies than by instinctual ape-tribalism.
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You don't want to be on the progressive stack. Being on the stack means being treated like a child, it means that your wins can always be questioned, and it means the worst representatives of your "group" become the loudest and most influential.
You want to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and fix whatever is making you miserable as long as you have consciousness and basic analytic abilities. I think this starts by learning what is actually abnormal. To some extent, "stimming" and "masking" are things everyone does. Everyone "learns" social cues, some just are naturally better at it. Everyone acts differently among different people and everyone has certain aspects of themselves that they hide from others. It's just a matter of degree for these things, even if the degree can be quite high and even though a lot of this stuff starts with outside factors that we don't control.
But I think the dislike "NTs" have towards autistic people is very similar to the dislike towards depressives, because I think (I suppose controversially) that people with both conditions can work on themselves to basically be normal, but both people of both groups often resent the idea that they can. For autistic people, I think they should just record themselves on their phone, and just try to analyze how they are talking and how others are talking in conversation. They should find NTs they trust and ask them to itemize everything they do differently than they are supposed to.
What will the result be? Probably shame. Being told how you are wrong or different naturally results in a lot of shame. And this is where I think a lot of the pushback comes from autists, from depressives, from minority groups, etc. But that is the point where you can say, I'm a grownup, I can deal with shame and move forward.
They don't pick it.
They 're born with it and stuck with it. That's why it works.
That's the beauty of it. Leninism stopped working around the time working class men saw they could get a decent lifestyle under capitalism.
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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.
Let's say there are three ways people can generally react to you: Disgust, pity, and respect. I believe that there is a world where as a group autistic people are generally treated with respect. Going on the stack means trading that for pity. Either is better than disgust. But I think the respect is worth aiming for, and I think it's where we are trending anyway. I certainly don't think of autistic people the way you describe, and don't know anyone that openly does. I work with autistic and non-autistic people and everyone is respectful to everyone, no one is making fun of anyone behind their back etc. I think things like this would be way worse like 20 years ago.
But looking at that study, which was a survey, it basically confirms my beliefs. You have this broadly shared set of behaviors in regards to masking across autistic and non-autistic, with some extras only exhibited by autistic. But then you have the shame response coming from the autistic group that hates it, that feels suicidal etc. What I believe, and I accept you may disagree, is that there is a shame element here, that is making the masking feel worse than it really is.
Lastly I'd just say that the fact that you have been able to find people you are happy and liked around is a profoundly good thing, and should be enough once you've found it in a stable place. At that point, you can weather the storms, because you have your people. And you can still fight for social change and respect etc. but you don't need the sham that is the progressive stack to do what it does, which I think is vampiric and ultimately soul-destroying, but that's just my personal opinion. Cheers.
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This has the vibe of “women and non-Asian minorities have always been the primary victims of identity politics that transfer income and opportunities to them from white and Asian men.”
I'd more than happily be treated as a child, have my wins questioned behind closed doors by wrong-thinkers, and have the "worst" representatives of my group being the loudest and most influential (as their loudness and influence only result in more benefits for me) if it means I, my relatives, my descendants get to enjoy preferences to the tune of +280 or +230 points on the SAT or the equivalent in education, employment, promotions.
I mean it's a sham, and it's leading to a less liberal society, and if you embrace it you're part of why it's worse. If you don't believe in personal responsibility or you get brainwashed, or don't think to much then you can live with that comfortably. If you're striving to be the best version of yourself, it's a hindrance. And I think the material benefits in return are ultimately not that consequential.
From the perspective of some, in both Blue and Red Tribes, plenty of powerful people seem to have abdicated personal responsibility and pawned off consequences onto others. Autists bootstrapping themselves, by themselves, probably aren't going to produce more apologetic politicians or CEOs who slash their own pay when times get tough.
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The majority of autists who are high enough functioning to (successfully) do what you’re suggesting already do so. That’s what “masking” is.
The ones who don’t mask are typically the ones who are more autistic. They’re both worse at understanding what’s wrong with how they act and care far less on an emotional level what others think of them in the first place.
The primary reason autists complain about masking (be it the ones who mask 24/7 or those who refuse to) isn’t shame; it’s that it’s a massive pain in the arse. This is to be expected; everyone bitches and moans about the annoyances in their life. The only difference is most people don’t empathise with their complaints because they find unmasked autists annoying.
Well to be frank, I've met plenty of high functioning autistic people who I think could do a way better job at masking, and I doubt many people are really doing all the things I suggest, I think most people just find a rut they're comfortable in and see how far it takes them. If autistic people want to show the receipts, and really lay down a whole list of things they do every day on the normie grind to impress me, I'm all ears, but it better be significantly more onerous than what say, a NP person with some social anxiety has to do.
But that said the question of how much sympathy people get for how much trouble they go through is basically a worthless train of thought. Most of the sympathy going around is false, virtue signalling, or confused. Each human being is lucky if they find a few who really understand them, are there for them, and able to listen reciprocally. If you haven't found that person, you're no different than an able white guy with no friends. You're two sad sacks looking for people who understand them. There is literally no difference in that respect, because for each person there are other people who understand, or who are willing to listen, and you only need a few. If that isn't filling then something deeper is wrong.
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"Never be on the stack, unless you can be a rep" sounds like a lucrative if somewhat spiritually impoverishing position.
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Normies will never do a thing to help actual autists (as opposed to trendy "autists" that act quirky for internet clout). The single most sympathetic place on earth to autists is 4chan, the idea of actually caring about autists and their struggles is completely beyond the notice, let alone the concern, of any normie individuals and organizations that could do something about it.
And to channel Ayn Rand for a moment, the least powerful, most oppressed minority is the individual.
Honestly doesn't feel like it (except for spammers). Genuine autistic posts online are much rarer than they used to be, and even on 4chan they get mocked. Being autistic is fine, but doing things like failing to read the room, writing awkward infodumps, having a weird emotion, etc. will get teased ruthlessly. I would bet most autists retreat to writing short, simple posts in public now if they write at all.
You might be able to find some sympathy if you posted on /r9k/ and framed your post correctly. In any case, I find 4chan's blunt, brutal honesty to be far more tolerable than Reddit's just world smarminess.
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