That's it. That's all I got.

I'm REALLY having trouble blogging today - or yesterday, or the day before. Why? Because the news is SUCH crap.

And WHY is the news such crap?

SHOW THE FUCK UP!

STOP by webcarve Get this custom shirt at Zazzle

It's Let's Piss off Jesus Day Every Day in Orlando

clipped from www.reuters.com

MIAMI (Reuters) - Police in Florida have arrested an activist for feeding the homeless in downtown Orlando.

Montanez was filmed by undercover officers on Wednesday as he served "30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilizing a ladle," according to an arrest affidavit. The Orlando area is home to Disney World and Universal Studios Florida. [Emphasis Mine]

The Orlando law, which is supported by local business owners who say the homeless drive away customers but has been challenged in court by civil rights groups, allows charities to feed more than 25 people at a time within two miles of Orlando city hall only if they have a special permit. They can get two permits a year.

Compassionate Conservatism in action, eh, wot?

It's better tor be obscene than absurd.

Gateway Pundit: "Seven words you can never say on television"... but which are said on the Internet. A lot.

Talk about potty-mouths.

The Net's not always a kid-friendly place; there is plenty of foul language out there. And of course, the blogosphere is no different.

But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to "dirty" language? Which side produces the most profanity-laced diatribes? Via Instapundit, I happened upon this interesting challenge from InstaPunk:

I propose an exercise to be performed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months' worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin's infamous '7 Dirty Words.' [Click this link for the list of expletives.]

And this is what I found, using what I deemed -- through a mix of TTLB and 2006's Weblog Award lists -- to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. (Not counting this one. :)) I couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn't make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Yowsers.

Ok, let me get this straight: while THIS was happening, rather than chasing the story down and doing something to really support the troops, you were constructing methodology to count naughty words?

Words fail me. And aside from that, what's your point, fuckwit?

All this very precious pearl-clutching is utterly pointless in a quest for "civil discourse" if you do not also consider the impact on civil discourse of statements such as these: (via Instaputz)

Ohhh-kay. Let's do a trial run.

Putz: What we really should be doing is killing Iranian civilians. Heh.
Malkin: Exactly. And the NY Times publishers should be locked up for treason.
Denny K: Yeah! Let's hunt them down and find out where their kids go to school.
Coulter: My only regret is that Tim McVeigh didn't blow up the NY Times.
Misha: Forget the Times, I want the Supremes. Five robes, five ropes, five trees.
Lefty Blogger: You're all fucking crazy.

InstaPunk: See? The lefty bloggers are more hateful.

…[W]hy not run a few chapters of Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries through your little Shrill Detector, and then compare those results with a Richard Pryor set from the '70s.

Idiots.

Now, I'm not a leftie - I'm just an uppity libertarian with not much respect for foolishness and a decent regard for semantics.

Therefore, I have something in common with Shakespeare's Sister The Rude Pundit and indeed The Ace of Spades.

A man-portable un-powered entrenching tool is a fucking spade.



More Vicious Left-Wing Mockery

tag: potty mouths, Hate Speech, pearlclutching, unintentional irony, , culture, morality, ethics

Supid is as stupid does...

The sort of people who star in this clip can be found here, at "liberalsmustdie.com".

If your entire premise is that "liberals must die," because your faith and beliefs cannot stand against a few pointed questions and a hard rain of facts - you are too damn stupid to breed, much less teach children.

Of course, us Libertarians may argue about Evolution, but we have great faith in Social Darwinism! A little too much, truth be told, and there's history behind us; there's any number of examples of wacky bible cults such as what infest our Body Politic at the moment that went down the toilet after the millennium-before-last.

Of course, if you really want to understand these folks - read their literature, and the folks that advertise in it, and who buy those sucker mailing lists.

Anyway, the hard core 6000 year creationist world view is depedant upon a literal - sort of - reading of the King James Bible - the most beautiful and least accurate translation there is. We have come a long way and found quite a few more original sources than King James's translators had.

Even IF I grant the "inerrency of God's Word" as presented in the King James - just for the sake of argument - I sure as hell do NOT grant the unspoken assumption of "inerrnency of comprehension" that's clearly being claimed. The folks depicted are clearly those who could not be trusted to assemble a bicycle from the instructions.

But let us go one step further. If you believe the Word of God is true, maybe you should actually take it at it's word. When it's silent on a topic, maybe YOU should be too. But these folks rely heavily on the Doctrine of Original sin - which is not explicitly in the bible. That was St. Augustine's bright idea. In fact, the various stories of Genesis have no conclusions to them, no explicit "moral." They are supposed to provoke questions, not supply definitive answers.

Further, if you are looking for condemnation of homosexual behavior, you will find the Bible a week reed. It's prohibited for "a man to lie with a man as a woman," which is in the Levitical code, and is apparently as tortured a phrase in Hebrew as it is in English. The law of Parsimony suggests that if God had wished to say that he disapproved of men having sex with men, he could have said so. Social context suggests that this was a prohibition of engaging in sex with Caananite temple prostitutes and priests - who apparently dressed as women. As for Lesbianism - the bible says not word one. Well, unless you read The Book of Ruth in a certain way, in which case it might be advocating committed same-sex relationships.

The "sin of Sodom" - google that for any number of perspectives - is most persuasively, from both text and culture, the abuse of strangers under the protection of Lot's household. At the time and even today, hospitality is sacred, an issue of importance beyond almost any other cultural imperative. hospitality and shelter were matters of survival.

I have immense respect for the Bible - and the Word in general. But I have far, far less faith in my fellow person's ability to read than I do in God's ability to write. Hell, that's a major theme with the Prophets. Where do these folks get the idea that their wackadoo world view, only vaguely connected to the Bible - is the result of any special understanding of God's Word? Because it's a truly "special" understanding, worthy of the "short bus." Don't take my word for it - ask any serious theologian. Or better yet, study a few dead ones; they aren't likely to be biased against these folks.

I commend to you St. Julian of Norwich. And I ain't even a Catholic. But then, more than a few of the catholic hierarchy of the day would have called her anything but "Catholic."

tag: creationism, ID, hate speech, patriarchy, Republican Values, clash of civilization, culture war

How do we save the earth, our freedom and our culture? With the stroke of a pen...

Note: I've revised and bumped this post rather than write a new post covering much of the same ground less well. I'd also like to put it into the context of "Framing the Unspoken Debate: Metaphor, Morality and Politics," which I wrote subsequently to this essay. Specifically, all the ills I address below can be accurately seen as Moral Pathologies of both Right and Left.

First - read this account of a very bad black man's life. Consider that his story is one of opportunities and context.

Second - The promise of a plant that is condemned, not because it is a drug, but because it's related to a drug. And why is it condemned? Because methanol would have competed with oil and chemical processes derived from oil and therefore it had to be demonized.

I can also point you to reasons why marijuana as a drug was outlawed, at least in part. It had little to do with it's actual effects, for good or ill and far more to do with attacks on cultures and subcultures that depended on it - in preference to ethanol brewed from wheat, oats, barley and corn, ironically enough.

Drug Crazy: How we got into this mess and how we can get out is a good starting point, illustrating the original agendas and the lies that hid them. But reason alone is a fair starting point. Consider this one statistic; that half of all prison beds are filled with non-violent drug offenders?

Consider that imprisonment itself has many of the same disruptive effects upon family and community as does drug-use itself, even when the drug use is undetected and untreated. We have little or no idea what the impact would be if we simply replaced punishment with treatment for those who needed it - but we do know that even if we replaced half of all jail beds with community-based treatment, we would be saving money, and employing a better class of people doing it.

Of course, there is a shadow-good in the current system; it keeps people inclined to be prison guards away from those who are not. However, I think treatment is a better option there - or perhaps, just perhaps, a mind-altering experience.

But there is more to the war on drugs than power, even more to it than social control, even more to it than the "opiate of the masses" attempting to eliminate shortcuts to and supposed replacements for approved forms of spiritual expression and experience. Indeed, the only traditionally sacred herb that remains legal for ordinary folks is tobacco - but only in it's most addictive and least psychoactive forms. The more sacredly effective forms of the herb are kept very expensive, or legally unobtainable within the United States. Dominican and Cuban tobaccos are some of the best remaining strains of the herb that originally swept Europe with it's manifold effects, both sacred and profane.

Note that in effect, the enjoyment of this "vice" is restricted by price and access to the elites that can "handle it" - ordinary tobacco addicts are kept pacified with denatured and adulterated nicotine delivery devices.

All of these concentrations of power, of wealth, of doctrinal property are expressions of a deep-seated terror that obsesses those who are called to power and control; a fear of what would happen if "The wrong people" were to be allowed to act as they pleased. It's not that they fear what they would do or not do, so much, as they fear the inability to be sure what any given individual should do. And sadly, if you look at the lives of those most obsessed with the behavior of other people, you will find little forgiveness for their own human failings, foibles or even harmless whims. They fear their own Liberty as much or more as that of any other - for they know all to well what they are capable of, if only they did not discipline themselves against it.

So really, they forbid all things that tempt them, and make mandatory all that comforts them in the rather childish assumption that these things are universal dangers and comforts, while allowing that other restrictions that really don't seem to apply to their own nature are nonetheless best conformed to in public, for the benefit of those who might otherwise be led into temptation and folly.

So by this, and many other small but telling examples that you may glean from examining the social standards for the "ruling classes" across time to themselves and the stricter standards applied to "ordinary people," we must conclude that there is some degree of apprehension as to what might happen if the common people were permitted to simply do as they pleased, to whatever reward or lack thereof that they might find.

The parallel argument is to examine the ethics of choosing on behalf of others what sort of expressions and behaviors they will be permitted or forbidden, and what they must or must not do in order to deserve such permissions in comparison it to the supposed evils and harms that may arise if these behaviors are not restricted.

There is no case where a rational, defensible examination of any restriction of truly personal liberty can be clearly demonstrated to have a greater benefit than the harm caused. Indeed, it's fairly easy to substantiate that exercises such as the Drug War create widespread, systemic, crippling harm on a level all out of proportion to any positive social gains. The same arguments apply to attacks on birth control - and the reasons why they are problematic were well-put in Grizwold(Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965))



Ignore the nonsense about "penumbras," thought they are true enough - go directly to the Great Unmentioned Amendment. It's existence renders absurd any argument that there is no "constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy." Of course not. The Constitution recognizes rights, and recognizes some that the founders thought required explicit protections.

Nonetheless, the Due Process Clause itself is foundation enough, as Justice Marshall famously noted in a widely cited dissent:

In Poe, Justice John Marshall Harlan II filed one of the most cited dissenting opinions in Supreme Court history. He argued, foremost, that the Supreme Court should have heard the case rather than dismissing it. Thereafter he indicated his support for a broad interpretation of the due process clause. He famously wrote, "the full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints." On the basis of this interpretation of the due process clause, Harlan concluded that the Connecticut statute violated the Constitution.

Shortly after the Poe decision was handed down, Estelle Griswold (Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut) and Dr. C. Lee Buxton (a physician and professor at the Yale School of Medicine) opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, in order to test the contraception law once again. Shortly after the clinic was opened, Griswold and Buxton were arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined $100 each. The conviction was upheld by the Appellate Division of the Circuit Court, and by the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. Griswold then appealed her conviction to the Supreme Court of the United States.

There are situations where the overall social benefits of a minor restriction on personal liberty are persuasive to a person of conscience. But by making the conscientious choice, the arguably moral and considerate choice - indeed, the sane choice compulsory, we replace conscience with compliance and pretend they are the same thing.

I would use a properly-designed safety belt whether or not it were mandatory. I do it mindfully, every single time, even though the car I drive has a full set of airbags. It's part of the ritual that puts me in a responsible mindset for driving. And frankly, I do not care to include the "freedom" to exit my vehicle via the windshield as part of my personal portfolio of liberties!

Should we try and legislate responsible behavior? That is the liberal excuse for fiddling with people's freedom to make personal choices. In very rare cases, your more enlightened liberals see the idea of providing access to "better" choices to be acceptable; more often they try to enact laws they know will not be respected in private and certainly cannot be detected or prosecuted without some intrusion into constitutionally-protected rights.

In a trial balloon that could remove all metaphor from the phrase "nanny state," the assemblywoman announced plans last week to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for parents to spank their own children under the age of 4. Convicted fanny-slappers would face up to one year in jail or a $1,000 fine.

Conservatives prefer to artificially increase the consequences of choices they disapprove of, then point to the artificial consequences as justification for advising against "irresponsible behavior." I do not care to concede any duty to be "responsible" to even the most benificant tyranny; at most, I will comply when it's not convenient or personally profitable to evade the tyrant's rule.

But neither approach to coercion of "good behavior" is any more reasonable; both take responsibility OUT of the hands of the individual and place it into the hands of some form of self-perpetrating elite, who, by virtue of recognizing one another as being worthy by virtue of some intangible and largely irrelevant commonality, such as Yale or the Episcopal faith, are of course better qualified to assume the burden of being responsible for the "little people."

Neither better motives nor more competence than those I cynically allege change my objection to any degree. Indeed, I disqualify myself explicitly as being of sound enough judgment to be either right OR left "enough" to decide what other people "should" be doing when they are minding their own business and enforcing my will in that regard. (I am, of course, always willing to consult with responsible individuals on matters within my competent purview.)

Distorting the consequences of irresponsibility, either by overly padding the corners of life or by breeding werewolves to prowl outside the "designated safe areas," Liberty Herself is raped. There can be no effective liberty with out the ability to make a broad range of choices, be responsible for the consequences of those choices and have those choices and consequences bear some understandable relationship.

The rewards and the costs of living as you choose, based on your own understanding of your personal needs and individual desires should be in balance with the choices you make. That is true Liberty and actual Justice.

Until that very simple concept of fairness is re-established, honored and insisted upon by every free person in this society, we will not live in the free and open society we have been told exists in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."

That may be effected by the stroke of a pen. All we need do is choose - as a block of freedom loving people - to recognize that the Unenumerated Rights ARE the right to choose for one's own individual sake, according to one's own perception of individual benefit, and most importantly, the most important of all enumerated rights - the right to be wrong. Yes, we do have the right to bear responsibility for being wrong, to accept and pay the due and just consequences that always flow from a bad choice, whether or not there's any recognition of it in law - and learn from it.

A free people - a people who are raised to tend to their own and govern themselves - have no need for coercive government, or indeed, any shred of external government they do not actively subscribe to.

If government - as a social institution - were restricted to doing only those things that enough people wanted done and were willing to make an individual choice to support, it would still have more to do in theory than it could achieve in practice.

This comes to be from a simple precept. People who are willing and able to govern themselves in all respects that they are interested in acting need no external government. To the extent they wish to act outside of their competence or experience, they may wish to abate their risks, for the price of screwing up at the expense of other people is a considerable consequence. And ultimately, unavoidably and necessarily those who demonstrate the unwillingness or inability to govern themselves will have to accept some form of restricted covenant upon their liberty that will assure those affected by their poor choices that both justice and prudence are satisfied.

Nonetheless, the fact that some cannot or will not be responsible for the consequences of their actions is no argument against the majority of those who are responsible and do choose to cope with the consequences of their choices.

Many on the Right like to use the term "personal responsibility" in ways that have no relationship whatsoever to the concept above. They mean it in the sense that you are personally responsible for visibly conforming to some external standard of behavior and must accept what arbitrary consequences that may be imposed upon you for being caught acting in private against those precepts.

The general lack of predictable and just outcomes in our system of justice is due to a simple fact; our system of justice is not about you, either as victim nor perpetrator; it's about a form of social justice and social regulation. Any individual justice is at best an accidental side-effect to a process that is brutally indifferent to the harm it causes in the process of "sending the right message."

The alternative, we are told, would be Chaos. And most fear chaos, flux and uncertainty to the point where we are willing to tolerate nearly any restriction upon our rights to avoid that fear.

But fear of unalloyed chaos is universal that we can be assured that no great amount will ever exist; all we need do is re-examine our constitution, which is our primary social compact in the United States, a document that sprang in it's from the best and most influential minds of America and Europe. It's very much more than our own private compact; it illustrates principles that are rooted in the bones of history and every act of regulatory futility and governmental abuse that predates it. It is a document of vast hope and even greater cynicism.

It sets up a mechanism whereby people in manageable chunks may regulate themselves as they see fit in concordance, while permitting dissent within and, should that prove futile, explicitly permitting people to "vote with their feet," to find a State that offers a social compact more suited to them and their needs.

The Federal Government was created as a check on those states putting too many restrictions on individuals, and as a means of organizing matters that were in the common interest of all states - such as a common defense, or the critical issues of interstate commerce, which are not things you might think of - what can and cannot be transported due to it's effect upon the morals of the innocent, but practical matters such as the maximum draft of a barge, a common standard of time, of wagon-gauges (so that wagons and carriages will create standard ruts and therefore avoid perfectly predictable problems.)

In other words, when there must be a standard chosen in order for a market to exist at all, you need an authority on the standards to make an acceptable choice from a wide array of possible alternates in cases where competition between standards would be foolish - like railroads and electrical plugs.

These are all cases where my "liberty" to chose between a dozen competing standards may interfere with my effective ability to buy and use an appliance I need in the place where I live. Increasingly, the choice of a reasonable standard is outside the competence of specialists.

This is the sort of thing that the best sort of government does best has been proven to work rather well even in the effective absence of anything we'd think of as government.

alt.config is pretty much all the government that Usenet Alt.* hierarchy has, is comprised of anyone and everyone worldwide that has an interest in the Usenet Alt.* hierarchy and it operates largely by consensus and common sense. That is also true of Usenet in a larger sense; the only penalty that can be assessed against those who violate a Big 8 newsgroup charter is to lose one's ability to connect to the Internet, and that penalty is assessed on a case-by-case, peer-by-peer basis.

Those persons and ISP/Hosts/servers who are locked off part or all of the "backbone" have every right - and a fair amount of practical ability - to route around the backbone. Furthermore, if too many people are restricted from "the" backbone, they can and will build "the other" backbone.

This is a model for rational self-government that depends on actual, predicable human behavior based in individual self-interest balanced against other, competing self-interests. It works, and it works rather well. Not only that, it is not possible to sabotage and subvert it by speaking one way and acting in another; the system depends on the actual behavior of participants to regulate itself, and to determine where and when boundaries must be drawn.

On the Internet, there are no crimes of thought or of motive. The Internet cares only about traffic, and whether you are placing more of a load on the system than you are contributing. Nor does the fact that the calculation is sloppy, dynamic and designedly imprecise of any great bother to most. So long as the signal-to-noise ratio is acceptable, it works as well as it needs to.

It is a new world view and an intuitively obvious demonstration of what is possible. There is one great truth that history paints with relentless precision; when a general perception of a better and more useful way of seeing the world and interacting with each other becomes widespread, it will come to pass.

[Jan 24, 2007: Substantially revised and updated to correct errors and include reference to the California Anti-Spanking initiative.]

tag: Internet, alt.config, chaotic systems, free speech, ethics, social control, discipline, punishment, politics, sustainability, liberalism, radicalism, constitution, constitutional, choice, bill of rights, ethical realism, authoritarianism, anti authoritarianism, moralism, individualism, morality, pragmatism, spanking, responsiblity, consequences, justice Grizwold v Connecticut, Justice, 9th Amendment, Unenumerated Rights, anti-authoritarian, drug war, energy policy

Give a Clue this Christmas!

My Latest Autism Designs and what they mean.

People who are neurotypical tend to think in boxes. One problem with being on the Autistic Spectrum is that you tend to not think in boxes. As far as I can tell, our thought process is highly relational. We tend to not even SEE the boxes and we don't think in a binary way at all.

A great number of problems come from the inability to understand that different people can have starkly different ways of understanding the world around them.

We tend to assume that people who came up with a functional solution for a problem came to it in the same way; indeed, by way of the same initial perceptions. Autistics and Aspies are as guilty of this as anyone; indeed, it's been studied within the AS population. The reason it's not been studied within the NT population is simple; in the case of NT's, the assumption that another person has a thought process that works like yours does is statistically likely to be correct.

So, when an autistic person makes this unwarranted assumption, it's called "mind blindness" and the autistic is gently handed a clue in the form of "social stories." When an NT does it, it's in the form of an organization called "Cure Autism Now."

If "autistic thought" were not valuable, there would not be such a roster of famous thinkers, such as Einstein and Newton now thought to have been probably autistic to some degree. By the same token, it should be a profound clue that there are courses to teach neurotypicals to "think outside of the box," and almost all higher education is aimed at rooting out simplistic, either-or thinking and to over-ride fear and submission responses when you have to communicate about or defend your work.

The ability to think and function outside of the box is an asset of significant value; recognising that is especially important if you are planning to "do something for autistics." Their ability to function in 'in an appropriate way' is limited, but that does not imply their ability to function, given an appropriate context is as limited as it appears. The trick is to find that context; and in that context they will not have so much difficulty "being appropriate."

There's no area where this insight is more critical than in regards to the parents of autistics themselves.

Make no mistake; autism can be a crippling condition, and it's made worse by being a condition where you absolutely must depend upon others to accommodate your needs and accept limitations that those without the condition cannot easily see or understand. But even the most obviously disabled "autist" is as severely affected by presumptions of how their disability affects them and even more by refusal of others to accept our word for the accommodations we need.

This following paragraph is emblematic of the crippling parental fears that the 800-lb gorilla of the pro-cure movement exploits for funding and validation:

You are never prepared for a child with autism. You will gradually come to believe it, but never fully accept it, get used to it, or get over it. You put away the hopes and dreams you had for that child - the high school graduation, the June wedding. Small victories are cause for celebration - a word mastered, a dry bed, a hug given freely. - FAQs about Autism: Cure Autism Now

Those of us who object to such fear, panic and the pervasive bigotry that exists with in the pro-cure movement - as well as it's seemingly obvious ethical deficits are pretty soundly attacked, with all kinds of terrible motives assigned us. (Theory of Mind, eh?)

A great deal of the work on the support groups that accept AS persons as contributors - something of a rarity - is to get non-AS people to accept that our "inability to cultivate friendships" is not a crippling condition to us. Once we have our one or two friends - friends as geeky and weird as us, generally speaking, we are done. My personal limit is two, and what NT's call "friendships," I now interpret as "Acquaintances." Yes, of course that has profound effects in terms of my ability to sustain a social network, and that has cost me many opportunities; indeed even jobs. I try and work things so that one of my two has the social skills I lack and the willingness to use them on my behalf.


Unfortunately, there is a lot of very bad advice out there and some very bizarre ideas as to what will be helpful to people such as I, who are on the spectrum and who are nonetheless potentially articulate and intelligent beings. Mostly this revolves around the idea that a bad job of conforming to the expectations of others is superior to a good job of being me. Here's Lennie Schafer on the topic of "fake autistics" like me.

(What about "high functioning autism" and how does that fit in? Simply put, it doesn't fit in anywhere. High functioning autism is not clinically defined and is not in the DSM-IV, and for good reason. High functioning autism is an oxymoron. If one meets the criteria for a diagnosis of autism, by definition one cannot be high-functioning. It would be as silly as the term sharp-eyed blindness.) (1)

So why would a handful of people, amongst a few others, who apparently are for the most part Aspergers, if anything, want to identify themselves autistic? Perhaps because autism is a profound disability and Aspergers is a disorder that is mostly not. Autism thus carries more moral weight than Aspergers and therefore has more moral clout for self-esteem building political and social agendas. "We autistics don't want to be cured" carries much more punch than "We Aspergers don't want to be cured", especially given the reality that there is no movement anywhere that seeks to "cure" those with Aspergers into being anything else.(2)

Aspergers-labeled alone, they would be ignored by the press and would be denied the juicy sense of empowerment that would come with a high-profile "oppressed minority" movement article like the one in the liberal New York Times. (3) (4)

The New York Times reporter failed to do a journalist's most basic homework. She failed to check the credentials of those doing the complaining, despite my urging. Anyone can call themselves autistic and write cranky letters to the editor. So how does someone determine if a person is truly autistic,or is an autism imposter with Aspergers? Ask to see their diagnosis. If someone claims to have autism for purposes of making some political statement, ask them to prove it. In any of the correspondence I have had with the autism "imposters", not one has ever supplied such documentation. (5) Of course, it is highly unlikely to ever see it. The irony here is that if someone has enough language skills to effectively complain about the treatment of autistics, then they themselves cannot be autistic.(6) Apparently more than one big city newspaper has failed to see through this deception, so eager are they to get an unusual victim story into print. Can we afford to allow the interests of our autistic children and everyone else "on the spectrum" to be pushed out of the public eye and displaced by a handful of imposters crying a contrived victimhood? Who speaks for autism? Not this bunch.

Note that he, and those like him don't like being quoted, even under "fair use" constraints.

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Of course, if I committed so many foolish rhetorical errors in public, I'd prefer not to be used as a hideous example either.

1. Argument from Authority. Of course, the process of determining what goes into the DSM-IV is pure and objective science .
2. Aspergers is, in fact an autistic spectrum disorder and has quite a range of effects. As a step-parent of a diagnosed Aspie, I'm very aware of the fact that there are very significant issues involved. They are not so inconvenient to US, as parents. They are going to affect HIM quite significantly unless we find some adaptive strategies that work for him.
3. As opposed to the entirely legitimate empowerment that comes from suffering the hideous, horrendous burden that is Autism.
4. Of course, it's a liberal thing to be concerned about the civil rights of children being abused and neglected for the sake of the convenience and social comfort of their conservative parents. This is the root host for "Autism, A Debilitating Disease, not a Culture," a page that links to both Free Republic and Free Dominion, while telling Canadians they a vaccilating, unpatriotic fools for not joining the "Coalition of the Willing." Snark aside, the fact that this site, is associated with Authoritarian Right Wingers explains a lot about the entire, very authoritarian "curebie" movement.
5. For myself, I want to see Lennie's MENSA results, his HIV status and full financials proving he's not unduly profiting from his activism before I deign to speak with him. I suspect he's unworthy of my attention, but if he proves otherwise, I will of course listen.
   
6. Factually untrue.

Unpuzzled is my most militant anti-curebie design, with the slogan, "help find a clue."

I know, it's rude and confrontational, but I've found that sometimes you need to swat people with a clue-by-four in order to startle them enough so they actually listen.

Those "seeking a cure" tend to ignore everything from those of us who ARE on the spectrum because it doesn't fit into to their mindsets, just as they reject "inappropriate" responses to communications from their autie and aspie children.

This is especially true of issues about communication style, reasonable accommodation and most importantly, the concept that a difference need not be AS disabling as it seems from an "NT" perspective. And, speaking as someone who's gone round and round on this at various times and under various circumstances, those who most boldly wave the "puzzle ribbon" seem at times to be making a point of their puzzlement, and their inability to understand to be the issue of auties and aspies.

See point above about how many friends and relationships an autie or aspie needs in an emotional sense. We do not absolutely require a relationship with the biological parental units. It's a nice thing to have, but we cannot and some quantity of will not be as easily coerced by family emotional ties as neurotypicals can be. This is not just because we have a "faulty" connection between emotions and reasoning. Our reasoning is not emotional, and our emotional responses seem to be quite different - across the board. Put two aspies in the same room and they will communicate quite well indeed - but their body language, topic choices and intuitive negotiations of "status" will be starkly different - and one of the greatest differences is the relative lack of huge tooth-bearing grins with full eye-contact.

To an aspie, to most sensible primates and all cats I've ever met, bare teeth and a full-on gaze is, at the very least, a statement of territorial or situational dominance, inviting a ritual contest of wills to determine who will be in charge and who will submit. Your typical aspie doesn't wish to play that game, having no need or real desire to join your pack, so if you do see them bare their teeth - it's probably in the context of a genuine, non-ritualized warning that Bad Things Will Suddenly Occur If You Do Not Go Away NOW.

What part of "Agggh! [flap flap flap] [throw object] LEAVE ME ALONE" is unclear to you people?

The "Unsmily" design honors the "aspie smile," a neutral expression that essentially means "hailing frequencies open." That look of slightly blank attention is a sign that an aspie or autistic is willing to let you talk at them for a while. Indeed, oft-times we are listening so hard that we are not thinking about what we will say next.

No pointless social noises please! Talk about something that is both objectively important and something within the realm of my interest and ability to have an opinion on. Make a full statement, then shut up and let me talk at YOU for a while. Then it's your turn.

Appalling, isn't it?

Well, that is the way aspies and auties communicate best - asynchronously. The full give and take of an NT conversation is difficult for us, and those of us that can manage it are doing it because we realize that style of communication is important to our NT friends all out of proportion to anything actually communicated. Mostly we grunt and make what experience has taught us to be socially appropriate noises at the expected times.

We are quite unlikely to put up with attempts to get us to conform to your expectations of what people like you should be. We are not 'like you,' and while we do very clearly appreciate that you have social advantages we do not, and we all understand that any parent would wish their child to have every possible advantage - we also know that many of those "advantages" come with a price. Some of those prices are ones we cannot pay - and for many of us, compromising who we are or being less than honest about what we know to be true is a price we will not pay - no matter how politically incorrect it may be to point out that the emperor has no clue.

In case you'd forgotten, the President is a lying' bastard.

Bush admits it right to their faces because he's been rankly lying about anything and everything ever since he ran for president and never, not once, paid a penalty for it. Think about it carefully--for anyone else a public admission of lying would be absolutely devastating on a professional and personal level.

Sorry, dear, I lied about sleeping with that perky admin half your age. No big, right? Yeah, boss, I said I delivered all those parts when I actually drank beer for two hours. So?

But for George Bush implacable rules of life just vanish, so he doesn't care, admit it right out loud on the record, why not? This horrifying national psychosis--words chosen with great attention--was very carefully and deliberately enabled by The Washington Post as they scrubbed their stories to hide the lying.

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Now, it's a Bad Thing to lie to the American People and to Congress. Particularly to members of Congress who's campaigns were damaged with all the "stay the course" rhetoric and public defense of Rummy right up to the "Heave Ho" moment.

But, hey, such trivial considerations of consequence are beneath our "decider." I can't complain about the outcome, of course. I merely point out that trusting a known and famous liar ain't the path of prudence, as many Republicans found to their cost this past election.

And meanwhile, the WaPo is trying to revise history - unaware of the Google Cache and The Memory Hole, apparently. These days, revising web history is merely an amusing spectacle of futility, rather like a cat covering up on linoleum.

I blogged you so!

"The profile of corruption in the exit polls was bigger than I'd expected," Rove tells TIME. "Abramoff, lobbying, Foley and Haggard [the disgraced evangelical leader] added to the general distaste that people have for all things Washington, and it just reached critical mass."

Compare and contrast

I forgive the folks of Elko and thousands of other deeply conservative towns across the nation for being in a state of shock and denial, for they cannot imagine how anyone who lives by their own virtues could screw up so badly. It is literally inconceivable; it should be a matter of practical impossibility due to bone-deep, value driven integrity that is the soul of small-town conservatism

Well, I'm sad to say this, but folks like George Bush and a thousand others took advantage of your preconceptions of how things ought to be. They said all the right words in public, and you figured that since you have integrity, they did too.

Sorry about that. I feel your pain. You see, I grew up in an area like that, where people had to rely upon one another, expected to be able to, and could. The closet volunteer fire department was a solid 15 miles away, the closet hospital was 45 minutes on dry roads in a fast car - and they were never dry. If you heard three shots in rapid succession, you grabbed a rifle and a first aid kid and ran toward the sound, because there was a broken leg or worse.

And when you grow up in such a place, it's really crushing to find out that people from the big city don't share those essential values. Well, not the rich ones, anyhow.

I'm going to be charging 15% more per post now. Just thought I'd let you know.