Demonise. (Or how removing the humanity of your opponent negates your argument.)

Wherever you go, when the subject of conversation turns to hideous, mind-boggling acts of evil, you will often find people leaping to conclusions. Whether those conclusions are about the perpetrator or the circumstances, generally, those conclusions form part of a psychological defensive reaction.

Wanting a divorce. A consequence of bad social policy that nobody likes to talk about.

“You know, Charles, I used to think it was going to be you and me against the world,” Mystique says. “But no matter how bad the world gets, you don’t want to be against it, do you? You want to be a part of it.” Take out a few words here and there (primarily from the start), and you have the essence of what I sent in a text message to my mother whilst I was unable to sleep a handful of nights ago.

Why I have not commented about the Eastwood debacle until now.

I will give it to you straight. Even though I am very interested in American politics as it affects the autistic and enforcement of their basic Human rights, unfortunately that same interest also makes me reluctant to read news about the Republican party and their doings. Maybe at some point, I will write my own commentary about how the Republican party that exists now, and existed during my lifetime so far, is a very different beast to the Republican party that Baby Boomers and such grew up with. But for now, I thought I would add my observations concerning Clint Eastwood and the debacle he made for his fellow Republicans a matter of weeks ago now.

Just to reiterate: sterotyping hurts.

Whenever I start to really think about things like culture or how I look at others around me, I start to ask questions. Why do I see people in the manner that I do? How did we reach this point? Are the ways in which I see this person or this group of people fair? Questions like that can keep a philosophical person up at night, and I think it is only fair that these questions get proper exploration.

Identity and respect… how the two combine.

It has occurred to me that I do not write nearly enough (in my view at least) about autism, what place there is in this world for me as an autistic adult, or the way forward for the autistic. I will try to correct this as best I can, but as anyone with a WordPress account knows, one can also look at their own statistics and see for themselves which tags and categories on their site are getting the most reads. Presently, the Media category gets nearly twice as many reads as does Autistic Identity, and a hundred more than its nearest competitor, Social Studies.

Militant autistic manifesto: If we are in this together, why am I so afraid you are going to sell me out?

One of the worst, most deceitful gambits that the curebie movement has come up with to date is the whole “theory of mind” or “lack of empathy” gambit. Seriously, if you are going to try to blur the line between autistic and psychopath, you need to work a lot harder these days than you did in the 1980s, people. But having said all of that, it is worth talking about a few things before I get to my main point.