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Trolls and WP Threads
posted at 08:12 am on 03-22-2009
Past threads on Trolls and Wrongplanet (I'll continue to add to this list)
[url=Asperger's Syndrome and the Internet Troll]"[b]Asperger's Syndrome and the Internet Troll[/b]"[/url]
[url=http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt64042.html][b]"Innocent People Being Accused of Trolls"[/b][/url]
was posted by Spokane Girl after she was accused of being a troll in the thread
[url=http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt46703.html]"[b]Current List of Trolls"[/b][/url]
Here's a thread about how Asperger people are being singled out as a kind of troll:
[url=http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt55021.html]"[b]WP mentioned in WIRED magazine article about Trolls[/b]"[/url]
(Comments)
"Dealing with Manipulative People" -- Excerpt
posted at 01:19 pm on 03-20-2009
I found a small tutorial, "Dealing with Manipulative People", that has a summary from a book outlining manipulative people and how to deal with them, etc. It was such a brief and easy-to-read tutorial that I really want to post it here because it's so helpful.
This is not intended to be targeted at any individual, really. I remember from a comment I made earlier in this thread about whether or not lying and deception is a part of manipulation, and this tutorial outlines what roles deceptive behavior ("covert aggression") plays in manipulation and control. I like the below because it lists the forms that some of that deceptive behavior takes, which is good specific info for people who lack Theory of Mind. Because I need specifics like that, I'm posting it here for others too.
The link above is to a summary of the book. Below is an edited version of the summary at (url=http://www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing11.html):
[b][u]Dealing With Manipulative People[/b][/u]
An Excerpt from the book: In Sheep's Clothing
By George K. Simon
[b][u]Two Basic Types of Aggression[/b][/u]
There are two basic types of aggression: overt-aggression and covert-aggression. When you're determined to have something and you're open, direct and obvious in your manner of fighting, your behavior is best labeled [b]overtly aggressive[/b]. When you're out to "win," dominate or control, but are subtle, underhanded or deceptive enough to hide your true intentions, your behavior is most appropriately labeled [b]covertly aggressive[/b]. Now, avoiding any overt display of aggression while simultaneously intimidating others into giving you what you want is a powerfully manipulative maneuver. That's why covert-aggression is most often the vehicle for interpersonal manipulation....
[b][u]Acts of Covert-Aggression vs. Covert-Aggressive Personalities[/b][/u]
Most of us have engaged in some sort of covertly aggressive behavior from time to time. Periodically trying to manipulate a person or a situation doesn't make someone a covert-aggressive personality. Personality can be defined by the way a person habitually perceives, relates to and interacts with others and the world at large....
[b][u]The Process of Victimization[/b][/u]
For a long time, I wondered why manipulation victims have a hard time seeing what really goes on in manipulative interactions. At first, I was tempted to fault them. But I've learned that they get hoodwinked for some very good reasons:
A manipulator's aggression is not obvious. Our gut may tell us that they're fighting for something, struggling to overcome us, gain power, or have their way, and we find ourselves unconsciously on the defensive. But because we can't point to clear, objective evidence they're aggressing against us, we can't readily validate our feelings....
The tactics manipulators use can make it seem like they're hurting, caring, defending, ..., almost anything but fighting. ...
All of us have weaknesses and insecurities that a clever manipulator might exploit. ...
[b][u]Recognizing Aggressive Agendas[/b][/u]
Accepting how fundamental it is for people to fight for the things they want and becoming more aware of the subtle, underhanded ways people can and do fight in their daily endeavors and relationships can be very consciousness expanding. Learning to recognize an aggressive move when somebody makes one and learning how to handle oneself in any of life's many battles, has turned out to be the most empowering experience for the manipulation victims with whom I've worked. ...
[b][u]Defense Mechanisms and Offensive Tactics[/b][/u]
Denial – This is when the aggressor refuses to admit that they've done something harmful or hurtful when they clearly have. It's a way they lie (to themselves as well as to others) about their aggressive intentions. This "Who... Me?" tactic is a way of "playing innocent," and invites the victim to feel unjustified in confronting the aggressor about the inappropriateness of a behavior. It's also the way the aggressor gives him/herself permission to keep right on doing what they want to do. ...
Selective Inattention – This tactic is similar to and sometimes mistaken for denial It's when the aggressor "plays dumb," or acts oblivious. When engaging in this tactic, the aggressor actively ignores the warnings, pleas or wishes of others, and in general, refuses to pay attention to everything and anything that might distract them from pursuing their own agenda. Often, the aggressor knows full well what you want from him when he starts to exhibit this "I don't want to hear it!" behavior. By using this tactic, the aggressor actively resists submitting himself to the tasks of paying attention to or refraining from the behavior you want him to change. ...
Rationalization – A rationalization is the excuse an aggressor tries to offer for engaging in an inappropriate or harmful behavior. It can be an effective tactic, especially when the explanation or justification the aggressor offers makes just enough sense that any reasonably conscientious person is likely to fall for it. ...
In the story of little Lisa, Mary felt uneasy about the relentlessness with which Joe pursued his quest to make his daughter an obedient, all-A student once again. And, she was aware of Lisa's expressed desire to pursue counseling as a means of addressing and perhaps solving some of her problems. Although Mary felt uneasy about Joe's forcefulness and sensed the impact on her daughter, she allowed herself to become persuaded by his rationalizations ...
Diversion – A moving target is hard to hit. When we try to pin a manipulator down or try to keep a discussion focused on a single issue or behavior we don't like, he's expert at knowing how to change the subject, dodge the issue or in some way throw us a curve. Manipulators use distraction and diversion techniques to keep the focus off their behavior, move us off-track, and keep themselves free to promote their self-serving hidden agendas.
Lying – It's often hard to tell when a person is lying at the time he's doing it. Fortunately, there are times when the truth will out because circumstances don't bear out somebody's story. ...
Covert Intimidation – Aggressors frequently threaten their victims to keep them anxious, apprehensive and in a one-down position. Covert-aggressives intimidate their victims by making veiled (subtle, indirect or implied) threats. ...
Guilt-tripping – One thing that aggressive personalities know well is that other types of persons have very different consciences than they do. Manipulators are often skilled at using what they know to be the greater conscientiousness of their victims as a means of keeping them in a self-doubting, anxious, and submissive position. The more conscientious the potential victim, the more effective guilt is as a weapon. ...
Shaming – This is the technique of using subtle sarcasm and put-downs as a means of increasing fear and self-doubt in others. Covert-aggressives use this tactic to make others feel inadequate or unworthy, and therefore, defer to them. It's an effective way to foster a continued sense of personal inadequacy in the weaker party, thereby allowing an aggressor to maintain a position of dominance....
Playing the Victim Role – This tactic involves portraying oneself as an innocent victim of circumstances or someone else's behavior in order to gain sympathy, evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. ...
Vilifying the Victim – This tactic is frequently used in conjunction with the tactic of playing the victim role. The aggressor uses this tactic to make it appear he is only responding (i.e. defending himself against) aggression on the part of the victim. It enables the aggressor to better put the victim on the defensive. ...
Playing the Servant Role – Covert-aggressives use this tactic to cloak their self-serving agendas in the guise of service to a more noble cause. It's a common tactic but difficult to recognize. By pretending to be working hard on someone else's behalf, covert-aggressives conceal their own ambition, desire for power, and quest for a position of dominance over others. ...
Seduction – Covert-aggressive personalities are adept at charming, praising, flattering or overtly supporting others in order to get them to lower their defenses and surrender their trust and loyalty. Covert-aggressives are also particularly aware that people who are to some extent emotionally needy and dependent (and that includes most people who aren't character-disordered) want approval, reassurance, and a sense of being valued and needed more than anything. ...
Projecting the blame (blaming others) – Aggressive personalities are always looking for a way to shift the blame for their aggressive behavior. Covert-aggressives are not only skilled at finding scapegoats, they're expert at doing so in subtle, hard to detect ways.
Minimization – This tactic is a unique kind of denial coupled with rationalization. When using this maneuver, the aggressor is attempting to assert that his abusive behavior isn't really as harmful or irresponsible as someone else may be claiming. It's the aggressor's attempt to make a molehill out of a mountain.
(Comments)
Found a sockpuppet on WP
posted at 09:36 am on 03-20-2009
[quote="Abangyarudo"]
I can in fact manipulate people if I please and theres a certain amount of manipulation inherent in social relationships. My choice is to be as far away from that as possible. I don't know about the transperent line as I'm not really transparent even in times when I want to be.[/quote]
Yes, but you don't have Asperger syndrome.
You do exhibit manipulative behavior here. You have on at least 3 occasions attacked other users, using intentionally psychologically undermining
You are using at least one other sockpuppet -- the member with name "Le Petit Prince" as well as this user "Abangyarudo". Both have "prince"-named hotmail accounts, and both users attack and follow the same members here on WP. While the profiles are slightly different, in your posts you admit to being from Lebanon and other things that are the same as "Le Petit Prince" and vice versa.
You use the "Le Petit Prince" user to make provocative mysogynistic arguments with women. In fact, that user has "female" and "feminist" on the profile, which is untrue as you are male. You use the "Abangyarudo" to hit on AS females on this site, lurking here and flirting with them, inviting them to contact you. In this "Abangyarudo" sockpuppet, you claim that you have a lot of relationships with women and that you dump them while they want to continue to be with you. And in both sockpuppets ("Le Petit Prince" and "Abangyarudo" you have threatened to stalk me here on WP and give me a hard time.
Furthermore, in the "Abangyarudo" user, you admitted to attacking me as "Le Petit Prince" as you admitted to engaging in the conversations "Le Petit Prince" had with me when "Le Petit Prince" attacked me. Here is the post in which you ("Abangyarudo") admit that you were the person arguing with me in an argument that you describe and quote from:
(http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp2111800.html&highlight=#2111800)
That argument was between you and I when you were logged in as the "Le Petit Prince" sockpuppet, though. In other places on that thread and elsewhere you admit to be connected to the user "Le Petit Prince".
I have found other posts where, when you argue with other AS that you don't like, you use arguments that they have psychological problems and other undermining, manipulative tactics.
I think it is true that you are, as you admit, "manipulative", to say the least. You admit that and your behavior is consistent with that. Obviously you are able to lie and do it regularly and are good at it, given your sockpuppets and behavior on this forum toward females. Not only are you using at least two sockpuppets on this website, one to attack feminists and other females who annoy you as being to dominating, but another to hit on AS women. And you have attacked me personally using both sockpuppets, to increase the harassment effect from your misogynistic focus on me.
So for your post above, while it is true that you are manipulative, as you say, you don't have Asperger syndrome and your socially aggressive behavior is inconsistent with other AS. This is true for both your sockpuppets, "Le Petit Prince" and "Abangyarudo".
But you don't have Asperger syndrome. And given your behavior here, I question whether you are even AS or some kind of online game player/sexual predator.
(By the way, isn't it against the rules of WP to have multiple user names? I think that it's very confident of you that they won't enforce that rule, to use different sockpuppets to engage with the same female.)
(Comments)
Story of my trauma -- Why I have PTSD
posted at 09:24 am on 03-19-2009
I have PTSD, pretty bad.
I have repeatedly been targeted by sociopaths when I'm in an academic environment.
At one university a professor became romantically obsessed with me and started stalking and sexually harassed me. He even went so far as to hack my student records in the school computer system and showed up at my classes making threatening remarks. He wasn't the sociopath, just clinically depressed (as later court papers revealed). When after several months of this I became unable to study and work, and started breaking down, I reported him to the university office for handling student complaints. There, I was misled and abused some more. The school had some sociopath in the office handling student complaints of discrimination and sexual abuse. The sociopath mistreated and bullied students and made all their complaints disappeared. I tried to fight back and expose him and the school set me up and brought false charges against me.
I carried my fight into the legal system, where it went up to the U.S. Supreme Court twice. In all that time, I got no interest or support from anyone. The ACLU and the National Womens' Law Center waded in a couple of times, but only on questions of law in the higher courts and wouldn't touch my personal claims. The state attorney general and other officials I tried to report the well-documented abuses to all laughed in my face or ignored me. Finally, 9 years into the court case, the sociopath in the school executive offices was busted for preying on underaged gay boys on the Internet, blackmailing sex from them and making pedophile pornography with them. He was busted and convicted. There was even incriminating evidence on his computer at the university when he was busted. And then the university made statements to the press about how amazed they were about the revelations about him, and this was during my lawsuit where they had been fighting against and suppressing my detailed descriptions of abuse for 9 years. They concealed the fact that he was in charge of handling (abusing) students complaining of sexual misconduct. The school and its faculty knew what this guy was and the kinds of things he did. He was useful to them to take out and harm student complaints of faculty sexual misconduct. I dismissed the case as pointless and totally worthless effort on my part, after he got convicted.
The university was George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The same school Alex (of WP) goes to. The sociopath convicted of pedophilia and extortion was Ronald Sinacore.
After recovering from the devastating trauma for several years, I went back to school, where a very prominent professor named Dennis Healy who had an Asperger kid befriended me and became my benefactor. But to make a long story short, he was just a sexually desperate loser and corrupt perverted jerk who thought I was an easy screw -- he thought he could take advantage of my AS naivete. When I didn't have sex with him and some sex addict did who was doing his junior associate (Jeffrey Sieracki) and hanging around his and John Benedetto's professional program, he started retaliating against me. The sex addict was the second sociopath. She had some kind of multiple personality disorder and had a different personality for each of the guys she was doing, including guys off Craigslist. She had a PhD in Electrical Engineering and acted like an elitist, bragging about food, clothes, drove a Mercedes and talked like an aristocrat. But she was probably the most ignorant and stupid street-whore personality I ever met. Despite her amazing social skills (she was a great actress and had good charisma) she was such a stupid, evil bitch she couldn't get real boyfriends. According to her, the longest she had had a real single boyfriend was one month. Her personal life basically consisted of sleeping around with her Internet f**k buddies and trying to persuade them into making her a real girlfriend, and having disingenuous, emotionally phony love affairs with very important, prominent married men (like my professor, Dennis Healy) who would treat her like a lady for a while. In addition to her harassment and psychological undermining of me, she would also corner me and unload dozens of hours of mentally ill, self-obsessed talk onto me. She was some kind of sociopathic narcissist who obsessed night and day about herself and beating down other women.
Before I associated with Dennis Healy, I told him my story and my problems, and he promised that, if I came to work with him, he'd intervene in case I encountered any harassment or abusers that I couldn't handle on my own. Apparently, that promise didn't apply when it was his mentally ill, jealous mistress who started to harass and undermine me. He let her harass me, disrupt my work, and he even ended up letting her micromanage my project with him according to her abusive whim. The clearest mental picture I have of this important, prominent mathematician now is how he got sexually excited and flushed when I tried to explain to him how she was harassing me and being abusive toward me, and how he just blew me off and let her unload on me for months, while she talked behind his back and told me stories about how lousy he was in bed and how he talked about his wife behind her back. This was a very bizarre and sick situation. Dennis Healy is a very, VERY respected man. He's a top influential program manager at DARPA - the United States' Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency and a key protege of Tony Tether, the Director of DARPA. He's also a sexually inadequate, corrupt man in his personal life.
The school engaged in much the same retaliations against me, only slightly less open and slightly more creative, as GMU did, when I tried to complain.
That was several years ago. I suffered a really, really bad relapse, worse than the first trauma. I'm still trying to recover. I have great difficulty trusting NTs and working in my profession. I think they're all corrupt, especially the really influential ones that everyone thinks are such great, honorable men that no one will ever talk bad about them. They can be the ones who take the most advantage of females without social skills, while everyone looks the other way. Dennis Healy surrounds himself with women admirers, for example, while everyone thinks he's such a sweet guy for being so supportive of female professionals. I have very little trust of NTs and NT world, since I've seen such open abuse at the kinds of institutions that we all look up to.
In my opinion, if you don't have social skills, you can be eaten alive in NT world in the modern world. Just as in the Middle Ages, autistic women were probably killed as witches on a regular basis. Isn't that the stereotype of the unkempt, unpopular wise woman living alone at the edge of the village? Every age has their way of persecuting and mistreating the socially vulnerable, while everyone looks the other way. I have just happened to see how it works in white collar society today, up close and personal, on two separate occasions.
IMO, the white collar American institutions are all pretty corrupt, from Wall Street to Washington, and their system of pretentious elitism is all hollow and phony. Any female AS who goes out there without social skills and something good others want to take advantage of is risking PTSD.
(Comments)
Natural Treatment for Diarrhea
posted at 03:23 pm on 03-16-2009
Someone posted a Q seeking help for this and I wrote this reply to them. I'm putting it here for future reference in case someone asks again. AS people can have a lot of digestive issues, and while this post is about food poisoning, the general info can be helpful.
"The biggest danger from diarrhea is becoming dangerously dehydrated and losing mineral salts, causing your electrolyte levels to fall dangerously. It sounds like you're doing the right things by getting gatorade. The electrolytes you don't want to get too low in are sodium, potassium, chloride, etc. Also, you want real dietary fiber, because the fiber will enter the intestines and will help stabilize the contents.
"So given the above, water, electrolytes and dietary fiber are natural treatments for diarrhea.
"To restore your electrolyte balance when you have diarrhea you are doing the right thing with gatorade. Foods like potatoes and bananas contain potassium. When you cook a potato, its dietary fiber breaks down, so bananas are a better choice, because they have both potassium and about 3 grams of dietary fiber each.
"Apples are a great diarrhea food because they have a dietary fiber in it, pectin, that helps the intestines work properly (if you are constipated, pectin helps your bowels move and if you have diarrhea it helps stabilize the contents.) "Kaopectate" is a product you can buy at the drugstore that uses pectin, but it's more expensive than apples and you get actual nutrition from apples. By eating foods with soluble fiber in the, you get nutrients as well as a diarrhea aid. If you try to eat crackers and other grains, try to get higher-fiber whole grain versions. Psyllium husks is another drugstore remedy that works for both diarrhea and constipation, because it contains a lot of fiber.
"Foods that have tannin in them help reduce intestinal inflammation and slow intestinal wall cell secretions (that cause excess water in the intestines). Regular black tea and berries like blackberries, blueberries and raspberries contain tannin.
"Food poisoning is a type of poisoning, and that means that there are toxins present that can damage tissue. Using activated charcoal according to directions for safe first aid poisoning doses might be overkill but might be helpful.
"Finally, you can take probiotics, like Acidophilus, which are friendly bacteria we are supposed to have in our intestines. You can usually buy these in a drugstore, too. The beneficial bacteria that helps us digest food can repopulate your gut with friendly bacteria and compete with the toxic bacteria from the spoiled food, helping to speed their passing.
"I'm not a doctor, and nothing I say should be taken as advice not to see a doctor for this. It's important to remember that the diarrhea can be a serious condition. You should get medical attention if it has gone on for a while and you are feeling increasingly worse, or aren't getting better, or don't feel that the toxic materials in the spoiled food are being cleared out of your system."
(Comments)
Suggested reading for what makes NTs tick socially
posted at 12:33 pm on 03-15-2009
(This is a cut and paste, and I'll clean up links later)
I have a lot of books, but I learn things in indirect ways. First I read randomly in low level stuff until I get a sense of the issues and concepts, and then I read more formal studies and data and then opinions of others.
I have social psychology books, that explain how people build a sense of identity and self-esteem, and once you understand that, it's a little easier to understand what ticks them off, what motivates them and what they fear. Peoples' sense of identity is where their Ego system (values and how they are valued) tie in with how they react to experiences with others and how they are treated.
That social psychology at the one-on-one level is how to understand what people want from each other and why they need to interact. That topic is "sociological social psychology." In addition to the social psychology literature, there is a lot of one-on-one reading material, from body language interpretation to how people lie. The Robert Greene "[url=http://www.amazon.com/Art-Seduction-Robert-Greene/dp/0142001198][b]Art of Seduction[/b][/url]" book would fall within the category of one-on-one interaction, but of a really sophisticated kind -- manipulation, like what a con artist or seductress does (some reader comments on Amazon.com are kind of interesting).
Sociology also examines groups and societies, and how people gain influence, allocate resources and compete. The stuff that Robert Greene's "[url=http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cg/Courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws_of_power.htm][b]48 laws of power[/b][/url]" covers is actually sociology -- applied practical group social psychology. Robert Greene's "48 laws of power" stuff is like Sun Tzu's "Art of War", and Machiavelli's "The Prince" in that it talks about how to get, use and protect influence in groups. These are more like practical handbooks for people who are in power or climbing the ladder. Sun Tzu's "[url=http://www.chinapage.com/sunzi-e.html][b]Art of War[/b][/url]" is an ancient Chinese war manual that is so wise, people read it as a metaphor for competing in life. [url=http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/macv.htm][b]Niccolo Machiavelli[/b][/url]'s "The Prince" is what people are referring to when they call someone "Machivellian". The book is about how a prince gains and keeps power among his court and subjects. The book itself, "[url=http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm][b]The Prince[/b][/url]" is a centuries-old classic and is online. Karl Marx is currently being rediscovered in sociology because [url=http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/marx/croce.htm][b]Marx's historical theories of society[/b][/url] are sound scientifically (even if his attempt to develop a utopia was not). The materialist theories of society also are referred to as "Historical Materialism" or "Political Economics", and study why groups and societies evolve the behaviors and patterns they do, from the context of who controls stuff people want and how people get more stuff (i.e. power)
Another way of examining behavior is a new economic approach, embodied in Stephen J. Leavitt's book "[url=http://books.google.com/books?id=LkQPOSXMUscC&dq=freakonomics&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=OCO9SavAA-OJtgecgoX4Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result][b]Freakonomics: the Hidden Side of Everything[/b][/url]". Leavitt takes a materialist tack on human behavior as an economist by studying the system of incentives and disincentives that surround white collar corruption. "Freakonomics" stuff usually explains some particular quirk or pattern of human corruption, and in the process the study ends up revealing interesting things about how people in groups behave in the presence of particular incentives and punishments, and their prejudices and assumptions. Leavitt's book is really fun, and has chapters in it like "Who cheats? Everyone cheats, Why people cheat." The really, really interesting thing about Leavitt's work and his book is that it turns out that white collar corruption is largely unconscious crime. I.e. the people often don't think of themselves as going over the line or hurting anyone, just taking advantage of the system. So most white collar criminals never even see themselves as bad, just helping themselves to an advantage that they think doesn't hurt anyone in particular. This is fascinating because it highlights the moral ambiguity behind a lot of unconscious abuse and exploitation, and because it's so relevant to what went wrong on Wall Street and in our federal government in the past decade.
What would be good reading? It depends on what level you're at in these topics. The thing is that so much of social theory is intangible, if you're reading above your level, it's hard to realize it and if you're mind-blind, like we are, its hard to skip levels. Maybe Greentea could give better recommendations.
If you're up to reading a college level textbook, a fast way to start is to slog through an introductory course, even though that is the least fun way to start on a subject. There is [url=http://novella.mhhe.com/sites/0072817186/student_view0/chapter1/chapter_summary.html][b]a good sociology book outline online[/b][/url]. If you can slog through it, the first few chapter summaries introduce the history of sociology and the major theories, like Marx's materialist theories of society. The later chapters go into sociological social psychology, like how we (or rather, how normal people) start forming their sense of identity and personality through each other. The book covers Mead and other major theories of other-and-self formation from social interaction. You can either get the book if you like the info in the outline, or just use the outline information as an intro to Google with, and learn from there.
For more neurological and physical oriented view of how people tick socially, the specialized topic of "psychological social psychology" is a more psychological version of social psychology than "sociological social psychology". The way psychologists study social psychology is more clinical and internal than the way sociologists do it, by generalizing into rules and laws of behavior.
(Comments)
Great Advice for Professionals
posted at 05:03 pm on 03-06-2009
There is so much great advice on WP on how AS can be more successful in the workplace, I've decided to aggregate some links to the posts.
Alba's great advice on being pleasant and interacting in the workplace:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp2086627.html&highlight=#2086627
(Comments)
Thought Police on a "Diversity Forum": Flaming Minority-View Opinions
posted at 06:20 am on 12-28-2008
The behavior is regarding the use of insults and flaming as a means of social control of majority viewpoints against minority views, including the discriminatory features of such activities.
We tend to view flame wars as personal, however, in the 3 threads I have been engaged in that became flaming, in each thread there was a minority view stated that evoked a visceral and contemptuous response from majority-view holders.
The first firestarter was a thread that a disruptive person ("troll"?) started, that asked "should girls be viewed as sex objects?". I stated that I felt that the thread was sexist and I was disappointed that the mods had not locked it as they had locked other threads started by this person. What ensued was my getting picked at by personal digs and confronted with full-on argumentation.
The second firestarter was a thread that someone who was pro-cure who posted a lot of lurid accusations about AS people, along with vague claims that they were attacked by "militant" anti-cure AS. Since this was the second thread alleging that "militant" anti-cure AS were attacking pro-cure people, in what appeared to be a straw-man attack on AS people, I challenged the assertions and stated my anti-cure beliefs. I was then attacked for many pages, during which I mostly did not respond.
The third firestarter was when I posted a thread alleging that a "teenaged male groupthink" dominated the site, and created poor forum content conditions on Love & Dating. I also used the words "Hi I.Q." and "High Functioning" in ways that others found offensive (which I later deleted). This brought people who were unrelated to the interests or topics in the thread out of the woodwork (who were apparently self-appointed young male groupthink spokesmen and their supporting chicks), who began a series of attacks on me that were much more personal and negative than the previous two. In this thread, I was explicitly stating my view that minority views were not welcome apparently at the site and that the behavior that they were engaging in was an example of "thought policing" that was intended to discourage and silence minority views.
This post examines flaming from a majority-minority view discriminatory standpoint. (more coming...)
__________
Wikipedia on "Flaming" (Internet)
Flaming is a hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users. Flaming usually occurs in the social context of a discussion board, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or even through e-mail. An Internet user typically generates a flame response to other posts or users posting on a site, and such a response is usually not constructive, does not clarify a discussion, and does not persuade others. Sometimes, flamers attempt to assert their authority, or establish a position of superiority over other users. Other times, a flamer is simply an individual who believes he or she carries the only valid opinion. This leads him or her to personally attack those who disagree. In some cases, flamers wish to upset and offend other members of the forum, in which case they can be called "trolls". Most often however, flames are angry or insulting messages transmitted by people who have strong feelings about a subject.
Some equate flaming with simply letting off steam, though the receiving party may be less than pleased. Similarly, a normal, non-flame message may have elements of a flame -- it may be hostile, for example -- but it is not a flame if its author seriously intends to advance the discussion. The word "flaming" is also sometimes used for long, intensive and heated discussions, even though insults do not occur.
Although the trading of insults is as old as human speech, flaming on the Internet, like many other online 'actions,' started in the Usenet hierarchies (although it was known to occur in the WWIVnet and FidoNet computer networks as well). Recently, several online forums have actively encouraged flaming amongst fellow posters.
FLAMING METHODS:
Flame reviews
Flame reviews are often used to insult the creator of a product (eg. a game, a story, or a video), but are particularly common on, but not restricted to, sites with poor review monitoring techniques. Since they are difficult to respond to, they rarely burst into prolonged online arguments, although they are intended to be both extremely annoying and hurtful (the two specific qualities required for a flame).
Flame reviews are often confused with destructive criticism. While non-constructive criticism is often painfully blunt, rude. and sometimes insulting, it never attacks the creators themselves, only their products. (eg. "The over descriptiveness and out of characterness of this story falls flat on its face!") In other words, the review is not made with malicious intent. The review may or may not be anonymous, because such reviewers rarely believe that they have actually said anything hurtful and so are not afraid of retribution.
Flame reviews, on the other hand, involve deeply personal attacks, often regarding the creator's sexuality, intelligence, choice of family or friends, with random cursing frequently thrown in. They are more likely to be anonymous and are intentionally insulting. If there is any reference to the product, it will be used to insult the creator (eg: "How stupid are you to have written this awful trash?"). A popular stereotype of a flame review is that it is badly spelt, typed in All Caps and contains either excessive punctuation or no punctuation at all, but none of this is compulsory.
Flame reviews and non-constructive criticism are usually only confused when the creator has never actually received a genuine flame. They are in fact very different and can be told apart on sight. However, both can severely emotionally hurt the receiver.
Flame reviewers are closely associated with Internet trolls.
Flame blitzkrieg
The using of multiple severe flames in quick succession to steamroll an opponent into submission. Sometimes multiple people with a similar opinion will participate. Sometimes one person will make multiple different flames, sometimes using alternate names to fake that they have backup (see also Sockpuppet).
Alternatively, the same identical flame may be used many times in succession - up to and over a hundred identical 'reviews' in situations where there is no limit to reviews and no way to catch the reviewer - copy-and-pasted into a review box by the same anonymous person. The 'review' may be extremely short and the same curse word pasted over and over in one review, then repeated in MORE reviews, it may be a filthy story pasted into the review box and posted repeatedly, or it may be the same flame posted repeatedly.
Holy wars
While a flame war is usually a particular spat of flaming, a holy war is a drawn-out disagreement that may last years or even span careers. For instance, younger Linux programmers who today have strong opinions on vi and emacs may not even have been born in 1976 when these editors were released. Other popular subjects include Windows versus Linux and the creation-evolution controversy.
Use of the term "holy war" implies that the root of the disagreement is a clash of values, and intractable of resolution except by agreeing to disagree. (This sort of flamewar requires the acceptance of differing opinions in order to end, as the length of a "holy war" clearly indicates that neither side is willing to change their minds or back down.)
Pie fights
A 'pie fight is a type of discourse specific to bulletin boards, blogs and other types of Internet forums. Pie fights are characterized by heated, emotional exchanges, and although they are typically of short duration, they can have a devastating effect on an online community. Pie fights can be started by Internet trolls who use baiting techniques to enrage Internet forum users so much that they post inappropriate and/or offensive messages. Unfortunately, this often results in disruption of the forum more than anything else.
The term "pie fight" is derived from a June 2005 event on Daily Kos, a liberal and progressive issues web site, in which site administrators accepted an advertisement that showed two scantily-clad women throwing pies and smearing each other with whipped cream and pie filling. This advertisement was for the TBS reality series The Real Gilligan's Island.
Despite the fact that the advertisement was only marginally related to the regular subject matter discussed on Daily Kos, it dominated the user diary entries and blog comments for several days. The animosity generated by the acceptance of this advertisement caused some established members of the Daily Kos community to cease participation in the forum that it provides.
Thought policing
Thought policing (taken from George Orwell's novel 1984) is when someone trolls the forums looking for posts that do not align with their political, religious, or moral values. When they find a post that they do not agree with, they post messages in that post to incite people to bring attention to that post to get it locked or deleted. This phenomenon is widespread in forums and motives can vary.
During the early days of Internet use, flaming could be considered an inside joke, a group game or even a participatory artistic activity. This can still be the case on forums and message boards which have a small number of regular users who know each other well. In this situation, flames are exchanged without ill-feeling and especially clever and humorous insults may be archived for the future enjoyment of users. In the 1980s when Bulletin Board Systems were becoming common, small and tight-knit online communities would often treat flaming as a litmus test for potential new members. If they weathered the attack, or better yet, joined in and returned as good as they got, they were worth keeping. An excellent example of one such board would be the FYAD subforum of the Something Awful community, which engages in constant vicious flamewars for both comedic value and to intimidate new users from posting. Especially humorous threads are archived in the FYAD section of the Comedy Goldmine. While those who participate in the 'art of flaming' may find it humorous, those who do not often find it hurtful and have their confidence shot down. Due to this, many web sites have had anti-flame groups spring up to get flamers banned from the site on behalf of those who have been hurt by an insulting flame. So far though, none of these groups have ever been successful in getting flamers removed from any sites, and more often than not the members of these groups are banned from websites themselves for harassing the flamers.
CAUSES OF FLAMING
There is no general agreement on the causes of flaming, although a recent study has led to somewhat conclusive evidence. Some common hypotheses are:
Some forms of flaming can be attributed to deeper social or psychological weaknesses, probably from lack of exposure to a broader spectrum of disciplines that result in self-control issues.
It is noted that Internet users are more likely to flame online than insult others in the real world, as the latter can lead to embarrassment and physical altercations, which online "anonymity" can avoid. Others urge against flaming, because people on the other side have feelings too.
Those guilty of flaming may justify it as getting even for having had their feelings hurt initially, so they see it as doing justice by inflicting serious emotional distress on another.
Some flaming may be done with no stronger motive than to get a reaction from the target of the flame, or for the feeling of power or moral freedom of causing emotional distress to another.
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(Comments)
What I think of suicidal people
posted at 09:36 am on 12-23-2008
There are many suicidal comments made in this forum. People with disabilities face a lot of abuse, on top of their challenges to develop themselves and live their lives.
The sad thing is that some of the things people get suicidal over is so transitory and not worth dying over. It's just as if they get stuck in some tunnel and don't know how to get out on their own.
IMO if they knew how to solve their immediate problem, and how unimportant fleeting pain and distress in compared with the bigger picture, they would not do it.
Any personal problem can be solved. You have to face them, and when you do, your life grows and takes on more meanings.
IMO that is why important professors turn into such egotistical, shallow, infantile jerks -- they exist in an ivory tower and as they gain influence, everyone starts agreeing with them, they start getting things with manipulation and favor networks, and they stop growing. The more they misuse their influence and power in their little kingdoms to compensate for their personal limitations and underdevelopment, the more they devolve into infantile grown men, smaller and smaller men with bigger and bigger Egos. They become like infantile, abusive aristocrats in Medieval times -- exploiting students callously, using each other, routinely cheating on their wives with sex they coerce from students and through favor trading for sex professionally.
Personal problems are meant to be solved. In fact, it is in the facing and solving of personal problems that depth, character, joy and greatness forms in people. Professional problem solving makes you a better professional, physical or survival challenges like climbing mountains or surviving a disaster with your wits makes you a more gifted athlete/soldier/adventurer. But personal problem solving makes you a greater person, and almost nothing else gives you as much bang for your buck in making your life richer and more meaningful than facing and dealing with your personal limitations and problems.
There is a saying in investing, about how you can find yourself in moments of crisis by not turning away from yourself:
"When a Man Stares Into the Abyss and sees nothing but darkness, this is the time that he finds his character. And it is his character, that keeps him from falling into the abyss."
There is something broken in the people who want to kill themselves, some inability to put their lives in perspective or inability to see that it is in facing personal problems and solving them, that ordinary people become great people. I view the AS the same way -- I have to face up to it, understand it and try to grow into it, even though I may never get control over the abuse and corruption that may flow my way.
You learn the personal dimension of facing up to yourself when you join the military and do dangerous things to save people or serve some great cause. I think some people who never sacrificed for others, never learn this. So it is the people who have put little of themselves on the line for others, who seem to be most willing to give up their own lives so cheaply.
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This is my thought in response to someone who started asking how would it be to stab your wrists, claiming that it's not selfish to commit suicide or ask about how to do it.
In my opinion, suicide is selfish.
Everyone suffers and struggles at some point in their lives. The ones who try to commit suicide unload their suffering onto everyone else around them who is not giving up. That's why girls don't like to marry guys who tried to commit suicide. What's the guy going to do when there are kids fighting and sick babies crying in the middle of the night, and you're sick too and can't get up? Shoot himself because life can become unmanageable hell sometimes, and leave you alone with a family on your own?
A lot of people with disabilities think about suicide when they are teens and young adults. A lot of normal people think about it.
So the poster asks, what would it be like to stab my wrists? My answer is that it would hurt like a bitch and then you'd be scarred for life.
And in the future any time some girl falls for you, you'd have to show her the scars on your wrist and explain that you used to think you were the center of the universe.
(Comments)
My AS Traits
posted at 07:54 am on 12-21-2008
SID, SOFT TOUCHES, STIMMING
Soft touch - Certain materials - Rubbing skin
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1935287.html#1935287
VOICE, SPOKEN SPEECH, SINGING, ETC.
Your speaking voice
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1935308.html#1935308
(Comments)
On Abuse, Bullying, Violence and Self Defense
posted at 07:02 am on 12-21-2008
[i]I wrote this in response to a question someone asked: when is it okay for an autistic person to be violent. This is a tough subject for people who get so routinely abused by those they trusted, who are often caretakers, teachers, fellow students, professionals and people who are respected in their groups and communities.[/i]
I am very defensive on account of my trauma experiences. I will beat the crap out of anyone who tries to physically abuse me.
I also have an extremely dim view of NT world. I think most of them are phony and corrupt and prey on others for gain. I see NT world as driven by Ego, delusion, narcissism and greed and if you don't keep them in line they will become quite abusive toward a helpless, vulnerable individual. As the Milgram experiment and Nazi Germany taught us, if enough people (or key insiders) of a group are engaged in sociopathic abuse or other bullying of a socially isolated individual or group, NTs do nothing to stop it (or join in).
For the above reasons, I strongly believe that in most cases of abuse, predation, discrimination, etc. "an eye for an eye" is what is necessary, in NT world, to keep abusers in line and your life under control, if you have a social disability.
So I believe in correctional discipline, on an individual level, when it comes to certain kinds of abuse, which is a kind of Constructonist theory of learning in life. If you don't hit back at people who hit for pleasure, they will continue and escalate their abuse, IMO, and that psychologically applies to NTs both individually and in groups. People who abuse most clearly understand the power dynamics of the abuse they dish out. So if someone attacks you by hitting you, to get the most correctional, defensive effect from your reaction, you should similarly hit them back (but harder and more painfully than they hit you). The best correctional defensive aggression is that which has the most correctional effect for the least amount of violence.
So I will hit back when hit, etc. But only in ways that I think are constructive. Mostly, this means verbal b/c you give feedback and information about what their behavior provokes, back to the person who offended you. And I have no problem attacking verbally someone who I think might be bullying me verbally, especially when my intent is to get them to leave me alone. I rarely let an insult, even implied, go unanswered, so people soon leave me alone if I don't like how they talk to me.
If someone attacks me physically, I will beat the crap out of them, which I am capable of doing even to men on account of my training and physical abilities. But only to the extent of getting them to leave me alone. So I wouldn't beat or kick someone when down, but would/will drive them off and incapacitate them as much as the circumstances indicate is necessary for me to be safe.
So to me, any abusive reaction (either verbal aggression or physical aggression) has to serve both correctional and self-defense functions, and then only enough to secure my safety or drive them off, etc. But within those parameters, I'm capable of unleashing a lot of fury in a burst, mostly when I feel in danger or threatened, on account of the energy from the PTSD.
In my natural personality -- i.e. pre-abuse, pre-trauma, I am extremely non-violent. I've heard some AS are extremely avoidant of inflicting harm on bugs, etc. That's me. I won't even kill flies that get into my house. I've gotten really good at catching flies, but if I can't catch one, he is allowed to live out his short life in my house. (That really bothers my husband). I'm not a vegetarian but I don't each much meat. When I do eat meat, it's in some nice dish or something. It's not really necessary for me to get a lot of my protein from meat, but I do think that it's important to have a natural diet and we evolved eating meat, so I don't exclude it from my diet. But it is something I've thought about. I don't like to kill anything, even plants!
It is because I'm one of those extremely pacifist, extreme nonviolent AS types, that I have such a structured system of measured response and defensiveness. I had to construct the system of measured response explicitly, to get sexual harassers, abuses, etc. under control for my life to be manageable.
A final note, and I want to add this b/c I saw in the news that the Seung Hui Cho (VA Tech shooter) emails were just released, IMO if anyone is being abused and feels they must act violently out of some delusion that it will do some good, that is a delusion.
There is no good to unbounded violence. All those male school shooters do who go on anti-bullying, justice-shooting rampages, have only internalized the evil aggression to which they were subjected by NTs and then by doing what they do, they become a part of that evil. There is no good in violence that purports to impose "justice". There is no "justice" in violence that mirrors abuse beyond that which it takes to defend yourself physically from physical abusers. To believe that one is an agent of righteousness or imposer of justice on the world is just another form of narcissistic bullying.
The NT world is fundamentally unfair, corrupt and exploitive. Trying to inflict justice on it through terrorism or violent attacks on those who didn't harm you directly, is to become part of the random evil and irrationality of the NT world.
Milgram Experiment:
http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm
Constructionist Learning Theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionist_learning
(Comments)
Why I have had some social experiences -- romance!
posted at 07:40 am on 12-20-2008
It's a little surprising to me other AS have had so few social interactions, when I hear some say they never had a casual conversation with someone longer than 10 minutes. But then, when I think about it, my true friendships were with men I was in relationships with.
I've stayed up for hours talking to guys I was interested in, on a couple of occasions. But even in relationships, I'm usually not a talker, except in areas of my special interests. Most conversation was incidental to being together, like in the car going someplace. When I have activity guy friends, these are not really talkers and we are just doing stuff. Apart from those few courting conversations that were long, and where the interest was more in the other person than the conversation itself, my conversational skills have been little more than desultory, disjoint comments up until about 5 years ago when I learned how to introduce topics that others might find interesting, like a funny new scientific fact about ants.
If it were not for sex and romance providing the context for a few conversations and having to talk to people incidentally, I would have had practically none of the socialization experiences I had. I would not have learned to get along with guys well enough to hang around in a room with anyone without being uncomfortable the whole time, and I certainly would not have learned how to have the few guy activity friends I've had in those mostly non-verbal, activity-based social experiences.
I'm starting to think that one reason I used to get so bored with a guy and have to move on after a while, is that my boyfriends and husbands were, each and one at a time, my whole social universe. After a while, anyone will get old and stifling, if they are your whole social universe. That is a lot to put on one man's shoulders.
It also explains why my social personality is arrogant. I expect everyone to be fascinated with what I say, as if they were my boyfriends or something. Because those are the social experiences that I got my conversational skills in. It never occurred to me that I have to try to express myself in a way that is considerate or entertaining, as if for someone who might not be in love with me. I only know how to really express myself (my feelings and personal opinions) as if I were talking to boyfriends. So if someone doesn't fall all over my words, I figure they are dumb or don't like me, or it's some personal issue on their part.
I have been shrugging off this social conversational disconnect -- people thinking I'm arrogant and obnoxious and me thinking they've got some personal problem if they aren't fascinated by everything I say without my having to carefully frame my ideas for their ears -- for years.
(Comments)
About those funny Geico "Caveman" commercials (Anti-Cure)
posted at 06:00 am on 12-20-2008
I think that the Geico "Caveman" commercials are a great metaphor for the feelings of anti-cure AS.
The commercials are funny. The storyline is that Geico has "it's so easy a caveman can do it" ad campaign, and the cavemen who work at the company get very upset because the ad campaign is discriminatory and they feel marginalized. The anger and discontent over the Geico commercials then spreads through the Caveman community. One guy gets bad therapy from a condescending therapist who tries to encourage him to realize he is indeed inferior. The Cavemen don't buy into all the attempts to portray them as inferior and belittle them, tho. They are pretty grounded, with a strong sense of Self. The story unfolds over a series of several commercials.
What is so interesting is that these Geico caveman commercials portray people (Neanderthals) who are fundamentally different than normal (modern Cro-Magnon) humans but not less than them. The Cavemen ARE indeed different: they have no imagination for insinuations, pretense, role-playing or the hypocrisy of modern humans. They also have a short fuse and are very emotional. But the Cavemen accept themselves as okay and have their own lives. The commercials have these Cavemen as being a community (living in groups, hanging out with each other) normally and healthy, not as if their traits are pathological problems to be doped up, fixed and surgically or therapeutically compensated for.
The Cavemen story is a great metaphor for AS because they are such concrete thinkers and can't role-play and get frustrated with the insinuations and hypocrisy of modern humans. They are very pragmatic and literal. But even though they lack the ability to appreciate pretentiousness, insinuations and resent hypocrisy (Geico hypocritically keeps airing the "even a caveman can do it" ads even though the company tries to apologize to the cavemen, claiming it's a mistake), they are still intelligent, creative, sensitive (play piano, etc.). They are not retarded and defective -- or ashamed of themselves. They hang out with each other, validate each other, and don't get why the modern humans think they're so superior. They do resent how the modern humans keep portraying them as less intelligent, when they are not. They certainly wouldn't buy into attempts to "cure" them.
These commercials could have been written by an AS who doesn't feel inferior to NTs and is sick of the soft bigotry of condescension and fallacious assumptions of AS inferiority due to not having a social mind. The funny set ups and great acting bring it all to life.
Here's a few of them all together in one YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=179Q_sAMUWM&feature=related
(Comments)
On Not Being Ashamed To Be AS, Not Wanting To Be NT
posted at 09:26 pm on 12-19-2008
Speaking personally, over my lifetime, I have "beaten" AS in the sense that I have relationships. I can have friends if I want them (but I lack a social drive and have anti-social impulses in that I don't like NT society or groupthink cultures much). I was in the military, I went through college. I have a very successful husband. I could have more money and a lot of things if I really wanted to. I could work if I had to.
I was traumatized twice, but not because I was AS, but because I was an attractive woman in math/engineering. The hurdles faced by attractive women in post-baccalaureate math/engineering are greater than those faced by AS. There are far more AS in post-bacc eng/math than there are attractive women. MY AS just made me unable to withstand and survive the discriminatory sexual misconduct that drives most women who attempt it out of the field. If it were not for my AS, I would have conquered the discrimination. So my AS was not a disability in the sense that it kept me from living my life or doing normal things, but it handicapped me in my attempt to go where few attractive women succeed in going.
I don't want to be "normal" or like an NT. I am better than most NT's, at least as far as my own standards about what makes a good life - having my special interests, having my sensual makeup and so on. My standards that make up a good life include a lot of things that AS like, because I like myself and most of my AS traits. So to me, being NT is a step down, as it is a step away from my AS "special interests" and traits. Just as an NT who is a social butterfly and executive-minded success would dread being put in the life of a cloistered nun.
I work on my social mind and social skills separately, as part of a discipline, because they are needed in the NT world, but I take no pleasure in them. If I did, I'd BE an NT. My special interests in cognitive systems would allow me to develop into an NT. I don't want to be one.
I have done the things I attempted to do, except to be an attractive woman in post-baccalaureate math/eng, and most sexy women are driven out of that, so I would have been beating the system that beats a lot of intelligent NTs had I succeeded. I have found ways to make myself be able to do things that I was not equipped for. My life has been full of adventure and challenge. I don't even really need to hammer away at fixing the academic traumas, were it not for the fact that I am constantly optimizing and need to face up to the challenge of fixing my damaged psyche to get my PhD (yes, I have figured out how I can do that without running the gauntlet of sexism in math/eng academia).
I don't want to not be AS. NTs aren't better than me and I can do things that most NTs cannot. I may be AS, but on the performance bell curve of "normality" in the things that I like to do, I'm always one standard deviation above the norm and usually more than that. Even in the things that I am "impaired" in, like paying my bills on time and keeping the house in order, I'm bad but not crippled. I do not envy NTs and would not trade down to be one of them just to fit in better or be more popular.
And I WILL succeed in getting past a gauntlet of sexist discrimination to get my PhD in math/eng, even if few attractive women do. My biggest problem in life is that I refuse to set limits on what I can do, and then I batter myself against my own limitations to try to get to where I want to be. All my trauma is self-inflicted in the sense that I put myself in situations that were high-risk and high-performance and drove myself to get what I wanted without regard for limitations. I WILL succeed in fixing my academic trauma and going forward. My problem has never been the AS. I like the AS.
I didn't choose to be AS, but having been born and developed into AS, it would make me irretrievably less of a person to trade who I am and what I value in myself, in order to be more popular and sociable. I suspect that people who do that, are they able, find little personal realization in the superficial popularity they buy by becoming other than what they are in order to grease their path to having more friends. Even if I am not popular, the personal judgments of others don't make me not like myself or hate AS.
IMO the unhappy-to-be AS people who launch disparaging broadsides at "ignorant" AS people, claiming we don't know better than to want to be NT, create a kind of verbally toxic environment when it is supposed to be okay to be yourself, in a sometimes hostile world.
(Comments)
AS Sexuality Beats NT Sexual Machiavellianism, Hands Down
posted at 06:53 am on 12-18-2008
Many AS ask questions about destroying the competition, undermining others, manipulating and playing head games to land a sex partner.
This is sexual Machiavellianism. It is a well-established and old sexual strategy. It is what some women do a lot .
It is what my second harassment trauma was about. I will tell the story of my second sexual harassment trauma now, from the sexual Machiavellianism angle.
The sociopath in my 2nd trauma was a sexual Machiavellian who was using sex to network through the town & she was having sex with men in the university, trying to get connections, etc. First, she befriended me, because we both had a lot in common, being engineers, etc. She was very charming and glib for someone with an engineering degree. We both liked to get out, talk about things like culture and art, and gourmet food. But then, as we got to know each other, she started dumping all her mental problems onto me -- hundreds of hours of sociopathic psychosexual history (this is where I started to feel "infected" by her mental problems, having dreams about her stories and this is how I learned and absorbed into my own social consciousness her livid sociopathic hatred and other sociopathic traits, etc).
Anyways, it turned out that despite the fact that she was so charming and glib and sharp socially, she had a bad sex life. She was always getting rudely dumped by men. All the single men she had ever started relationships with suddenly cut her off with no calls, etc. The longest time she had a boyfriend, ever, was one month. So she "fed" off married old professors. This is something (based on the hideous information dump she subjected me to) that apparently developed in Bangladesh where she had fallen in with someone who was seducing and blackmailing Muslim women and then threatening to expose their sexual activity if they didn't pay. She seems to have translated that, sexually, into seducing and manipulating her professors while she was in school. One of the stories she told me was that she would undermine her rivals -- tell the professor who deserved good grades and who did not by whispering stories to him claiming this one cheated or that one was actually very stupid. These married professors that she had affairs with turned out to be the only ones who never immediately dumped her, so these were her "boyfriends" because she couldn't get single guys.
So her sex life was basically horrifically inept, lousy sex with old married geezer geeks. Yet in her narcissism she imagined she was an incredibly seductive, gorgeous, emotionally connected love child and she put on this act well (like sociopaths are good at doing). So from the time she first impressed me as a charming, glib, accomplished intellectual woman, she steadily changed from being a smart, sensual, cultured and adventurous woman, to being more and more, as I got to know more about her, a deluded loser who was bottom feeding off old married geezer geeks, giving them sex in exchange for attention and professional favors. The more I got to know her she got smaller and more ugly, the more I could see through her phony surface and see the selfish user inside her.
On the other hand, I was a simple, socially naive student who was interested in a lot of things, but didn't brag or posture much. But as she got to know me better, SHE started to get really jealous of ME. So as we got to know each other, she started to go from being condescending and patronizing toward dopey, simple socially naive me, to becoming intensely jealous of me. Then she started competing with me on a host of things, from trying to out-hike me to out-poetry me. It was absurd.
Once she started jealously competing with me, it got real obvious what a poseur she was, and how stupid and talentless she really was. She pretended she knew how to watercolor (as part of her I'm-an-accomplished-female phony act), but I really can watercolor. In one thing after another, she was a phony or a bore, and her attempts to beat me at something became pathetic: poetry (she couldn't understand why some poetry didn't rhyme, which undermined her attempts to intimidate me re: poetry, she just couldn't get "Leaves of Grass"), and so on....
She got more jealous and contemptuous as time passed, and started competing with me. And as she competed with me, she became more and more angry at all the things I could do that she couldn't. She was really good at acting smart, but she was stupid. A great actress, but nothing there. Like a true sociopath, she seemed completely unaware that putting together a completely authentic act isn't the same thing as being that thing in reality. Being able to posture and project that she is a skilled amateur watercolorist, isn't the same as being one, especially when you don't even know what the paints are.
So it started with her being baffled at how someone so socially simple and socially retarded like myself had so many men in love with me. Unlike her, instead of being dumped, I had men following me around. Men proposed to me all the time, asking me to move in with them, marry them. I had men stalk me on occasion. My first sexual harassment trauma was a mentally ill professor stalking and threatening me. She was very curious as to why simple, socially retarded me had this big following. I told her regular AS stuff: guys tell me that I'm "not like other girls", I don't play games and act manipulative... I don't do dates, but do things with them that we actually enjoy like go hiking, fishing or to sports bars to watch their games... they tell me that I'm like a guy, not a girl and more a friend than a girlfriend. They tell me I'm brilliant. Then they start proposing to me and following me around.
Sexually, we started comparing notes and it seemed to me that she was kind of deluded in thinking that she was good in bed. She seemed pretty much on the lower end of run-of-the-mill, in terms of the sex skills we talked about.
Sexually, the more she talked to me about sex the more it became obvious to us that I was a kind of sexual bombshell, a kind of sexual savant. I have the hypersensual development of an AS and sex had been a "special interest" for me at times in the past. I even have what is allegedly info from an ancient martial-arts like society of women's sexual Kung Fu in China. On the other hand she was a sex addict that single men avoided and married old geeks cheated on their wives with until they better-dealed her. By the time I met her, she had sunk to working Craigslist for her sexual networking and was flipping academics who wanted to cheat on their wives. Once we started comparing notes re: sex, that was when she really started to get mentally abusive, and lividly jealous.
Then she "targeted" me for elimination.
This woman, SK, was sleeping with my professor, among other men in the department and school, because I hooked them up to get him off my back sexually at a time when it appeared he was holding his support for my project hostage for sex. I was shocked at the time she started backstabbing and undermining me with her sex partners, but now it's obvious why: a sociopath's con game is only good when everyone buys into it. I wasn't hanging out with my professors socially. But if I ever did start hanging out with them, it would have become obvious, even to their sexually naive minds, in their woman-starved world, what a phony she was compared to me. So I was a threat to her entire game. That was why she had to get rid of me.
The way she got rid of me is complicated but it involved her setting out to mentally abuse and retraumatize me from my past sexual harassment and stalking PTSD. One day, I even went into her office and there was reading material about Asperger Syndrome up on her screen. She was studying up on me.
I'm not going to go into it, but it was abusive, intentional, and my professor became her enabler and an abuser-by-proxy, even though he had spent months assuring me that if I went to work with him, he would ensure that I had an harassment free, no-sexual-complications environment.
I blame my professor, Dennis Healy, for the abusive experience. I don't really blame this SK woman, even though she was the instigator of all this. She was, under her charming and apparently cultured surface, a flaming Machiavellian narcissistic sociopath who would do anything (and anyone) for some attention and social climbing. The stuff she did was due to the compulsions of her personality disorders, like what a predator does. She did what sociopaths do naturally. I blame my professor more, because it was he who made his false promises to me but then threw me into some sexual political game, where the woman who gave him sex got his support and help.
What SK did was classic sexual Machiavellianism -- eliminate the women who are hotter than you, who make you look like old cheese with blue fuzz on it. She had sold a bunch of naive academic geeks in one corner of the Math department that she was some exotic, sensual creature. And her game was vulnerable to being debunked any time they might suddenly see through her like I did.
Machiavellian sociopaths are efficient, and successful, and they are hard to beat. But I don't begrudge her the win. Those men might be important researchers who tower over mere mortals, but according to her her sex life as mistress-to-aging-married-geeks-cheating-on-wives-and-preying-on-students was a depressing life of miserably bad sex. And I recognize that Dennis Healy never really offered me a research opportunity. All he really offered me was the opportunity to be taken advantage of by a sexually desperate loser and then I could develop into a kind of corrupt professional whore like his girlfriend. She's welcome to them all -- Dennis Healy, John Benedetto, Jeffrey Sieracki. They might be good mathematicians but they aren't real men, or even men worth knowing.
I would say that sexual Machiavellians -- like those who eliminate the competition -- do win in the short term. Their kinds of sexual schemes, along wtih head games, disingenuous pretenses of love, and psychological manipulation, can lead to what some people recognize as sex. But I'm not really interested in the kind of remedial sex those people have with each other and their dysfunctional head games. The kind of sex they have is bad, actually bad, unsatisfying and leaving you clutching a bag of lies when they are done.
Why the hell would any AS dive into the sexually and personally impoverished world of the head gamers and sexual Machiavellians of NTs? The only NTs who do those kinds of things are the losers, anyway.
AS hypersensuality and other traits can enable AS to develop into extraordinary lovers, better than NTs on average. It's important to in good physical condition, put a lot of attention into developing sex skills, be a good person. If an AS develops a "special interest" in sex, that's all he or she needs to become the kind of sex partner that most NTs are incapable of being. Honesty is a powerful aphrodesiac, and an AS lover's greatest asset, the overwhelming in-the-moment honesty combined with the acutely fine (hypersensual) sensual response and intensity. Very hard to find that in the world of NT sex.
The NT's who engage in sexual Machiavellianism are the romantic equivalent of those guys who used to cheat in class, steal the smart kids' books and beat up the geniuses. They engage in what they do because they are pathological losers who will do anything to feel like a winner from time to time. They, and the people who get into relationships with them, create a culture of corruption and perversion wherever they go, mostly over sex that is pathetically lame and bad by any standard.
AS sex beats NT sexual Machiavellianism hands down, any day.
(Comments)
AS Beauty Vs. NT Beauty
posted at 10:01 am on 12-17-2008
AS BEAUTY V. NT BEAUTY
I had one boyfriend who was a track athlete on scholarship at the first university I got traumatized at. He was a pole vaulter from Hungary, named "Zoltan", with dark, gypsy looks, long hair in a pony tail and the most beautifully balanced body that was so lovely it it was like art. I have a picture of him cooking dinner for me, with his back turned to me, and the line of his body, from the top of his head down his back, backside and legs, is just beautiful, like art. (I might dig up his pic and post it).
Who did I marry? An Asperger engineer who was by NT standards ugly. But he was in great physical condition, worked out and was a perfectly beautiful man in his own physical expression of himself.
AS have their own kind of beauty, and I happen to prefer it because it comes with a lot of honesty, intensity and sensitivity. You couldn't put Zoltan's glorious scholarship student athlete pole vaulter body around the depth and intensity of an AS mind. It wouldn't wrap right because some things don't match up with the traits.
So what I think is most beautiful is that which is a healthy wrapper around the kind of mind-body features I like. So long as that wrapper is healthy, strong and clean, etc... it becomes beautiful or not, according to the character of the person inside that brings it to life.
DELAYED IMPRESSIONS EFFECT
Also, there is the delayed-impressions effect. In my experience, AS people grow more beautiful as you get to know them.
Sometimes I am beautiful, sometimes I'm a hag. If I'm running every day, getting $100 haircuts and wearing suits, I tend to be in a good-looking phase. Lately, I'm a real hag. I'm not kidding, a real hag by "not really ready for a run to the supermarket most days" standards. But my husband still stops and looks at me and tells me, "My God you're beautiful". And even in my "good-looking" phases, I'm just good-looking and sexy, not actually pretty. But he sees me that way. And I see him that way.
None of the men who stalked me, etc., did so off the bat, because, as the OP says, I'm average looking to a snapshot. But men I spend a lot of time with develop an interest in me, some start following me around after they know me for a while, and some men become fascinated with me. Then when I try to tell officials what is happening, they don't believe me unless I am all dressed up and made up, because while I am attractive sometimes, I don't give an immediate impression of being so attractiveness as to be a magnet.
So, IMO, AS become more beautiful as you get to know them, and they become quite attractive over time.
NTs also have a delayed-impression effect, where the first impressions might change over time. But this is to a lesser extent as they don't have sensorimotor issues. But NTs also usually get more attractive as you get into the person, too.
There is one instance in which looks really matters: and that is when the looks of NTs evolve into being uglier as you get to know them. This is the case of the man or woman who becomes uglier as you get to know them. It is the OPPOSITE of the case of the AS person who generally more beautiful as you get to know them.
When an NT is outwardly attractive, strong, personable and projects an attractive personality and you like them, but as you get to know them more and more they become unattractive, like their bodies seem to sag more and their faces seem to be less alive, what you are seeing is not their superficial beauty. What you are seeing is that they are less of a person deep down inside than they are on the outside. The NT that grows uglier and less attractive, and seems to become less attractive the more you know them -- even if your observations are completely physical, like their arms sagging or their faces dulling -- that's someone to stay away from. That was my second professor. He was not the man on the inside, that he projected and everyone thought him to be.
CONCLUSION:
AS people tend to grow more beautiful as you get to know them, some NTs grow more beautiful as you get to know them and some grow more unattractive. Looks matter a great deal, but it's not the first impressions, but the impressions that you develop about someone over months, evolves into their real appearance. So long as a someone is healthy, in good condition and takes care of themselves, that is all that is needed to be seen immediately and the rest of his or her face will show itself to you over time. Anyone who gets unattractive as you get to know them more is someone you should probably stay away from.
FINALLY,
It is in the nature of men to be fascinated by the visual beauty of women. It is also in the nature of women to be aroused by beautiful, strong men. But judging people as objects, on their superficial (snapshot) looks, is only something that you do to strangers. It's not something that you bring to a forum, a friendship or a relationship, and lay on others.
And anyone who runs around fixated on people's snapshot looks is wasting a lot of time and energy, IMO.
(Comments)
My theory of ASS
posted at 10:15 am on 12-01-2008
I've been working on a theory about NT psychology that will help me explain some of the dynamics of the sexual harassment problems I've traumatized by as an attractive Asperger female trying to get a higher education without social skills or defenses.
What I've been working on is sort of a side theory that helps support the more generalized theory of systematic sexual corruption in academia, where post-Baccalaureate women in Math & Sciences have to run a gauntlet of sexual objectification, marginalization and harassment and to make a place for themselves, often they have to form sexual alliances with professors who will be their benefactors and protectors. So unless you go to an ivy league or lack any shred of sexual appeal, you have to deal with someone's sexual problems with women -- or, more often, serial encounters with sexually dysfunctional academics. This make it important to understand the basic features or dynamic of what appears to be a pervasive of both sexual incompetence and sexual dysfunction of academics. Hence, my theory of "ASS" in America: Anti Sensualist Syndrome.
Rather than get too technical into the psychology of sexuality (I will relate some concepts later), I will ground my discussion almost entirely with reference to America's food culture. Anti-Sensual Syndrome applies equally to food culture as well as sexual behaviors. So, because most people are familiar with America's food culture and it's not unusual to hear allegations (here and abroad) that the food in America is unhealthy, unsavory and dysfunctional, it's more accessible for me to explain my ideas by making references to America's food culture problem instead of trying to make points about sexuality that will be abstruse to some people.
(Comments)
Threads & Posts I Liked Re: Asperger Syndrome
posted at 12:56 pm on 11-29-2008
SOCIAL DISSONANCE
"Conversations where it's like you're not there"
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt86063.html
ASPERGER LIFE REFLECTIONS
"Grieving decades of Naivete" -- Greentea
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt86067.html
AS V. NT
"The Pro-Cure thread" --
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postx85977-105-0.html
ASPERGER TRAITS
Motor skills - Gross vs. fine
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postx84171-15-0.html
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