The UCSB shooter--an Aspie with a rant against women

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30 or 40 years ago, maybe. Mainstream, big-feminist-women's-studies media is very much about the interplay of class and race privilege, the privilege of the able, etc. Believe it or not, they're pretty sophisticated about it. Here, have a look, even Wikipedia's into it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

About respect: I'm actually very small and soft-spoken, I mean to the point where people in the room with me have trouble hearing me. It's just my own wiring, I sound loud enough to myself. I also take a long time to formulate thoughts on the fly -- long pauses, a lot of careful editing and revision. But apparently people regard me with a good deal of respect and even trepidation, and even in grad school the program director would allow seminar conversation to grind to a halt while I put together a thought. I do not honestly know why I get this reception, but I find as I get older that original thoughts are pretty hard to come by, and most people are very much afraid to speak their minds. I'm often willing to say things that other people won't, and I think of things that other people don't. Things that, apparently, other people in these contexts find interesting or valuable. I'm also less afraid of rank than I should be and present as someone far above my actual station. And at this point I have mom face and really don't take a lot of s**t. I've also learned (finally) to have the meetings before the meetings. So while there are times that I do get shut up in meetings, much more often I get courtesy and space. I'm sure the contexts matter a lot.

Tarantella - I think there are women who suffer from this a lot less than other women do. I don't get talked over a lot in work contexts. It does happen, but not much. I'm also not the kind of woman who tends to get cornered by aggressive men in pick-up situations. I get hit on. But not in the jerk kind of way very often.

But Marshall I do want to counter that it's only NTs and extroverts that do this. I'm most often talked over and interrupted by my AS husband. In fact, he had a meltdown yesterday when he interrupted me wanting to talk at me about something from his work while I was on a deadline for something for my work. It was so bad, I felt I had to leave the house.

As far as I know he never actually tried. Apparently he went to a party once, for instance, only to just be there, be present, and expect girls to throw themselves at his chest. From what I've read it appears that he really lived in his own head/mind and never bothered to ask anyone out or anything. Which is good, by the way. It explains also why a good-looking fellow (wouldn't expect him to never having kissed a girl at 22) never got close to a girl in the slightest.

But what is it that makes the socially unable violent? I'm socially unable and I feel no aggression or hatred towards people just for not liking me. Maybe it works different in guys as they've got more 'natural aggression'?

This is my biggest problem with men who have problem with feminism. Feminism is a very broad movement and it concerns 50% of the worlds population. It is there only to identify problems which arise from discriminating against females. If you don't do that, congratulations, you are a decent human and should just ignore these things and to not over think them. For instance, I have no interest in people fighting against racism, (unless from humanistic point of view), because I am not a racist.
What I want to say, is that you don't have to involve other factors so much and try to differentiate between different contributions in discriminatory behavior. Having AS I truly sympathize with how extroverts and loud mouths are taking over, and you get unfairly discredited only because you cant sell yourself. Now imagine all of that and add the fact that people have already a prejudice against you because you are a female. And lets be fair - a lot of people do. It is for some reason unusual to see for instance women in science, and when I have to present something and its like 3 females vs 20 males, you can see how people will have some notions, expectations and prejudices.
If you look on average, you will have that majority of people are NT and extroverts. So in a more global context, it makes no sense to emphasize these privileges. We are talking about more global scales, and where a white western male is on top of the food chain. Of course then there are minorities in those groups who can be discriminated against more severely than any other group; for instance if you take AS male and some rich blond young ignorant bombshell, of course feminist arguments cant hold up.
It bugs me that people often take feminism personally where they should not. It does not grant women more, undeserved rights, it just promotes equality and stereotype breaking.

Honestly I didn't read his "manifesto" nor I have any interest to do it, I don't want to damage any of my precious brain cells, his videos were enough.

I think those murderers copycat from others, every time they leave a manifesto and videos behind them, did he mention Georges Sodini in his writings? I wouldn't be surprised if he was his fan.

Those are your assumptions based on what the media has reported of what is basically the last year or so of his life. You really think middle school, high school and college he did not talk to girls but rather expected them to toss themselves at him?



Thats where the megalomania/mental illness part comes in. AS by itself does not make a person prone to violence..but it does have a very high rate of depression/suicide/social isolation problems. You may not be aggressive to others but I'm willing to bet there's been times you hated just being born. The megalomania projected the self-hate outward..its classic anger projection..you can see it in children and almost every violent psychopath and hate-group follower.

I can understand WHY he felt the way he felt... but the WHY he did what he did I cannot understand.

Don't underestimate the impact of the traditional/conservative women, I've noticed that a lot in some of user's arguments here (tarantella, starvingartists...etc) they dismiss this huge faction of women and their influence on society and on men in particular (and themselves influenced by the macho society). I haven't seen this jerky behavior that you're describing from men (shutting up a woman talking and calling her names during the conversation) and surely I wouldn't remain buddies with those, but what I see that men often dominate the conversations due to passiveness of the conservative women who are present.

Senior career women aside because they are often not like this, I knew 2 women, one of them was my boss who were capable to dominate any business meeting or social setting, but those are the minority, what I am talking about are the average women with average ambitions in life, those latter tend to be passive in a mixed-gender settings, be it a business meeting or even an outing, passive in initiating talk, passive in body language, passive in everything really when men are present, especially their SOs.

I bet that those men (especially seniors) who shut you down in conversations/meetings are often married or in relationship with conservative women and were raised by conservative mothers, contrary to the popular belief traditional men (with traditional/sexist views on women) are more likely to hold higher positions in corporate life and status than the egalitarian men (confirmed by a study that I used it once against tarantella's post who was saying otherwise). So these men are used to this "man should talk first" rule and when they see this rule getting challenged they would "naturally" react ugly -it is well implemented in their mindsets because that's the environment they used to it, same for their fellow women, they really don't know the concept of "sexism" or how it feels, the same way a fish never knows what's "wet" is because it's always in water.
In several conversations with similar women, they even sometimes explicitly express a preference for men taking the lead.

You can do a little experiment, ask a couples in the street about some direction or anything, the more conservative the area is, the much more likely the woman looks at the man and let him do the talk first, then she might contribute, as if there's a rule that man should do the first talk - I am not sure if the gender of the asker has any effect tho, but I think this is one fine example of their subtle passiveness (of those women).

Another example of subtle passiveness but even more obvious, just observe at the couples you know who get in the car, couples whom both man/woman have driver's licences and can drive, you would notice that in the majority of times, the man swiftly gets in the driver seat and the woman swiftly gets in the next seat. When couples drive together, it's usually the man behind the wheel. This is true in the Middle East, and I am personally certain it's also true in Canada and Australia too.

I can give dozens of examples, but let's not go too off topic lol.

I guess I'm just frustrated that less attention is paid to other smaller groups that are marginalized. I respect feminism as a movement. I see the historical context and realize there's still a long ways to go.

Maybe your husband's problem isn't his AS. Maybe he's just a selfish person who happens to have AS. People with AS generally aren't good at multi-tasking. If someone interrupts me, my whole brain is jarred and I have to spend a lot of mental energy just getting back into what I was doing. I would also be irritated being interrupted while I'm working hard on finishing something. I would get where you're coming from in not wanting to be distracted right then and there BECAUSE I have an autism spectrum disorder.

I don't think feminism is about granting women undeserved rights. Sorry if I came across that way. I just get a really strong sense of hostility from more radical feminists that bugs me. I think the big problem is with how I see US based social justice movements in general. Their focus seems to weight too heavily on power imbalance, rather than focusing on quality of life imbalance. I agree that the root of quality of life imbalance is usually a power imbalance, but focusing so much on the power imbalance leads to a lack of focus on general compassion and community. There's a certain hostility to it. People are eager to demand equal rights and fairness and look for a power imbalance that's holding certain groups back. It's a competitive individualistic fighting mentality.

I mean, which is worse, women facing a disadvantage compared to men while climbing the corporate ladder, i.e. the "glass ceiling" effect, or low-income single mothers being characterized as lazy, e.g. accused of having children and dumping the "man of the house" just so they can collect benefits and not work. The latter is what makes my blood boil. It's ugly victim blaming BS. Anyone who actually knows someone in that situation knows better.

Also, the whole "income inequality" debate is so focused on the very wealthy and how the majority can no longer "get ahead". There's little focus on the declining quality of life for those on the very bottom. I have no problem with people getting as rich as they please, but what's happened now is the economic system is negatively effecting the quality of life of people who are just barely getting by. That's what's happening in the US. People are being made miserable just so the ultra-wealthy can continue to get even wealthier. I think what the left really needs is a secular equivalent of the ideology of Pope Frances. A message of compassion minus the negative baggage - homophobia, misogyny, etc... inherent in Catholic dogma. Less focus on power, more focus on community.

Last edited by marshall on 30 May 2014, 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

(referring to bold) marshall, the two are intimately connected. You cannot separate them. If the women can't make it through the glass ceiling, the environments at the top don't change. The women also stay relatively poor. Have you ever taken a look at how fundraising works? You know, for spreading wealth, help, lifting up the disadvantaged? Or how legislation works, making sure those at the bottom are protected? You need money and power for those things. And if the smartest, most capable women still can't get to the money and the power, we can't do anything about the rest. Apparently waiting for the guys at the top to turn into different people isn't working.

You should listen sometime to development officers for women's colleges and groups like Emily's List. They have a base of highly-educated, extremely able, extremely intelligent women -- who have to ask their husbands before they write a big check. Or who can't do it anyway because they don't make that kind of money, don't make big-donor money. It matters, and it matters a lot. I'm working on behalf of a grad student who's got children and needs to finish her diss -- there's no money to help her, in part because we have no big women donors who'll look at that situation, recognize how screwed the young woman is structurally, and lift her up, let her do her work and go on with a PhD.

Sitting back and fantasizing about how some group of activists is wrongminded, and criticizing them, because their work doesn't match your pure mental model of how the world should work..this is not helpful.

Let's go back a minute to that poor single mom. I was a poor single mom. Some would say I still am a poor single mom. You'd better believe there's sexism in how I can work, how I can get paid. I'm highly educated, highly able. Why should my kid suffer because of glass-ceiling/corporate-world sexism? Yeah, my job, on paper, is a support job. And yet here I am doing much of the same work that people making ten times the money do. I live in the support ghetto, which is highly female-dominated, because these are nice mom jobs; plenty of flexibility for staying home on those snow days when the kids are out of school. There is very little respect for support work; we are definitely low on the totem pole. So what's it mean in the end? It means my kid either doesn't go to college or comes out with a millstone of debt around her neck, and starts adult life as another poor woman. You might not think that's a big deal, but I sure do.

Wow, this topic has turned into a landslide.

Your child shouldn't suffer. Here is my question though. Why does this corporate world even exist in the first place and do we all really have to play this game? Why? Maybe what Marshall is trying to say is that our whole cultural model that we're all living under is screwed up. What if Misogyny is but a symptom of our culture itself and this extreme individualism and this hustling environment we're all forced to conduct ourselves under? Why do we have be competitive against each other?

What if the problem is we're all considered commodities as having no intrinsic worth. We're looked as resources instead of human beings. Even your colleagues try to up one another in a competitive game of showmanship right? A lot of people seem to be unhappy with this whole setup. Why are we all playing this game?

Maybe we all ought to question the assumptions we're all working under like individualism, hustling, free enterprise and maybe we ought to question the American Dream itself? Why is the American dream the only valid way to live? Why can't we discuss the theories that we are all working under? Some people like myself do not want to hustle nor want to play this game. How do we live our lives in virtue and honesty with ourselves and others? How do we spin our straw into gold?

It seems like we're all forced to play a silly game that a lot of people are unhappy to play in. So, why play it?

In the end, what is the fate of all of us? What do the winners win in the end? What happened to the Alpha males that have ever existed in all of Earth's history? Eventually they all died. We all die, so in the end how do we win? What do we win? What is the point to all of this free enterprise and competition? Why play?

Sigh. I'm sympathetic to your line of reasoning, so I'll try to work with it. It's true that academics has a role to play, especially since private businesses focus on things that promise near-term profits. Unfortunately for us, academia focuses on things that sound exciting in grant requests, so they have a perverse research bias as well. It happens to be a bias that excludes the things that we could have used most.

We were in the business of making nearly perfect things, so we depended on a lot of little things being right: extremely flat, stable surface plates; straight, square ways on measuring and production machines; stable, consistent materials. None of that is very sexy.

Even more than any of that, we depended on staff who were comfortable baby-sitting very tricky processes. The reason is that physics doesn't give you solids that are stable to less than 100 nanometers over useful distances. Even materials like diamond, pure beryllium, sintered silicon carbide, Zerodur and Invar still warp with temperature changes and sag under gravity.

You can avoid the stiffness problem in some places by using pure energy. You can measure with lasers and you can replace some parts of a structure with magnetic fields. Either of those can remove some gravitational sagging, but both create heat problems that more than offset any gain. You're working with temperature sensitive Jello.

So the problem is that we worked in a field that was unappealing to researchers, and physics suggests that most improvements will come the hard way.

We did benefit from organizations like NIST. It has an annual budget of about a billion. NSF gets about 7 billion.



What makes you think that I'm missing that? I'm aware enough of the value of inefficiency in biology to have suggested mimicking genetic diversity it in software years before academia appreciated it. Most CS departments were still stuck on the idea of making some perfect fortress that nobody could break into.

As far as misreading data, I'll give academia the prize for that. My favorite example - which I see everywhere - is claiming to have found the answer (singular) when there are dozens of explanations that fit the data just as well.

I wasn't surprised by the LIBOR debacle because I'd already spotted some problems with price indices. I haven't heard a peep from professional economists about the latter, even though they lecture on the same issues in other contexts.



Yeah, the Wright brothers really burned through cash.



I take issue with that. Some of my better contrarian bets have come from appreciating social factors, even in fields that people think of as technology driven. I bet years ago that Intel's fabrication lead would start to matter less as the low end chips got better. Again, most academic research was still focused on making computers faster, even though they were already so fast that we could afford to waste most of that speed on crumby software. Most people didn't need more speed. They needed greater reliability and security, and lower cost.



I picked those novels for a very specific reason: to the extent that we're both grown-ups, we share a lot of the same assumptions. That's particularly true when much of our maturation is standardized and happens in co-ed classes. The ways in which we're likely to be different are emotional. A novel aimed at the 'finding yourself' demographic is a very good place to start.

I mentioned military equipment because it was the only thing left standing when I debated LKL on equal draft registration. All of the other things are easy to overcome. If you disagree, take it up with her, not me.

The thing is, most of the women who manage to get passed sexism and break through the glass ceiling aren't the type that care about the disadvantaged. They tend to have the narcissistic "if I did it, so can anyone" mentality. Those that get to the top generally don't feel solidarity with those that don't get there. A woman who's an investment banker with a $900,000 salary doesn't care about the plight of poor single moms who never had a chance. She only cares about her own offspring. People that actually care go into the support jobs. That just shows how screwed up it all is. I don't know what made you think I would think it's not a big deal.

NK, are you trying to tell me, with a straight face, that your company's research had few or no roots in the sci/eng generated with public funding in the last 70 years? I mean you mention lasers and gravitational fields; I guess DOD had nothing to do with Hughes or Bell Labs.... The math and physics behind those guys, of course, I guess they ran an office pool.

Are you also saying that your company's clients' end-users are not healthcare providers and healthcare researchers?

I don't think you're going to find a way out of this one. NIST makes sense, sure, but you're right, NIST's tiny. Even so, a billion here, a billion there, you give it a few decades and it starts to turn into money.

I am sure there are lots of holes in places where it'd be helpful if the academic researchers had got there first. (In fact I know there are.) But when you do your own R&D, you start somewhere, and it ain't usually 1935. The development of the instrumentation alone bumps you into the federal era, and I will not get glowy on you about DARPA. You stand on the shoulders of well-funded giants.

I'm not saying that the feds paid for your immediate research, nor were they supposed to have. The university/fed-contracts-for-corporate-labs model did what it was supposed to do -- and wastefully, sure. What was it Minsky said about NASA? "It's not that they waste money. It's that they waste ALL the money."

Anyway. When you come around saying nobody's entitled to your work: well, what the hell? How were you entitled to benefit from the taxes paid to fund the research your company's leaned on, or the taxes paid to pay your clients' customers' bills? Or, for that matter, how were you entitled to all the unpaid childrearing work that went into raising those customers in the first place? You've changed diapers, you know the young adults don't just materialize, ready to work and spend. I've spent over a decade and will spend another doing this work, bending my life around it and damaging my health to do it well, and I'll get fuck-all for thanks from all but one of the many people who'll benefit by it. On the contrary, the demands of that unpaid work mean I'll likely wind up poor in old age, and be told it's my own fault. And yet if nobody chooses to do that work, or not enough can afford to do that work reasonably well, this is also an emergency for anyone trying to make a living.

The morning you wake up and actually live independent of society and previous generations' society -- that's when you're entitled to say, "Nobody is entitled to my work." Yeah, I know -- what an outrage that there should be a taxing authority. I'll tell you what: if you're that revolted by the ed system, and why not, then go teach. Do something. You've got enough money that you're mad when someone taxes you to pay for ed. Go do the thing you say is so important that you shouldn't pay to see it done badly. Because nobody else is going to do it, baby. You want, I'll send you some examples of people doing a nice job. And if you don't want to do it, or find it's harder than it looks or you're not cut out for it...I mean that's serious and draining work, dealing with a room full of kids day after day ...maybe do it a different way. Make teaching tools, stuff to learn with, that's good and has a hope of making it into kids' hands. That's still too much? Come back and I'll give you some other ideas.