on neurodiversity politics

it's good. i think it brings many of the relevant topics into this academic idiom very well.

historically, every pluralist victory has been achieved not because it's the right thing to do but because that belated acceptance promises to put an end to the troublesome minority's clamor for equal rights.

there's not a chance in the world that NTs will actually come to consider themselves other than the custodians of consensus reality; they are newly confirmed by each effortless interaction, & begrudge even handicapped parking places when it means they have to park farther out.

we will be doing good to achieve the status of just another minority, colorful & empowered to have a putative say in how our lives can be minimally accommodated. our point of view in any particular discussion, though, will not prevail except by adopting the rhetorical tools & persuasions that an NT is able to respond to; it's a characteristically aspie mistake to rely upon unadorned logic. that doesn't even work on professional philosophers.

an exchange from wrong planet

The_Postmaster wrote:
Same here. I started playing chess, and within a year I was playing at the level of people who had been playing for 5 years. And this is only one example, it happens with just about everything that doesn't involve socializing.


that was my experience, though (as much as i love music) i've had to accept the fact that i don't have the talent for making sounds people want to listen to...tuneless, arrhythmic, harsh; i imagine a culture that valued being able to make things as unlike what was made before, as possible. but that's not what music is--or art either--really.

how

my book of primes
goes into the box
how will i know now

when i meet a new number
if it's happy or sad

feral

i imagine in many other places & times there was not even sanctioned nonconformity, but during my life i have visited several of the sanctioned subcultures (which are generally pretty conformist within their limits, but moreso than the society around) & managed to fit in, while it served my purposes to.

true eccentricity is not easy for most others to even perceive; they don't get past their initial repugnance to discover what it is that made them dislike it. they substitute something they already know about. you're lucky if it's not a projection. better a cliche of harmless silliness than that-which-must-be-destroyed.

i have met numerous individuals of the authentic kind, not always simpatico but often. these believe in following their own forms, something i call "autotelic" to unite it with similar phenomena (the creation of a work of art, for example). even though i know this is not possible for everyone, i can't help thinking the world would be a better place if it were.

endangered--like the rest of the natural world. aspie is somehow feral.

i have seen the future

After "bytebeat" & Robot X. & datamoshing*, i can already foresee the development of humanly-pleasing, quasi-random computer-generated media (whether images, music, or words) that satisfy the casual desire for entertainment-distraction, & obviate the commercial need for content-providers. All that will remain will be the creative development & differentiation of branding... Those with a taste for oldmedia will, of course, be able to find it in specialty-niche markets--at a price. Just as a few collect 8-tracks or 78 RPM records; silent movie aficionados (& really, when was it ever easier to find such stuff since the lapse of their heyday?); books of poetry in prior Englishes... But will the internet endure, once downsizing proceeds beyond a certain point? I fear these things will be lost, after that. What "use" are they, to the ones who are coming?

------------------------------------------------------------------
*not to mention Harold Cohen's AARON

consciousness

(via pvidyasagar dot wordpress dot com)

don't need this noun.

the ego is a matter of boundaries drawn, some of them more permeable than others. it is possible to "sit back" & watch things happen, even in the innermost citadel; to disown one's voice. then what remains? the habit of description. cliches of conceptuality. the old binary pairs, starting with "inside" & "outside".

we know that perception occurs, in the beings that live & whose lives depend on being elusive. sometimes our instruments correlate, such as photometers, to the point where we can declare that "light" is something both "internal" & "external". to the instruments: photons. to the mind: brightness. but what explanations are good for, lies elsewhere. we can perfect a machine that turns light into data; we can sharpen our senses, too. what kind of story could we tell, that would make the brightness collapse into one thing, light? is it enough to measure that reaction begins before the advent of willing it? then we are (meat-) robots who believe we are free. that still leaves us wondering why we do so, how belief works, & what robots are, that they should have such pretensions.

on the other hand, as Roethke said: "Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries."

Durable Balloons

     sonnet in -gry

Finding again my haggard heart fang-hungry
after a gram of psychotic pottingry
i wonder if i can mask with wonted rungry
grin like a choice Manhattan-fetching aggry.

Helmet i patch & this time, wrap the puggry;
questioning all, i'm yet of dreams the bowgry.
Where will i go? in public or in skugry
seek out a dragon-task not over-angry?

Truly we're hot to make the Double Ulgry
whether it's growth-enhancing, or in malgry:
let me forget that here i glister meagry...
Everyone's heaped like hares in a conygry!

So much have i tried to sundrily hide from vergry,
stodgeful's this box. Bring on the higry pigry.

(12 13 89 /publ Feb 91 Word Ways)