> Yeah, if the person is intellectually disabled and that disability causes them to act in a certain way then I don't really consider them a scumbag either.
That's easy to claim online talking about abstract scenarios, but if you saw a man beat his wife in public I think you'd be more than willing to make a snap judgement about that man's moral character, and wouldn't stop to think "well maybe he's not a scumbag because..."
to me it does. I think as a society we're at the level when we can allow and thus must allow to cut some slack to disabled people, and temporarily or permanent lack of ability to reason is a disability just like not having a leg for example. When some limping guy with a stick say stumble and hit you while falling, would you deploy your anger like it would be in the case of intentional hit? The same way with people who may not be able to function in the society and manage their societal responsibilities at the level we think of as minimally acceptable. Whatever reason for their current condition, to me these are just ill people who need help instead of full legal violence deployed against them. Though, from pure logical point of view, we can just say to this woman that last 20 years she should have learned her some Python, and thus her situation is her own doing. In my personal view, our ability to rein in such logic and deploy compassion instead of it is what determines whether our civilization goes forward or backward.
> Is hitting your kids any less morally despicable than hitting your spouse?
> Why does such a large section of society think it's OK to hit your kids and not your spouse?
It's not OK. Beating your kids is not OK. Beating your wife is not OK. Beating anyone is not OK.
Resolving to violence is weak.
One of the cases is when adult tries to explain something to kid but kid can't understand. Adult gets frustrated and starts beating kid. I was not a smart kid and my father was not particularly great at explaining things. He never beat me but verbally and vocally felt that way.
> To give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it was some kind of lack of social skill on De Greys side rather than actual sexual predatoriness? Am curious what that legal investigation will find out
This isn’t the benefit of the doubt. You don’t get a pass on bad behavior by reason of actual mental illness. If in the grips of psychosis you slander or assault someone you did a bad thing. You do not get off because you have BPD or are schizophrenic or whatever. There are consequences. And even if de Grey is autistic as fuck he’s intelligent enough to emulate allistic people’s basic social sense and something approaching consensus morality. If I can do it he can.
This is not a commentary or prejudgment on whether he did or did not do anything. It could be a giant nothingburger like with rms. He could be a monster. Wait and find out.
> Dude you seem to have a problem. Beating folks into one inch of their life looks to me a significant overreaction.
Without further articulation on the un-crossable line, this is by no means true. My brother is a bonafide, diagnosed psychopath, so I have much more experience than most in the subject. Sometimes such things are necessary.
> This is how my friends and I treated one another, and others. There were other examples of stupidity. Taking baseball bats to taillights in parking lots. Driving around town shooting pedestrians and bicyclists with airsoft guns. Getting blackout drunk and racing down the freeway wearing a blindfold.
At no point in my life have I ever wanted to damage someone else or their property for the fun of it, and I wouldn’t call the acts above an example of stupidity. This is just bad parenting or hanging around people with bad parenting.
And my parents worked 24/7 trying to survive with their small business and trying to learn English. But I don’t think I had to be told not to go around breaking people’s tail lights. I saw how hard they worked to put food on the table, it would feel disgusting to me to throw all that effort away doing things to harm others for no reason.
> The latter is just trying to justify and excuse the bad behavior and save face
Ok, but in the example that was given, it does justify it, a little bit.
It doesn't justify it completely, but I would absolutely have more empathy for someone who stabbed someone out of some amount of self defense, than I would for someone who stabbed someone for no reason.
Do you really believe, that in the stabbing example, someone who stabs someone, for literally no reason at all, is exactly the same as someone who did it, in response to being assaulted first?
> I mean, this just isn't true though, Bell was hurting people. I don't think these communities are making this stuff up; oppression is real.
Who said anything about Bell not hurting anyone? I was the one who called him a Eugenicist upthread. Can you point to something I’ve said that suggest that I think Bell didn’t hurt anyone?
> I also don't think anyone is saying you personally are stepping on people's faces,
Why would you even imagine such a thing?
> what people like me are saying is that discrimination and anti-community policies/actions against disabled communities exist.
What do you mean ‘people like you’? What group membership are you claiming? Given that I also agreed that such policies exist, are you saying I am someone like you?
> I'm not sure why that statement is controversial.
Where is the controversy?
> Bell was advocating for eugenics. I actually don't think he got up in the morning and thought he was doing something bad, I think he probably thought he was trying to help deaf people. But he was doing something bad, he was contributing to deaf cultural suppression and advocating for eugenics.
Agreed.
> Separating people's actions from their intentions can be good, but only if we don't allow the intentions to completely override their actions.
Disagreed. If you knowingly attribute intentions to people, that you don’t have evidence for, then you are simply lying for political gain.
You never have to ignore the impact of peoples actions. But whatever the impact is, there is no justification for lying or making false accusations.
As soon as you do this, you lose moral authority and are simply engaging in tribalism.
> And I've read enough accounts of people who have gone through BMT to know that there is actual harm that's happening around these communities, they're not making it up.
Did someone say they were?
> to claim that they cannot think for themselves because their faces are being stepped on.
> I think you might possibly be reading some intentions into the author that aren't there. No one is claiming this, it's your own leap of logic.
No. The author is claiming that people can’t think about other intentions because their faces are being stepped on. This is exactly what they are saying. You don’t seem to have understood their analogy.
It would be true if someone was literally stepping on their faces. That would be a good reason not to be able to reason about why it was happening. It’s also true for someone in the midst of a coercive therapy. Thus far we agree.
However it’s not true for you, or the author, or large numbers of marginalized people, most of the time. We are not literally having our faces stepped on or being confronted by police, so that isn’t a reason we can’t think clearly about people’s intentions.
> People are pointing out there there are policies (intentional or not) that suppress communities and hurt people.
You pointed out the part about suppressing communities. I have agreed that people are being hurt. I’m not sure why you are making this comment.
> GP isn't saying you're part of those policies,
Clearly. They don’t say it anywhere or even imply it. Why would you think this was ambiguous?
> nor are they saying they speak for everyone about what that oppression looks like, the comment you're replying to never uses the words "we" or "us", only "I" and "me". This seems relatively uncontroversial to me.
Yes, he uses the terms “I” and “me”, but the context is that he is placing himself in the metaphorical position of a community member who his having his face stepped on. He is asking us to imagine he is one such person. I.e. a representative.
If you are going to take “I” and “me” literally, then you must also think he was literally having his face stepped on as he was typing that comment. I don’t think so.
> We can agree that suppressing sign language or performing electroshock therapy on autistic kids is wrong -- regardless of what anyone's intentions are
Yes, I agree with that.
We can also agree that misrepresenting or distorting other people’s intentions is wrong regardless of what their impact is. Doing so creates additional harm.
Here’s an example that might help clarify why it’s wrong, and just as systematically violent as the things you are listing:
Alex: “We have a spare office that is unused. Would you mind if I used it while it’s available? I would be able to be much more productive if I didn’t have to deal with movement and noise in my field of vision and hearing.”
Jack: “You just want special treatment.* Those offices are reserved for when we hire more managers.”
Notice that the oppressive move in this conversation is when Jack imputes a false intention to Alex.
If we want to live in a world where Autistic people’s* motivations are not misconstrued or falsely imputed, we need to live in a world where people’s motivations are not misconstrued or falsely imputed.
>I am capable of domestic violence, despite a lot of evidence in my life that suggested I would never do such a thing or even need to worry about that side of myself.
Most people underestimate what they're capable of when angry.
> I think I'm a high functioning Aspie. Learning not to do exactly this kind of shit was something I needed to do manually. I don't feel he's done that.
Me too. I wouldn't want or expect the world to change to fit me. I understand well that there are natural consequences for the ways that we behave -- and after fumbling through them my whole life they even make a strange kind of sense. Gaining a particular reputation and having some people avoid you seems to lie within the realm of the reasonable.
But the consequences in this case were not commensurate with the crimes. To have your coworkers gang up against you? And pass around a petition to get you fired? And use logic like "intentions don't matter"? Surely you see that this got completely out of hand.
And the part that makes it just that much worse: Some of the people who lead the charge on this would not have had a leg to stand on just a handful of years ago, before their chosen political ideology was en vogue. And as soon as they do, this is how they use their power. To gut this person, this fellow prickly traveler of theirs. It's just depressing as hell.
>Neither psychiatry nor psychology works so reliably
I agree, most of the shrinks I dealt with were a mess, and could hardly help me.
>That argument is literally just you trying to insult/offend people.
I didn't mean to, and I regret posting that, as I really don't believe that it would help. And yes, I meant it as an argumentative point, that if you can't control your own actions, your likely a danger to society. Which really isn't a good argument to make in this context, and was a low blow.
>...you are still solving disagreement with insults...
The thing I taught my family, that didn't get mentioned here yet, is that I taught them how to be wrong and sorry. This solves almost every problem in a relationship.
I did it openly in front of everyone in the family. And when I screw up, I gather my family together in one room, and I openly apologize in front of all of them. I state clearly what I did wrong, and that I was sorry for it. I don't make an excuse for it, I just say sorry.
It doesn't mean there aren't fights, that will never change or end as long as life has difficulties and stresses. It means that our fights are more about what is actually wrong, not about being personally hurting towards the other person.
And when I go over the line, I apologize, and now everyone else in my family does this too.
>Society does not side with people who have problems, except in very few circumstances anyway.
Not in a good way, but society certainly likes to give excuses for keeping our problems as they are, or blaming someone else for them. Or at the very least, making us feel like we can't solve them ourselves or with just our friends and family.
> Since when is dirty laundry exclusively about bad behavior?
Never said it was. What I said was someone using your dirty laundry "for public entertainment and out of rudeness" is bad behavior. I mean, it's right there in your definition: "and out of rudeness." I thought it was pretty obvious.
> @Diane "Maybe they haven't had a family member with mental illness."
Yep. That was a perspective I hadn't though about before. The sentence after that "This Elan guy clearly hasn't" commits the same crime he's accusing Elan of, but the point is sound.
That being said, the woman didn't have a mental illness, and the assault at the end was inexcusable.
> What's inherently a bad thing is that when human remorse and guilt has been genetically disabled, those people will do things to you which are fucked up.
Honestly, did you read the entire letter? Because he clearly address that point:
Its true that I do not 'feel' guilt or remorse, except to the extent
that it affects me directly, but I do feel other emotions, which do not
have adequate words of description, but nevertheless cause me to derive
satisfacton in developing interpersonal relationships, contributing to
society, and being gentle as well as assertive.
> Those actions shouldn't be praised, but they also shouldn't be judged outside of their context.
Imagine that you live in a bad part of town, and that you have been assaulted before. Somebody takes out a pocket knife and starts carving a figure on a tree. You lash out and kick them in the crotch. Congratulation, you completely overreacted. I expect that most people would apologize and feel kind of bad for having taken out their frustration/fear/whatever on somebody harmless. Especially when they had a long time to think about what they did.
>You also seem to believe that people have no responsibility for making people around them comfortable unless they are explicitly told it is making them uncomfortable. Everyone has a responsibility not to be ass.
I do not believe this.
>My problem with your comment is the entitlement you claim to define acceptable behaviour of those being abused "what I demand from anyone who wants to call themselves a victim". Also people don't want to call themselves victims, they are victims who may feel able to make that known.
Well if they want my sympathy those are my standards, sorry.
And by the way this:
>Also people don't want to call themselves victims, they are victims who may feel able to make that known.
> psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit
I think you're getting a bit off in terms of perspective here. There's a huge difference between [words on a page] and [Human being I'm talking to]. I might well say something that makes someone on the internet cry, I might laugh and post pubbietears.jpg if they said my comment had made them cry.
If I saw someone crying in close proximity it's likely I'd stop and ask if they were ok (albeit i would also feel very uncomfortable and undecided on said course of action in case it's imposition).
I'm being artificially extreme but it's certainly true that empathy in most people will be more pronounced for a physical person than an online username (who, lets face it, may or may not be representing their reality).
> No if it was beating up cheating ex wife's lover.
Well that one is indicative of a violent person, with maybe some poor impulse control. Not necessarily someone I'd want to work with. (but since I'm in a country where companies can't easily get criminal records, I don't think I'd ever be in position to make such a choice)
> This isn’t a disability, sociopathy is a self-propelled toxic character trait, typically resulting from deep childhood trauma that our society rewards structurally
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make here. If this is a result of deep childhood trauma, in what way is it self propelled?
> Mostly we just need to identify and isolate people with ASPD as quickly as possible.
This seems pretty horrific to me. Assuming ASPD exists on a spectrum, and assuming it’s possible to treat it or at least manage it, it seems like the absolute worst option is to isolate people, the realities of which would almost certainly mean grouping people with these traits together.
Furthermore, if indeed trauma is the cause, it seems even more horrific to categorically discard people who have undergone this kind of hardship through no fault of their own.
I’m not saying people who cause harm to others should get a free pass. But what you’re describing seems untenable from a moral/ethical standpoint, to say nothing of the practical implications.
That's easy to claim online talking about abstract scenarios, but if you saw a man beat his wife in public I think you'd be more than willing to make a snap judgement about that man's moral character, and wouldn't stop to think "well maybe he's not a scumbag because..."
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