Okay, so then I guess that was a different kind of ableism from you. Instead of using the word “Autism” as a mere insult along the lines of “nerd”/”neckbeard”/whatever, as seen in the less civil places of the internet, you basically first made a neutral assertion (LW membership correlated with autism spectrum).
But then you sneaked in the implicit assertion that 1) autistic people should be discouraged from discussing sexual and romantic relationships because of their extraordinary ineptitude, etc at such things—and that 2) they’re silly and deluded if they even aspire to collectively learning about such—and, importantly, that 3) “normal” people know better than those weirdoes what’s best for them.
Now replace autistic people with some widely accepted subject of minorities’ rights/”social justice” movements (like blacks in postwar America), and you’ll see how the framework of marginalization is very similar even though its coordinates and scale are different. “Ain’t got nothing against them negroes, we take good care of ’em, they just need to mind their manners, don’t get all uppity and don’t listen to them Commie troublemakers.”
(Plus the negative/perjorative connotations of “den”, often used as an off-handed reminder of an outgroup’s inferiority and otherness. Nobody really says “Den of cool people”, or “den of original thought”, do they?)
P.S. We need a Tumblr-Social-Justice bot in here. Because the thing is, for all the limitations of “social justice” liberal-activist theory, many LWers don’t actually care to understand its epistemic/rationality core, and then get offended when a liberal activist points out how PROBLEMATIC some casual language can be without any malign intent.
When someone calls out tech/econ/”rationality” geeks on some problematic language/framing, applying some basic “social justice” ideas about privilege, othering, etc (maybe not always explaining the reasoning in sufficient detail) - well, immediately a cry about evil totalitarian progressive feminism police goes up… and to me it oddly resembles a dogmatic anti-market Marxist going off the rails when confronted with some equally basic Austrian School criticism like economic calculation, the knowledge problem, and such—for example, here. “NUH UH, talking about privilege and oppression is a silly fad for silly airheads on Tumblr” leaves one epistemically as crippled as “NUH UH, von Mises was a right-wing douchebag beloved of right-wing douchebags.” In place of “capitalist lie machine” LW might use epithets like “moral signaling spiral”, but the basic pattern of pre-emptively mocking Those Insufferable Cranks before they could mess up our tidy little epistemology is there.
Okay, so then I guess that was a different kind of ableism from you. Instead of using the word “Autism” as a mere insult along the lines of “nerd”/”neckbeard”/whatever, as seen in the less civil places of the internet, you basically first made a neutral assertion (LW membership correlated with autism spectrum).
But then you sneaked in the implicit assertion that 1) autistic people should be discouraged from discussing sexual and romantic relationships because of their extraordinary ineptitude, etc at such things—and that 2) they’re silly and deluded if they even aspire to collectively learning about such—and, importantly, that 3) “normal” people know better than those weirdoes what’s best for them.
Now replace autistic people with some widely accepted subject of minorities’ rights/”social justice” movements (like blacks in postwar America), and you’ll see how the framework of marginalization is very similar even though its coordinates and scale are different. “Ain’t got nothing against them negroes, we take good care of ’em, they just need to mind their manners, don’t get all uppity and don’t listen to them Commie troublemakers.”
(Plus the negative/perjorative connotations of “den”, often used as an off-handed reminder of an outgroup’s inferiority and otherness. Nobody really says “Den of cool people”, or “den of original thought”, do they?)
P.S. We need a Tumblr-Social-Justice bot in here. Because the thing is, for all the limitations of “social justice” liberal-activist theory, many LWers don’t actually care to understand its epistemic/rationality core, and then get offended when a liberal activist points out how PROBLEMATIC some casual language can be without any malign intent.
When someone calls out tech/econ/”rationality” geeks on some problematic language/framing, applying some basic “social justice” ideas about privilege, othering, etc (maybe not always explaining the reasoning in sufficient detail) - well, immediately a cry about evil totalitarian progressive feminism police goes up… and to me it oddly resembles a dogmatic anti-market Marxist going off the rails when confronted with some equally basic Austrian School criticism like economic calculation, the knowledge problem, and such—for example, here. “NUH UH, talking about privilege and oppression is a silly fad for silly airheads on Tumblr” leaves one epistemically as crippled as “NUH UH, von Mises was a right-wing douchebag beloved of right-wing douchebags.” In place of “capitalist lie machine” LW might use epithets like “moral signaling spiral”, but the basic pattern of pre-emptively mocking Those Insufferable Cranks before they could mess up our tidy little epistemology is there.
P.P.S. Wow, I accidentally up a meta level.
Wow, you tumblr social justice warrior types are really good at having meltdowns. You even put the word “problematic” in all caps. 10⁄10
You might like to click the link.