By David Futrelle
I spend a lot of my time reading through other people’s very bad opinions. And I don’t always have to go to Reddit or Incels.co to find them. Trolls and weirdos often deliver their terrible opinions directly to me in the form of emails and tweets and comments they try to leave here on the blog.
So I thought I’d open up the old Malebag and share some of these nuggets of wisdom with you. First, let’s take this, well, intriguing assertion from someone who came here to defend the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin from my criticisms:
“Bashing a guy cause he doesn’t like you or think like you do is a form of slavery,” wrote someone called Ingar, “you seek to force him to agree with your view or be an enemy.”
That’s a rather, well, elastic notion of slavery. And while Ingar stands staunchly against the “slavery” of me critiquing a literal Nazi, he doesn’t seem to have much problem with actual, literal slavery, ending his comment by noting that
I’ll go back to 1850 thanks very much biggest expansion of the average persons wealth in history.
Not much of an expansion for the slaves though.
From a would-be commenter called “Send_Ford_To_The_Chopshop” I learned that all “neurotypicals” are abusers. It’s (apparently) just SCIENCE.
The very reason neurotypicals are considered “typical” is BECAUSE they’re abusive. They built civilization, which is to say they took more from nature and their fellow humans than they deserved, bullied everyone around them into following their ways and raped anybody they could get their hands on to spread their poisonous genetic material far and wide.
Not that Ford here is opposed to abuse, so long as it’s directed at the right people. “Hatred and revenge should be human rights provided they’re against those responsible for bullying,” Ford wrote.
Nah. Bullying bullies is still bullying.
Someone called TheGrimSpectreOfChesterton has a remarkably similar evo-psychy assessment of the alleged evil impulses of normal people, telling one commenter here that they
deserve to be castrated, as does anyone who talks about “progress”.
Huh. That seems a little … harsh. Mr Chesterton continues:
Rape culture isn’t some malign influence that makes otherwise decent men hurt women. It’s an expression of the vicious, acquisitive impulses that allowed your ancestors to kill their neighbors, rape their wives and daughters, steal their land and thus pass on their genes and their way of life to subsequent generations including you.
Weird, because there’s a lot of research suggesting that evolution also rewards cooperation, and not just among humans and, you know, bees.
It’s inside you, you swine. It’s inside you and no scalpel is ever going to cut it out. If we ever want to live in a world without it every generation is going to need to be subject to the same discipline. No progress, rather constant vigilance against REGRESS to the cruel hedonism of the past.
Worst pickup line EVER.
On a somewhat lighter note, here’s a guy who’s worked himself into a bit of a tizzy over a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it lesbian kiss in the latest Star Wars movie.
I was appalled by this scene as if it really represented what I want to see in Star Wars. No question that Disney pandered even with the number of women and other minorities. Stars Wars is now a PC joke. Other films will also suffer to the rainbow regime as that person put it. Movie making is about telling stories not PC issues. You can make whatever homosexual movies you want just leave that stuff out of big franchises but oh wait then you probably couldn’t profit well with them.
Wait, I thought the slogan was “get woke, go broke,” not “get woke, profit well with it.”
Most of the comments I don’t let through moderation aren’t quite this creative. There are the routine requests to “kill yourself;” the slur-laden attacks on women, LGBTQ folks, people of color and so forth; the regular reminders that I’m a fat fatty. (I’m aware of that!)
And then there’s this person, who thinks we’re the truly hateful ones:
Anyone reading or writing in here is clearly fucked up, wow. Please don’t waste your lives however little you capacity for love is in a place so filled with hate and negativity.
This was in response to my post Redditor outraged to discover that women want “hot fun sex with men they’re sexually attracted to.”
I’m having a hard time seeing myself or the regular commenters on this blog as the hateful ones here.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
@Nequam
I’ve seen a few studies that conclude that autism and being trans* are correlated (yes, I know that the studies are on dysphoric trans* people specifically, I recognize non-dysphoric individuals as valid as well, this is just the research I’ve found). It also checks out with my own experience, as a very significant chunk of the trans* people I know IRL and online are autistic.
@naglfar
Re: women and POC in autistic communities. Sad but true. With all the negative stereotypes that get played up in media it’s weird how consistently they sugarcoat how prone to xenophobia (or at least less interested and/or competent at hiding it compared to normies) we are as a class. Not just whites, even. I’ve known at least two Black men who were on the spectrum and both were involved with the Nation of Islam, though one of them later came to regard this as a huge mistake.
Re: Will Graham. Wasn’t the deal with him that he THINKS he’s autistic at the beginning but it later turns out he had some brain disease that was slowly killing him and Hannibal figured it out but didnt say anything because he wanted to watch it progress?
@Naglfar : while that’s partly because knowing that information don’t interest me much, I don’t remember anyone whose I suspected they were autistic before they actually said it. From my point of views, some people, most but not all of them asocial, are autistic and decide to reveal at some point that the cause for that is autism. Presumably, some other don’t reveal that and it’s fine, while a lot of asocial people are just asocial. Crucially, the majority of anti-social people, and the majority of people that rumors say are autistics, aren’t autistics. While a good deals of actual one don’t show it if you’re not in a relationship with them.
To take the problem from another angle, I am not terribly interested in the relationship between trans-ness and autism. Half because that mostly look like a way to victimize both of thoses groups even more (as shown when you talked of how TERFs weaponize that hypothese), but also simply because I don’t see much practical good from studying that link. Maybe there is a use for that information that I didn’t think of, but every parents need to be attentive to whether their childrens are trans or not, and it’s not like the parents of non-autistic one can be any less attentive.
(by comparison, knowing that most french people whose family name is “Boileau” are at heightened risk for diabetes is interesting to me, because there is a practical public health policy to be extracted from that who don’t throw people under the bus)
@Naglfar:
Dysphoria and dissociation are also linked. It makes me wonder if dissociation and autism might be linked, and how.
Hey, if there are any Australians awake now, how big is the Bettina Arndt thing in the media there? Would it be fair to say she’s the most hated Australian woman at the moment?
Kei-O-What
(…) LoK got back on track in the third season after the first two were sexist messes, (plus fixing the original’s “Mother Problems” with Su Yin being both alive and prominent).
@Crip Dyke
I was aware of dissociation being linked to dysphoria, but I don’t know if there is a link between dissociation and autism. It could be, but I haven’t seen research. The most I know on that front is anecdotal: I (and a few other autistic people I’ve talked to) had few friends as a child and developed a vivid imagination and would daydream a lot. In retrospect, this was a coping mechanism of sorts. Not sure if that would count as dissociation, I’m not an expert on psychology.
Yeah, I’m just a disappointment to people because I’m autistic and also kind of a dope. I can’t even remember my own phone number. I’m not Rain Man, I can barely add in my head.
I’d just assumed that they were. My mom and I are both autists and we both dissociate to a high degree.
@Ohlmann:
Huh. The only person I remember doing this is Greta Thunberg. But maybe all the fake I’m-not-an-asshole-I’m-an-aspie folks on Incel forums use that too?
If so, it’s probably been called out right here on David’s blog and I’m just not remembering it for some reason.
@Crip Dyke
I’ve seen a few people claim aspie supremacy as an ideology that autistic people are superior to allistic people or represent a next step in human evolution. This ideology isn’t as common any more as it once was, but it resurfaces every once in a while. I haven’t seen it on Incel forums, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Note: I in no way endorse this ideology, or any supremacist ideology for that matter. I don’t think I’m superior or inferior because of autism, I just am who I am.
@Recovering40KFan
I’m guessing the xenophobia gets glossed over because our society as a whole is highly xenophobic so it is just normalized.
@Ohlmann
There are many characters that are coded as autistic, including lead characters like Temperance Brennan from Bones and Maura Isles from Rizzoli & Isles. But like lots of other groups, we have a desire for explicit representation. The comparison I would make is characters who are coded LGBT vs. explicitly LGBT. (On which note, I am unaware of any characters that are explicitly both LGBT and autistic outside of a handful of webcomics like Dumbing of Age. Definitely nothing mass media.)
@Naglfar
OF COURSE the TERFs are doing this. Awful people are so rarely awful in only a single way. Ugh.
@Elephants_Through_Cartilage
Will Graham’s viral encephalitis was giving him hallucinations, but it was unrelated to being on the spectrum. He was identified as such both before the symptoms appeared and after it was treated.
Speaking of autism and trans, a good read is Laura K Dale’s book “Uncomfortable Labels” from last year.
The lead character in the TV series “The Good Doctor” is autistic. It’s very specific. He is a resident in training to become a surgeon and competing and socializing with a small group of the other residents. It’s quite a good show and well-written and acted.
As for “PC”, many, many years ago, when I worked in a store, we used the term as shorthand for “private cop” or “security guard”. One day, someone from corporate was in the store and asked me where a PC was. I told him that Arturo was upstairs by the front door, and that the last I’d seen, Victor was in the Classical Music section. Corporate dude gave me a loooong look like I was stupid, then slowly and with careful enunciation, asked – “So, this ‘Arturo’ and this ‘Victor’ – are they PCs or are they Macintoshes??”
Re: PC
In my early lawyer days I saw in some case papers that my client had been apprehended by “PD Rebel”. I didn’t recognise the appellation but I didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking. So I asked why there was no statement from them. Turns out PD is “Police Dog”.
However transpires I wasn’t the only one to get confused by that.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/police-dog-witness-statement-uk_n_2717815?ri18n=true
I liked this autistic character https://cbselementary.fandom.com/wiki/Fiona_Helbron because she reminds me of a lot of great nerd women I have met and of one autist women I love, even though we often have to take a break from each other.
@Alan Robertshaw
Could you point me to a few good ressources for healthy vegan cooking (again)? I’ve got some friends who might have overdone it a little with the whole suffering-for-mother-gaya thing in their politically optimized but not very well thought out diet and someone has to show them how proper vegan cooking works.
@Crip Dyke
Can I have a link to your blog too? I really prefer reading to playing computer games in my free time.
Also, hm, I dunno. I seem to be allowed to hang with a lot of nice people on the larger neurodivergence spectrum (ADHS, aspergers,autism in one case…) get regularly asked questions about the topic and confused with an autist cis girl and can also deal with the more stressfull of nerds who decide that yelling at me is the best course of action. What is weird to me is that I seem to have this, well hyperspeed mode, where I can do stuff extremly fast and without thinking but it starts to fail as soon as there is the slightest interruption by social signals. For example I was recently training with the hanbo and there was a womens self defense class in the same room and I had started to work on my trauma and found other trauma victims who also seem to have profited from me telling my experiences and trying to help them. Also it had rained and rain had recently caused me to damage my car and someone else’s in order to save a friends life (she’s fine) and I was wearing the wrong clothes and was very stressed out before I even started. So the situation was very charged for me and after a while I started being really aggressive to the point where there was constantly one of two things happening –
a) I was attacked in a lifelike fashion and easily won but showed a lot of aggression way beyond my normal level of fairness
b) I was given conflicting instructions, often last-second and tried to act on them instead of defending myself — failing very often and very hard. Overall this mode seems to be related to the cooperative 10 for 10 mode (you work as fast as possible without a lot of conscious thought and are allowed to think and talk for 10 second if you feel good about getting 600s of calmer working in return) in some fashion and overdoing it is a bad thing.
This seems to be a general pattern for me: I can do a lot of stuff when my self-confidence is high but this always depends on very obscure things I need to find and archieve and on being able to help others and can be brought very low by even slight justified criticism. I can make the issue go away by either smoking or consuming other dampening substances, getting beat up in training regularly, starving my body or making it unable to function in another way, but whenever my body is sort of whole, highspeedmode (sorting stuff in a carload full of bags with two hands without pausing and remembering the items in each bag over days so I don’t need a list, reading texts or talking and loosing all sense of time and of course rescue medicine and fighting) is waiting patiently in the background and has since I can remember. It’s not even like I want to be seen as strange or aggressive, I just..seem to get weird ideas whenever I need to be faster than usual. So today I drank chocolate from a measuring cup I brought to the super market because it was raining and I really needed one to deal with the lights, the chaos, the noise and all the people optimizing their own paths around me all the time. I also have begun to have mental breakdowns whenever the pressure to do stuff like shopping in the correct way gets too high and my plans fail. I then forget a lot about what happened but somehow act in a predictable and adequate way. So, I guess I might have ADHS yet? My psychologists seem to think differently and will need some convincing, as usual.
@ Lisa
I would love to. I’ll ping Varalys though; she’s the real expert; and somewhat less didactic.
BRB.
Oh, and Crip Dyke’s blog. Well worth checking out.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/
Pinged. Also, I don’t know if @nobody is vegan; but they know a fair bit about this stuff; so maybe have some pointers?
@Alan
Maybe I’m missing something, but how does one “ping” people on here? I haven’t seen that done before.
@ naglfar
Ah, I pinged her elsewhere. Usually though I just ring her at the exact moment she was about to win a boss battle.
@Alan Robertshaw
Ah. That makes more sense.
@LindsayIrene
Yeah, I also hate that meme. We discussed the term in a local hacker space when some other, mostly cis girls talked about how great and cool their projects where and tried to talk to me like that and compliment me for trivial stuff. I’m fine with them having other plans than I have (regarding earning money and such) but this super-hero meme stinks of comic-book ideas of supremacy. I actually prefer girls like Pippi Longstockings because she is keeping it real and, while sometimes using vocabulary that is seen as problematic today, her author is cool and I have yet to meet someone who tries to be an evil version of her. All the superheroes out there, however…shudder. Those are not nice people. Aspiring to be more than human isn’t fun, it’s a stress reaction to danger and will destroy your mind and body.
I have met entirely too many special girls who where broken by the system and by people who where cruel enogh to use them as basically a code monkey (paying peanuts of course) or who where sorted out even earlier for failing to study because their psyche wouldn’t tolerate it anymore.
My own superpower seems to be that I can think two or 2^n (n being mostly 2..4 or other nice numbers) things at once (maybe some adhs/shizoid thing, didn’t really get a diagnose) and become basically a tool for any job I am trained to do. Afterwards people are usually angry at me that I didn’t listen to their advice while in the mode and am smug enough to explain why exactly my actions where right later. However, I also don’t stay aggressive. I like to yield when there is even a mediocre argument. …. it’s complicated.
Healthy vegan cooking. Well there are a few vegan channels I follow on Youtube that might be helpful. Cheap Lazy Vegan is a good resource also personally I have got lots of recipes from a Youtuber called Hench Herbivore, he’s a vegan body builder but is also a lovely non-macho guy who is LGBT friendly and does a lot of “What I Eat I A Day” videos which have inspired me to cook. Healthy Crazy Cool is another great channel for vegan recipes too.
@LindsayIrene:
What do you mean by “dissociate”, precisely?
@Lisa Siebel:
Funnily enough, Pippi seems to have sprung to life recently, somehow, and started doing a lot of activism on the topic of climate change. But she’s now going by the name of Greta Thunberg. 🙂