Self-identified incel Alek Minassian is currently on trial in Canada for the van attacks that killed ten in Toronto in 2018. His defense? That his autism made him do it, leaving him not criminally responsible for the killings.
One of the psychiatrists testifying on his behalf argued that his thinking was so distorted by “extreme autism” that he was virtually psychotic. The other argued that Minassian was so lacking in empathy he was unable to understand that what he did was wrong.
There are several problems with these arguments. For one thing, autism is not remotely the same as psychosis. For another, despite Minassian’s lack of empathy — a trait shared by many violent criminals — he made it clear in interviews with the two experts that he does indeed know the difference between right and wrong. It seems unlikely that the defense’s logic will convince the judge trying the case.
More broadly, the “autism defense” is distressing because it essentially throws every law-abiding autistic person under the bus, suggesting some sort of innate connection between autism and acts of extreme violence that simply doesn’t exist. As Autism Canada has pointed out in a response to the defense’s arguments, autistic people are far more likely to be the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators.
In an essay on the case, autism activist Sarah Kurchak wrote
The lingering idea that autism alone can make a person violent and dangerous, and the idea that autistic people can’t experience empathy—and that those who don’t experience empathy are dangerous and incapable of caring about others in alternative ways—affects everything from the way that people treat us socially, to our employment prospects, to whether we are able to access autism testing and services at all.
Reading about the Minassian trial, I’m struck by the similarities between his lawyers’ arguments and the ways in which Minassian’s fellow incels also use autism as an excuse for their own foul ideology.
Many incels claim to be autistic, or at least on the spectrum, though it’s hard to know how many of these people are legit and how many are self-diagnosed pretenders. And while it’s likely that the social awkwardness that tends to come with autism has led to romantic difficulties for some incels, autism doesn’t explain or excuse their adoption of a hateful, misogynistic set of beliefs, or the cheering on of mass killers like Minassian and incel “saint” Elliot Rodger, or the acts of outright harassment of women and girls that some incels indulge in.
Just as there is nothing inherent in autism that led to Minassian’s rampage, there is nothing inherent in autism that leads to the so-called “Black Pill.” Pretending there is some innate connection is an insult to the overwhelming majority of autistic people, who are as horrified by incels as the rest of us.
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O/T: Today is the 31st anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre. I expect incels will be doing something awful today to commemorate.
Wow, there really are a lot of us autistic folx that frequent this site. I don’t have much to add that others have not covered, this really is endangering a lot of innocent people to defend a monster.
@ allandrel
I wonder if that’s because this is a safe space for autistic people; or maybe it’s that there’s a particular ‘house style’ of commenting here, that sort of reasoned analytical exploration of issues, rather than just the all too common internet ranting, that autistic people seem especially good at?
@Alan Robertshaw
I feel like it might be a combination of both, it’s definitely a good space for autistic people and also we tend to do a lot of that type of commenting. It might also be that a lot of autistic people are interested in social justice, which is of course important here, especially given that we discuss neurodiversity and disability fairly often. Another possible explanation is that, in a lot of mainstream autistic spaces there isn’t much of a voice given to certain subsets of the autistic community, such as autistic women, queer autistic people, autistic PoC, etc.; and here those groups can have more of a say.
Another autist here. I can think in both words and images. In fact, my inner world is so vivid that, as far back as can remember, I’ve always had trouble staying mentally present. It started being a problem when I was in middle school (along with undiagnosed inattentive type ADD and dyscalculia)–my grades went way downhill because I could not pay attention in class and would just daydream class time away. Fortunately, I found a good job (school custodian) where my body can move on autopilot while my mind does its thing.
One fun thing I can do with my brain is listen to and even create music. If I know a song well, I can alter it in my head. I can imagine it as played by a music box, sung by Dolly Parton, performed by a black metal band. Unfortunately, it doesn’t translate into musical ability. I absolutely cannot play any musical instruments. I had three years of piano lessons and never got beyond the most basic level. Which may be the dyscalculia. Can’t follow choreography or play sports, either. Or drive.
@ lindsayirene
That isn’t necessarily a problem. Ozzie Osbourne just used to hum tunes he came up with and the other band members would translate them into actual music. He said Randy Rhoads was especially good at that, hence asking him to join his solo band.
This is a rhetorical question: Why are more and more children being diagnosed with autism? From Wikipedia: In the US – 5,413 children in 1991-92, to 370,011 in 2010-11 – had been “identified and served as eligible for autism services.”. I don’t want to anger anyone here, but I can’t help but be suspicious.
The following is of course only anecdotal, but at one place I worked, out of everyone in the IT department who had children, all of them had at least one child who’d been diagnosed with autism. This seems very suspect, to me. These were all employees who enjoyed good incomes, and had more than adequate health insurance.
@ Dormousing_it
For one thing, in the past, autistic people were often diagnosed with other conditions, usually mental disabilities. As autism diagnoses rise, diagnoses for those other conditions drop. This article goes into all the factors. Though unfortunately it parrots the “autism is a male disease” line. Autism has definitely been underdiagnosed in women and girls.
IT is attractive to autistic people. Autism has a genetic component. That doesn’t seem sinister to me at all.
The inability of a person to get tested for different neurodevelopmental states unless they are disabled by them looks like society has made personality a pathology. I keep thinking it’s like left-handed people but with personality.
I also walk on my toes and I have tourette syndrome, adhd, and likely undiagnosed social ocd. I get the impression that the difference between autism/tourette syndrome is like that between add/adhd.
@LindsayIrene
Same here. I dissociate a lot, though in my case that may also have to do with gender dysphoria. The trouble is that I’m bad at writing about it, so I’m not a particularly great author. Since it occurs in my head as visual scenes rather than words, maybe that’s why, and it’s possible I’d be better writing for a visual medium, such as screenplays/scripts.
I can also do that. I have a very good memory for music, which has helped me as a musician a lot.
Maybe one of these days I should do a black metal cover of a Dolly Parton song. I’m not very familiar with her music, though.
@Dormousing_it
There are a few likely explanations for more autism diagnoses in children. On the diagnostic side, the DSM-5’s criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are much broader than the DSM-III-R’s and it contains what would have been numerous separate diagnoses such as Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, etc., under one heading. For example, when I was diagnosed in the early 2000s I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, but nowadays I would not receive that diagnosis as it’s included under ASD as of the DSM-5 in 2013. As well, it’s somewhat easier to get a diagnosis now than 30 years ago. I also think that a lot more autistic folks who mask it well are diagnosed today than would have been in 1992, back then it would have mostly been people who didn’t pass for neurotypical.
As for why more of your colleagues’ children were autistic, I have a few possible explanations. One is that if they had a higher income it would have been more likely they could afford to see a psychologist and get a diagnosis, and the other is that some fields, like IT, may attract a lot of people on the spectrum and their children would be likely to inherit that.
Edit: LindsayIrene beat me to it.
Don’t want to keep talking about me, but I’m still kicking around the signs, noticing I do them A LOT more than I thought now that I am paying attention.
Also, thinking about how both my father and uncle had developmental issues at a young age, delayed talking, difficulty relating to others, etc. Even today they are considered weird loners
who talk about things nobody else cares about.
My brother commonly wrings his hands ad he constantly paces. His son, a toddler, didn’t learn to talk until later, is incredibly inconsistant and picky about food, ignores other people in preference to playing with toys…
Well, whatever it is, the Force is strong in this family.
I’ll have to remember to ask my brother more about how his son behaves. Need to tread carefully, he and his wife are rather worried about it, and apparently some are trying to associate autism with killing people these days, amongst other things. “Congrats, I think your kid is autistic as the day is long, but don’t worry, so is everyone else in the family!” Hmmmm… might not go over well.
While not a direct consequence of Minassian defence, someone in my family said yesterday “we should stop allowing being autistic as an excuse, that way less people would pretend to be it”. I hope he won’t have autistic childrens.
—
One of the reason in my opinion of having more diagnosed autistic people now, in addition to how they are more likely to get diagnosed, is the same reason for which they are more openly homosexual people : in the past, autists either learned to not show discomfort and fake social expectation, or ended badly if they could not.
(also, modern life is from what I understand much more stressing and taxing for autist than medieval life, which make accommodations more import for modern autists than ancient one)
Yeah, in modern life it’s almost impossible to get away from light and noise and constant human interaction. I wonder how many monks and nuns were on the spectrum. And I wonder how many people put in terrible ‘madhouses’ were autists having trouble dealing with modernization.
@Dormousing_it, you say you find the prevalence of autism amongst your colleagues’ children suspect. May I ask what it is that you suspect? You also mention the decent wages and health insurance of your colleagues in a way that suggests it is related to the likelihood that their kids would be autistic, but I’m not sure I understand the connection that you’re making there. Are you able to explain it?
Also, I have for years, I think–however long you’ve been commenting, anyway–read your nym as “dormousing it,” like you are dormousing a thing. Is it actually “dormousing IT,” like the information technology department? I’ll have to read it differently from now on, if so.
@.45
Not a professional, but it sounds to me like your family and you are autistic. I gave my dad copies of Luke Beardon’s books ‘to help him understand me and (his wife’s granddaughter)’ in the hope he’d get the idea and see if it was worth getting an assessment. Don’t know how much luck I’ve had with that strategy because I’ve barely seen him this year due to lockdown, but my younger sister is coming around to the idea that she might be somewhere on the spectrum and my nephew (older sister’s son) has his first assessment appointment next week.
@Viscaria. I’m suspicious, because I wonder if their doctors might see them as easy prey. It’s cynical of me, I know, but doctors know these people have good jobs, and good health insurance. So, diagnose their children with a lifetime condition, and profit. People will pretty much do anything for their children, it seems to me.
‘Dormousing it’ refers to hibernating in a nice warm bed, in a darkened room, generally early in the morning on a cold day. It’s a joke between my spouse and I. It has nothing to do with information technology.?
@Dormousing_it
I think the kind of pretense you are suspecting from the doctors would be very hard to maintain over a long term. How would you continuously convince people their child is exhibiting developmental difficulties when they aren’t? Also, the doctors themselves probably won’t get much profit from that, because support for autism is – at least as far as I know – much less medical and more social, psychological etc. This would require a conspiracy of many different people, all of whom do not care about the difficulties of the parents and of the misdiagnosed child. It doesn’t seem tenable.
The other explanations you’ve been offered seem much more reasonable. I’ll add another possible one, although with the disclaimer that I don’t know much about the subject so might be wrong. Anyway, I’ve heard that one suggested cause for autism (along with the genetic factors) is parents’ age – as in, the older the parents are when the child is conceived, the higher the chance for autism. Again, I might be wrong about this. But if I do happen to remember that tidbit correctly, and if that tidbit does happen to not be dated, disproven, or just totally baseless to begin with – well, people that are more educated and have higher income generally tend to have kids later in life.
@Dormousing_it
Pretty much all autism treatment is related to specific accommodations based on the patient, so unless they needed specific support the doctors wouldn’t make much money. Some autistic people need more support than others, and that’s okay. So no, I don’t think neurotypical children are being diagnosed as autistic.
I will say, this seems rather conspiratorial and sounds a fair bit like the anti trans conspiracy that pharmaceutical companies are making doctors diagnose more kids with gender dysphoria to profit (often presented with the line about “lifelong patients”). I’m not accusing you of believing that one, just noting the similarities.
@Penny
You are correct that autism appears to be more common in children born to older parents, so that’s also plausible.
This will ramble over several topics.
Re: music — I can also manipulate music in my head to a similar degree to LindsayIrene. Images and words as well, though, and turn words into audio in any voice I remember. The big limitation on this is working memory — past a certain point (and of course if I want to share it with others) I would need a way to get it out of my head and into an external recording medium of some sort. Sadly, the tools to do this with music or images (e.g. WACOM tablets) are quite expensive, aside from low quality analog (e.g., pencil and paper, requiring consumables and with no easy way to digitize it without further losses of quality).
Re: uptick in diagnoses and a “nest” of autistic kids in some IT department — I would concur with the other suggested explanations. Good paying jobs with good health insurance makes getting a diagnosis easier than if you’re poor in the US, or working class with poor/no insurance. IT attracting people who might have autism (perhaps undiagnosed) or might have a subclinical amount of autistic traits, plus heritability, is also likely part of the explanation.
As for why IT attracts people with autism to begin with, it’s probably a combination of two factors. One, you deal more with machines, which tend to obey strict rules and (normally) “can’t let you down” or behave “flaky” if you do everything exactly correctly — itself easier for autistic people than neurotypical ones (about which more below). Two, in a sense “everyone is autistic on the Internet”, so if you’re doing a lot of online collaboration rather than face-to-face it’s a level playing field. The neurotypicals’ unfair advantage is gone … or was, until Zoom became so damn popular. Just look at me: I can contribute and participate decently here, but I can’t even have a face-to-face conversation with most people. If it’s one-on-one it just withers and dies after a couple of “hi, how are you”s, and if it’s a larger group, they actively contrive to limit my ability to contribute, by avoiding topics where I have anything to say and, if such a topic does come up, chattering so much that I can’t get a word in edgewise without resorting to rude interruptions while they maneuver away from that topic.
The overall increase in diagnoses might be from several combined causes: improved access to health insurance since Obamacare was introduced; combining multiple diagnoses into ASD; and perhaps an underlying, smaller, genuine rise in incidence. Pollution exposure during pregnancy is listed as a cause of some cases, and in recent years we’ve seen the rise of fracking, we’ve seen Flint, Michigan, and there have been lesser-publicized Flint-like incidents elsewhere. There’s even one here in Canada, involving mercury contamination of the water supply on some First Nations land. One anticipates there may have been a “lull” in the 90s and early 00s with spikes in incidence both before and after, with the current spike due to the fracking boom and the previous spike being GenXers exposed prenatally to tetraethyl lead when the use of that was at its peak in the late 1970s. (That previous spike would include myself and most of the other middle-aged autists who have weighed in in this thread.) Another trend contributing to the current rise could be urbanization, with more of the population being exposed to the high levels of automobile-related pollutants, and some industrial pollutants, that occur in dense cities than in the past. Even without tetraethyl lead, I expect that modern urban pollution is capable of contributing to some non-zero degree.
Meta: I still can’t access the Jordan Owen thread. Why has no action been taken regarding a serious malfunction that was initially observed several days ago? That same thread had experienced a prior glitch, in which a single comment that had set off my troll-dar and prompted me to ask the commenter for supporting evidence disappeared, leaving my response dangling where it no longer made very much sense.
Re: my disabilities — I have several aside from social deficits. I’ve mentioned the sleep disorder, and I do not seem to manage frustration at all well. But there’s something weird also with my executive function, I think, which is more of a mixed blessing than either a straight ability or a straight disability, with the negative component coming because it makes it harder for me to relate to others’ experiences and perhaps makes my expectations of others difficult for them to meet. I think it also has an inhibition effect that prevents me from taking certain types of risks, some of which may be necessary to achieving certain social goals that other people attain with ease. Think of it as being “super-sober” — compared to me, everyone else seems to be mildly drunk most of the time, both in terms of looser inhibitions and in terms of impaired judgment.
Specifically, other people appear to make very odd impulsive choices from time to time, typically regretting them almost instantly as evidenced by statements like “silly me” and the like. I don’t, although at a low rate similar outcomes still happen to me for some reason — for example, lost or forgotten items. The difference, besides lower frequency, being that at no time did I experience making a conscious decision that produced the bad outcome. Instead it just happened, an external factor like the weather over which I have no control. There was never a “silly me” making an impulsive choice that was quickly regretted, there was just a me going about his ordinary business when out of the blue something went wrong for no logical reason.
That last also, obviously, raises a separate question: What is it, external to my conscious decision-making, that causes such incidents, and how do I get rid of it? Besides sometimes causing the world to give me the feedback it would had I made one of those “silly me” choices that I don’t ever make, despite my not having made it, it also sometimes corrupts the behavior of external things such as computers. For instance, right now I am having problems backing up a machine here. It seems that Microsoft Security Essentials is triggering on an old, disused file (one that never triggered it before) and in turn is tripping up the backup process. The thing is, I went to the reported file path and deleted the file in question, then reran the backup, and the same thing happened again. Citing the same exact file. The one that isn’t actually there anymore. So, it’s “pretending” that I never deleted the file that I deleted less than three hours ago! This is part of the “the world itself is gaslighting me” thing I keep experiencing. It does not correspond correctly to the choices I have made and sometimes just pretends I did “what it wanted me to do”, usually when it sets a trap of some sort and I sidestep it. It’s like Donald Trump and the 2020 election — when it’s determined to get me, it simply will not acknowledge that I actually avoided the wrong-action it wanted to lure me into and punish me for, and punishes me anyway! Unfortunately, while Trump lacks the power to rewrite reality to suit his own preferred narrative, the world itself has that power. It’s supposed to lack a preferred narrative, so that all of us have freedom of will (even to deny realities like climate change and election losses), but apparently in cases that involve me it has a preferred narrative and will railroad the plot no matter what I do like a cack-handed and inflexible dungeon master.
@Surplus
I have another bit of a theory as to why autistic people are attracted to IT. Since many of the people who developed computers were likely autistic (Alan Turing, for instance, showed many signs), they made them to work in a way that made sense to them, i.e. to autistic people. As a result, the technology today still works in a way that makes more intuitive sense to autistic people. It’s a stretch, but it’s possible.
Re: pollution, I wouldn’t lean too much into that explanation, given that autism is more or less the opposite of the typical symptoms of lead or mercury poisoning and there is no known link for those specific substances. It’s possible, but I have yet to see evidence and it feeds into the narrative of autistic people as damaged goods (e.g. the anti vaxxer obsession with thimerosal, an organomercury compound).
Wikipedia’s article lists environmental pollutants as a risk factor.
Re: older parents, it is also the case that people in general are delaying marriage and childrearing longer than in the past, in addition to the effect of affluence. This could also cause an uptick over time.
Re: overdiagnosis, I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Taking what is actually within the normal range of human personalities and pathologizing and medicalizing it is suspected in some other cases. For instance, people within the normal range of variation who lie outside the narrower range for which the one-size-fits-all classroom-learning school system was designed end up having difficulty in school and in recent years there has been a trend of diagnosing ADHD in these cases — and prescribing ritalin, so someone’s been getting rich off this trend at some pharma company or another. This is probably less a conspiracy than a “bad synergy” of assorted independent motives: parents to fix their kids’ school problems; schools to fix “disruptive” students and other impedance mismatches that result from real-world children not being spherical students in a vacuum; and doctors and pharma execs to make more money and expand their market shares. Many of those misaligned incentives stem from one root cause: capitalism. The one-size-fits-all schooling system was designed to churn out competent factory robots, and then retrofit to produce a Borg hive of bland, confirmist suit-and-tie-wearing cubicle fauna, all for the benefit of giant corporations and their wealthy owners, on top of the obvious motives of high-earning Ferrari-driving MDs and downright rich multi-yacht-owning pharma CEOs.
Any more elaborate conspiracy is unlikely to be true. A lot of the “conspiracies” of the modern world are similar confluences of “bad synergy” with perverse incentives that happen to align in some malign, but unplanned, fashion. Throw in common phenomena like “an institution will seek to preserve the problem to which it is the solution” and “the bigger your problems, the bigger your department’s budget if it’s allocated according to apparent need” and toothless antitrust to prevent capitalism’s one redeeming feature, competitive markets, from pruning the worst cases of this out of the private sector, and you easily get many of the messy problems in the modern world, from overdiagnosing and overmedicating various things to the school-to-prison pipeline to open-ended no-exit-strategy wars in the Middle East (though it takes a Cheney-level war criminal to start one, it just takes the perverse incentives of arms merchants and assorted other political and capitalist fauna to perpetuate it thereafter).
And on the topic of my own anomalous executive function, the “super-sobriety” or whatever: I am wondering if this is an autistic trait, nominally disjoint from the social issues, and contributing to our ability to handle well things that are finicky and detail-oriented by their natures — such as IT work.
I’ve also sometimes wondered if, while being “super-sober” vis-a-vis the symptoms of alcohol intoxication, my mind acts as if I’m on a constant low-level drip-feed of hallucinogens, or something of the sort. That in turn leads to another thought: that maybe many of the intoxicants that see recreational use operate by nudging people along various of the dimensions of normal variability; so, alcohol makes one more extroverted and impulsive, hallucinogens make one more creative (but the usual recreational dose takes one well outside the limits of normal variability, to essentially dreaming-awake), tobacco and marijuana make one less neurotic, and so forth. In five-factor terms, alcohol produces + extraversion and – conscientiousness, the things one smokes produce – neuroticism, and so on.
Where the external “cack-handed and inflexible DM” comes in, I don’t know. Probably unrelated, precisely because it is external. It might be that it does similar things to other people but their own lack of super-sobriety prevents them from realizing it, as they just assume the consequences to be among the results of their own frequent minor lapses in judgment. The signal to noise ratio is poor in their case. If that hypothesis is correct, and the one about super-sobriety being an autistic trait rather than an independent comorbidity, then other autistic people should have noticed the DM, but no one else here has come forward yet to say “That’s happened to me, too!”, so we now have circumstantial evidence that the DM is specifically my problem, for some reason.
And the railroading of the plot that it does is often extremely obvious. The current backup difficulties with one instance thus far of the universe pretending I didn’t delete some file that I deleted is only knee-high to what happened the last time I did a full (not incremental) backup. That time the power to my apartment kept going out! Invariably when it got to about the 90% mark. The (alleged) causes differed every time: loss of supply from Hydro One; freezing rain (that was less than a millimeter and shouldn’t have been enough to cause any problems beyond a few hours of slippery sidewalks); a transformer blew out (on the other side of town?!) but every single time the outage’s geographic footprint and timing made sure it knocked out my backup just as it reached the 90% mark. If you tried to sell this script to Hollywood, they’d reject it as too contrived.
That, in turn, pales in comparison to the saga of the cramp preventing medication. There, the DM was adamant that I pay out of pocket for it, rather than get it covered by health insurance, and it pretty much literally moved heaven and earth to achieve that objective, including: closing my doctor’s office in the middle of a workday afternoon, on of course the exact day I went there to renew the scrip; actually canceling my service with them, on of course the exact next day I went there to do likewise; suffice to say, there was a lengthy sequence of chess-like moves by me to obtain the meds and countermoves by it to keep them away from me, escalating all the way to the point of the DM engineering a planet-wide recall of almost every version of the drug from almost every manufacturer, leaving, so far as I am able to determine, only a single generic manufacturer standing … whose version is only available in inefficient, somewhat pricey OTC blister-pack boxes, not as a covered prescription in an efficient little bottle. I don’t think anything else has ever been made so systematically unavailable worldwide except for DDT and chlorofluorocarbons, and both of those would destroy the planet if used in large quantities. Whatever the DM is, it has the power of a supranational consensus on the same order as those that banned DDT, if not the power of an honest-to-god god, but none of the elegance of the latter.
The closest analogue in religious literature that I can find is the systematic abuse and harassment of Job, which was however way worse. Outside of religious literature, I could refer you to any number of poorly-written novels and movies where the plot just steamrolled over character motivations, sensible precautions and planning, science, logic, and reason to arrive at the writers’ desired destination. Why did they leave the prisoner not only his clothes but his weapons? Because the plot required him to use them to escape. Why in the movie Independence Day did the USAF have nothing but fighters? Here in the real world they have bombers too. Why not drop the ring right into the top of the volcano from the eagles, or for that matter cut out a lot of dangerous walking and boating in orc-occupied lands? Why don’t the villains, after episode 4 or 5 or so, just shoot James Bond on sight? They all work for Blofeld so it’s all one single organization. Don’t they share information internally? Why does it take more than half an hour for the Independence Day aliens to think of turning their computers off and back on again? Ditto the crew of the Enterprise in Contagion, and the Romulans in the same episode. And so on and so forth. At least they thought of that remedy in half the time in Jurassic Park…though the notion of body armor seems to have eluded them. If it will stop a six-inch stiletto and even a bullet it will stop a raptor claw or tooth. Instead all they got issued was a useless construction-site hard hat. Nobody on the seabase in Deep Blue Sea had an elephant gun. Nobody on the seabase in The Abyss or Sphere had a jellyfish-proof diving suit. All three seabases and Jurassic Park were rendered helpless by conveniently-timed tropical storms, for which they inexplicably had only hours instead of days of advance warning, and of all of them, only one, the base in Sphere, had a submarine docked, and it was only big enough for half the main cast…though, in fairness, Titanic sailed with only enough lifeboats for half the ship, too, in the real world and not just in the movie.
There’s only one conclusion to be drawn from all of this data: I am a character in a bad Hollywood film. Worse, I’m not the hero, or even the villain or the hero’s sidekick. I’m that guy that’s in every movie who is supposed to be a knowledgeable expert in $(FIELD) but somehow everything goes wrong anyway, either because he isn’t listened to or because he is magically wrong due to the bad guys actually having actual magic powers or something similarly out of left field from the point of view of $(FIELD); and who also has no on-screen love interest, no prospects, at one point openly fantasizes about the group’s horse, llama, or other such animal, and if anyone gets captured and tortured by the bad guys, it’s him. You know the sort of character. Chekov. LaForge. The guy with the reedy voice in all the Mummy films. Him.
I want to speak to the director. There, if I say that, will that make my part’s actor say that to the actual director and maybe get something done?
@Surplus
You know, I was thinking of having a stab at addressing your wall of text, but am at work.
So until I get off, I’ll settle for responding to you implying you are the Laforge character. I’d say personally I empathize more with Barclay than Geordie. Barclay was a weird guy who didn’t fit in, awkwardly annoyed most of his coworkers to the point of avoiding him or wanting to get rid of him, but eventually he made contributions and became part of the team, finally depicted as having stayed friends with several of the main characters for years after the series ended as I recall.
I feel like I have something in common with his story. I am terrible at breaking the ice, do very poorly dealing with confrontation, struggle with multitasking, etc. I have had numerous coworkers comment on how they hated me for months, thought I was an arrogant dick, useless, didn’t want to work with me, etc, but in the end many of them came to think fairly well of me.
Anywho, that might apply to some of your life as well. Do you try to look incredibly interested in potted plants?
Yeah, Barclay might be an even better fit. (Which means TNG had two of this type of character. Though only LaForge kept getting captured and tortured. Romulans, Klingons, the Borg, pretty much everyone from the Trek rogue’s gallery got their turn with him eventually.) It seems there’s two types: the mostly-competent-but-romantically-hopeless ones, and the completely-comic-relief ones.
Maybe the one film to seriously subvert this trope is Ghostbusters II. The classic example of the trope from the first film, Louis, apparently gets with the nerdy secretary who also appears in both films. Of course, the sleazy womanizing lead Venkman had no trouble at all while the more honorable but goofy/ditzy character had to wait until halfway through the 2nd film still …
@Dormousing_it
Re: Your nym, okay, I’m glad I was reading it right all this time! You talked about IT and I was like, oh no, I have misunderstood that name every single time I’ve seen it.
Re: Your suspicions, thank you for explaining further. I believe the possible explanations put forward by other commenters are more likely, but I sincerely appreciate you explaining where you were coming from because I wasn’t able to put it together on my own.
@Surplus
Well, Barclay did get turned into a humanoid spider in one episode. Have you watched DS9? As far as characters who get the short end of the stick go, all the “O’Brien must suffer” episodes take the cake. Dude got his very own trope. (Of course, both the actor and the character are Irish, so there are so many jokes that could be made here.)
At any rate, there were the more serious parts of your life you mentioned.
Disclaimer: I have not been here long, not read many of your posts, have not lived your life, I haven’t been there to see how your super-sobriety works, I am not a professional anything, I do not know much of anything about your issues or conditions, management not responsible for injuries to person or property, do not use underwater or around hazardous chemicals. I also am not trying to offend or wound you, but given that tone is hard to moderate through typed word…
Heath Ledger Joker: “Here. We. Go.”
To start, I find it interesting you seem to apply Occam’s Razor to the idea of doctors, pharmaceutical companies, etc, having a specific and malicious conspiracy plot afoot to play games for money with various patients.
Wouldn’t Occam’s Razor also suggest that a vast conspiracy or the plotting of someone upstairs to specifically target one individual for the “lulz” to be a bit far fetched? Especially when said individual also suggests in the same post that their condition might be influencing their state of mind? (Yes, I am aware that this argument smacks of gaslighting and implies you cannot trust your own assessment of a situation I have no first hand experience with. Still, what would these entities or DM gain from expending a great deal of time and resources on annoying and threatening you specifically?)
Speaking of specific people: “It might be that it does similar things to other people but their own lack of super-sobriety prevents them from realizing it, as they just assume the consequences to be among the results of their own frequent minor lapses in judgment.”
I’m sorry, but what? I don’t know where you live, but where I live, or specifically, work, there are multiple people who seem to be in a near constant struggle to keep their heads above water. You are hardly alone.
I have several people who owe me hundreds of dollars because every time they start to get something going for them, their car breaks down, they need a new hot water heater, they or a family member has a medical emergency, etc. I mean, not to brag, but if it wasn’t for my lack of boundaries and inability to say no to a good sob story, there would be a few extra people either homeless or in the morgue. (And yes, I know several are literally just sob stories they made up for booze money, but there are some I have ample reason to believe are telling the truth.)
As for blaming their own lapses in judgement, again, I don’t where you live or what parts of society you interact with, but if you take prescriptions, you have to have seen patients insisting that “This always happens!” or “You guys are always screwing up my stuff!” Around where I live, people usually blame everyone but themselves. Heck, if people blamed themselves for whatever consequences, we wouldn’t have this particular page on this particular blog to talk about this.
I know I myself am prone to blame inanimate objects for, well, oftentimes obeying the laws of physics. “*Censored!* I wanted you to *Censored* stay there, you *Censored* *Censored!* I didn’t tell you to fall over, you *more in that vein*” I certainly know that I put the top heavy object down in a slanted location, I know I hit the wrong button, I know did X, Y, and Z, but damn it, why didn’t it do what I wanted instead?!?!?
Moving on to your apparent computer issues. We use computers daily where I work (not that that is any big statement in today’s world). Naturally, glitches and problems are a daily thing. If they weren’t, then why would we even have IT departments? When I first got my latest phone, it constantly gave me trouble, not receiving text messages until days afterward. I took it in to “The Man” (which was a woman actually) and aside from updating the software and suggesting I restore to factory settings, they had nothing. This occurred numerous times before magically the problem just went away on its own. However, this did cause some issues when my boss could not get a hold of me. Am I to assume this was specifically a malicious act to sabotage any chance to earn some overtime?
I mean, to continue in that vein, at work we have had so much trouble with call offs and such, it would not suprise me if you tallied everything up and found we have run with more shifts understaffed than full ones. Computers fail, equipment breaks down, etc, usually when we are behind and need everything in full fighting trim just to deal with the latest problem coming down the pipe. I often joke I am surprised when something actually works as intended.
So, were I so inclined I might even theorize that such events as above occur more often on my shift than others. It wouldn’t be true, but…
Sorry, I feel like I am rambling here, it’s late, and I’m apparently not as prepared or coherent as I thought.
So, I guess I will conclude with another random observation on some previous posts of yours: I notice that you make references to arguments and how you believe your arguments won in numerous cases.
Let me ask you this: Why do you put this in terms of argument? Why are people arguing with you? What do they gain by it, win or lose said argument?
Honestly, to answer those questions for myself here, I have to say I am responding to you for several reasons. I’d like to say that concern for your wellbeing is the only concern. I.E. I hope that something I say here helps you in some way.
However, I have to be honest and say there is a certain amount of narcissistic rambling going on ala Bond villain, and a certain amount of “Someone’s wrong on the internet” involved. Ultimately, whether I win or lose this “argument”, I mostly think my only real gain will be a bit of practice at trying organize my random thoughts and observations on the fly.
Anyway, I hope I did not offend, and I hope that some of this is helpful.