glenn beck is crazy

this glenn beck guy is seriously off his meds and needs to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital:



time for the men in white coats to take him to the loony bin...

oh great

oh great, some jackass murdered a bunch of people here in binghamton. this is so messed up... nothing like this has ever happened here before. goddamn murderer. at least the guy who did it is dead. we have always had so little crime in this small tight-knit community before today. a very sad day for everyone. i am glad i was not at the civic center today. my job is just across the chenango river from that place.

right-wing stupidity

i often come across stupid comments right-wingers leave on the internet. today i truly found a gem: an entire thread full of comments by them denouncing the new york times and proclaiming how happy they are that it is going out of business. it actually isn’t going out of business, but these conservative lunatics have a very tenuous hold on reality, and as they make clear in their comments, they wish that the only media that existed were conservative propaganda outlets like fox news, right-wing rags like the new york post, washington times, and wall street journal, and right-wing talk radio (rush limbaugh, sean hannity, mike savage, etc.). ok, so here it is, take a look! just read the comments there, and you will see a huge number of incredibly idiotic comments by right-wing loonies, and a few sensible comments by people who are not right-wing lunatics. when i was in college at cornell i read every issue of the cornell review that was published during that time. it is the ultra-right-wing student newspaper written by complete lunatics at cornell, and it was founded by ann coulter when she was a student at cornell. anyway, reading the cornell review was a form of entertainment for me and many other cornell students, and the vast majority of us who read it found it to be full of nonsensical articles that are completely without merit written by people who seemingly inhabit some parallel universe where creationism is factually true, any sexual intercourse outside of a heterosexual marriage is an evil sin, unregulated free-market capitalism is the only economic system that works, the war in iraq is perfectly justified because saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and evil godless liberals (who are all communists in disguise) were somehow ruining the country even at a time when conservative republicans controlled all 3 branches of government. so anyway, i have long observed that conservative republicans are completely disconnected from reality because they are so indoctrinated by their absurd ideology, and this seems to hold true both when they are in power and when they are out of power. they seem to think, for example, that ad hominem attacks against al gore for his personal energy usage disprove the scientific theory of global warming. the beautiful part about all this is, pretty much every republican politician out there calls themselves a conservative, and lots of democrats do too, but hardly any politicians are willing to be associated with the term liberal, because they are all scaredy cats when it comes to being associated with liberalism. this is because foaming-at-the-mouth rabid conservatives have spread their infection to much of the public, making people think that liberalism is somehow bad, and thus only a small percentage of people have the guts to actually call themselves liberals. i am a liberal, of course, because i am not some dumbass coward afraid of the ramifications of admitting the truth. now let me discuss the merits of the arguments the conservatives were making in this thread at politico.com. many of them were saying “who cares about darfur?”, admitting to the public that they do not really care about the suffering of other people, even if the other people are innocent victims of a genocidal campaign of terror by a brutal dictator, namely sudanese president bashir who has been indicted for crimes against humanity. of course, i have always known that conservatism is based on selfishness and liberalism is based on actually caring about other people, and statements like this by conservatives only confirm this truism. i also read many comments rejoicing in the downfall of the new york times, claiming that it was full of liberal bias. i suppose that conservatives don’t care about facts, like the fact that the new york times helped lead the way in cheerleading for bush’s war in iraq before the war started, or that the new york times always has at least 2 staunch conservatives among its small group of paid opinion columnists, and whenever 1 of them leaves, they find another staunch conservative to replace them. if you look at a conservative newspaper such as the wall street journal or the washington times, you will find that every single opinion columnist is a diehard conservative, and no dissent from the party line is allowed. the new york times regularly criticizes both republicans and democrats, but republican publications such as the wall street journal and washington times are completely 1-sided on their opinion pages. the news pages of the wall street journal are respectable, but the news pages of the washington times are just as full of right-wing bias as the editorials, which is not surprising, given the fact that the washington times is owned by korean cult leader rev. sun myung moon, who served time in federal prison in the united states before he managed to use his political connections to become a free man once again. sometimes conservatives even accuse the washington post of being a democratic paper, which is far more ridiculous than saying that of the new york times, since the washington post is a centrist paper that usually favors the conservatives, not the liberals. the conservatives who comment on threads like the one i linked to get almost all their information from conservative propaganda outlets, except these internet conservatives tend to get most of it from conservative websites on the internet, not television, radio, or newspapers. i get news from the internet, television, radio, and newspapers... from all of them... even news-magazines like time magazine too. conservatism is insane because it is a form of fundamentalism that applies to all issues. conservatives are fundamentalist about religion, fundamentalist about free markets, and fundamentalist about pretty much everything, which means that they all have 1 point of view that they all agree on, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, and they stick to that point of view no matter what. being liberal, as a dictionary will tell you, has among its definitions being open-minded. as for conservative, the first definition is “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.” the first definition for liberal is “favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.” another definition for liberal is “favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.” another definition for liberal is “of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.” and liberal is also defined as “open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.” in other words, liberalism means that people are open-minded and do not stubbornly stick to old ideas that don’t work and have been proven wrong, while conservatism means either wanting to preserve the status quo and avoid change, or to go back to a previous status quo that was traditionally followed in the past until recently. now, there are several arguments that could be made against these dictionary definitions, such as saying that the dictionaries are written by a bunch of liberals, or that liberal and conservative no longer mean what they traditionally meant several decades ago, but i am not going to get into a debate over that. i would just like to say that the definitions you get at dictionary.com are fairly accurate in my opinion, and they seem to portray liberalism very positively and conservatism more negatively. perhaps the most obvious flaw of conservatism is that conservatives often find themselves debating scientists, and saying that science is wrong. this glaring flaw in conservatism is why i think it is a form of lunacy. science is what has brought us all of the modern technology we take for granted nowadays. the scientific theories underlying many of the advances in technology are the very theories conservatives claim are incorrect, yet conservatives use the same technological devices as liberals all the time. for example, much of modern medicine is based on the theories of evolution, and most conservatives are not so wacky that they refuse medical care and seek out faith healers or witch doctors instead. most conservatives are at least sane enough to accept modern medicine and allow it to be used on them. they just disagree with the primary theory underlying the very scientific advances in medicine that save their lives, the theory of evolution. evolution, for instance, explains why bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, something that cannot be explained by so-called “creation science” or “intelligent design”. another atrocious thing about conservatives besides their complete disregard for science or logic in favor of ancient superstitions is the fact that they only seem to care about people who are very wealthy, and always try to change the laws to help out people who have much more money than they know what to do with, at the expense of everyone else. they even engage in blatant corruption like the awarding of no-bid contracts to halliburton, the company dick cheney was ceo of before becoming vice president, and they nakedly do this corruption in front of everyone, and have no remorse or shame about it. it is hard for me to find any redeeming qualities in conservatism, but i am liberal and open-minded enough to find at least two. first of all, if there is some old tradition that liberals want to change, and the tradition is actually good and the proposed change would actually be bad, then in this case the mindless impulse of conservatives to always want to preserve old traditions actually turns out to be the correct course of action. a stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say. secondly, we liberals want to fix problems, and often our open-minded thinking leads to bold proposals, but these bold proposals are not always correct. it is necessary to have somebody arguing the opposite from what we argue, arguing that our proposals are wrong, so that if we do come up with flawed proposals, the flaws in the proposals are made known and debated, and then hopefully the flawed proposals are either fixed or discarded. but in general, liberals do want to fix problems and conservatives want to leave them unfixed. that is just the general mindset of both groups, and conservatives do occasionally realize that a problem needs to be solved. usually, though, when conservatives want to solve a “problem”, the “problem” is just liberal policies that they disagree with, and not an actual problem. for instance, in the case of the new york times, conservatives view its existence as a problem, because the new york times generally favors liberal points of view over conservative ones, and despite the fact that there are far more conservative media outlets than liberal ones, conservatives cannot stand the existence of even one liberal media outlet. conservatives would like to shut out all debate and have their opinions be the only opinions allowed, which they make very clear in the comments thread i linked to above. they are really an undemocratic group of people, but luckily they have not ended democracy in our country yet, probably because democracy is a tradition and they feel bound by traditions. now i may come off as biased, and of course i am quite biased, obviously, but i do often wonder about whether there are intelligent, thoughtful, open-minded conservatives who are capable of considering other opinions and defending their own opinions in a logical manner without resorting to absurd arguments or arguments based on claiming the factual authority of things like the bible. there are a few conservative columnists and pundits that occasionally seem to be sentient beings, but just when i start to have faith in humanity and think that maybe conservatives aren’t all bad, my new favorite conservative always has to go back to spouting absurdities without logical justification, and i have to stop liking them, since the whole basis of me liking them was that they seemed to be logical and make sense and not be total wackos. as for liberal commentators, there are many that i like. for instance, i like paul krugman of the new york times, which you may find surprising, given that paul krugman has said that barack obama’s economic plan will not work and that i also like barack obama a great deal. i also like the columnists at the nation magazine a great deal. my main news sources that i look at each day on the internet are the huffington post, cnn.com, and the drudge report. yes, i know, the drudge report is conservative, but, i am a liberal and we are open-minded. my mind is always open to new ideas, even now. for instance, when it comes to things like bailouts, i am not sure whether they are a good idea or a bad idea. i do not trust the government or large corporations, but the government is far more trustworthy than corporations since at least it is accountable to voters. corporations are supposedly accountable to shareholders who own common stock and can vote, but in practice, this does not work at all, and corporate leaders are basically not accountable to anyone except the government, and only sometimes, because there is selective enforcement and double standards. bernie madoff was the former chairman of the nasdaq stock exchange, the 2nd largest stock exchange on wall street, the one where most of the tech stocks are, and he pulled off the biggest ponzi scheme in history. the person in charge of the stock exchange is the highest level you can get to in wall street, so the corruption in wall street goes all the way up to the top, bernie madoff being proof of this. and of course the government cannot be trusted, since after all, we have gone through 8 years of having george w. bush run the government, and it is still full of many conservatives he put there, some of whom are bound to sabotage things that the obama administration tries to accomplish. ok, that is just one of many reasons not to trust the government. another more obvious one is that governments can never be trusted under any circumstances, which is obvious if you look at history and see how all the governments have been untrustworthy in the past. any large enough institution becomes to some extent a malicious entity that strikes out against those who oppose it and tries to suppress information that makes it look bad, regardless of whether it is a public or private institution. part of being liberal and open-minded is being skeptical and not believing in things 100% unless you have absolute proof, so a true liberal, even if they think obama is great, is still somewhat skeptical, since you can never be too sure about any politician. if you are not skeptical about your own opinions, and you are a bit of a fundamentalist about them, then you are really just like the conservatives. you have to at least think twice about things, consider other points of view, and have some doubts about your own opinions, or else you are not truly a sentient being, but merely an overrated animal that knows how to walk and talk but not how to think. yes, humans are animals, unless you think it is better to categorize us as plants, fungi, bacteria, or something else, but of course calling humans animals is controversial to many conservatives, despite it being a scientific fact. to me, anything that conflicts with science conflicts with reality itself, and has zero credibility. science, logic, and mathematics are the foundation of all human understanding of reality, and any understanding of reality that is not based on them has no real justification at all. for years, conservatives have argued that if you cut taxes on the wealthy, this can actually increase government revenue. that is an example of something that completely violates all mathematics and logic and has basically zero validity whatsoever. pretty much everything conservatism is based on is fundamentally illogical and nonsensical, which is why the end result is the same. garbage in, garbage out. it is much more popular for people to call themselves conservatives than liberals only because conservatives are masters of sticking to the party line and staying on message, creating a vast echo chamber of conservatives who all agree with each other and spread the message to other people who are not conservatives. also, since conservatives favor the wealthy, the wealthy have a natural interest in favoring conservatives, which means conservatives have a major source of campaign contributions as well as people who own media conglomerates that will spread the conservative message for them. liberals favor the poor and middle class, who are not really in charge of anything, despite the fact that the vast majority of people are poor or middle class. this means lots of potential voters, but those potential voters can easily be won over to the other side through the ubiquitous conservative misinformation coming from so many media outlets. and the conservatives want to silence the few media outlets that do not treat their ideas as equal to or better than liberal ideas. now think about this: many major cities, such as washington, d.c. or new york city, have very liberal populations, but their newspapers and other local news organizations do not share the same views as the public in those areas. new york city does have the new york times, but more people read the new york post, a conservative paper, since it is cheaper and has a tabloid format aimed for mass appeal, and there is also the wall street journal, another conservative paper that is quite popular. in washington, d.c., neither the washington post nor the washington times is liberal, although the residents of the city are incredibly and overwhelmingly liberal. the washington post is centrist and the washington times is very conservative, neither of them reflecting the views of the people of washington, d.c. i think this fundamentally indicates the cozy relationship between wealthy media barons and conservative politicians whose policies benefit the wealthy. for anyone who still believes the myth that the media has a liberal bias, i highly recommend the excellent book what liberal media? by eric alterman, which thoroughly debunks that myth. it turns out that even the new york times is not as liberal as people think it is, and it only seems liberal because all the other news outlets are so conservative. of course, the book what liberal media? was written prior to msnbc deciding to become a liberal network, but its thesis and many examples documenting how the media is actually conservative are still valid in my opinion. msnbc, for instance, is owned by a large corporation, general electric, and while its evening lineup may feature the liberals keith olbermann and rachel maddow, the warmup act, chris matthews, is a centrist who used to be a supporter of george w. bush, although nowadays he pretends that never happened. msnbc prominently features pat buchanan and other conservatives, and it gives hours of airtime every morning to conservative joe scarborough. in the past, msnbc gave shows to mike savage, tucker carlson, and don imus, among others, helping to spread the conservative message. the mike savage show, which was called savage nation, was especially awful. as for cnn, until recently they had glenn beck, and they still have lou dobbs. it is hard to make the case that cnn is liberal, and in fact they have a bias towards conservatives that is documented in the book by eric alterman. anyway, my point is, conservatism is basically an extension of fundamentalist religion, and arguing with a conservative is not really a political argument but a theological dispute, even if you do not even believe in their religion, because to them it is a theological dispute. it is pretty much a form of mental illness, one that is contagious, and one for which there is no known cure. most people who suffer from conservatism will have it for the rest of their lives. i hope that someday we can find a cure for this dreadful form of mental illness. the once great republican party, whose first president, the great liberal abraham lincoln, freed the slaves, has over about 150 years steadily gotten more and more conservative, and is now worse and more malignant than ever before, when the republican party was originally a source for good in our country. it is quite a sad tale how conservatives came to dominate the republicans, and when all the dixiecrats left the democratic party to become republicans, along with “reagam democrats”, the republicans successfully peeled away almost all the conservative democratic voters, and later most of the liberals who had voted republican in the past (such as for nixon or reagan) switched to voting for democrats like bill clinton. every 4 years, each presidential election seems to have the ideological split between the 2 parties become more rigid than ever, and there are always a number of former members of one party who “see the light” and switch parties, changing all their beliefs too. this gradual process has purified the essence of the democratic and republican parties so that both parties are now dominated by bases of voters whose views do not agree with the views of the majority of the public. the republican party, however, is much more strongly dominated by its conservative base than the democratic party is dominated by its liberal base. the democrats do not really have to do much to appease us liberals, and they can often govern as centrists and get away with it. republicans, on the other hand, have to be staunch conservatives, or else they will find ultra-conservatives running against them in primary elections the next time they are up for re-election, and they will be replaced by ultra-conservative radicals. this is why republicans in congress are so staunchly conservative and in lockstep with fox news and right-wing talk radio on everything. they have eliminated dissent from within the ranks of their party, and they have proven that they do not really have any governing philosophy other than victory at all costs and trying to pander to the base as much as possible without alienating moderates. they seem just like a fanatical cult of brainwashed zombies, except they have no leader, which has thrown them into chaos recently. at least they can agree on one thing: opposing liberalism and democrats, and trying to obstruct everything that liberal democrats try to do. perhaps i should feel sorry for them, but i cannot feel sorry for such intolerant, hateful people who think everyone who had different beliefs from them will end up in hell for all eternity, yet who do not even care about the genocide in darfur. i don’t think they would want my pity either, but that is all the more reason to give it to them: because it would piss them off, and they deserve it, after giving us 8 years of hell under george w. bush. conservatives make the most absurd arguments, like back before obama was even elected, back in october, some of them were already blaming the economic recession on obama, claiming that the stock market went down in anticipation of obama winning the election, and that businesses were already laying off workers and cutting production in anticipation of a future obama win and future tax increases on them. to prove this point, these republican commenters claimed to own businesses themselves and be laying off workers and cutting production in anticipation of a future obama win that they thought would mean higher taxes on small business. this proves the depths to which the republicans have fallen. they have seemingly hit rock bottom, so perhaps the only direction they can go from here is up. and that is what frightens me. that is not to say that i am not also frightened by what is going on in our country, right now, even with my fellow democrats in charge. these bailouts are quite disturbing, and i also have a lot of problems with other aspects of the economic policy, such as the large deficits, even though i know that large deficits are supposedly a necessary evil when you have a recession, according to most mainstream economists. having taken 4 semesters of economics in college, i do not consider economics to be an actual science. it is a “social science”, or in more realistic terms, economics is a form of applied mathematics used to advance ideological points of view by making dishonest oversimplifications and assumptions about reality in order to lie by using statistics. even economists who want to tell the truth and think they are telling the truth cannot really do so, in my opinion, because the field of economics itself is fatally flawed. we saw evidence of how it is fatally flawed with alan greenspan’s reaction to the current recession: he was completely shocked and had not predicted it at all. billionaire hedge fund manager george soros, who also happens to be the biggest donor to the democrats, did predict it, and made a lot of money because his predictions turned out to be true, and you can read his theories about it here. you should take it with a grain of salt, though: he might just be trying to advance policies that would benefit his hedge fund, although i think that is unlikely and he seems sincere. the other reason to take it with a grain of salt is that economics is basically bullshit, even when it makes a correct prediction. it is like trying to predict the weather. we have theories to explain the weather and scientific models, but we still cannot predict weather, and disasters like hurricane katrina can catch us unprepared. economics is far less of a science than meteorology, since economics has become part of politics, economists are divided ideologically, and the scientific method is not the basis for this so-called “science”. it is impossible to do a controlled experiment in economics, and controlled experiments are necessary for doing real science. so in the absence of facts, opinions prevail, to the detriment of everyone, since everyone is part of the economy and everyone suffers because of failures in the economy. there is really no way economics could ever be fixed, other than simply having several hundred more years of human history in advanced technological societies during which economic data is monitored and kept for future generations to study. in each generation, conservatives argue in favor of the world being like what liberals in the previous generation argued in favor of. that is human progress. and liberals never want to go back to the old ways. we always want to achieve greater things than have ever been achieved before, rather than going back to the dark ages, the 1800s, the 1950s, or any other time in the past. the fundamental basis for conservatism is being stuck in the past and wanting to keep everyone else stuck back in the past with you. i suppose it is natural for people to be afraid of change and want to stick with the old ways of doing things that they are comfortable with, so there will always be plenty of conservatives, regardless of how irrational conservatism is. i know the failures of conservatism much better than most people, because in my personal life i am afraid of change and i stick with the old ways of doing things that i have always done before, and i have found that this does not lead to any progress in life, yet i am unable to summon the courage to change things in my life. this is the problem with conservatism, except instead of feeling that way over their personal lives, people feel that way over government policy. and i know firsthand that it just won’t work, period. like they say, doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and that is why conservatives are insane. of course, that is not the dictionary definition of insanity, so if you want to be picky about it, conservatives are not necessarily insane any more than anybody else would be insane, but that is only if you are obsessed with going by the dictionary definitions of things, which means you are obsessive and therefore insane. as i have shown by my earlier obsessive use of dictionary definitions in this post, i am likewise insane, so you should take everything i say with a grain of salt. therefore, conservatism is 100% true. just kidding, belated april fool’s joke. being obsessive is not a form of insanity either, technically. it is a natural personality variation, just like being right-wing or being stupid.

demonizing autistics

my last post was about a very strange woman who has autism. today, i bring you a different case of autism, one far more sinister. the son of salon.com regular contributor ann bauer has autism, and while she has written several articles about other subjects, about half of her articles for salon.com have been about her autistic son, whose name is andrew. her latest article is where to start, describing how he has turned into a violent “monster”. it is the fifth article about her autistic son andrew. here are the previous articles (read them after the fifth one if you are actually interested, but the fifth-one is the only must-read out of them all): first, second, third, and fourth. now i found her latest article to be incredibly shocking and disturbing, as i have asperger’s syndrome myself, and asperger’s syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder and is often thought to be the same as high-functioning autism. she even says that her son has high-functioning autism. then i started reading all of the many, many responses to her latest post, and some of them made me feel even more upset. ann bauer is blaming her son’s autism for him being violent, but plenty of men (and women too) who do not have any autism whatsoever are also violent. most people with autism spectrum disorders, such as me for instance, are not violent. while her latest article is quite personal and i am sure accurate (ann bauer even admits that she has been stockpiling lots of sleeping pills and planning on committing suicide if her son ever kills anyone), i think that it sends a dangerous and misleading message about autism spectrum disorders (which are sometimes also called pervasive developmental disorders, a less explanatory name). the most dangerous form of mental illness is, in case you didn’t know, antisocial personality disorder. anyone who has antisocial personality disorder is pretty much guaranteed to be a criminal, and very likely a violent one, since people with it have no morals, do not care about anyone except themselves, refuse to follow any authority or rules, and are impulsive, often in violent ways. as for my asperger’s syndrome, i think my case of asperger’s is quite mild, and mostly it is just social anxiety disorder (that later worsened into panic disorder when i started having panic attacks in college), combined with avoidant personality disorder. i am not 100% sure whether i actually have or don’t have asperger’s syndrome or avoidant personality disorder, but what i can be 100% sure of is that i have panic disorder, since i sure as hell have had some nasty panic attacks. panic attacks are caused by the “fight or flight response”, which, in the case of panic, is the flight response (wanting to escape from a scary situation). sudden violent outbursts are the other side of the “fight or flight response” coin: they are the fight response. my brain seems to be hardwired for anxiety, not fighting, when i find myself upset. so perhaps the violence of this autistic man andrew can be explained as a fight response. or maybe he is intentionally malicious. it is difficult for me to speculate about what may go on in the mind of someone with more severe autism than the incredibly mild version that i probably have. i am so much more like normal people who don’t have any form of autism whatsoever than i am like people with severe autism. still, i feel badly for them, and the ones that behave badly give the rest of us who are on the autism spectrum a bad name. i do not understand them at all, but that is a problem for all of us on the autism spectrum: we do not understand other people. the mother of andrew, ann bauer, seems to have a bit of mental illness of her own; in fact, i can say it as a factual matter that she suffers from mental illness, because she is suicidal and that is by definition mental illness. perhaps her mental illness is simply plain old depression, or depression mixed with anxiety (i have anxiety too, like i said). in any event, somebody who has no mental illness cannot be suicidal, because of the way mental illnesses are all defined and because psychologists and psychiatrists pretty much all agree that being suicidal indicates mental illness. anyway, depression and anxiety are mood disorders, and are not actual insanity. insanity, or, as it is now called in the psychological and psychiatric professions, psychosis, involves a person being disconnected from reality, and the most common type of psychosis is schizophrenia. autism spectrum disorders, personality disorders, and mood disorders are all outside the realm of insanity and psychosis. people who have them are still sane; they observe the real world, they can think logically unless they are too retarded to do so, and they are not lunatics. autism is a rather curious condition then, and it is primarily social retardation along with a few quirky eccentricities. i suppose that andrew, if he is autistic and does not have any psychosis, is most likely someone who is just frustrated with his life and the way things have turned out, who hates himself, who cannot understand other people, and is just very very upset. what people without autism spectrum disorders often fail to understand is that people who have autism spectrum disorders are mostly people that want to be social creatures just as much as everyone else, if not more so, but they find themselves unable to be social, and instead they fail utterly in this regard. throughout my lifetime so far, my experiences have been exactly that: wanting to be just as social as others, if not more so, but finding my own social abilities and my social courage to both be severely lacking, to the point where i have had very little success socially. i also understand why andrew would be upset: as a young person who his loving mother kept insisting was intelligent and had a bright future ahead of him, he most likely had set up very high expectations for himself, and when he ended up in living conditions where he no longer had any freedom, he probably became quite upset. however, i also think andrew may have antisocial personality disorder, as evidenced by his criminal activity (such as eating at restaurants and not paying, or assaulting women). he may very well have developed antisocial personality disorder “comorbid” with his autism, meaning that he has both conditions at the same time. when you read the articles by his mother (including the other articles on salon.com by her that are not about her son), it also becomes clear that she led a very chaotic life, including a rather chaotic divorce with her first husband, and then a messy series of relationships and periods of being single, ultimately resulting with a second marriage that seems to be going well so far. the mother seems quite obsessed with her autistic son and helping him out, and while it is natural for mothers to want to help and protect their offspring, it is perhaps advisable to remember that there can be too much of a good thing. while, as i mentioned earlier, we who have autism spectrum disorders often want to be social, we also often want to be left alone, just like regular people often want people who are bothering them to leave them alone. autistic people are not especially different from normal people except for things like the lack of communication skills. of course, severe cases of autism are often comorbid with mental retardation, and i think the reason for this is that the learning process, wherein one person teaches new information to somebody else, is in some ways a social interaction, and someone severely disabled socially as well as with communication may be unable to learn things from other people. in this case, such a person would need to learn everything on their own, and they may not be lucky enough to possess a keen enough intellect to figure things out without the aid of others, the end result of this being retardation. or perhaps in the severe cases, the mental retardation exists from the beginning. anyway, if you look at the comments for the article, you will run across a number of people who have worked in jobs where they had to interact with people with autism on a daily basis, and both people who dealt with autistic children as well as those who dealt with autistic adults said that some of them could be quite violent. so a great deal of people are actually coming forth with firsthand accounts of how they witnessed violence carried out by people on the autism spectrum. a lot of people talk about people with autism as if they are animals or just things, and some of them recommend castration as a solution! we are being objectified and treated as subhuman, as animals, by some of the people who commented on this article. i certainly do not have full-blown autism, but these are human beings we are talking about here! men with autism care just as much about their balls as any other men, and sure as hell don’t want a bunch of assholes castrating them. castration used to be done to the mentally ill, but luckily that horrific practice was stopped. if you take away a man’s testes, his manhood, you may as well just take away his life and kill him... and in fact some of the people commented that the most humane solution might be to euthanize people with autism. other people commented that there should be some kind of eugenics to prevent anyone with autism from being born in the first place, as if autism is some kind of horrible disease that needs to be eradicated, and not just a natural personality type that many people happen to have. it was very chilling reading people’s reactions to it, how so many people dehumanized not only andrew but everyone with autism, and how they seem so ready to deny the basic human rights that we hold so dear to people with autism spectrum disorders just because a small percentage of autistic people end up violent (probably around the same percentage of non-autistic people who end up violent). it makes me think of how the jews were discriminated against by the nazis, and i know that whenever anyone brings up hitler and the holocaust, this is supposed to indicate that they have taken the argument to an absurd level and therefore lost the argument. i am not saying this is anything like the holocaust whatsoever, just that it made me think of the holocaust, and it made me frightened for my own safety, as someone with an autism spectrum disorder. of course, no action anywhere near that bad has been taken against us on the autistic spectrum so far by angry mobs with pitchforks and torches, and if i think about it realistically, i sincerely doubt that anything like that ever would happen. but just reading what some people write about people with autism frightens me. then again, i am frightened easily, since after all, i do have panic disorder, the one disorder i can be completely sure that i have, because my numerous severe panic attacks over the last 9 years are proof beyond any reasonable doubt. it is pretty obvious that i am overreacting to this article by ann bauer about her son and the comments posted on salon.com about it. i feel badly for both her and her son, as well as everyone else who has been involved in any way (anyone her son did bad things to, for instance). in the case of her son, it is clear that andrew is a menace to society and cannot be allowed to roam free or to ever have the chance to physically attack someone who is weaker than him. i hope he can be rehabilitated somehow so that he is no longer dangerous, but otherwise, he ought to remain behind bars, in a mental institution preferably, or else in jail. being autistic is no excuse for his behavior, and even if it is a valid excuse, that does not mean society should just let andrew continue attacking people. however, he is just one person and every person is different. we should not generalize about everyone with autism just because he is a violent criminal. the virginia tech killer was asian, in fact south korean; however, we have not seen asians or south koreans demonized as a bunch of crazy killers... i mean, we actually have seen that, but it did not last very long, and it was just a few people on the internet anyway. i suppose there are groups of people that continue to have an image problem when it comes to violence. men, for instance. black people. arabs. muslims. all have been stereotyped as violent. however, if you look at the statistics, men really are more likely to be violent than women, and african-americans are more likely to be violent than european-americans (i am using that to refer to white people since, after all, we white people are of european ancestry and are not native to america like native americans; also i am hyphenating both with americans to indicate that i am only referring to people in the united states, since i am going by those statistics). i need not go into the various debates over why violent crime is more commonly carried out by african-americans than european-americans, because those debates are unrelated to the subject of this blog post, so suffice it to say that i think the primary reason is economic inequality. as for the level of violence carried out by arabs or muslims, the overall number of people killed or percentage of people who are violent or kill people is not something i know the statistics for, but certain types of violence, like major terrorist attacks, are almost exclusively done by muslims, usually muslims of arab ancestry. this does not mean that muslims are more violent, since after all, non-muslims have plenty of ways to kill people, such as using military force. anyway, that is not the main topic either, and i was just trying to point out that sometimes people with autism spectrum disorders are demonized, and that is not cool with me at all. that type of discrimination is like racism, sexism, homophobia, age discrimination, or any other type of evil bias against those who are different from you. many of history’s greatest geniuses are thought to have had asperger’s syndrome, the milder autism spectrum disorder that i have. this includes people like isaac newton and albert einstein, among the many great names. among people alive today, we have stephen spielberg, bill gates, and al gore, just to name a few. and ok, i have to mention the encyclopedia dramatica entry on asperger’s. everything on encyclopedia dramatica is meant to be as insulting, negative, and offensive as possible, regardless of who or what it is about. the first time i read that article, maybe 3 years ago or so, i was very very upset, and the article was actually quite different then but just as offensive and insulting, mainly just with less pictures and videos, and not as long. i did not quite understand the purpose of encyclopedia dramatica or what encyclopedia dramatica was all about. now that i have read a whole lot of articles on encyclopedia dramatica, and enjoyed most of them, even learning a lot from them, i know that the article at encyclopedia dramatica is all in good fun and they insult everybody, and i just need to have a sense of humor and not take it too seriously, because encyclopedia dramatica is a fake encyclopedia full of offensive humor designed to produce “lulz” such as my initial reaction to the article about asperger’s. lulz are basically laughing at someone else’s misfortune, as encyclopedia dramatica explains quite clearly. since the entire purpose of encyclopedia dramatica is lulz, it makes no sense for anyone to take anything on that site seriously, and it is good for everyone, especially those of us on the autism spectrum, to have some sense of perspective and a sense of humor, and not take things personally when they are just jokes. the article on salon.com and its responses, however, are not jokes or lulz, and are what the humorists at encyclopedia dramatica refer to as serious business. so when someone is serious about demonizing autistics and denying basic human rights to fellow human beings, when people talk about castration, euthanasia, and eugenics, and talk about people who are different from them as if they are subhuman animals, that is when i have a serious problem with them. it would be bad enough reading comments like that on some wacko conservative website, but salon.com is a haven for liberals, and it appalls me to think that my fellow liberals would have such discriminatory and intolerant attitudes towards autistics. salon.com does allow people of all political persuasions to comment, however, and it does have its fair share of libertarians, republicans, independents, and other non-democrats among people who comment, although they are very much in the minority. more than half the comments were ones expressing sympathy, which is good, and some of the comments were ongoing arguments between various commenters there who hate each other and argue all the time. there was some foolish bickering between a wacko who hates psychiatrists (but is not a scientologist) and people who actually are psychiatrists... he seemed like one of the libertarian ron paul supporters. anyway, amid all of those comments were the ones that i personally found disturbing, the ones that threatened bad things for people with autism. i would have left a comment myself, except i do not have an account at salon.com or any of these other websites where i look at the comments. it is too much of a bother to register at all these stupid websites, just to post comments. so i don’t do it. i only register at a website if i have a good reason to do so, and if there is not a way around it. so anyway, i doubt any of the people from salon.com will find my response here, but at least people who read this blog entry can find what i am responding to, since i linked to it at the beginning of the entry. i am not sure if anyone will read this or even care, but frankly that does not really matter to me anyway. i just felt like saying all this, and i don’t too much care whether this blog is a private journal that nobody reads or a really popular blog that everybody reads. my preference, if there is one, is that a few people read this blog, more than 1 or 2, but not like thousands or anything, because that would probably be too much. anyway, i think i made my point in this post and i am getting kind of lengthy and repetitious so i should quit while i’m behind. also, i need to sleep. now. good night, or whatever time it is now, wherever you are. you are probably on earth, but who cares? it would be cool if an astronaut looked at this blog from the international space station, i guess, but whatever. i am not sure whether astronauts have the internet up there, but who cares? that is just something completely irrelevant that i just brought up at the last moment because i am tired and my mind is wandering, and it has nothing to do with anything. my thought process is non-linear. in keeping with my thought process, let me briefly pretend time is going backwards, for the sake of silliness: hello and welcome to this blog post.

an interesting lifestyle choice

most people’s lifestyle choices are fairly boring. there are a few different choices people make about how to live their lives nowadays but basically most people operate in the same way as a large percentage of other people. for instance, some people graduate high school and others are dropouts. some people decide to go to college and others don’t. some college students get all the way through to a diploma and others drop out or fail out. some people party a lot and others are at home most of the time. some people have jobs and other people live off of welfare, either from the government, from charities, or family/friends. some people are sexually active and others aren’t. some people are straight and others are gay. some people are into sports, some people are into video games, some people watch a lot of television, and some people spend a lot of time on the internet. people like or dislike different kinds of foods but we generally agree on what things are considered food and what is not considered food (e.g. broccoli is food and plastic is not food). most people are fluent in at least 1 language that is spoken by their fellow humans. all in all, there are many possible combinations, but the array of choices people have for lifestyles nowadays is not terribly vast. of course, the above comparisons of lifestyle choices are typical ones you find in the united states, and in many other countries the array of choices would be very different, quite often even narrower.

however, there are a few strange individuals out there who boldly live lives so utterly bizarre, they are truly unique. one such example is a woman who calls herself faye kane. i read a comment by her at slate.com about a slate.com article i read. both the article and faye’s comment condemned republican hypocrisy, and i agree with both the article and her comment on it. but at the bottom of her comment i noticed her “signature” (something that is automatically added by people to their web postings on certain websites):

<quote>
I'm an autistic savant. I live naked in the woods because I'm disgusted with grotesquely-misnamed "humanity". I steal electricity to run my wireless internet. Yes, really. Read more of my smartmouth opinions at http://tinyurl.com/fayescave
</quote>

as someone with asperger’s (the same as autism only milder, and probably what she actually has), i know firsthand that people on the autistic spectrum (myself included) tend to be weirdos. but let’s just get a few facts about faye kane out of the way first: she is an intelligent person on the autistic spectrum, which probably means she has asperger’s syndrome instead of leo kanner’s classical type of full-blown autism. she lives in a cave in the forest (or rather, a tent covered in branches and leaves to hide it). she proudly proclaims that she is hot, that she is naked all the time, and that she spends most of the time masturbating. she mostly avoids interacting with other humans in real life, but she has managed to steal electricity from the electric company and hook up her cave with power, where she has a computer with broadband internet access. she forages for garbage in dumpsters and then sells it on ebay. basically, she is a very strange individual who is, at least as far as traditional society is concerned, an insane pervert and a criminal. however, i don’t really think there is much of anything wrong with what she is doing, and i find it fascinating that a homeless person like her would be so advanced. now, if you want to know why she ended up living such a bizarre lifestyle, read this. that is her explanation, at least. apparently she had a series of jobs where despite her superior intelligence and technical aptitude, her bosses kept getting into disagreements with her and she kept getting fired. she ended up pretty much completely disillusioned with humanity, apparently. of course, it is easy for someone on the autism spectrum to become disillusioned with the rest of humanity, and it comes quite naturally to us. but usually we do not resort to such strange and fascinating lifestyle choices. there are those who think that asperger’s is just a way to classify intelligence as a disease. some companies actually go out of their way to hire people with asperger’s in the belief that people with asperger’s are smart, hard working, and the perfect kind of people to hire, despite the lack of social skills and inability of people with asperger’s to “sell themselves” at job interviews. and of course, here is a postmodern feminist critique of asperger’s symdrome, which is rather interesting. anyway, if you doubt whether faye kane really lives like she claims to, this is her rebuttal to all the doubters. personally i believe her story to be true, in part because people with autism or asperger’s generally do not lie, but more importantly because this story is too weird to be made up, there is photographic evidence, there are other people online who have actually been to her cave, her story does not violate science or logic, her story is just so awesome i want it to be true even if it is totally made up, and i do not care whether it actually is true or not since it does not impact me in the slightest. so anyway... if you thought i was strange, there are MUCH weirder people out there. and i find them interesting. don’t worry though, readers... i do not want to be like the ultra-weird... i am trying to “cure” myself of negative aspects of asperger’s to become more normal. but when it comes to stuff like faye kane, i just want MOAR LULZ!!!

update: i just found out she is a subgenius after looking through her newer blog entries. the subgenius advertisement she includes in that post has only had 36,390 views according to youtube, so the odds of a random person on the internet being one of the people who actually saw that subgenius video are incredibly low. however, rev. stang has described the church of the subgenius as “kook flypaper”, and it does seem to attract the weirdest elements of humanity. ok, so i have no evidence that she has actually joined the church of the subgenius, but clearly she has found out about us, and in a more recent post she derisively spake of the “normals”, so she is already adopting subgenius terminology. i doubt she would join the church of the subgenius, since she has been living homeless and unemployed in a secret forest hideout for years now, so she would have a hard time coming up with the $30 one-time-only membership fee, and would have no mailing address for her super-awesome membership packet to be sent to. so, she is one of the many non-subgenius subgenii, people who know about the church of the subgenius and agree with it but have not sent in the membership fee to become ordained subgenius reverends. i do not really consider this to be much of a coincidence, despite the seemingly low probability, because “bob” is everywhere, and the weirder someone is, the more likely they are to find out about him and become a follower of his. in her case, it is especially likely, since she is alone all the time in her “cave” in the forest and has a computer with broadband internet, and she has the same deviant tendencies as most other subgenii. i must point out, however, that there are many famous people who are members of the church of the subgenius, such as the actor who played pee wee herman, the actor who played dolemite, all the members of the band sublime, penn jillette from penn & teller, the lead singer of 80s band devo, george clinton (of parliament funkadelic fame), and timothy leary, for starters, and here is wikipedia’s list. for some reason wikipedia only has a list of american subgenii and a list of british subgenii, and the 2 british ones are people i never heard of, so i just linked to the american list since it is much much longer. anyway, this odd coincidence is not so odd when you remember 2 important facts: 1) people on the autism spectrum are weirdos. 2) subgenii are weirdos. so, the set of people who are weirdos has two subsets of its own, people on the autistic spectrum and subgenii, and those two subsets intersect each other, as i could easily depict in a venn diagram if i felt like it. i happen to belong to the intersection of those 2 subsets, and apparently this faye kane lady is also in that intersection. luckily though, i have a place to live and a job, and i have absolutely no intention of ending up like her, with neither. some argue that high-functioning autism is the exact same thing as asperger’s, and i agree completely. therefore, given the fact that she is intelligent and on the autistic spectrum, she has aspeger’s. unfortunately, this disproves the popular theory that only males have aspeger’s, a theory held by many people, including me, because i have only met guys who have asperger’s, and never encountered a female with it. another counterexample to the only-guys-have-asperger’s theory is temple grandin, inventor of the hugbox. however, george orwell developed a new type of logic in 1984. war is peace! freedom is slavery! ignorance is power! under orwellian logic, because females with asperger’s exist, females with asperger’s do not exist. therefore, i have disproven the existence of faye kane. q.e.d. signed, brilliant mathematician