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Let's Study the Man-Child
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what i'm less sympathetic towards are the people who emulate aspergers/ autistic behaviors because if society is going to accommodate someone with a disorder, they feel like society should accommodate them as well. it's like someone taking a handicapped space because they're lazy.
haha, this is gold
Also, while CasedOut is not doing the best job of it, he's basically restating some standard Foucauldian views about normalcy and deviance -- I think in Discipline and Punish Foucault even talks about psychology and psychiatric disorders.
I basically agree, actually -- there's nothing about a disorder that objectively makes it a disorder, but we're getting into some pretty philosophical territory. I mean, in a certain sense, people have argued that nothing we define really exists objectively -- i.e., that the way we chop up reality is essentially arbitrary and doesn't exist external to human cognition.
But anyway, while surely people with, say, ADD have different neurochemistry than an average person, contextualizing that neurochemistry under the heading of "disorder" is something that is, frankly, subjective. It depends on one's historical and social constructs. Hell, even schizophrenia was once not considered a disorder -- you weren't someone handicapped to be drugged and nursed, you were just an oracle or a shaman or a dude who should go write the Book of Revelations or something.
The point being that we should be a little circumspect in claiming that disorders definitively exist and are disordered. Now, on the other hand, just because something's a social construct doesn't necessarily mean it's not real or important. While psychology can be argued as a tool of social normalization, that's not necessarily a bad thing, because, really, as society changes such that certain modes of conduct and cognition become privileged over others (e.g. people who can focus for extended periods of time on a single task are generally rewarded over those who cannot), the two options are to change society, or to change the outlying individuals. Well, the third option is just to be OK with people falling through the cracks and ending up at perpetual disadvantage, but I think most of us are not in favor of that.
And even if you do change the society, it's hard to create any system that privileges all modes of behavior equally -- personally I can't really think of any system that does this. So, even if you chose "change society" as your preferred option, it's really more a matter of re-distributing than fundamentally changing the reality of the situation.
My personal inclination is that it's really important to do all you can to be responsible for yourself. That means taking as little outside assistance as you can reasonably manage, including government support. If you're holding down a job, taking care of your own personal life skills, and treating other people with respect, then your mental quirks and strengths and weaknesses don't really detract from you as a person. Even if you have rather severe weaknesses, or at least things most people perceive as weaknesses. You're doing what you can.
If you're taking more than you're giving, I think that's dishonorable. Don't accept help for what you can fix yourself.
http://numberblog.wordpress.com/
Being wierd, even very weird, is not an issue if you can pay your bills, enjoy life, and not make the lives of others miserable in the process.
Those people who dress up as Disney characters at Disneyland for a living? If they have a warm home, healthy relationships, and are responsible citizens, they are, despite being professional fursuiters as healthy as any engineer or scientist.
my argument is that "being very weird" can very much reduce one's quality of life. we are built to be social creatures, and encouraging an utter disregard for social expectations and public sentiment is counterproductive and unhealthy.
There are specific kinds of weird that don't work, and in certain locations, sure.
It's also possible these people, especially the ones who are still in their teens, disagree because by the time THEY are in their 30s, society will have changed enough again that gaming is fully accepted as being mainstream and comics are in the same state as gaming is today.
Really, a lot of this is made of self-fulfilling prophecies. If the old generation insist on clinging to the old ways, then it'll be harder for the new generation to usher in their new ways. And vice versa.
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Wearing cat ears and all of this other nonsense doesn't remove someone to any significant degree from the order we exist in. Not taking care of yourself financially and otherwise would.
Even then, there's just so many complicated factors involved in what is acceptable to the greater order(region, ideology, etc) that categorizing people as things like man child is pointless and hollow. the whole concept itself seems to be a case of overestimation. It's likely extremely rare that there exists people that simply say fuck it, I'm not going to care or pay any attention to any social mores.
gilt.com had a "Suits under $200" sale today, but fucking everything sold out literally within 3 minutes of the sale starting
god
damnit
Whereas Aspergers, being a mental disability, is more "invisible" . . . and someone who lacks the ability to read social cues is going to miss nonverbal cues such as "you are making me uncomfortable", "go away", or "I'm bored because you've been yammering on about something I'm not interested in for twenty minutes. LOOK, I AM YAWNING. WHY CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BORED?" Sometimes Aspergers comes with an inability to feel empathy, too. Not good.
Now, I do think these days a lot of people conflate "any behavior remotely out of the ordinary" with Aspergers and other mental disorders, and that's just silly. Example: I was on a message board where someone claimed Charles Darwin had Aspergers because he was shy, collected beetles, and took nature walks. "People with Aspergers have social problems, like being alone, and often collect things!" was her argument. Yeeeeah, hm.
Probably the overhwleming majority of the man-children out there don't have anything wrong with them, from a clinical perspective. They're just dofuses.
Rigorous Scholarship
thanks fartacus for more clearly stating what I was trying to get at, I do have a tendency to botch my ideas when I put them down on paper
Don't get me started.
It tends not to manifest itself in the passive-aggressive kind of backstabbing that women are taught is the only proper mode of interpersonal conflict, but in openly shitty behavior.
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Steam Id: Jager2
Really? In my experience, passive aggressive people are far more likely to conspire against someone while maintaining a pleasant public facade.
If someone had a problem with me, I'd generally rather just be told about it and air it out.
The only time I went around someone's back and went over their head to complain about them was once, and it was because the person I was complaining about was showing legitimate psychological deficiency and would have likely made a huge fucking scene. And yes, she got fired because of it. I felt kind of bad, but then again she was responsible for taking care of sick people, and you don't want psychotic people performing medical care.
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