Is it that hard to see? I just don't want to be cool

[sovay]

Here's how my day is going: I left the house to walk to the library and came back with blisters on both heels, because my socks had spontaneously committed suicide in transit. That is even shabbier than my usual aesthetic. I am going to need new socks. Also my heels hurt.

On the other hand, Craig Laurance Gidney is enjoying my "dense opiated prose." Any favorable comparison to Tanith Lee improves my afternoon.

These links are a mix of things.

1. I have just learned from Anu Garg that tosspot words are a particular class of compound noun rather than words that are frequently hungover. I had no idea there was a name for them in English. "What does a scarecrow have in common with a pickpocket?" feels like an outtake from Lewis Carroll.

2. I suppose it is appropriate that I read this article for Tisha B'Av. I certainly consider Netanyahu and his administration a disaster for the Jewish people.

3. I don't know that there's ever a good time to read that the roots of autism as a diagnostic category are intertwined with Nazi eugenics. I keep reminding myself that thinking of myself as a profitless and unconscionable waste of other people's resources and time (on repeat these days) is the same kind of idea and I should stop it.

4. For those unaware of the recent trash fire regarding Worldcon 76, the Daily Dot has a good overview. The con chair has just responded on Facebook and Twitter.

5. I have to say that I'm not sure if Alan Turing chained his mug to the radiator because he loved tea that much; I think he might just have hated people stealing his mug.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

The point is, once the knowledge exists, what do you do with it? The question is less acute with Asperger because he did not actually describe autism as a means toward extermination, but it's still fucking Nazis.

And he's also not the only source of that knowledge; he helped provide ammunition for Wing and co. in developing the idea of the autistic spectrum as something that extended far beyond the very very specific "Kanner-type" autism, but that's work that was happening anyway. So arguably, modern conceptions of autism could well have evolved without his contribution.

(Which is another reason to be angry that Scheffer seems to be trying to argue that his Nazi allegiances somehow taint the whole concept of autism.)

But one painful element is -- I read his paper, and felt seen. He looked at us and actually saw us, at a point when people were generally not seeing us. And it is painful to know that co-existed with collaborating with the T-4 program.

(Not implausible or unknown, because, as you say, we know humans are not all one thing. But saddening. And I need to read the Czech article, at some point when my brain's in better shape.)

Further ironies: when I read up on family history, I found out that there was someone with a screamingly obvious case of undiagnosed Asperger's a few generations back (on the side of the family where at least half the men would tick sub-clinical "autistic traits" anyway). Like many people with undiagnosed AS, he got depression as well, and was in a psychiatric clinic when the Nazis invaded Holland. They shipped out all the Jewish patients en masse to be gassed.