Have I told you all lately why

[conuly]

this sort of shit just isn't funny?

It wasn't funny when it started, and it sure as hell isn't funny now, years after the fact.

Find a new joke.
One that's relevant.

Hell, I'll even repeat my list.

Ways we know Bush is stupid:

His foreign policy is non-existant
He thinks people believe his lies (well....)
He thinks abstinence-only education works
Etc.

Things which DO NOT prove his stupidity:

He speaks with an accent (nuculer, al quader)
He has problems speaking (this could be a learning disability or a simple problem of poor verbal performance. We all do that)
He's clumsy (oh wow. He fell off a bike! He's an idiot! Along with everybody else who can't ride a bike! LOLOL!!!!11111)
We can find a funny picture that makes him look like a chimp (just stop insulting our friend, the chimp.)

See the difference?

Comments

[readerravenclaw.livejournal.com]

Another nosy person who finds you fascinating -

At what point were you taught to write/read even though you weren't speaking? Are "professionals" who work with Autistic children taught that sometimes it's a good idea to go straight to writing/reading without the verbal lanugage communication, or is your case non-standard? (I'm studying speech pathology in college, and I find linguistics and language in general to be really interesting.) Feel free to ignore me if you'd rather not go into any details. :)

[wakasplat.livejournal.com]

It's actually not that I don't want to go into details, but that I don't think I can get all the details right at the moment, and quite possibly not in a short post. (I wrote something about 30 pages long on this subject that might eventually show up in an anthology, but I'm still trying to figure out how comfortable I am publishing it.) Part of the problem is that explaining these things requires starting from scratch, which when talking to non-autistic people usually means first getting them to drop a whole lot of assumptions about how people can experience the world. So I'm going to point you at some links instead, since I don't have 30 pages to write or the ability to write it right now.

While I did not experience precisely the same pattern of knowing/not-knowing that this person did, and disagree with xem on a few points in the article, you might find the following article interesting: Bridging the Gaps: An Inside-Out View of Autism (http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/bridging.htm). It at least does as good a job as any of removing those assumptions, but even so people who've read it often still have trouble grasping what those "gaps" mean. I'm a little hesitant to throw the following article at you (because if you follow the assumptions most people associate with the words in it, you might come up with some conclusions that don't follow about my life), but it deals with some of the issues of internal vs. external perception stuff as well as what finally worked as far as communication goes (although it's not something a non-autistic person or even some autistic people would have necessarily been able to do for me): Past, Present, and Future (http://www.autistics.org/library/time.html).

My life also has some similarities (although some differences, since people are individuals) to what is described in the following lecture by an autistic person, when xe finally gets to the part about people who figured out the point of communication fairly late (and upon exposure to other autistic people), or who developed communication and speech and reading and so forth separately: http://144.92.102.54/documents/Sinclaire%20Lecture.mp3

Or you could go look through the entire sample course, which I'd strongly recommend:

http://144.92.102.54/assignments.html

It's by a professional (course website says she's an internationally known researcher in cognition and language) and a mother of an autistic boy, and she actually uses tons of autistic people's writing and speeches as legitimate course material. One thing to beware of in the speeches is a lot of them (not all) tend toward the canned "self-narrating zoo exhibit" speeches that end up sounding very similar after you've heard two or three. (This is not the fault of the people doing them necessarily; that's what the ASA likes and that's where she got most of the speeches.)

Sorry for not being more personal about it, but my language programs seem trained on other topics right now (which is good, because I've been trying to point it toward politics and away from other things, and it's moving faster than usual in that direction).

[readerravenclaw.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to the first two articles; I found them very interesting. (Shocking as well, of course, but fascinating.) I do already have some background knowledge about autism - I read Temple Grandin's autobiography among other books - so I hope that I did understand the articles as they were meant to be understood.

Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to listen to an audio presentation, but I'll keep it in mind for the future.

Thanks again. :)