The Weekly Infodump, 2022/12/13
Welcome to The Weekly Infodump, which contains a short write-up of whatever is on my mind. You are allowed to share this newsletter with others and I hope you will.
I've been sick for weeks and autistic for my entire life, so I am officially Over It for all values of X.
(Links) Let me make myself perfectly clear: I despise Ron DeSantis. But I despise him because he is a power-hungry hatemonger actively pursuing a political agenda that harms vulnerable people (notably, but certainly not exclusively, trans youth), NOT because -- to pick a quote at random from this Atlantic piece -- he's a "strange no-eye-contact oddball." Even this insightful Insider profile of his wife, Casey DeSantis, dedicates significant word count to her strenuous efforts to make him more palatable to the general public:
"She humanizes Ron, and humanizing Ron is a pretty difficult thing to do," a former DeSantis congressional aide said. "He is a pretty robotic person."
Setting aside my emotional reaction to these words, which are exactly the kind of thing NTs say to/about me, I have serious reservations about this line of criticism. Now, clearly this dude is an asshole, and pointing out the many ways in which he is an asshole is absolutely the correct thing to do. However, dwelling on personal traits that read as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent? Is perhaps not helpful to a group of people that is consistently othered by the media.
(It takes me back a few years to when journalists would describe Trump (whom I also despise, to put it mildly) as "crazy" or "deranged" whenever he said or did something shitty, which was all the time. As someone – one of many – who has spent a lifetime managing my mental health issues with the goal of preserving my own bodily autonomy and personal agency, I am always troubled by this kind of discourse, which threatens the safety of people who don't automatically receive the full complement of human rights.)
It's funny, my first thought on reading the profile was: I would be devastated if this dude turns out to be autistic, because we already have Elon Musk and isn't that enough to apologize for?
However, I suppose it's always good to be reminded us that our neurodivergence is never separate from the rest of our identities. White people don't stop being white when they're autistic, men don't stop being men, etc.
Just being alive in this society gives us constant low-level exposure to a host of toxic beliefs. As with "forever chemicals," we absorb these attitudes because they're in the environment and no matter what you do to flush them out of your system, they're constantly creeping back in. Resisting shitty ideologies is the work of a lifetime!
(Links) Speaking of which: meet the so-called "Hipster Eugenicists" who are determined to populate Earth with the "right" people, by which they mean, people like themselves: i.e. white and wealthy.
It's Quiverfull for the tech bro set, I guess?
The piece profiles the Collinses and is a study not only in white supremacy but also Aspie supremacy. Yes, Simone Collins was diagnosed with Autism, but she asserts it's the "good" kind that makes her a superior, next-stage-of-evolution-type human and not some other, "lesser" kind? (My access timed out and now I can't get the article back but I seem to recall she made some sports car metaphor about her supposedly superior brain? Ick.)
We are probably safe from a world of Collinses because convincing every single direct descendant to commit to having at least eight children for 11 generations is a tall order. My totally unscientific hypothesis is that eight potential children sounds awesome until one has two actual children, at which point most people say, "Yeah...I'm good, actually." There will always be outliers, of course, but will a given family produce 8.5 billion of them? Probably not.
Quick, I need something to talk about that isn't a downer! Um...
(Links) Science-based special interests are double-edged sword: on the one hand, they never grow stale because there's always new information to absorb; on the other, if you don't keep up with your SpIn (or if you take a temporarily break from it), you might end up not knowing a blessed thing about something you were once an expert on.
In my case, that would be dinosaurs. (Yes, I am a cliché. What of it?)
Wee-aspiring-paleontologist-me used to annoy the shit out of my family and friends with a constant stream of dinosaur "facts" – which are now, thanks to the swift march of scientific progress, completely wrong. I used to know everything about dinosaurs. I now know nothing about dinosaurs. New species are discovered all the time! The ones we thought we knew did-or-didn't-or-no-wait-did exist! Regardless, they didn't look, sound, or do anything like what we thought they did. They lived in places we never expected. That's very exciting if one has the time to play catch-up and rather discouraging if one doesn't. (Guess which camp I fall into?)
Someday, I hope I will have the time and bandwidth to reestablish my baseline knowledge of dinosaurs. If you have a passion you'd like to reconnect with, I hope you are able to do so!
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