The Weekly Infodump, 2024/02/29
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.
(life) Because I am a cliché, I am highly proficient at Microsoft Excel, which is the most autistic software application, and not just because – as the joke goes – it can't tell what is or isn't a date.
Consider: it's extremely powerful, boasting an impressive repertoire of features (albeit ones destined to go largely unutilized), but it's also deeply eccentric and (to others, though never itself) needlessly stubborn, always telling you what you need to hear ("ok what you're trying to do to this column makes no sense" or "that's not a number") instead of what you want to hear ("omg your data looks AMAZING sweetie!"); and, either despite or because of these qualities, normal people kind of wish it would just go away – not away, away, because then nothing would get done, but just like, permanently out of sight, out of mind.
Anyway, this is fine because I, a Murderbot, would rather not talk to coworkers at all, ever. I will make limited, time-sensitive exceptions for discussing the current season of Love is Blind, but otherwise, please go away and let me format Pivot Tables in peace.
(books) Because I am a fun, chill person with totally normal interests, I am reading The People We Meet on Vacation...haha jk I'm reading Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer.
I was interested in this book because there's a lot of...shall we say, "discourse" around Hans Asperger and his professional affiliation with the Third Reich? Many people call him a Nazi (I am one of "people"), while others leap to his defense, saying that "Well, Actually(TM), he never officially joined the Nazi party so"
Now, to my mind, "Asperger wasn't a Nazi, merely a Nazi collaborator" is NOT the debate-winning argument people think it is. But I am not here to quarrel with Asperger apologists because they are not only wrong, they are missing the point entirely. We could just as easily have called "Asperger Syndrome," "Sukhareva Syndrome" or even "Wing Syndrome" (which kind of awesomely makes it sound like some of us could be birds), but...it's not really the name that's the issue here.
The real problem(s) with NTs dividing up the spectrum into syndromes, subtypes, and levels is that it
- allows allistic people to define what autism is, as well as who/what autistic people can be, despite the fact that they clearly have no idea what they're doing.
- opens the door to assigning value to human beings according to their ability/desire to assimilate into the dominant culture and reproduce its values.
If you're out of the loop wrt the past, oh, 12-thousand or so years of human history, I'll summarize: we've been here before, many times, and the results are always horrific.
And yet!
People keep on circling back to eugenics, which is basically the perpetual motion machine of the social sciences: it doesn't work, it cannot work, and yet that does not stop people from convincing themselves – like some Scooby Doo villain squatting in an abandoned amusement park – that they would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for thermodynamics/antiracists/tbh anyone with an iota of of common sense or a shred of human decency.
Anyway, if you are ever like, "But what if we made a comprehensive hierarchy for classifying humans" I am telling you JUST WALK AWAY, don't even finish that thought.
(links) This EW recap of a podcast interview with Joel McHale (this I guess is what constitutes news in our current media-death-spiral era) in which the actor-comedian "opens up about raising [son] on the autism spectrum," which had me very worried but...turned out to be fine?!
To my surprise, McHale seems to genuinely like and appreciate his own children, one of whom is autistic! Although in the grand scheme of things this is a very, very low bar, it is also a very, very low bar that many parents, celebrity or not, fail to clear.
(In fact, I'm just going to go ahead and name him Father of the Year, because who is the competition even? These assholes who train for ultra-marathons during their paternity leave? Fucking Kevin, who most definitely sent an email to the entire office that he'd be out because he had to "babysit the kids" by which he meant his own offspring? All those playground dads (I see you and I judge you) who let their kids wander off because they're too busy dicking around on their phones?)
But BOO! to this interviewer who harps on the "challenges" of raising an autistic child, to the point of tossing off that oft-cited, unfactual "statistic" that having a child on the spectrum makes couples more likely to divorce (it does not, science has receipts). By the way, I really appreciate that McHale pushes back on this, with a gently humorous reminder that modern parenting is hard and expensive full stop, and that you just have to love and support the children you have, whoever they are and regardless of neurotype.
In a bizarre coda, the interviewer then concludes that "it all worked out" because in his opinion, McHale is "weird" and "one of the most different men [he] know[s]" and, as the ND child of ND parents, who in turn married an ND and created ND kids (the CIRCLE of LIIIIFE!), I am laughing my ass off at this.
Should we maybe say something?
...Nah.
And now, for something good:
(links) Presenting the Winner of the 2024 Dance Your PhD competition!
This is the end. Have a Happy Leap Day. Real life is for March.