Toot link; transcript:
Greta Thunberg could have, by now, carved out a very comfortable life for herself as a liberal grifter-celebrity offering platitudes about personal responsibility at Davos. Instead she connected the dots between ecocide, capital, and empire, aiming squarely at the heart of the beast. And now fresh out of captivity she downplays her own suffering to recenter the urgency of aid to the Palestinian people. No wonder she's hated by the fascist+lib coalition that rules this world.
Author: JP (@jpbreton@mastodon.social)
I feel like when it comes to passion, autism is a superpower. My neurotypical self, would never.
More power to her.
Will is a superpower. Drive and focus are superpowers. Hyperfixation are just happenstance. She has done this of her own making and design, not because of a quirk of her birth. Anyone is capable of it, given the right mindset.
Yes and no.
Strong feelings about perceived justice and refusing to do what you know is wrong, to the point you rather sacrifice yourself then make a compromise are clinically known common tenets in autism.
Source: I am an autist and this was part of my diagnosis. It remains a challenge in holding a job because i refuse to work for anything that creates profit and frequently openly question the ethics of management decisions.
Still Greta is an idol of mine since her first move precisely because she did what i had never been able too. Which was to stop listening to my peers and acting on my own accord.
This feels like something added by groups in power who want to maintain a status quo rather than an actual medical scientific reasoning, kind of how before being LGBT was a mental disease and women's brains were different and that's why they couldn't do what men do in white collar jobs or positions of power. Or phrenology being used to explain why whites were superior.
Something they don’t teach in school is how the concept of a disability only emerges in contrast to an individuals environment.
If the majority of people where high functioning neurodivergents then the world would be designed to play into their strengths and they would be “neurotypical”. Everyone who is neurotypical now would have a neurological disadvantage and thus count as disabled.
In a modern perspective of autism and adhd in human history its quite possible that society requires us as a subgroup, similar (often overlapping) to the prehistoric advantage of having 10% of you group being nightowls that could keep the communal fire burning.
A rash of artificial selection experiments has provided serious support for the existence of the type of ‘balancing selection’ at the population level you describe.
One experimental setup I know really well involved frightening aquaria full of zebra fish (an important model species for many things in biology research.
The researchers would hide behind a curtain until everything was quiet and calm, then emerge and make note of which fish swam away to hide and which came to the glass to investigate the investigators.
Breed shy with shy and bold with bold and very soon you have two populations that behave either over-cautiously or in an overly risky way. Artificial selection is a cool way to identify the genetic basis of these sorts of traits.
One conclusion to come from doing this in various model species (even fruit flies have this population level variation in response to new stimulus) is that ‘balancing selection’ seems to maintain populations naturally with about 25% ‘bold’ phenotypes with the remainder taking the careful ‘shy’ approach.
They have been able to identify some of the genetic basis of these differences in behavior, too.
So yea it’s very socially determined which neurotypes will prosper.
As they say,
If you are poor, you are considered crazy.
If you are middle class you are neurotic.
If you are rich, you are just eccentric.
Good point and you are right. Her drive and focus are what's import here.
Sure, yes and true until we get to the last sentence. Anyone is absolutely not capable. There are many reasons why some people will never get to the mindset required to sustain any of these superpowers no matter what because the genes and brain wiring you end up with are more powerful than any external factors.
I think they should remove Aspergers from the autism umbrella. It's clearly advanced or evolutionary, not a negative syndrome. I know, some won't have excuses to make anymore, but that's probably a good thing.
No it's not. I have what used to called Aspergers and it's not a freaking superpower, it made my childhood a painful and confusing time and still causes my trouble today. You can't judge all autistics by one autistic. Look at Elon Musk, you think he represents the autistic community?
My cousin was diagnosed with Asperger’s a long time ago and I can agree with you for a fact that it definitely presents in many different ways, and cannot simply be called a ‘superpower’. He has struggled for a very long time and continues to struggle to this day. Thank you for providing a balanced opinion.
Evolution does not 'advance', that's a very commonly repeated fallacy. Organisms change and adapt to their environment, but what is 'better' or 'worse' is entirely dependent on that environment, which can easily change. Asperger's is no more an 'advancement' than red hair or sickle-cell anemia.
I agree that classing all forms of Autism as a disability or negative trait is absolutely foolish. But believing it to be superior is equally foolish. People are diverse, and some better adapted to this life, this society. You perhaps see Asperger's as a better adaptation to how you perceive society 'should be', which is relatable to me.
Yeah we know. Thx tips.
Well there is a sociological theory that autism evolved and was kept around in the population because the tribe always needed someone laser focused on the tiny differences between berries or something. They were probably responsible for a lot of the leaps forward because everyone else would be just getting on with life and didn't have the mental space for anything else.
After they invented flint napping it probably gave them very high status within the tribe, so they would have had a lot of kids and so the trait was retained. But equally it would be detrimental if everyone was like that because you still need people to be good at hunting so although the trait would have survived, it would have always been a minority of the population. Which of course is exactly what we see, it just looks a bit different now there are 7 billion of us.
Processes for Cheese? Sour dough? Beer? As if these were invented by normies, amirite?
Those are so easy to make they're likely accidents. Literally just leave some random fruit in water and you'll probably get alcohol or vinegar.
Easy in retrospect, yes. So easy, that now even neurotypical people can follow recipes and make good beer or wine.
But it takes a special sort of nerd to notice the differences in when that random spoiled fruit turns to alcohol and when it goes straight to vinegar. It takes a deeply different mindset to get obsessed with that question and do the work to figure out how to control the process by experimenting.
Yeah whoever invented beer was probably given leader of the tribe lifetime status.
Although jokes aside it probably wasn't very strong, it was more about finding way to purify water