Posts by BenWilson
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For those curious about my (for me) prolonged absence from Public Address, this blog may go some way to explaining it – both in its content, and the shitty shitty quality of the writing.
It does go quite a way. Stress can be affecting you in ways you aren't aware of. You've had a huge amount to cope with. I don't think it's bad to tell us, even in a "shitty shitty" way. I didn't think it was shitty, just not the fantastically witty prose we're used to, but straightforward telling. Get it off your chest, sometimes it helps. Trying to be witty about your problems can trivalize them, and force you to say things that aren't really what you meant, sometimes. Or say nothing.
btw, your book became my Christmas present to myself in the end, cause I didn't finish it before Christmas and got all greedy and just kept it. Highly recommended.
I've also discovered that people are a de-stresser. Possibly on account of too much solo work. They may be tiring, but it's tiring like training. Overtrain and you get fatigued by it. Undertrain and you get fatigued by everything. We need people in appropriate doses.
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I pity you people with slightly uncommon names. I can post without a pseudonym safe in the realization that I'll be at least 200 pages down in any Google search.
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And there still isn't...we need a tank.
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I do also feel under siege from contraception, especially condoms. I've often wondered (to the obvious scorn and banalization of the family) whether money shots are poking fun at the 'withdrawal method'.
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Hey recordari don't go redacting flippancy on my account. I wanted to talk about my aunt's sterilization as contextually relevant, but it wasn't meant to be a bummer. If anything I fully expect someone to tell me it was an outrage, and that I'm a eugenic wanker for thinking it was the right thing to do. Maybe I am, let the wisdom of the net rain down. Or ignore it and have fun - I won't be upset.
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I'm pretty sure I could have taken him.
LOL. Who would you pick in Einstein vs Gandhi though?
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Quite. Autism suggests the broader fear is of difference, not really weakness as such. Unless someone wants to argue Einstein was weak.
I think people still have trouble not simply putting it in the same basket as other mental disabilities.
I believe my aunt was sterilized early on. She is very severely IH, or whatever the term is these days, a tragic case of PKU syndrome before there was standardized testing for it. Especially tragic because it is treatable if discovered, and the cause of the brain damage is all the foods parents were taught to give children in those days.
Having known her my entire life, I can see sense in the sterilization, but not from a eugenic point of view. There is no reason she could not have healthy children. But there is absolutely no way she could have cared for them, or herself during a pregnancy, and it was pretty clear that she could be sexually active. She was and still is prone to extreme self harm. She is completely blind, having bashed her head so much that she detached both retinas. She was constantly injuring herself deliberately by punching and kicking walls (putting holes in them usually) if upset. Caring for her was too much for my grandmother, whom she specialized in reducing to tears for fun at every chance. A child would have been taken from her immediately at birth and would fall on the state or family to look after, after which it could all happen again, and again, with no memory or thought for consequences.
In her case, she is simply not competent to make any big life choices, and sterilization was to her own and everyone's benefit. It also meant she could actually have a sex-life. I don't know if she ever did.
But I think it's all to easy to generalize from such clear cases to the much grayer ones. Certainly I feared that my children could have PKU, it being a genetic condition, and raised the question constantly in the hospital, until we were shown the negative results. Kind of ironic one of them ended up brain damaged anyway, the ultimate cause still being mysterious.
Perhaps Marcus' autism is a result of his brain damage. Perhaps not. It doesn't really matter, to me the autism is the least of our worries, having seen what just out-and-out brain damage is like. Certainly I got some sharp looks from the pediatrician when I related details about my parents noticing a great deal of similar things in my behavior at the same age as Marcus shows - was "Undiagnosed High Functioning Asperger's" flashing through her mind? Or was she just pondering the strangeness of the human mind? As Russell once noticed, once you learn the smell of autism, you sniff yourself a lot for it. But now I just don't care. He'll be what he will be, and we'll continually encourage him to improve in all directions, physically, cognitively, linguistically, socially. I'm trying to do the same with myself. Much less fruitfully, it seems. Being old is the worst disability of all.
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Yes, and Brash's alleged affair was certainly received with far more relish than it should have been.
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I doubt there would be anywhere near so much really high level super advanced mathematics if autism didn't exist.
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Watched Gattaca for the first time tonight and thought it dealt with eugenics in a very entertaining and inspiring way. Quite a good watch.
Indeed. Eugenics fears weakness and death so much that it limits true potential. Nice idea, does tally with my experience - having natural advantage can make a lot of people lazy and weak.
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