Tuesday, August 23, 2022


Autistic people and romantic relationships

Sandra Thom-Jones is on theautism spectrum and offers below her experiences as a guide to other autistic people. What she offers is hower just standard female advice: You need to "work" on yourself to discover who you really are.

In case a male reading her advice tries to heed it, I think I should point to different advice. I am a high functioning autistic in a relationship with a female high functioning austistic so I may have some generalizable advice.

Over the years (I am now pushing 80) I have had many good relationshps that I really enjoyed -- including four marriages. So the question for me, as it was for Sandra, is clearly why did not any of the relationships endure?

And the answer is that I have the characteristic autistic insensitivity to the feelings and motivations of others -- so behaved insensitively to the women in my life. I did not give them the attention that they needed emotionally. That caused them to feel unloved and they left me. People need to love and be loved.

I did not however have much insight into my deficits so I kept making the same mistakes. On a recent occasion, a woman in my life suggested that I was autistic and I recognized that as an accurate diagnosis. So I have subseqently changed my behaviour. I now take a greater interest in what the woman wants and needs. And I endeavour to supply it. I am much more apt to express affection, in particular. And it seems to be working. Being in a relationship with another autistic is difficult but my partner and I do seem to be very firmly attached.

So my advice to male autistics is the opposite to that below. I think we need to follow the wants and needs of others MORE than we otherwise would do. I am, for instance, much more into kissing, cuddling and caressing than I used to be -- and that is very well received



If social relationships are tricky for autistic people, then romantic relationships are like walking through a minefield in size 13 boots with your eyes closed. I share the relationship experiences I have had not because I want to embarrass myself, but because if you are loving or supporting an autistic person it is important to understand the predicaments our lack of awareness of social cues can lead us into.

I was shy, geeky and socially awkward as a teenager. I didn’t have close female friends whom I could go to for relationship advice, so I learnt the “rules” of dating from reading Jane Austen novels and watching family-friendly television shows. As I progressed through my teens and adult years, I had my heart broken several times and apparently I broke a couple of hearts myself.

My lack of insight into the motives and thoughts of others, combined with my inability to read subtle cues and body language, has resulted in some serious misunderstandings and conflict. I am not suggesting this is unique to autistic people: unrequited love is a common enough theme in movies and songs that I realise it happens to everyone. The difference is that my inability to read non-verbal communication or to have insight into the thoughts of other people means that I often do not see what I later discover was obvious to others.

Have you seen the 1999 movie Runaway Bride? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it as a great representation of how many autistic people adapt to be the person others want them to be. Don’t focus too much on the plot – just focus on Maggie’s character and the way she metamorphoses in each relationship. She changes her clothes, her interests, and even the way she likes her eggs cooked, morphing into the perfect girlfriend for each different partner.

That movie really struck a chord with me. When I look back on my relationship history, I underwent a similar process in each relationship as I tried to be the person my partner wanted me to be.

Girlfriend, like daughter and friend, was a role to be learnt, with clear expectations of what I was meant to look like and how I was meant to act. So, in each relationship I became the person my partner wanted me to be.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back I can see that in each relationship I changed the way I dressed, the way I spoke, the interests and hobbies I had, and even my life goals. Some of those relationships lasted for months and others for years, but in the end they all fell apart. As we all know, masking is exhausting and eventually the mask slips. When that happens, either our partner realises that we aren’t the person they want us to be or we decide we don’t have the energy to keep being that person.

Eventually, after a number of failed relationships, I decided it was all too complicated and I was much better off staying single. Then I met the man who became my husband.

At the end of each relationship, I found myself even more confused about my identity. For me and for many autistic women, relationships are the ultimate masking experience. We know that we need to hide the parts of us that annoy or frustrate our partner, and that we need to be better at being who they want us to be. It’s one of the things that makes many of us vulnerable to domestic violence and other forms of relationship abuse. When a partner tells us that we aren’t good enough, we believe them – because most of our lives we have told ourselves the same thing.

At the end of the movie, Maggie moves to New York to live by herself and discovers her own interests and style (including how she likes her eggs).

I did not have the same lightning moment, perhaps because, unlike Maggie but like so many other autistic people, I wasn’t only masking who I was in romantic relationships, I was also hiding my real self at work, with friends, with family, and even from myself.

Eventually, after a number of failed relationships, I decided it was all too complicated and I was much better off staying single. Then I met the man who became my husband. Our relationship began in much the same way as others I’d had. I figured out who I was meant to be and played that role for quite a while. As in all of the other situations in which my mask is on, this was physically and emotionally draining.

After a while – just like in my previous relationships – my mask started to slip. I became less eager to please and more confrontational; I declined invitations to events I didn’t want to go to; I stopped listening to music and watching movies that he chose unless I actually liked them. We had a few rocky patches but came through them still enjoying each other’s company.

Over time, as I have come to be aware of and accept my autistic self, I have continued to morph into the real me. I think I am a very different person from when we met, but my husband seems to think that what has changed is surface stuff that doesn’t matter too much. I don’t know whether this is because he has a wide tolerance for change or because I let him see much more of myself from the beginning than I realised.

If you are an autistic person, you have probably had (or probably will have) your share of failed relationships. My advice is not to buy into the myth that you need to be better or different to find and keep a meaningful relationship. What you need to do is to be yourself and to be comfortable with yourself. If you find someone who realises how awesome you are, that is terrific. If you don’t, it is better to be the single but genuine you than the partnered replica of someone else.

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More Leftist hysteria about conservatives

They are getting their rocks off imagining a "vast Right-wing conspiracy" (again)

As President Joe Biden’s polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover.

This time, the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a “civil war.”

The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy “civil war” conjectures.

Recently “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned “civil war.”

Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to his supposed mishandling of “nuclear secrets.” Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss’ death-penalty prompt, adding that it “sounds about right.”

Hayden had gained recent notoriety for comparing Trump’s continuance of the Obama administration’s border detention facilities to Hitler’s death camps. And he had assured the public that Hunter Biden’s lost and incriminating laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.”

So, like the earlier “Russian collusion” hoax, and the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” the supposed right-wing inspired “civil war” is the latest shrill warning from the left about how “democracy dies in darkness” and the impending end of progressive control of Congress in a few months.

On cue, Hollywood now joins the “civil war” bandwagon. It has issued a few bad, grade-C movies. They focus on deranged white “insurrectionists” who seek to take over the United States in hopes of driving out or killing off various “marginalized” peoples.

Pentagon grandees promise to learn about “white rage” in the military and to root it out. But never do they offer any hard data to suggest white males express any greater degree of racial or ethnic chauvinism than any other demographic.

When we do hear of an insurrectionary plan—to kidnap the Michigan governor—we discover a concocted mess. Twelve FBI informants outnumbered the supposed four “conspirators.” And two of them were acquitted by a jury and the other two so far found not guilty due to a mistrial.

The buffoonish Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol is often cited as proof of the insurrectionary right-wing movement. But the one-day riotous embarrassment never turned up any armed revolutionaries or plots to overthrow the government.

What it did do was give the left an excuse to weaponize the nation’s capital with barbed wire and thousands of federal troops, in the greatest militarization of Washington, D.C., since the Civil War.

In contrast, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters were no one-day buffoons. They systematically organized a series of destructive and deadly riots across the country for more than four months in the summer of 2020. The lethal toll of their work was more than 35 dead, $2 billion in property losses, and hundreds of police officers injured.

Such violent protesters torched the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church and attempted to fight their way into the White House grounds. Their violent agenda prompted the Secret Service to evacuate the president of the United States to a secure bunker.

The New York Times gleefully applauded the rioting near the White House grounds with the snarky headline “Trump Shrinks Back.”

As far as secession talk, it mostly now comes from the left, not the right. Indeed, a parlor game has sprung up among elites in venues such as The Nation and The New Republic imagining secession from the United States. Blue-staters brag secession would free them from the burden of the red-state conservative population.

Over the past five years, it was the left who talked openly of tearing apart the American system of governance—from packing the Supreme Court and junking the Electoral College to ending the ancient filibuster and nullifying immigration law.

Time essayist Molly Ball in early 2021 gushed about a brilliant “conspiracy” of wealthy tech lords, Democratic Party activists, and Joe Biden operators.

Ball bragged how they had systematically poured hundreds of millions of dark money into changing voting laws and absorbing the role of government registrars in key precincts.

What was revolutionary were new progressive precedents of impeaching a president twice, trying him as a private citizen, barring minority congressional representatives from House committee memberships, and tearing up the State of the Union address on national television.

In contrast, decrying the weaponization of a once-professional FBI and the scandals among its wayward Washington hierarchy is not insurrectionary. Nor is being appalled at the FBI raiding a former president’s and possible presidential candidate’s home, when historically disputes over presidential papers were the business of lawyers, not armed agents.

Historic overreach is insurrectionary, not objecting to it. And those who warn most of some mythical “civil war” are those most likely to incite one.

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Consequences of Political Activism Are No Longer Only One-Sided

Conservative states have a warning for corporations that have “gone woke”: The consequences of political activism are no longer one-sided.

This month, West Virginia declared it would no longer do business with five Wall Street banks over the companies’ anti-coal or anti-fossil fuel policies.

“You have your right to be able to boycott the fossil fuel industry, but we’re not going to do business with you. We’re not going to pay for our own destruction,” State Treasurer Riley Moore said. “They’ve weaponized tax dollars against the very people and industries that have generated those dollars.”

Derek Kreifels, CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation, added, “If you want to make social change in this country, we have a democratic process that you should utilize to get that done.”

In recent years, corporate board rooms have been smitten with a movement of “ESG” principles, which elevate “environmental, social, and governance” issues—fancy words to describe a preference for progressive policies—over profits when making business decisions.

The movement encompasses everything from reducing their carbon footprint to expanding employee benefits, lobbying legislators to using rainbow logos in June.

The well-intentioned activism can sometimes fulfill expectations, but often it causes harm instead. For example, at least 60 corporations responded to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision by expanding employee abortion benefits.

Corporations believed woke activism would win over progressives by demonstrating that they were one of the “good” businesses, while the pro-business policies of Republicans would prevent them from retaliating.

Oh, how wrong they were!

As major corporations have increasingly embraced ESG activism, conservatives have increasingly requited their animosity.

U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., publicly broke with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last fall, saying, “I didn’t even know it was around anymore.” Not too long ago, such a public break between Republican leadership and the Chamber of Commerce would have been unthinkable.

But the era of good feelings between Republicans and major corporations is no longer. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-leaning association of state legislators, recommended this spring that state pension funds remove their investments from stocks associated with ESG.

“Politically motivated investing, by definition, takes rates of return off the table,” explained Jonathan Williams, chief economist for the American Legislative Exchange Council.

One state this summer to begin divesting from woke funds is Florida, whose governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, called the ESG movement a type of “financial fraud.”

Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis called ESG political activism “anti-American, anti-freedom, a deliberate attempt to subvert our democracy,” adding, “for years now, the cult of ESG economic activists has been working overtime to infuse unwanted, woke ideology into the American economic system because they know their social policies wouldn’t pass the sniff test from voters.”

DeSantis also gained national attention earlier this year for out-boxing the Florida-based heavyweight, Disney.

Disney abandoned its brand to publicly criticize the state for passing a law protecting parental rights and childhood innocence. Florida Republicans not only evaded the blow, but landed one of their own in return, stripping Disney of long-standing privileges to essentially act as its own government. The fight ended with Disney crying “uncle.”

Now, West Virginia has opened a new chapter in the fight against woke corporations by severing state banking contracts. Legislators in at least 16 states have proposed legislation to follow suit.

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Calls for shark nets to be removed at Australia's busiest beaches - just months after a man was mauled to death by a shark while swimming

This is an old issue. The Green/Left care more about animal lives than human lives. So even sharks they don't like killing. The talk below is about higher tech instead of trapping them but why not do both?

A mayor has led calls for shark nets to be removed from Sydney's world-famous beaches this summer to protect marine life, just months after a man was mauled to death.

Waverley mayor Paula Masselos has divided opinion on her push for beaches in Sydney's east to go without nets this summer, including Bondi Beach.

Beaches will be without shark nets for the first time since they were introduced 85 years ago if the mayor gets her way.

The calls come six months after former British RAF engineer Simon Nellist was mauled to death in front of horrified beachgoers at nearby Little Bay by a 4.5metre great white shark during his daily swim.

It was Sydney's first fatal shark attack in 60 years and prompted the Department of Primary Industries to install 15 SMART drumlines from Little Bay to Bondi.

More than 50 nets are usually installed along beaches between Newcastle and Wollongong from September to April.

But Cr Masselos said locals are 'very concerned about the bycatch' getting caught in shark nets and argued they're ineffective.

'Shark nets are only 150m long. They're 6m high and set at a depth of about 10m. They're not there to actually create a barrier between swimmers and sharks, but they sort of help disrupt some of the swimming patterns,' she told the Today show on Thursday.

'We actually often see sharks on the inside of the shark nets. When you look at Bondi, it is actually a kilometre long. So the shark net isn't creating a huge barrier at all.

I think it's actually creating a false sense of safety. There are other technologies like smart drumlines and aerial surveillance that are far more effective in spotting sharks and advising people.'

She understands beachgoers' concerns but argued shark nets were old technology.

'We're driven by the science and the data and we believe that there are far better ways of actually keeping our community safe, because we take that responsibility very, very seriously,' Cr Masselos added.

'I'm an ocean swimmer myself. I totally understand the issue and people's concerns.

'Shark nets are very old technology. They were first introduced in 1937. We're in the 21st century now. I believe we can do much, much better.'

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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