So "it was funny until it was relevant to me personally, then it wasn't"?

Strong moral backbone ya got there.

You've just described the premise of growing into an adult. Congratulations.

Not really? Children frequently demonstrate the same behavior. Laugh at the kid with X problem until you have a problem yourself, and now you dislike bullies.

Growing older and realizing in general that things you did when you were younger are bad is fine and dandy, and indeed is "growing up".

But only deciding things are bad when they personally effect you has nothing to do with growing older and is not a good look. It's just selfish myopia.

Being an adult with a consistent moral framework is about being able to say "this is right or wrong", regardless of if it effects you personally or not. If you only notice something is bad when it happens to you, then that's basically what kids do automatically.

Adolescence vs adulthood is the timeline here.

Consider this: you read this anecdote and thought “I’m going to belittle this guy.”

Says a lot about _your_ morals.

Huh, that's strange, because the comment I read said:

> ...particularly after having a child diagnosed with an autism...

Which to me says the dichotomy in particular is "before autism personally affected me" and "after autism personally affected me".

Calling people "autists" as a joke is either problematic and worth calling out or it isn't. You being personally affected doesn't change that. At least that is what I would argue is required from a consistent moral framework.

Don't think that says much about my morals, just that I like them to be consistent / not myopic.

Think about the thread we're posting in. This is basically about a company/industry that was like "these retail investors don't need protecting, they're adults and can make their own decisions, even if it means losing money", until those retails investors started costing them money with their adult decisions, at which point they change their mind and decide "actually they need protecting from themselves".

The way you phrased your comment, it sounded like you did the same, just swap out financial shenanigans for name-calling.

> I've struggled with this in some friend groups, particularly after having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.

Can you elaborate this some more? Are you saying that you've struggled with this because people take that 4chan attitude they grew up with into their IRL lives and are assholes to your son with ASD?

What needs to be elaborated? Question feels voyeuristic.

Figuring out just how they're assholes in real life helps understand and contextualize the problem better. Are they oblivious, or dropping offensive memes at his kid, etc?

Does it really matter? If you reach your mid-30s and haven't figured out that mocking someone with ASD is wrong, I'm not going to waste my time educating you. I'll simply cut you out of my life, gradually or all at once.

The royal "you", not you specifically.

?? I asked the question more because I was just curious if there are legitimately like mid-30 year old groups of friends that haven't grown out of this "4chan attitude" of using the n-word, calling people "autists", etc.

I didn't ask out of a sense of voyeurism. More like a, "dang, is this something I need to watch out for when I get older?"

This is precisely it. A willful ignorance when referring to awkward people as "autists" along with tasteless WSB quotes.

Essentially, yes. Whether it's playful or not, a lot of the memes on a place like WSB are incredibly demeaning.

Cheers. And yes, I'm totally aware of how awful and toxic those parts of the internet are, but usually those toxic and awful people hide it more when you talk to them in real life.

I’ve found many who are very outspoken in these communities have little to no filter in real life.

most of that is self aware deprecation from other autists. frankly being able to joke and shittalk with eachother makes it a lot easier to deal with having autism and everything that comes with it.