The asshole is thoughtless because they believe others to be less important than themselves. The person with autism is (may be) thoughtless because their brain isn't wired to be thoughtful. Or they actually are thoughtful, but don't know how to express it in a way that others can understand.
The idea that autistic people are assholes is an artifact of every other gamer on the internet self diagnosing themselves with aspergers in the 00s and then using that as an excuse to be un-introspectively cruel to each other.
If I appear scrupulously kind to you, it is because I am compensating. If I appear emotionally intelligent to you, it is because I had to learn what is literally instinct to most people. At least for me, I am able to compensate effectively and pass in most social situations, but it is exhausting.
When I read RMS's writing that lead to the conflict in question, it struck me as an entirely reasonable piece. When I read the responses to it, the message I got, loud and clear, was "my thought patterns are not welcome here"
that you choose to be kind does not make you less kind. that your emotional intelligence was learned rather than instinctual does not make it less real. that you willingly exhaust yourself exercising those skills is absolutely the opposite of being an asshole.
> that your emotional intelligence was learned rather than instinctual does not make it less real.
That is a rather technical statement, that would be dependent on exactly what you mean by "emotional intelligence". Relying on general intelligence to do tasks that most people accomplish with more specialized brain power is certainly different, regardless of if you want to classify it as emotional intelligence or not.
Sometimes I resent the patchy compensation mechanisms I’ve built up. It’s almost impossible to explain the frustration, the exhaustion, of choosing to be kind in a fashion that differs from my own understanding of kindness.
I am inherently kind, and I don’t have to choose that. I am confident in that statement. What I do have to force is mapping my default expression of kindness to the norms that friends, family, and acquaintances will understand. This is so important, because failing to do so means pushing all those people away. I feel like I can never let my guard down.
Then I remember to stop talking about myself; cue flash of (rational) anxiety; catch myself from a mental break; go and take a 50 minute long shower.
I’m so thankful for the people that give me a chance to reset, learn, and grow from these iterations.
I have a generic model and I develop ones for individual people too, what one key find normal another will find distressing - and none of it makes any sense to me at all.
What about all the other people who were excluded from the movement because RMS was an ass? A common human fallacy is to overindex on the contributions of assholes, while ignoring the potential contributions of those who were excluded by their actions.
My subjective evaluation, having met RMS in person and looked at the consistent patterns in his behavior, is that he is "below replacement value" -- he has overall caused far more harm than the average person in his position would have.
In this case, though we actually could, if we wanted to, find some data. We could go around and ask a bunch of people if they wanted to get involved with the FSF but didn't, and see how many of those people were turned off by RMS. Another option could be to look at the demographics of people getting involved in the FSF before and after RMS had been outsted, and compare.
None of that is perfect, and especially the second option would only give you a correlation, not necessarily causation. But, again, our data will always be incomplete, and you just have to go with what your experience tells you will or won't happen.
>>thoughtless / mean / an ass
>This is precisely what people with autism tend to be
It's not a special preoperty of spectrum people that they have to learn what neuro-whatsit folks know "instinctively"; we all have to learn these things. Socialisation is learned, not instinctive. You don't have to have a disorder to have poor social skills.
It could be that your poor social skills are the result of inadequate experience or training; it might be that you don't care much (not because you don't care about others, but just because the approval of others doesn't matter much to you, and expending energy on gaining that approval is wasted energy).
Not needing the approval of others isn't a disease; it's a mark of psychological health.
This is precisely what people with autism tend to be like because of the difficulty people with autism have empathizing with others and seeing things from other people's points of view.