[Ipg-smz] On Stallman

[Tara Calishain]

"Every day I deal with my autistic brother's shenanigans. He is built,
how he's built.; in the 1960s it was rare to even get a diagnosis and
few knew what to do with autistim diagnoses. He's trainable. Graduated
high school. But moving outside of his own context is nigh impossible. "

Oh my word. This. So this. My brother was not diagnosed with Aspberger's
until 2003, when he was almost 40. (He has other health problems that might
have inhibited an earlier diagnosis.)

He has done things that have made me want to crawl in a hole and pull it in
after myself. But I will give him this: if he does something ridiculous, my
mother explains that it was ridiculous and not to do it again, and he
doesn't. And I have never seen him be intentionally cruel or mean.

(He's also the only one of the three of us who graduated from high school,
so he also gets props for that.)





On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 11:24 AM Tom Henderson via Ipg-smz <
ipg-smz at netpress.org> wrote:

> Fellow Guilders,
>
> I go way back in Linux. Long ago, the Linux Business Expo was part of
> COMDEX, and I was one of many functionaries in the greater spheres of
> COMDEX program development. Lots of interesting characters evolved Linux
> for a variety of motivations.
>
> Stallman was the anti-Microsoft. The pillar of free. I'm not a licensed
> medical/health/psych practitioner in any jurisdiction, but Stallman had
> brains, perhaps some autisim, and thought things through. He cared not
> one whit about his personal appearance or scent. Clue #1.
>
> He had boundaries in the philosophy of Free. They were well-developed
> and thought through. Much of his hard work in finishing the utilities
> that make the operating system we know as Linux were at his hands, or
> one step-away.
>
> His lip flatulence was notorious, as is/was/were many in the early
> free/open source movement. Many of them had a gripe with the sheer
> mendacity of Microsoft and its minions. SJV-N believes Microsoft has
> changed. I'm not sure if I share that believe, but as an researcher, I
> continue to observe.
>
> Stallman is a member of a wider body of men that think within their own
> context. It's difficult to shift outside of that personal context for
> them. I'm not excusing their behavior, just observing it.
>
> Nor am I forgiving it, and history shouldn't, either. The object that
> we'll look backwards upon 100yrs from now, should have that stain
> mentioned, not just the bullet-point of: founder of "free" as a
> construction and architectural concept. He was also: a dick.
>
> Can he help being a dick? I'll leave that to others. Too many men follow
> their hormones rather than something evolved in the pre-frontal cortex.
> Is being a dick part of autism? Does it being autism make it forgivable?
> No, is my answer-- it's a quality that doesn't offset the fetid scent.
>
> Every day I deal with my autistic brother's shenanigans. He is built,
> how he's built.; in the 1960s it was rare to even get a diagnosis and
> few knew what to do with autistim diagnoses. He's trainable. Graduated
> high school. But moving outside of his own context is nigh impossible.
> Change comes after daunting repetition. Only then. Trust me: only then.
> My late mother had him queued in a very Pavlovian way, and was
> successful, but my brother doesn't live with me. I've developed a
> support network for him. At a family event, he will blurt the most
> insane stuff, not understanding how a poop joke might not go over well
> with his aging aunt. Clueless. There are many clueless in the world.
> Their population doesn't forgive the cluelessness, just makes us work
> harder at inculcating manners. Like most of us, he wants to be loved.
>
> And so, atop the object that we might describe about others, their
> incredible accomplishments but their amazing lip flatulence and even
> more morbid felonies: some were built to not recognize the emotive
> response of other humans. It's just the way things are.
>
> There are many "Aspie" and autistic people somehow in my immediate
> circle of people, or perhaps, one step away. Here in the university town
> where I live, it's like the aforementioned Mensa meeting, where people
> came to study, and unable to live in the real world, became academics,
> or failing that, became "townies" with IQs in excess of 145 joining
> their peers. They never succeed in any recognizable way, but they fit
> into a rag-tag bunch of intellectual misfits which in turn, becomes a
> subculture of snorters. Nothing inherently wrong with snorters. And a
> common denominator of humanity is: Misfit, if of differing cultures and
> acumen.
>
> To address therefore Dana's "everyone is eventually forgiven" comment,
> my answer is no, that's not quite correct. Like most things, it's more
> complicated than that. Some will want to understand the complexity,
> while others just want to ascribe to The Winning Team or soundbite.
>
> Tom
>
>
> --
> Tom Henderson
> ExtremeLabs, Inc.
> +1 317 250 4646
> Twitter: @extremelabs
> Skype: extremelabsinc
>
>
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