Writing Ace

I am going to assume your goal was not to be ableist. So I will explain how this differs in autistic communication: As an autistic person, if someone else infodumps I do not see this as selfish. I might not be interested, but I don't ascribe meaning to it as selfish. I just think, "wow this person really loves X!" And i know that if they spent 30 minutes listening to me, I owe the same to them. It is a way of sharing interests and directly getting to the point in conversation.

Neurotypicals will observe this dynamic differently and again ascribe or assume it as selfish, but its a different communication paradigm. I genuinely prefer listening to someone infodump for 2 hours than dance around conversation topics that are superficial at best. Calling it masturbatory implies an intent that I don't think is there when someone is not aware or able to understand certain social rules. Struggles with turn-based communication is literally in the diagnostic criteria. This is, again, what defines autism as a disability.

To me, selfish talking at someone (whether it is infodumping or not) involves monopolizing conversation to the point where the other person is unable to participate except by engaging with that one specific topic, especially in situations where disengagement is not an option.

Here's an example: a few years ago I was traveling with a friend, where we were going to an event together and sharing a hotel room, so disengagement was complicated at best. During that trip, she turned nearly every conversation into being about the same topic, even steering my attempts to talk about my own things or literally anything else back into the sole topic she wanted to talk about.

Not every autistic person experiences the same symptoms, obviously, and so it is difficult to talk about autistic people as a collective when it comes to things like the ability to successfully engage in turn-based conversation. I have relatively fewer issues with that specific piece, so I recognize that it is difficult for me to speak to that.

But I think that there are people (including autistic people) who will engage in more selfish forms of talking at someone (purposefully disregarding explicitly attempts to redirect or disengage, taking advantage of people they know are unable to disengage for whatever reason) because it is easier or more comfortable or less work or simply because they want to talk about that thing so much. And the purposeful part is key here--I'm not talking about "oh I missed a cue trying to redirect" but "they asked if we could talk about something else and I actively ignored them because I really wanted to keep talking about this."

I love telling my friends things! I love my friends telling me things! But part of why that works is that it is reciprocal, and also we are interested in hearing what each other has to say.

But I wouldn't enjoy some random person making me sit through their soliloquy about idk golf or whatever.

'speculums open you up less than sex' *loud incorrect buzzer noise* what kind of sex? Not all kinds of sex involve penetration. Why are you assuming that everyone who has a cervix is having penis in vagina sex?

'if you can have penetrative sex you can get basic medical care' ok. If I can't have penetrative sex then what??

there is a widespread assumption that if you are an adult with a cervix then you will be having penetrative sex and that, therefore, vaginal penetration in a medical context will be no big deal for you.

this is untrue as a) not everyone is having penetrative sex and b) not everyone who is having penetrative sex finds penetration in a medical context painless and untraumatic.

the result of this is that people for whom cervical smears are significantly painful and/or emotionally distressing are not universally properly accommodated and supported in medical settings.

like yes dude us other autistic bitches have had these problems too but social norms being less intuitive and harder to pick up doesn't mean it's impossible. it is a skill you can learn like any other if you stop acting like the people trying to teach it to you are snuffing out your divine spark or whatever, and stop plugging your ears whenever other people tell you how they want to be treated.

i think ultimately frustrates me the most about this behavior is that it's just such an insanely selfcentered understanding of human interaction. you think that conversation and behavior You don't personally see the purpose or value of has no purpose or value at all. and instead of trying to meet other people half way in their expectations of how relationships develop, you expect them to instead abandon all their criteria for socializing in favor of yours because you believe your own social framework is innately superior.

With the way that society prioritizes romantic relationships over platonic relationships, and the way that culturally we are expected to celebrate romantic love, there is some level of social expectation that, if someone tells you that they have a crush on you, you are supposed to either "give them a chance" or in some other way adjust your behavior to account for their feelings. Their romantic or sexual feelings for you now become something you need to keep in mind when engaging with them.

For example, if someone has told you that they have a crush on you, by some set of social expectations (at least based on reading a fuckton of romance novels and such), you're then not supposed to talk about romantic feelings you have for other people, talk about dates you go on, etc., because it might hurt their feelings.

It's not exactly the same, but when I was in high school a guy I barely knew asked me to prom, and I had countless people including a teacher pressuring me to say yes--and it is, I think, the same general principle. I was supposed to "give him a chance" because he had expressed romantic interest in me, and that's how it goes.

(I did say yes, we dated for eighteen months, and it was Not Good.)

All of this is to say that I absolutely agree with you that having a crush on someone or being romantically or sexually attracted to them in some way is not harmful or a burden on them. But I think it's also important to recognize the ways in which amatonormativity can turn someone telling you that they have a crush on you into a clear set of social expectations that can be burdensome or fundamentally harm a relationship.

I am not a great fan of infighting on the broad left - at this point literally anyone who is not a fascist is welcome to die on these hills and make the fascists die on theirs - but it must be admitted that "Accept this as a normative statement" is usually asked of the farther left by the more central left. (Not the actual "centrists," who are too politically incoherent to count as left-leaning.) Today, I am asking for the inverse.

In particular, with Noem getting fired, some people are responding to the gleeful cheers of "Next, abolish ICE" and "Next, abolish DHS" with "That's not realistic."

I think abolishing ICE is becoming increasingly realistic! More importantly, the problems go far beyond ICE - some of the most appalling crimes have come from Customs and Border Patrol personnel who have worked as part of DHS for years - so I've got my "Abolish DHS" banner flying. How likely is it that we're going to be able to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security for parts and distribute anything of true social value into a separate agency (keeping in mind numerous preexisting agencies were incorporated to make DHS in the first place)?

I'm not going to argue on the immigration side, but it seems like for the rest of it, abolishing DHS means either creating a bunch of new agencies, which would increase the administrative burden; moving agencies/offices back to somewhere they don't really belong (moving CISA back into GSA doesn't make a ton of sense to me, for example); and/or totally splitting the component parts back up to their original offices (which would likely both increase the administrative burden and end up putting offices places where they don't make sense).

Definitely, "Turn the whole thing off, then turn the parts you actually want back on again" is extreme. There's a reason I don't think it's probable. If it is does happen, it'll be a huge undertaking that requires dedicated and trustworthy public servants. But re-absorbing the Confederate States was also a huge undertaking. The New Deal was a huge undertaking. Making the DHS in the first place was no minor task!

Returning some of the 22 agencies to their original homes seems like the 'easiest' fix. Why not return Customs to the Treasury and Immigration to the Justice Department? (Literally any option strikes me as an improvement over letting Immigration be handled by the literal White Supremacist Memes Department!!) But certainly others might fit better in new places. Some might wind up together under an umbrella that kinda looks like DHS 2.0, but hopefully without the white supremacy. Some might be abolished altogether.

My comment about the administrative burden was less "new signs and some extra paperwork" and more "making a bunch of new agencies likely means we would have to have half a dozen separate HR departments, contracting shops, badging offices, etc." Which as a taxpayer I am not super fond of the idea of.

It's like if your family doctor, your dermatologist, your stylist, your library, and your neighborhood sanitation workers were all bundled into one thing called Bureau of Health - and there were still separate HR departments, contractors, security details, etc, even after merging. What changed was that departments that had once reported up their chain to the head person now had to report up to ALL the head people, and worse, a lot of a department's work now had additional requirements to 'bring them into alignment with each other.' Like saying doctors have to learn to cut hair and sanitation workers need to be able to shelve books.

The various agencies hated it. Everything became horribly inefficient and overly complicated (and don't even get me started on 'homeland' which is uncomfortably close to Motherland and Fatherland). There are actually multiple interviews with former DHS people who lived through it.

What you should be unhappy about is the 23 years of performative bullshit that turned smaller agencies with established processes (a major aspect of efficiency is 'we all know the next steps') into offices stuck with new, unfamiliar, and often duplicative procedures that wasted their time and our money, not to mention the addition of who knows how many additional layers at the top that made oversight twice as hard (if not effectively impossible).

Let's say we take the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC). FLETC used to be housed under Treasury, and then in 2003 it was transferred from Treasury to DHS when DHS was stood up. From what I can tell from looking at DHS's org chart, the Director of FLETC reports directly to the Secretary/Deputy Secretary of DHS. Presumably before 2003 they reported to the Treasury Secretary, but I will be honest, I am too lazy to check. That is a single layer of reporting, which is almost certainly at least as efficient as it was under Treasury.

In fact, if you look at the org chart, there's no indication that any of the component parts of DHS (FLETC, Science and Technology Directorate, Office of Health Security, ICE, CBP, FEMA, Citizenship and Immigration Services, TSA, CISA, Secret Service, Coast Guard, etc.) report to each other's leadership, so I'm not quite sure what you mean by "What changed was that departments that had once reported up their chain to the head person now had to report up to ALL the head people".

When the federal government talks about bringing missions/efforts into alignment with each other, it generally does not mean making people with entirely disparate skill sets do each other's job. It's usually about aligning efforts, aligning plans, trying not to be redundant, etc. I'm not saying the federal government is always or even necessarily often good at it, but it's not really comparable to saying doctors need to learn how to cut hair.

I'm also not really sure if "there are new processes" is a great argument against it 23 year later, especially when some of those agencies that were folded in were only created in 2001/2002.

(A major part of efficiency is also "people who do similar things are grouped together" which is what DHS was trying to solve. And you make sure people know the next steps by writing plans, which I can guarantee you they have done at some point over the last 23 years.)

And I hate to break it to you, but virtually every department in the U.S. federal government is basically a bunch of smaller bits in a trench coat. Department of Commerce, for example, includes the Census Bureau, Patent and Trademark Office, NOAA, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology, among other parts.

I am not a great fan of infighting on the broad left - at this point literally anyone who is not a fascist is welcome to die on these hills and make the fascists die on theirs - but it must be admitted that "Accept this as a normative statement" is usually asked of the farther left by the more central left. (Not the actual "centrists," who are too politically incoherent to count as left-leaning.) Today, I am asking for the inverse.

In particular, with Noem getting fired, some people are responding to the gleeful cheers of "Next, abolish ICE" and "Next, abolish DHS" with "That's not realistic."

I think abolishing ICE is becoming increasingly realistic! More importantly, the problems go far beyond ICE - some of the most appalling crimes have come from Customs and Border Patrol personnel who have worked as part of DHS for years - so I've got my "Abolish DHS" banner flying. How likely is it that we're going to be able to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security for parts and distribute anything of true social value into a separate agency (keeping in mind numerous preexisting agencies were incorporated to make DHS in the first place)?

I'm not going to argue on the immigration side, but it seems like for the rest of it, abolishing DHS means either creating a bunch of new agencies, which would increase the administrative burden; moving agencies/offices back to somewhere they don't really belong (moving CISA back into GSA doesn't make a ton of sense to me, for example); and/or totally splitting the component parts back up to their original offices (which would likely both increase the administrative burden and end up putting offices places where they don't make sense).

Definitely, "Turn the whole thing off, then turn the parts you actually want back on again" is extreme. There's a reason I don't think it's probable. If it is does happen, it'll be a huge undertaking that requires dedicated and trustworthy public servants. But re-absorbing the Confederate States was also a huge undertaking. The New Deal was a huge undertaking. Making the DHS in the first place was no minor task!

Returning some of the 22 agencies to their original homes seems like the 'easiest' fix. Why not return Customs to the Treasury and Immigration to the Justice Department? (Literally any option strikes me as an improvement over letting Immigration be handled by the literal White Supremacist Memes Department!!) But certainly others might fit better in new places. Some might wind up together under an umbrella that kinda looks like DHS 2.0, but hopefully without the white supremacy. Some might be abolished altogether.

My comment about the administrative burden was less "new signs and some extra paperwork" and more "making a bunch of new agencies likely means we would have to have half a dozen separate HR departments, contracting shops, badging offices, etc." Which as a taxpayer I am not super fond of the idea of.

I am not a great fan of infighting on the broad left - at this point literally anyone who is not a fascist is welcome to die on these hills and make the fascists die on theirs - but it must be admitted that "Accept this as a normative statement" is usually asked of the farther left by the more central left. (Not the actual "centrists," who are too politically incoherent to count as left-leaning.) Today, I am asking for the inverse.

In particular, with Noem getting fired, some people are responding to the gleeful cheers of "Next, abolish ICE" and "Next, abolish DHS" with "That's not realistic."

I think abolishing ICE is becoming increasingly realistic! More importantly, the problems go far beyond ICE - some of the most appalling crimes have come from Customs and Border Patrol personnel who have worked as part of DHS for years - so I've got my "Abolish DHS" banner flying. How likely is it that we're going to be able to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security for parts and distribute anything of true social value into a separate agency (keeping in mind numerous preexisting agencies were incorporated to make DHS in the first place)?

I'm not going to argue on the immigration side, but it seems like for the rest of it, abolishing DHS means either creating a bunch of new agencies, which would increase the administrative burden; moving agencies/offices back to somewhere they don't really belong (moving CISA back into GSA doesn't make a ton of sense to me, for example); and/or totally splitting the component parts back up to their original offices (which would likely both increase the administrative burden and end up putting offices places where they don't make sense).

Let's take the 'Autistics NEED to learn how to make small talk' posts that keep popping up. Before taking this program, I was definitely one of those people who thought Small Talk was actually a code for Cruel Psychological Torture. Turns out I was totally wrong! It's just that neurotypicals are fucking deranged define Small Talk as something completely different from what literally every autistic person I have ever spoken to on the topic would say it is. What they call Small Talk, we see as A Conversation.

The examples given on how to improve your small talk skills were things like 'Ask how ABC made them feel' 'Relate what they just said to an experience of your own' 'Make sure your questions are open-ended so they can expand their answer into more detail.' And I was getting more and more confused as it went on.

That isn't small talk! That's a conversation! It's a chat with a friend over coffee! Apparently anything that isn't a deep, emotionally involved discussion about world changing ideas is considered to be Small Talk to NT people, whereas ND people see Small Talk as standard social scripts of 'Brr, cold enough for ya, Jim?' and 'I really like your hat.'

It's informal/light conversation about something other than the reason that you're doing something.

I talked about small talk mostly in the work context, because that's where I most often make small talk, and most often for me it's the conversation at the start of a meeting before we get to the point of the meeting. So if we're waiting for people to join or just breaking the ice or whatever, we might chat about the weekend or the weather or something similar. It's low-risk, informal conversation that's not about work or about the meeting that we are there to have.

If you're at something like a party or an event, most conversation will be small talk, because there's less Reason Why You Are There, so there it will be more characterized by being low-risk and informal.

The set of people I generally am around talk about politics A Lot. But politics isn't necessarily a low-risk conversation, so I would generally consider talking about politics to not be small talk.

Similarly, talking about a traumatic or difficult topic generally wouldn't be considered small talk, because it's also not low-risk. There is a decent likelihood of stirring up high emotions, fucking up the mood, etc. That's not to say that you can't talk about those things, but that it's not small talk.

So it's not really that NT people see all non-taboo/not-stressful discussion as small talk, but instead that is a necessary but not exhaustive criteria for small talk. The other main criteria is that it is not functional (that is, it is not directly to accomplish what you are there to do). It's as much characterized by the context as the topic.

Small talk:

Talking about the weather with a cashier while they ring up your purchases

Talking about a recent film you watched with a coworker while you're waiting for a meeting to start

Complaining about potholes in the road with someone at a party

Not small talk:

Asking the cashier to split your purchases across multiple bags so it is easier to carry (because it is a functional conversation)

Talking about a recent film you watched with a coworker while at an office event for film enthusiasts (because it is directly related to why you are there)

Talking about a dying parent with someone at a party (because it is high-emotion conversation)

Asking a customer how their day is going while working in customer service (because it is scripted/formal conversation)

"How is your day going?" to a coworker in the hallway: small talk

"How is your day going?" to a customer while working in customer service: not small talk