Against Teleology

Originally, this was going to be a post on why I hate Rationalism (and things associated with it, like the New Atheist movement.) Then I realized that my problem wasn't so much with Rationalism as it was with Teleology. So now this is a post on why Teleology has to die.

I suppose I should start by precisely defining my terms in the traditionally high-handed manner, but eh. Precise definitions are so rarely actually helpful. Impressionistic will have to do. There will be sufficient high-handedness as things stand. Teleology, as I'm using the word, is essentially the set of end-states - "perfection", "truth" and "utopia" are three of the clearest examples, but any idea of a state of affairs where progress ceases altogether counts - these ideas can be found in all fields of human thought, from aesthetics to religion to politics to science (the Theory of Everything is a particularly good example). And all of these ideas, without exception, are destructive.

Take truth, for instance: truth is an idol worshiped by many, held up as the ultimate aim of human thought, as the only thing worth pursuing, but its true nature is this: truth is the sacrificial altar where thought dies. Imagine actually knowing the truth - isn't it self-evident that nothing more can be thought once the truth is known? There is no questioning, no wrestling with problems, no change, no growth. Truth is stagnation. Truth is not a state of existence that any living mind could participate in, for no living mind could fail to change or to grow. (Consider also the behavior of those who claim to know truth. It's bad.)

Or look at what the idea of "moral perfection" does to people. Instead of feeling limited and specific guilt for actual moral transgressions (that is, the sort of guilt that is actually useful for motivating you to improve), many of us have been taught by our parents, by our religions, by our teachers, to compare ourselves to this unrealistic standard of moral perfection - which, of course, we fail to live up to, causing an increasing build-up of unresolved guilt and self-flagellation. The same pattern can be observed at the macro level, where - at least in the United States - the sharp contrast between the idealized version of the country (with liberty and justice for all) and the one that exists in reality (the one built on slavery, with Trayvon Martin, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and an absolute inability to ever achieve the moral high ground in any conflict (listen, World War II was a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to actually be the Good Guys for once, and then we dropped two nuclear weapons on civilian centers.)) results in the twin responses of outright denial and desperate, misguided, guilt-driven activism.

With that kind of cognitive dissonance, it's no wonder people turn to eschatologies and savior narratives. It doesn't matter whether you're waiting for the Revolution, the Rapture, the Singularity, or just Someone to do Something - what you have, in effect, said, is "We can't fix this by ourselves. We have to wait until it becomes, magically, alright." You have capitulated to Teleology, and unless you recant, you will wait for Something to happen until you die, having accomplished nothing.

Well, fuck that. Teleology has to go. And not just fundamentalist beliefs that "This is truth (or perfection) and this is how we get it," - no, we also have to get rid of the idea that truth or perfection is unattainable, but that the point is to get as close as we can in a sort of asymptotic striving. "Of course we can't actually achieve truth," they say, "but we can get as close as we can, and isn't that something, perhaps even noble in its own way?" Well, no, it's not.

And here's my second point: not only is Teleology destructive, it is totally incoherent. The ideas of Truth or Perfection are not just contradicted by all of human experience (we have absolutely no empirical reason to believe these sorts of end-states have any reality, conceptual or otherwise) - but they are completely inconceivable. This is why Christian authors have had so much difficulty dealing with the concept of Heaven (I am thinking particularly of C.S. Lewis' two attempts, in The Great Divorce and in The Last Battle, both of which portray Heaven as an infinite journey toward Truth and Perfection, since actually portraying those states of existence is impossible). Go ahead, try to imagine a state of absolute moral perfection, or a state of absolute truth. The mind recoils, or else edges around it with comfortable and meaningless religious platitudes.

"Inconceivable? Ridiculous! The ideas of truth and perfection are not only very much conceivable, they are necessary! And what's more -" Listen, hypothetical (and apparently indignantly British and heavily moustached?) interlocutor: these ideas are not necessary. They are merely entrenched. Heavily entrenched, no doubt - these Platonic absolutes curl around our brainstems, but if Stargate has taught me anything, it's that these parasites can be removed (as Wittgenstein reclaimed language from Plato with the idea of the "family resemblance", grounding language in similarities, approximations, and the way people actually think - rather than the Platonic (and entirely bullshit) idea of the essential thingness of a thing).

The idea that truth or perfection are necessary for progress - scientific, philosophical, moral, or otherwise - is purely a figment of the Platonic infection. To think that progress necessitates some sort of absolute metric presupposes Teleology. But look at how people actually think: we know (or can figure out) what one step better than here looks like. Progress means "better than here", not "toward some ideal". Maintaining that distinction is the first step toward living and thinking progressively, rather than teleologically.

Frustration with games

This is not, let us be perfectly clear, the frustration that results from being extremely bad at games like Demon's Souls or Rayman (let us briefly pause to note the glory that is the Rayman intro) - I essentially have trouble with anything that isn't a straight-up RPG. But that's not the issue here.

The issue is that videogames are (drumroll...) sexist. Yes, we are all surprised. I mean, I actually am - in spite of my already existing knowledge that, in this culture, women don't count, it seems like I'm always getting blindsided by just how much they don't count.

So Assassin's Creed II, right? My roommate plays through it, I watch most of the game. Good fun if you wanna climb all over parts of Renaissance Italy and stab people in the face/throat/groin/back in rather brutal ways. Pretty scenery. Fun gameplay. Characterization and plot are shit.

So, ignoring the present day framing story (which we don't care about and which doesn't really add anything to the game except for occasional incoherent ramblings about conspiracy theories - of course, the main antagonists of the game are the Templars - which build slowly up to a big reveal over the course of the game, which is - spoilers! - that aliens did it! which was obvious a third of the way through the game), let's examine the game's treatment of women. And yes, I know that women's role in society was rather constrained in Renaissance Italy, but the gamemakers' commitment to historical accuracy doesn't really extend beyond what can easily be shoehorned into their Assassins-versus-Templars conspiratorial rhetoric. It does not, for instance, prevent your in-game pal Leonardo da Vinci from making anachronistic and therefore at the time literally unthinkable speculations about the existence of gravity - fine, whatever, he's a super genius, still not how that works, but whatever - or from subscribing to the idea that people thought the Earth was flat pre-Columbus, which they really, really didn't.

But okay I'm getting off topic: yes, patriarchal society at that time in that place, but that does not excuse anything, as we shall see.

So aside from random female passers-by, the only women in this game who matter at all are:

1) your mother, who has no role in the story other than to introduce you to da Vinci, and then promptly gets all of the words beaten and possibly raped out of her and is therefore totally mute for the rest of the game, and also you have to protect her in an escort mission;

2) your sister, who has no role in the story other than to ask you to beat up a cheaty boyfriend and then is nothing but a glorified menu screen for the rest of the game, and also you have to protect her in an escort mission;

2b) other women who want you to beat up a cheaty husband, for money, because that is how you solve problems apparently;

3) two of the only three women who manage to get anywhere above woman-you-have-to-protect-and/or-fuck rung on the ladder of female characters, who actually teach you useful infiltration techniques and whatnot, and who both run brothels, because apparently the way to be both female and not-someone-to-rescue in this game is to literally be a prostitute;

4) an apparently competent and, naturally, sexually attractive thief who gets shot in the leg with an arrow the precise instant she attempts something dangerous, and whom you have to rescue and escort to safety, after which you have to physically carry her. Note that, when you are carrying her, there is no danger, you've already reached safety, and there is no point at all to this exercise, other than having you physically carry a sexually attractive woman who could have been not-a-sexist-object-lesson in another game. Also then the rest of your encounters with her are just flirty banter which is so painfully bad;

5) okay this one pisses me off. Sometimes in this game you'll come across some optional events where there's this thief who's all, hey, I'm fast, bet you can't beat my time on this parkour course I've mapped out for you, and then you're like, fuck you buddy I am a self-insert cardboard-cutout quote-unquote "badass" and therefore it is intolerable that anyone could be better at a thing than me, and then you run over some buildings and it's fun and you get some money at the end. Good times. So then you arrive at this particular race and instead of the usual thief guy it's a woman giving you a mission. This piqued my interest because, other than this, the only random-NPCs-who-give-you-missions who aren't men are women who have decided that you almost killing their husband is the best way to fix their marital problems. So, cool, a woman who can run around quickly and competently! Except, no, there's no indication that she's done this course (it's a horse race this time) - the time you're trying to beat is that of a guy who was trying to impress her. She's unimpressed and tells him that any random passer-by could beat his time, that random passer-by is you, she tells you to go race, and you say, "What's in it for me?" Which is, if I recall, a question you ask of no other mission-assigner, you just do the mission and then you get money. And her response? "Private riding lessons," nudge nudge, wink wink, and oh my GOD could you have picked a more painfully bad euphemism. So you do the race. And then she fucks you. Pushes you down into the hay and straddles you and the screen fades to black.

WHY.

Because, apparently, women exist in this game either to be protected or to be fucked by you the male douchebag protagonist.

6) yeah we're not done yet. Caterina Sforza. Go read that wikipedia article. Ask yourself, how could you conceivably have Caterina "Il Tigre" Sforza, Caterina "I'm going to ride through riots while seven months pregnant in order to occupy a fortress" Sforza, Caterina "Good for you you've taken my children hostage I can just fucking make more" Sforza, in your game, as a major character, and still not have any non-sexist portrayals of women. That's a damn good question, and they didn't completely spay her because that would have been pretty much impossible.

But they sure as hell tried. Your first encounter with her is brief and she is played entirely for sex. Your major encounter with her, much later in the game, is when her children are taken hostage and she lets fly with an (admittedly excellent) string of profanities culminating in the legendary and possibly ahistorical, "so what? Look right here, I've got the instrument to make more" exchange. Which is solid, until she turns away from the enemies and tearfully begs you to go rescue her children, which you do. Then you become unconscious because plot happens and she nurses you back to health and that's all we see of Caterina Sforza. Still, though, you can't completely dilute her, right? Some of it still comes through, right? Well, of course, which I guess is why the game decides to label her, in its educational historical database, as a "lunatic warrior woman", just in case you might be getting any crazy ideas that maybe there's more to gender relations than "men protect women". Also? All of the above is just DLC, meaning that if we count only the core game, we don't even have sammich!Sforza to populate our extremely short list of female characters.

So the moral is clear! If you are a woman, you're allowed to be a mother, or a sister, or a wife, or a fuckable, or a damsel-in-distress. You want to be a fighter? Well okay, if you want to be called a lunatic. You want to be a thief? Fuck you, here's an arrow through your leg to remind you of your place.

I mean, okay, there's a couple of female characters in the present day framing story, one of whom has no personality whatsoever beyond "hacker chick", and the other of whom actually punches people into unconsciousness!...and is only really characterized at all as "designated love interest for present-day main character in upcoming sequels". Well okay, so there's no depth of characterization whatsoever in this game, but "all our characters are flat!" isn't really much of a defense.

Oh also there's the woman very early in the game, whom you romance, using quick-time events. Forgot about her.

Yeah, so, that.

Was going to also talk about similar issues with Persona 4, but this is probably enough for the night. Short version: Persona 4 honestly tries to deal with issues of non-heterosexuality, and even non-cisgenderism, and is a fantastic game that I love a great deal - all of which makes its failures that much more frustrating.

On a positive note, however! Portal and Portal II are both really, really excellent games, and refreshingly Not Sexist. They're not trying to make any sort of feminist statement, it's just that all two characters in the first game, and half of the characters in the second game, are female (or at least female-ish AI), including, of course, the protagonist, and after the entire history of videogames worth of either exclusively or default male protagonists (except for Samus; if you bring up Lara Croft as a counter-example I will track you down and ram Susan B. Anthony silver dollars down your throat until you jangle sufficiently while I am throttling you), it is really, really nice to see an exclusively female protagonist.

Now if we could just get non-silent female protagonists, we'd be making progress (and ditto that thing with the silver dollars if you bring up Metroid: Other M).

Final note: I got my roommate to go through a quick scan of his 150- to 200-game library. There were six games that he could think of that had 1) clear protagonists who were 2) non-silent and 3) female. Half of those we dismissed as being way too fanservicey *cough* Bayonetta *cough*, which leaves us with a nice one-in-fifty ratio there. Even leaving out games that don't have clear talky protagonists, that don't look good.

Hey, privilege, what's up

So I'm in Arkansas (lest we forget) and have been, of late, subjected to what seems an endless stream of sexism and homophobia via my voyeuristic over-the-shoulder observation of my roommates' facebook feeds (my roommates themselves are stand-up folks, but many of their facebook friends are not.) So after a particularly nauseating instance in which my roommate dared to post a status implying that calling something "gay" in a derogatory sense was maybe, y'know, homophobic, and was subsequently dogpiled by three or four people vehemently protesting to the contrary, I felt that I needed to write a thing. So I did. Here it is.

To those who think using the words "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense isn't homophobic: hey guess what you're wrong.

Look, I am as aware as anyone, more aware than you are, of the fact that language changes, that words come to have different meanings over time, that language is dynamic and that people who obsess over grammar at the expense of communication are stupid, but let's just take a moment and examine the facts:

Fact 1: The words "gay" and "faggot" come to have derogatory senses only because of the social (and legal!) stigmata associated with homosexuality.

Fact 2: The words "gay" and "faggot" continue to be used, right now, in this country, in a derogatory sense by the people who are responsible for the continuation of these stigmata, i.e., homophobes.

Fact 3: The stigmata associated with homosexuality have real consequences, right now, in this country, from widespread social disapproval, to greatly increased difficulty if not impossibility of adoption, to not being allowed to be with your dying lover, to being continually tormented to the point where you commit suicide. People die because of homophobia, right now, in the United States of America.

I am not making the argument that calling someone a faggot is morally equivalent to killing them. That would be a stupid argument, and it would be stupid to think I am making it. What I am saying is that homophobia is a serious issue, right now, in this country, and it is facile to suggest that derogatory uses of the word "gay" are A-okay because the word's meaning has changed. It hasn't.

To use "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense, is to associate negativity with homosexuality. This is how language works: words mean things. They don't stop meaning things just because you don't mean them (or claim not to mean them). When you say, "that's so gay," or "what a faggot," what you are communicating, whether you intend to or not, is that gays are less: less worthy of respect, less entitled to rights, less human. That is what people will hear, and that is not their fault, because that is what you have communicated.

But okay, maybe using "gay" and "faggot" as slurs, repeatedly, doesn't make you homophobic. (Maybe using "nigger" or "kike" or "spic" doesn't make you racist.) Maybe you have gay friends. (Maybe you just used the same argument Sarah Palin did. Congratulations.) Maybe you don't think people should burn in hell for eternity just because they're gay. (You probably also don't think the Holocaust was a good thing. You don't get a cookie for that either. I'm not impressed by very very basic human decency.) Here's the real reason that you, specifically, are a homophobe:

Your immediate, knee-jerk reaction when someone brings up that your use of "gay" to mean "bad" is homophobic, is not to listen, or to examine yourself for any unrecognized homophobia, or to just stop using two words with hundreds if not thousands of substitutes which, by contrast, do not communicate that certain classes of people are subhuman - no, your immediate reaction is to justify how you are not at fault, and how the fault lies with the people who might be hurt by your thoughtless language.

Here's the moral of the story, the central point I'm trying to get across: if you are some combination of white, male, straight, cisgendered, or Christian, when dealing with people who are some combination of not those things, about those things where you are in the majority or privileged class, your first response must always be, without exception, to shut the fuck up and listen, because you have no idea whatsoever what it is like to be them, what they think, how they feel - whereas everyone knows what Christian white straight cisgendered males think and how they feel because we have entire media networks devoted to delivering us this information. Shut the fuck up and listen, because you have lived all your life in a bubble of privilege, and you aren't even aware that it exists, because no one has ever given you hateful looks because you are holding hands with someone you love, and you don't have a one in three chance of going to prison because your skin is too dark, and you don't have a one in four chance of being raped because you don't have a penis, and your father has never thanked God out loud before dinner that the rest of the family isn't like you. Shut the fuck up and listen - stay shut up and continue to listen. Ask questions to clarify, if you need help understanding - and you do need help understanding. Let no one accuse me of anti-intellectualism; there is a time for rigorous intellectual discourse and argument, but that time is not now, because you have a serious case of straight (or white or male or cisgendered or Christian) privilege, and the only cure is to shut the fuck up and listen, because until you learn how to do that, you will continue to be a homophobe (or a racist or a sexist or a genderist or a creedist), and I will continue to call you what you are: Bigot.

tinker tailor hipster nerd

The first thing you're going to notice when listening to Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal (who are in fact of Athens, Georgia - the juxtaposition of the B-52s and Of Montreal in my head is doing interesting things.) is that there is a hell of a lot going on. (The first thing you're going to notice about this blogpost is that I have once again jammed a bloated parenthetical in between the subject and the predicate. Again. In the very first sentence. So much for that.) There are layers of production, multiple vocal lines chasing each other round, plenty of weird instruments, abrupt mid-song stylistic shifts - sometimes two or three per song. You will already have noticed - from the band name, album title, and songs called "An Eluardian Instance", "Beware Our Nubile Miscreants", and "Triphallus, to Punctuate!" - that you are in for some pretty hipster times, and nothing you will hear is going to contradict that. The lyrics are swollen masses of referentiality and are mostly incomprehensible. What might surprise you, however, is how much you will enjoy it.

The first song, "Nonpareil of Favor", opens with a harpsichord, followed quickly by an irresistibly upbeat rhythm section and a catchy pop tune which lasts all of a minute-and-a-quarter before slipping into something more comfortable: a slowed-down swinging verse which makes it maybe half another minute before they decide that what they really want to do with this song is hammer the same chord very loudly for a couple more minutes, accompanied by harpsichord. Then they decide that they're instead going to hammer the same chord more quietly under a hazy mix of vocalization and...celeste, I think? It's better than it sounds - the hammering in the middle is jarring at first, but they do good things with it.

Third song: "For Our Elegant Caste" opens with the immortal lines,

We can do it softcore if you want

But you should know I take it both ways

We can do it softcore if you want

But you know that I go both ways

The next iteration of these lines turns into a round, mostly in falsetto, and this brings up another characteristic of of Montreal: they are the single gayest-sounding band I have ever come across - quite apart from their lyrics, which admittedly don't contradict that impression. For me, this is utterly delightful, though the exuberant camp might grate on some people.

Another characteristic is their habit of inserting bits of - sometimes spoken - dialogue into their songs: from "An Eluardian Instance",

You sat me down, we had some drinks

And you told me all kinds of insanity

I asked your friend if you were available

She answered, "no, but yes, oh well oh well yes and no."

From "Women's Studies Victims",

Then threw me out into the snow, I waited for the bus

Up came some values voters screaming are you one of us?

I said, "Of course man can't you see I've got some text reconstruction?"

(What does that mean?) No clue. It must be illicit - pentagram.

(What are you talking about?) No clue.

And from "Triphallus, to Punctuate!",

"You should call me sometime.

I won't answer but at least I'll know you care."

"How will you know it was me?"

"What do you think, I've got caller ID."

Which is charming, is the point.

Also! These songs are incredibly obscene in the most delightful way imaginable. "Plastis Wafers", for instance:

I confess to being quite charmed

By your feminine affects

You're the only one with whom

I would roleplay Oedipus Rex

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know what it's like to be inside you

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know how it feels

There's really a hell of a lot to say about this album, and you should listen to it yourself, so I'll leave you some surprises, but just a quick overview: "For Our Elegant Caste" is two-and-a-half minutes of the most enjoyable ear-heroin I've ever come across; "Gallery Piece" is a wonderfully schizoid love song; "Women's Studies Victims" is the perfectly representative blend of pointless referentiality, interpolated dialogue, and really catchy upbeat tunes; "Plastis Wafers" is both incredibly catchy and so very obscene. In summary! Fifteen very catchy, layered, ADHD songs. Well worth listening to.

Last week I said I would deliver my opinion on the state of the world. Then I realized that this would be stupid as I just have half-educated guesses based on very limited and probably inaccurate readings of Marx, collateral knowledge of economics, and wild extrapolation. Thus I will not do that, instead sticking to subjects I know things about. Next week - let's see - how about Gorillaz' Demon Days and Plastic Beach? That sounds good. Should get some film in as well. Season 5 of Doctor Who, or maybe one of Clint Eastwood's westerns. Also literature assuming I have time to read. Eventually I'll finish Swann's Way. Been in the middle of it for over a year now goddamn.

Side note: somewhere back in the archives - way, way back - there's a cringingly embarrassing fanboyish rant about xkcd. I think for the sake of honesty, integrity, and justice, that I should say that the person who wrote that was young and foolish and that xkcd - and the nerd culture that has sprung up around it - is little more than festering shitegobs predicated on, among other things, a tribal mentality of "us" v. "them", a smug assumption of false superiority, a belief that a store of utterly trivial knowledge somehow makes one a better person, the utterly perplexing belief that having Asperger's Syndrome is a virtue, and a mindless conformity to all of the above.

To clarify: I understand where these self-described nerds are coming from. It's a lot like the worldview of me and my peers - we're all fairly elitist, we all like stereotypically nerdy things - roleplaying games, sci-fi television shows, superhero comics, video games - and there's more than one aspy in our ranks. But there are differences. We don't have the martyr complex of the high school nerd, we don't judge people by how much Batman trivia they know - and more importantly, we have knowledge - and discussions - of the non-trivial variety: about literature, physics, biology, chemistry, history, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, higher math, Talmud, Bible, music, art, psychology, sociology - you get the point. The point is, we're intellectuals, not nerds. We've all been - and many of us still are, to some extent - part of the nerd culture I've described. The thing is, we all grow out of it.

The fetishization of the nerd is a perplexing, fairly recent pop culture phenomenon. If you've seen the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the past few years, you've noticed it: the immense hype surrounding it, the movies and books that have been made about it, the media personalities condescending to the victorious middle-schooler who is orders of magnitude more literate than they. And, by and large, it's awful. Don't get me wrong, I love the spelling bee. But my god is it painful to watch the media milk adorable younger siblings of contestants, or interviewers asking some eighth-grader who was favored to win how it feels to be eliminated in the fifth round on some word only spellable if you've happened to have come across it before. Also, Akeelah and the Bee was an unholy abomination and should have been aborted in the first trimester.

Or perhaps you've watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which is about the lives of physicists as imagined by someone who's never actually hung out with any sort of intellectual. The laugh track is the least objectionable portion of the show. Or perhaps you've come across My Life Is Average, a website founded in response to the pathetic whinging of Fuck My Life, a website populated entirely by anecdotes of stupid people about their terrible lives. MLIA started out as a rather clever statement, where people would post completely mundane, uneventful stories about their lives. Then it became a circle-jerk for nerds to congratulate each other on how delightfully quirky their lives were and how they recognized that Harry Potter was superior to Twilight, apparently forgetting that one step above awful is still just mediocre. Or, again, maybe you've come across the creepy, bitchy, faux-intellectual, artless pile of shit that is xkcd. I used to call these people nerd posers. Then I decided that they were real nerds and I was not. And that's fine with me.

Probably I should justify this vitriol. In particular, I realize that my accusations of "a tribal mentality of 'us' and 'them'" and "a smug assumption of false superiority" may seem hypocritical, and that this whole thing may seem like mere wankery. So let me justify my statements a bit more: I have a friend, a third-year undergraduate, and young for that, who gives talks on mathematical logic at graduate conferences, and knows a great deal about literary theory, philosophy, foreign film, Kafka, and midrash. I have multiple friends who know so many languages it will make your head explode. I have a friend who reads Heidegger for fun. I have an undergraduate friend who is trying to get a Ph.D. in Classics so that he can become a practicing neurosurgeon. And yes, we are far too insular; and yes, we all, virtually without exception, fanboy or -girl hard over Doctor Who; and yes, many of us have inside jokes which stem from our Shadowrun campaigns; but we don't glory in being unable to interact with people outside our peer group; we accept people who think Zelda is the protagonist of Ocarina of Time; we don't consider non-intellectuals beneath us.

...except for nerds.

Not convinced there's a difference? Yeah, I get that. Not very convincing. I'm not quite communicating here. This is my emotional reaction, and I have yet to completely rationalize it (that might seem a bit ex post facto to you, but I think that's a big part of how our minds work. The reaction is prior, and if you can honestly justify it, then good, and if not, you need to fix your reaction.) So I'll keep working on that - I welcome any input - but I do sincerely think there is something severely wrong with nerd culture as it currently exists.

One last note, re: Asperger's - I hope my comments won't be misinterpreted as prejudice. I have a moderately high-functioning cousin with Asperger's, and a couple of close friends who are quite high-functioning - not that "some of my best friends are, etc.", but rather that I've had some experience with it. Obviously, it's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's something that makes your life more difficult in a lot of ways - something you have to struggle against. My cousin, for instance, can instantly detect spelling and grammatical errors in a document, but has a hard time grasping that not everyone is as interested in All in the Family or ALF as he is. One of my friends has had to reverse engineer a sense of humor and is knowledgeable about theories of humor, which is admirable, but he doesn't have the instinctive feel for it that most people do, and so he tends to say legitimately very witty things at inopportune moments. What I dislike - and I'm open to correction on this point - is people who feel that Asperger's excuses their antisocial, obsessive behaviors and that they therefore don't have to try to change, and everyone else should just put up with it.

Oh, and you should really check out the blog I linked above. It's amazing.