On celebrity autism

Content warning: ASD discussion...

 

I'm no expert but I have worked with a lot of people on the autism spectrum.

One of the biggest challenges is trying to figure out when their behaviour is a manifestation of their condition, and when they are using it as an excuse for being lazy or rude or otherwise anti-social. That sounds harsh, but it’s accurate.

But regardless of whether it’s one or the other, it's part of my job to help them understand what is socially acceptable. I've had to tell a student he can't just go to sleep on the floor when he’s bored. Sure, it's harmless, but it freaks people out.

I’ve had another student who is hyper-aware of his condition and obsesses over people not making allowances for it. I ended up telling him, “Unless you want to wear a badge that says, ‘I’m autistic, please be nice to me,’ then the world has already adjusted to you as much as it's going to.” You have to be cruel to be kind sometimes.

And that brings us back around to Elon and Kanye. An autism spectrum diagnosis (and I do mean diagnosis) may explain their behaviour but it does not excuse it.

This is not an unfortunate still taken out of context.
This is an adult who should know better.

In such a situation, it’s incumbent upon those around the individual in question to help them understand what is socially acceptable – and if they can’t understand it, at least act within what polite society considers appropriate.

I’ve been there myself. As I child, I was in the front room playing and I held my right arm out in a way that I had seen a robot in a movie do to zap some bad guys. Or maybe they were good guys – I don’t remember and it’s hardly relevant. My father sat me down and explained that we never EVER hold an arm out like that.

I was confused. Didn’t he understand I was just being like that robot in that movie? (He didn’t. And that’s fair enough) But after a few minutes I understood and I never did it again. I was 8.

Being on the spectrum and being a dickhead are not mutually exclusive.

I’ve written before about my own mental condition and I can tell you from experience that when someone uses a mental condition as an excuse for being a dickhead, it’s because they’re a dickhead, not because of any condition.

Autism conditions can be perfectly manageable if the individual and those around them (not necessarily in that order) are willing to manage it

Anyone who can’t make a gesture saying, “My heart goes out to you,” without it looking like a Nazi salute has deeper problems than being on the spectrum. Saying, “I’m a bit socially awkward cos autism,” is not just a pissweak excuse, it’s an insult to all those on the spectrum who have struggled for years to adjust to social norms which don’t compute for them.

 

 

Weather vane Zuckerberg has swung and will swing again

Does anyone remember the Metaverse?

It was Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for giving everyone digital avatars in virtual reality. Basically a bad cover version of Second Life which no-one remembers either.

A measure of its awfulness was when Zuck tried to impress everyone that Meta had invented legs.

He even changed the name of the company to Meta, which was in no way* related to the fact the company named Facebook had been caught out accepting billions of dollars from bad actors trying to influence to 2016 US presidential election.

Zuck was obviously the only person in the world who cared about the Metaverse and the various departments of Facebook Meta tasked with making it work referred themselves unofficially as MMH or Make Mark Happy.

It was eventually Elon Musk who saved Zuckerberg from himself. As Musk was incinerating Twitter, Zuckerberg launched Threads. And in the smartest move he’s made in a decade, Zuckerberg tied Threads to Instagram, which still has some cachet with young people, instead of Facebook, which is now social media for boomers.

Meanwhile, the whole Metaverse folly has been quietly buried.

Now Zuck has had another epiphany. In the Zuckiverse, the result of the 2024 US election – which he seems not to have interfered in this time – means truth is out of style.

With his typical awkwardness, he accused his own fact-checkers of bias in a deadpan echo of Stephen Colbert’s ironic assertion that reality has a liberal bias.

And also, “please don’t crush my business, King Donald.” This is notwithstanding the fact that the incoming president has no legal way to crush Facebook. It would be easier to make the Metaverse happen.

While billionaires act in what they think is their own self-interests and bugger the other people it affects, their interpretation of self-interest varies.

Elon Musk has quite obviously decided it’s in his self-interest to proactively support populist right wing causes. Zuck’s method is to curry favour with whatever he believes to be the dominant paradigm. 

While Musk, like Trump, thrives on bad press, Zuckerberg is clearly terrified of it, while still lacking the social and political skills to know what kind of bad press to care about.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg is a weather vane. I don’t believe his latest pivot to unmoderated speech and MAGA-lite notions of masculinity is the beginning or continuation of a post-truth dystopia. It’s just the current focus of the Make Mark Happy department and will eventually go the way of the Metaverse. 

It might take until the US mid-term elections, but eventually he will post another awkward and out of touch video apologising for the current policy and announcing a new focus on whatever he thinks will make him popular again.

 

 

Why the duct-taped banana is a true work of art

Oscar Wilde said all art is quite useless. Many disagree but at a level of human necessity, he was correct. You can’t eat art. You can’t build your house out of it. You can’t burn it for fuel (at least not for long, anyway). So it’s kind of like gold in that sense. Its only value is the value we place on it.

Last week, the value of US$6million was placed on a work of art consisting of a banana-duct taped to a wall. (Okay, maybe you can eat art).

What makes this a true work of art in late 2024 is that it is quite simply stupid. It’s a stupid price for a stupid work. We can all agree on this. It’s simply stupid.

One of the cures for ethylene glycol (or antifreeze) poisoning is to get the patient drunk and keep them drunk. Stay with me here; I’m going to make a connection.

Ethylene glycol on its own will not kill you. The problem is the liver will convert it into chemicals which will kill you.

However, the liver also prioritises the chemicals it processes. Ethanol, or drinking alcohol, is a much simpler chemical than ethylene glycol and the liver processes the simpler toxins first. By getting the patient medically drunk on ethanol, the liver spends all its time processing the ethanol, and the ethylene glycol passes through the body unprocessed. If successful, the patient lives do to another stupid thing another day.

I wish to present the theory that the liver is not the only organ which processes the simpler things first.

We live in a world full of relentless, toxic stupidity.

We see Israel bombing hospitals and murdering children in the name of self defence and there are people willing to accept this logic even when the stated objective is one that can only be described as genocide.

At the same time, it’s somehow controversial that Ukraine would defend itself against a hostile invasion by a notionally far more powerful nation. In the world I grew up in, powerful countries consuming smaller ones was considered bad. Then again, taking the wider view of history, maybe this value was just a 20^th century blip, but I’m holding onto it.

Meanwhile, America has elected a carnival clown as its leader for a second time. And said clown wants to put the guy who became a multi-billionaire from government contracts in charge of cutting government waste and a science denier in charge of the country’s health.

Each of the three paragraphs above contain so many complex layers of unfathomable stupid as to leave the normal, compassionate human brain beachballing.

It’s much easier to process the stupidity of an artist duct-taping a banana to a wall and getting someone else to pay $6million for it.

I’m sure there are people willing to justify the rationality of this, but they are far fewer and further between than those willing to accept the stupidity of Israel, Russia and Trump.

That makes it easier for us all to process too. In a world where even objective reality is somehow up for debate, we can comfort ourselves that we can all at least agree that paying a stupid sum for a stupid banana taped to a stupid wall is stupid.

For sure, it’s a sad indictment of us all on many levels, but this is a piece of stupid we can all process without killing ourselves and for a moment, the really toxic stupid does us a little less harm.

And that is art.

 

Time dilation in popular culture

When George Lucas’s nostalgia trip American Graffiti was released, the tag line was “Where were you in ’62?”

The movie was made in 1973 and seemed to be set in a completely different world.

If the movie were made today, it would be set in 2013.

 

In The Four Seasons’ Oh What a Night! the singer was reminiscing about December 1963. The song was released in 1975.

If it were released today, it would be about 2012.

 

When The Eagles sang “we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969,” that was eight years prior to the song.

If it were released today, it would refer to 2016.

 

In The Smiths’ song of educational trauma, The Headmaster Ritual, Sir wears the “same old suit since 1962.”

Since the song was released in 1985, the suit would be from 2001 today.

 

The Smashing Pumpkins sang about 1979 in 1995.

Today, it would be about 2008; the year Obama was elected.

 

The song 1985 by SR-71 and made famous by Bowling For Soup is about a mother who is completely out of touch and living in the past. 

Both versions are now over 20 years old – older now than the era the song was about.

Oh, and if it were twenty years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play, that would put it way back in 2004. 

A few reasons to not despair

It’s early days yet. The count in the US election will probably stretch on for weeks. Polls are useless but credible analysts are showing the current results are following the red mirage/blue wave of 2020. However, the fall of Georgia means for the good of our mental health, we should begin preparing for a second Trump term. I will be more than happy if the following becomes redundant. 

[Update: It didn't]

1:

The one saving grace – if you’d call it that – of the first Trump presidency was its rank incompetence. It was a joke from beginning to end. For sure, great damage was done which will reverberate for decades, but apart from appointing partisan lickspittles to the Supreme Court (and I am in no way minimising what a heinous outcome that was), he did almost nothing he said he would. The wall remains unfinished, Hillary Clinton remains unindicted, the Affordable Care Act remains in place, and it was left to Biden to withdraw from Afghanistan.

And this was all while he had the ‘axis of adults’ who figured he may be a sack of shit but at least he was a Republican sack of shit and they could guide him towards what could be considered normal conservative policy.

What everyone from John Bolton to Marine General John Kelly found was the Trump is absolutely uncontrollable. Now the MAGA crowd claim that this axis of adults were the ones who nobbled Trump’s first term agenda (and to a certain extent they’re right) but these were competent people who knew how to get things done in government.

A second Trump administration will likely be filled with ideologues with no experience in government. This is not going to turn out well, either for the American people, or for their agenda. Eventually they will realise that “because I said so,” doesn’t actually get stuff done and Trump will find himself longing for the dignified competence of Sean Spicer. 

And it surely takes a special kind of stupid to believe the guy who became a multi-billionaire through government contracts is going to be the one to cut government waste. 

2:

We know exactly how people get what they want from Trump.

It’s obvious that Trump becomes putty in the hands of anyone who flatters him. His mortal enemies become his best friends with the slightest of compliments – and vice versa.

What we (and by ‘we,’ I mean sane people) have to do is suck up our disgust for him and play his game. A little like this:

“Congratulations Mr President! My, what big hands you have! I can’t tell you have great it is to have a REAL president back again. This really should be your third term, you know!”

- Yeah, and it would be if it wasn’t for the fake news and all the stealing but at least we’re back now, right? So what’s this meeting about again?

“Well, we wanted to… Wow! You know, your tan is even more radiant in person. I didn’t expect that!”

- Thanks! You know people keep saying it’s makeup but this is all natural. And I don’t even have to go out in the sun or get under one of those light bed things. It just happens. It’s genes. It’s all about the genes!

“Yes sir. Well, we’ve come to you with a recommendation on how to replace the disaster of Obamacare.”

- Yeah, what a disaster! You know I’m gonna come up with something so great even I can’t imagine it yet!

“Well, good news sir! We’ve got the plan right here. We call it Single Payer. We’ve written it all up and you don’t need to do a thing!”

- Single payer! Yeah! It’s genius! Why have all these hundreds, thousands, millions of payers when you can just have one?

“It’s so much more efficient, sir!”

- Damn right, it is! And no-one knows more about health care than me. I basically invented health care. They call me the father of health care!

“We certainly do, sir! Thank you, Mr President! The people are going to love you for it!"

- They already do! But who couldn’t use a little more love, huh?

“I knew you’d see it our way. I was sure Stephen Miller was mistaken in what he said,”

 - Wait, what did Stephen Miller say?

“Oh, nothing. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

- Has Miller been saying bad things about me? You know I never liked that guy!

“Well, I’m sure he was just joking when he said you were so far up Steven Bannon’s ass you’d never listen. It was an honour to meet the greatest president in history sir!”

 

3:

Assuming Joe Biden becomes a lame duck, he has two months to executive order the absolute shit out of everything.

Do it all! Ban automatic rifles, mandate Medicare for all, institute a national $15 minimum wage, or even a universal basic income, fire and replace the entire Supreme Court, seize every oil field, deport Elon Musk, revoke Fox News’s licence, outlaw the Republican Party, bomb Mar-a-lago. The Supreme Court ruling in a case brought by Trump says the president has the absolute right to do all of this and no-one can stop him.

 

I remain (slightly) hopeful that none of this will be necessary. [Edit: so much for that!] But if history has taught us anything, it’s that the last thing Trump will do is what he says he’ll do, and his staff will be too busy trying to find a working microphone to implement any of their horrific visions.