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Canopus

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Posts posted by Canopus


  1. Canopus, I was unaware that so many modern cultures today stemmed from Protestantism but thinking it through, I can see parallels between the religious movement and modern society.

    It's all there in the history books.

     

    It is interesting that today's British and American societies are so heavily founded on a Christian religious movement considering Jesus reportedly denounced lust for money as sinful and was a proponent of sharing wealth - in other words, the complete opposite of modern capitalism.

    John Calvin was the mastermind behind Protestant economics and the Protestant work ethic.

     

    In my opinion, a peaceful revolution would have to begin with the closure of all mainstream media outlets.

    I do not buy TV licences.


  2. Liberalism is one of the sacrosanct cornerstones of the British political establishment. The highly controversial Prevent strategy is actually about upholding and enforcing liberalism by creating a police state rather than stopping violent terrorism from occuring. Notice how we didn't have anything like Prevent in the years when the IRA was blowing things up every week!


  3. Does anyone else think that Western/white culture (I say 'white' because Western culture is almost entirely controlled by white people) is the major cause of humanity's problems?

    After a bit of head scratching I concluded that what you are referring to is the Protestant influenced culture created in the 16th century which is the bedrock of modern day culture in the US and much of Europe, and during the 20th century spread out worldwide.

     

    There have been many different cultures throughout history in Europe so it's unjustified to claim there is only one white or western culture.

     

    The Protestant culture has spawned many other ideologies over the centuries including:

     

    Liberalism

    Socialism / Communism

    Mass atheism

    Multiculturalism

    Zionism

    Capitalism

    Materialism

    Americanism


  4. You know your American history, Canopus, far better than I do. Most interesting. I've researched the Protestant work ethic and its links to right-wing Christian fundamentalism and the punitive, judgmental mindset. It's no accident that the USA has the largest prison population in the world as well as the highest imprisonment rate.

    I'm no expert on American history or Protestantism. The book Banking - The Root Cause of Injustices of Our Time by Diwan Press is not American specific but is a good read about the development of Protestantism and its effects on the economy. I also recommend books by Morris Berman, especially The Twilight of American Culture, who refers to the US as a nation of hustlers.

     

    Nor mine. Independent thinkers are not welcome and considered a threat.

    JW are trained to be subservient and respect hierarchy because the religion is one based on hierarchy rather than equality. I have not yet got to the bottom of education and JW but experience points in a direction that they are rarely intuitive people or deep thinkers. They appear to be more into arts and cultural matters like films or music than intellectual pursuits. The JW who converted to Islam claimed that the JW ideology was shallow and lacked spirituality.

     

    Popularity is proportional to how much we have in common with the peer group/gang. If we are popular, it's a sign that we're conforming well to that group's approved stereotypes, and this reinforces our self-esteem and confidence. If have little in common, such as different social class, accent, colour, religion, musical tastes, support a rival football team, dislike sport, wear 'unfashionable' clothes, etc. we're seen as 'different' and risk becoming vulnerable to bullying. Aspies by definition are very unlikely to be popular. Popularity is closely tied to culture and subcultures, and Aspies don't easily fit to these.

    I have wondered if you take a popular kid and move them to a different school then would they be just as popular? What about a school in a different country with a different language and culture? If popularity is portable then it suggests that it results from an ability to naturally pick up social cues and adjust to the local environs whereas unpopularity can be caused by rigidness either as an inability to pick up social cues or act in order to fit in locally.

     

    Undoubtedly body language comes into it. Aspies are more likely to respond in 'inappropriate' ways, i.e. non-NT ways. Sociopathic bullies do have better powers of reading people. This is largely how they 'succeed' in life. I'd imagine that the psychodynamics of groups that bully are very different, in that the majority of those involved do so to appear 'normal' to the leader/s. This saves them from being bullied themselves. They receive protection, but only at the price of trading their freedom and humanity.

    You might like to read about Jack Welch of General Electric.

     

    It depends upon the individual; they can be any or none of these. Many who bully have sociopathic or narcissistic traits, and these seem to be caused by childhood psychological trauma, head injury or brain tumour. Children who become sociopathic bullies are most likely genetically predisposed, for many traumatised children never become bullies.

    I'm of the opinion that a significant proportion of bullies are trained to bully by their families or people they associate with. If parents are vindictive themselves - and could be employed in a position where being vindictive is an advantage such as a security guard, Job Centre worker, or mean corporate boss - then they are likely to pass on their vindictive traits to other members of their family.


  5. Bullying at school is not a subject which is well understood but is almost certainly intertwined with the question as to why certain kids are more popular than others. Contrary to what many people think, very popular kids are rarely regular bullies and bullies rarely envy the very popular kids.

     

    I have speculated that body language and non-verbal communication plays a large part in bullying but this is rarely even looked at by analysts of bullying. Do those who bully possess advanced powers at being able to read people and those who are bullied have deficiencies in this area? Are there big differences in psychology between those who bully alone and those who bully as part of a group? Do different bullies like to pick on different types of people?

     

    There's always a reason for bullies being the way they are, whether it's coming from a broken family, being bullied themselves or being physically, emotionally and/or sexually abused.

    I don't buy into the argument that bullies are the result of broken families; or that they are people who feel insecure and lack confidence; or were previously bullied themselves.


  6. The indigenous languages continued to be spoken by the people (and eventually written) regardless of what languages were being used in the liturgies.

     

    The same would presumably apply to the survival of Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, etc. Even a few minority Slavic languages such as Upper and Lower Sorbian (Wendish), Carpathian and Pannonian Rusyn, are still widely spoken in certain places.

    Am I correct in saying that the Slavic languages in south eastern Europe are derived from Old Church Slavonic, which was propagated by the Orthodox Church, but are not otherwise native to this area?


  7. My opinion of academic qualifications: they are a relatively-modern invention of the NT world designed for the career market, rather than the love of learning for its own sake (the Renaissance - and polymathic - worldview). Being by definition, narrow and artificial, they've never appealed to my polymathic tendencies. Careers are important in themselves simply for providing us with 'bread and butter'. 'Economic activity' has become the god of modern societies and states, a universal panacea.

    I hold a similar opinion in that an education system driven by qualifications has the potential to spoil the enjoyment of a subject. Take history for example. History courses at school and university are all about essay writing and critical analyses rather than learning in an enjoyable way. I hated secondary school history and my brother, who has a history degree, was up all night writing critical essay after essay about wars and other things. Yet at the same time I enjoyed watching history documentaries and visiting places of historic interest.

     

    Vocations are far more profound than academic qualifications, for they come from the heart: they are impassioned 'callings', not in the least motivated by material 'success'. The highly materialistic NT world requires some of us to have 'good careers' equating this with 'success', while the rest are expected to have mediocre or menial 'jobs' - to support those of 'higher' social status. These people are deemed less successful or even unsuccessful, but nevertheless are crucially necessary to enable the success of the successful. An artist may work with a fiery passion, but isn't considered a 'success' unless she/he becomes famous which can only happen when his/her work makes money. This system barely recognises vocational drive unless it happens to relate to academic qualifications, paid work and this specious notion of 'success'.

    My findings are that parents of kids with AS put vocations well behind school work but often fail to realise that their kid's talents and interests could land them with a good or very interesting job. They think that getting GCSEs are more important although rarely do they even research what subjects are available for GCSE.

     

    Social skills are so different. They are the natural and essential abilities of any social animal necessary for living harmoniously. Humans are very complex social animals, and so these skills are also complex. We Aspies are constantly being led to assume that it's us who have the social difficulties, yet in reality many accepted aspects of NT society itself are socially dysfunctional. If a highly logical alien race landed on earth they'd see the collective personality of Aspies as being far more balanced and far less sociopathic, deluded, paranoid and hysteria-prone than that of the NT world. This is how we should be looking at the big picture, rather than merely from our own restricted points of view.

    Popular opinion, majority consensus, and historical tradition are powerful forces in shaping social skills. More NT people do things according to etiquette or convention rather than look at things logically from first principles.


  8. My own theory is that there was once a closely related group of south eastern European languages before the territory was conquered by the Romans then later by the Slavs / Orthodox Church. Albanian is the last surviving remnant of these languages mainly as a result of geographic isolation.

     

    How did Romanian survive the onslaught of the Orthodox Church with its Slavic languages?


  9. Don't I know it! :) American culture and their tendency to create neo-Christian sects has long interested me. Their reasoning skills seem to be very weak and shallow - as does their level of 'spirituality'. Of course, by definition religion puts faith before reason, but the particular mix of the American psyche (especially their fixation with materialism) and politically right-wing beliefs really makes these sects have a very different flavour to those not originating in the USA. You're absolutely right when you link political, economic and social factors to the success of these sects - which all began with self-identified prophets with an eye for making profits (of the commercial type!). All religions attract their own distinct personality types; those who don't psychologically feel at home in them (and may dare to question certain dogmas) either leave or are 'disfellowshipped'.

    The US is the child of Protestantism. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg then little did he realise that it would result in the creation of a new nation based on his ideologies on the opposite side of the Atlantic. The American economic ideology based on the pragmatic mercantilism of the Dutch Calvinists who founded New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in the 16th century, and the American political ideology results from the English Nonconformists with their small government mindset who emigrated to the US during the 18th century.

     

    Although Europe and the US developed along separate lines during the 19th century, the outcome became somewhat recursive after 1945 with American culture diplacing European cultures in Europe.

     

    We tend not to realise that there's a very close correlation between religions and personality types.

    I have been saying this for several years. The JW appeals strongly to a certain personality type and it isn't the way that my brain is wired.

     

    I never saw it in this way, but you could very well be right. I wonder if the peculiarly American love affair with guns, violence and extreme punishments reflects this too? I know several Americans who don't behave like this, and they feel very frustrated living in country where so many do.

    It probably does although American JW rarely have guns at home. I have noticed a strong correlation between places in the US that are trigger happy and places populated by Bible bashing types. Texas being a particularly strong example.


  10. I agree that children, or adults, with low confidence and self esteem can often be identified by bullies.

    I disagree. Experience tells me that most bullies are assertive people with a high level of confidence and self esteem.

     

    Even the Jehovah's Witnesses in their idealised, naive drawings of Adam and Eve fall prey to these silly stereotypes: a handsomely, tall, rugged Adam with his neatly trimmed beard and short hair and a 'glamorous' Eve whose long styled hair looks as if she's just come out of the neighborhood beauty parlor (sic)! And of course they're both thoroughly Caucasian-looking, and their hair length conforms to 'accepted' gender . They conform to the stereotypical all-American man and woman. Hilarious but so ignorant!

    This is because the Jehovah's Witnesses are an American religion. A former JW who converted to Islam (and has been disfellowshipped by her own parents) told me that the United States was the only country with the right political, economic, and social climate during the 19th century that would allow a religion like the JW to flourish. Even today it is a very American centric religion where much of what the JW writes about is biased towards the US and American people.

     

    I think there are elements of Americanisation in this attitude, too - the sort of 'big, bold and loud' ideology that seems to make up so much of the USA. It reminds me of a teenage boy who wants everyone to think he's really cool but most people really think he's a bit of a berk.

    American culture is loosely based on 18th century British culture which is why it is so big bold and loud. Almost the opposite culture from the disciplined Victorian England.


  11. What I really meant was that the spread of English was caused by British colonialism (even in Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

    I don't fully agree with this. If the United States was factored out then English today would largely be a language confined to the Commonwealth similar to how French and Portuguese are confined to former colonies of France and Portugal. English would almost certainly be in the top 10 economically important languages but it wouldn't be a global language. Outside of the Commonwealth, far fewer people today would know or be learning English.

     

    One factor that has upheld the learning of English in Commonwealth countries is the large number of students who take IGCSE and A Level exams. In many Commonwealth countries no English = no recognised qualifications because national qualifications either do not exist or are not valued by society.

     

    It began losing its way with the industrial revolution and the ensuing urbanisation of the rural peasant class, the class that lies ate very heart of any culture, that harbours and hold dear its folklore, traditions, music, art, costume, etc.

    Urbanisation and industrialisation irreversibly changes the culture of any nation but at the same time it can create new local identities. The Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Tyneside accents and dialects are largely the products of the industrial revolution.

     

    Germany and Japan industrialised but still maintain their own distinct culture, identity, and language. It's also notable that these countries have not endured the wrath of a politically correct liberal elite since the 1960s that England has which has exacerbated the demise of several aspects English culture and identity. The City bankers are equally to blame because they see England as nothing more than a machine to make money from and making money as the only activity of any worth in England.

     

    Standard English only became universal in England due to films, radio and TV. In countries that retain living peasant cultures dialects continue to thrive regardless of the mass media. They're used in parallel with the standard language. This is why Occitan is still widely spoken in southern France, and why the Oltenian dialect is still widely spoken in southern Romania, etc.

    The BBC (once dominated by public school toffs with Home Counties accents) was quite brutal towards local English dialects. They once wouldn't allow a person from Tipton to be a radio presenter because they had too much of a black country accent! ITV companies were once more localised than the BBC was but ITV today is a faceless monolith run from central London and Manchester. Remember TSW? Probably the most localised and homely of all ITV companies in England.

     

    It doesn't really matter, but it surely helps to learn a language belonging to a culture with which you identify. Maybe a country you've visited on holiday or lived in.

    In my opinion, education policy makers in England have not taken into account the increasing number of kids of foreign origin who know a language other than English when it comes to generating the MFL curriculum in schools. Very few schools teach the languages that these kids know or allow students to take them for GCSE. At an education meeting it was suggested that evaluations of teaching locally prominent languages and offering them for GCSE in secondary schools should be tried out in a handful of local authorities. The initial proposals were Urdu in Kirklees, Gujurati in Leicester, and Bengali in Tower Hamlets. European languages will still be available in secondary schools for GCSE but will be optional. Some concerns circulated that indigenous British students (and other students who don't know the languages) might struggle more than with a European language as a result of the different alphabet. What do you think of this?

     

    At the risk of being politically incorrect (not unusual for me!) I've always admired Enoch Powell's intellect. He stands out almost alone amongst modern politicians. I'm certain his knowledge of languages helped him understand other cultures more than most. He was almost certainly an Aspie too:

     

    "There could have been something else, too (and others have realised that, as a trawling of the internet will show). In Powell one can recognise some, at least, of the symptoms of Asperger Syndrome, a medical condition not fully diagnosed until 1994. There need be nothing offensive about such a suggestion. Many sufferers are, like Powell, highly intelligent. They are child prodigies of enormous talent and ability who can sometimes find it difficult to emotionally relate to others. They are single-minded to the point of being obsessive. They may dislike change and identify very closely with the ethnic and national community into which they were born. They may experience frustration and failure later on, through their own personalities or the failure of others to understand them" http://www.guyblythman.com/page28.htm

    You are not the only one. Adults with AS who admire Enoch Powell and his intellect are quite common even though they do not agree with everything that Powell believed in. I think it's a combination of Enoch Powell potentially having AS himself and people with AS having a more questioning mind that doesn't go with the flow of popular opinion and the mainstream media like a high proportion of NT minds do. I have suspected that sections of the radical right have appealed to people with AS whereas liberalism and modern western socialism are difficult for people with AS to comprehend.

     

    An admiration of Enoch Powell by people with AS has caused many frictions between them and NT parents of kids with AS who overwhelmingly despise Enoch Powell but rarely make the time and effort to study him in depth.


  12. The 6 figure salaries of senior officials in the NAS is a very sore point. I do not buy into the argument that such salaries are justified in order to attract the best brains because running a charity should be a labour of love and dedication rather than a means to become wealthy. A person who really cares about ASD is one who is willing to sacrifice a 6 figure salary in the City for a salary of no more than £30k. Running a charity should also NOT be a selling point on a CV for someone applying to a corporate senior management position because it creates a potential of using a charity as a springboard into a lucrative corporate career.

     

    Independent support groups often provide better services for people with ASD than the NAS does on a shoestring budget by unpaid volunteers if special schools and residential care services are factored out. It's almost beyond dreaming what these same groups run by knowledgeable and dedicated individuals would achieve if they only had 5% of the money the NAS rakes in each year.


  13. English has become the world's default language due to historical chance: British colonialism, later followed by American imperialistic cultural aspirations, and later still accelerated by the internet.

    The United States is responsible for English becoming the world's default language after 1945. In 1900 English was a language confined to the United States and the British Empire rather than a truly global language. Only a small fraction of the people living in the rest of the world learned English then, and in Europe, Latin and German were more popular as second languages. If the United States had decided on German rather than English as its national language then history would have been much the same during the 19th century but very different after 1914.

     

    Most programming languages are based on English. Some even expect dates to be entered in the American rather than the rest of the world formats.

     

    A double-edged sword for England, for language is the central to cultural identity. Without its own language or dialect, the culture loses its identity and perishes. This is one reason why I feel England has lost its way, unlike Scotland, Wales or Ireland. Go to any European country and you'll find that their own distinctive languages help to maintain their own unique cultures and a sense of identity going back many centuries. England increasingly lacks this, and has to invent a pseudo-identity (mainly involving relatively modern royalty-related traditions and aimed mainly at the tourism market).

    The identity of England - both in general and in relation to other European countries - is a subject that I have debated many times in the past. Does standard British English / the Queen's English / the National Curriculum English create an artificial identity? Is American English really as bad as the media and teachers make it out to be despite it being closer to the English of England during the 17th and 18th centuries?

     

    Take into account that many countries use Spanish and Arabic but do they each lack local identities?

     

    Even trying to learn a second language provides us with a whole new outlook on the world. There's no better way to understand different cultures. It helps us realise that there's more than one way of seeing the world. I often need to know how non-English speaking countries see a particular issue, and the only way to do this is to read on that subject in another language. These are all valid incentives.

    This is very true but it still doesn't answer the question of which languages to learn. Take into account that it is exceptional for people in any country to possess a working knowledge of more than four languages unless they are language geeks or professional linguists.

     

    John Enoch Powell knew 12 languages including Latin, Greek, Welsh, Hindi, and Urdu, and even held discussions with his constituents in some of them. I can't help wondering whether he understood people and cultures in a much different way from your average English monoglot 'far right nutjob' resulting in him being a very misunderstood person.

     

    A basic knowledge of Greek and Latin can still be useful, but maybe we should start with our closest neighbours, France and Wales.

    Very little teaching and learning of north European languages takes place in England despite historical connections between East Anglia and Holland, and Yorkshire and Tyneside and Scandinavia. To an extent I can appreciate that they are fairly minor languages on a global basis with most native speakers also fluent in English which acts as a disincentive to teaching them in schools.


  14. People in this country are strange in their aversion to learning other languages. England is known for this throughout Europe. I know of many children in Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, who can fluently speak three languages.

    I have thought about this situation then concluded that the British might be lucky more so than lazy in that hundreds of millions of people worldwide know English either as a first or second language, and that vast quantities of written and audio video material is in English. The result of this is a lack of an incentive for the British to learn another language compared with people from countries where only a small number of people worldwide know their native language and very little in the way of material in their language exists apart from that which is localised. In order for them to study a subject higher than secondary (or even primary) school level; access foreign news; or learn about computers, machinery, wildlife, Asperger Syndrome etc. knowledge of another language becomes essential.

     

    For many countries it is quite obvious which second and third languages its citizens should learn. This isn't the case for Britain where the most worthwhile foreign language is very debatable.


  15. If the NAS isn't delivering the goods, then perhaps a new organisation devoted to adults with Asperger's should be set up.

    Organisations that provide a much better service for people with high functioning ASD than the NAS does already exist but they live in the shadow of the NAS. The problem is that people are attracted to the NAS because of its large size and it's the organisation that the NHS and local authority have as their official ASD service providers. More often than not the NAS turns out to be ineffective or unsuitable but people don't realise until after wasting several years battling with it.


  16. As long as the organisation's name is never directly mentioned, I don't think there is a lot they can do.

    Doesn't that defeat the whole point of an exposition of the NAS as what it really is and really does?

     

    The mainstream media is on no one's side apart from themselves and big business.

    The NAS is in effect a big business that sells services to local authorities.

     

    They do seem to have a particular problem with autism though - I have noticed that whenever someone with autism commits an atrocity, their autism is always referenced.

    I have wondered from time to time whether there was an underlying reason for all the media coverage given to Gary McKinnon. Was it intended to tarnish the reputation of people with AS or create stereotypes?

     

    That's interesting about the conspiracy theories. Do you know any details of them?

    I'm keeping them under wraps for the time being until I have collected sufficient concrete evidence to back them up with.


  17. We could begin by getting a website up and running at least. I'm teaching myself HTML and CSS but so far it has been a slow process with other distractions getting in the way. We need to get some aspies who are skilled at web design and who care about these issues to get a website up and running

    That's the easy part. There are already plenty of websites and people skilled at web design so you don't have to worry about this side of things. The difficult part is as I described in #13 of avoiding any potential legal battles with the NAS and their smart lawyers out to sue anybody who dares to write bad about the organisation and its senior officials for defamation. The media isn't on our side either. I have suspected that the NAS has friends in the media ready to give them positive vibes and vilify any critics.

     

    A few conspiracy theories exist as to why the NAS got involved in AS and other high functioning ASD in the first place. If the NAS just stuck with traditional autism then nobody from the high functioning ASD communities would have anything to criticise them.


  18. So what can we do together to get ourselves heard as a group? How do we organise?

    We could make a start by publicising the NAS for what it really is and why it is almost impossible to reform.

     

    My experience of parents of kids with high functioning ASD is that they fit into 4 categories.

     

    1. Those who don't know much about the NAS but want to go along with it.

     

    2. Those who know how the NAS works and its deficiencies but believe it can be reformed from within.

     

    3. Those who know how the NAS works but have given up with it as they have come to realise the difficulties of reforming it and know that better support is available elsewhere.

     

    4. Those who have had no or very little involvement with the NAS.


  19. I'm not a pessimist at all. I have concluded that change will come from society rather than from central government or the NAS.

     

    The lack of clarity what people with high functioning ASD want means that those in power don't even know what to provide. Independent support groups often provide better services to people with high functioning ASD than the NAS does although their services are very localised. This could be argued to be society in action with the potential to provide a template to government organisations.


  20. I'm hoping for bigger change than just in the NAS. I'm hoping for cross-party government recognition of all forms of autism, from classic autism to 'high-functioning'. That way the NAS may just allow autistic people in its decision making and hopefully other organisations will follow suit in seeing the value of autistic employees

    You can live in hope. I think the mature view is that it is something outside of the scope of central government nowadays. Remember David Cameron' s Big Society?

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