Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Autism isn’t nearly as big a part of my life now as it was just a few short years ago. My son’s pretty much decided to turn his brain on (for the time being), and all the well-wishers and buttinski educators who saw Rain Man one too many times have backed off on throwing the A-word around. In fact, they’re lining up to say “Morgan Freeberg, the Dad, boy he had it right all along, and we all wish we listened to him all those years ago instead of giving him all that guff we gave him.”
That last part I made up just now. That ain’t happening. Folks are coming around, they’re recuperating from their feverish infections of OCBASASBDII, but they’re going to amazing lengths to pretend it’s all their idea.
But a few years ago — although no one involved is going to back me up on this — I was a lonely voice in the wilderness. Everyone who was anyone, swore up and down that my son had some kind of learning disability, usually Autism or Asperger’s. My side of the story was that the boy was solidifying a personality type, one that was becoming more pronounced as he became older, but was actually selected before he saw his first birthday, probably. He was what, in generations past, was politely called a “nerd,” and nowadays is categorized into any one among dozens and dozens of LD’s.
Kids haven’t changed. Our expectations of them have changed. They are to be hyper-normal; if they aren’t, then into the yawning, hungry, steroid-saturated, explosively-growing special-ed system they go.
Dr. Helen has dredged up an interesting take on all this:
I read a good article in a recent copy of Forbes on Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism. The article asks the questions, “What caused the explosion in autism diagnoses?” and “Why are boys more affected by this disorder?” Baron-Cohen’s answers provide a different way of looking at autism:
Baron-Cohen has been the first to advance and test some groundbreaking ideas in the field. But as for what has caused the increase in reported cases, he doesn’t put undiscovered toxins at the top of the list of suspects. “A good part” of the rise, he says, can be explained by better diagnosis and an expanded definition of autism.
Since autism was first described in 1943, the definition has shifted. Doctors have come to agree that autism is characterized by poor social skills, communication difficulties and strong, narrow interests and repetitive behavior. Once upon a time it was understood as categorical: Either you were autistic or you weren’t. Starting in the late 1990s, Baron-Cohen advanced the idea of an autism spectrum on which everyone falls, just as we would fall on a spectrum of height. As he sees it, we’re all a little bit autistic. …
Baron-Cohen is responsible for spreading the idea that the autistic brain is basically an extreme version of the male brain. He observed that people with autism were better at things for which men show more aptitude than women (like systemizing) and worse at things for which women show more aptitude than men (like empathizing). It’s noteworthy that boys are diagnosed with autism four times as often as girls. “There was this massive clue that nature was giving us that autism might be in some way sex-linked,” he says.
Baron-Cohen (his first cousin is Sasha Baron Cohen of Borat fame) doesn’t believe we should see autism as an epidemic. “The same genes that make a person good in a systemizing occupation, like math, physics or engineering, may also contribute to autism…Eradicating autism could mean eliminating genes from the gene pool that are probably key to such abilities as doing complex mathematics.”
It’s almost a word-for-word echo of what I said in that five-hour-long parent-teacher conference we had when my son was finishing up Kindergarten, as I was splitting up with his mother.
Now that all the air conditioning, refrigeration, e-mail and broadband have all been invented, and we have our water delivered to our doorsteps on exactly the same patch of land where our ancestors had to lift it out of a well — we just don’t have that much to worry about. We think we do, but we don’t. So we all want our kids to be bubbly, chatty and precocious. We don’t see value in any other personality trait at that age.
But talk-a-mile-a-minute youngsters can’t solve problems. Oh, a few of them can — the extraordinary bright specimens who can burn the candle at both ends. But even they, with a glut of success on the social-skills front, will find the cognitive skill challenges to be a bit of a bore after awhile, and abandon them.
And so, to continue surviving, we need this personality type now more than ever. In a milder form it is simply the Myers-Briggs INTP personality profile. In an extreme form it is a superlatively male brain…otherwise known as Autistic. Baron-Cohen may be on to something here.
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