Yeah, it is mostly good. It's also a good companion piece to a lot of other videos on here

It's not that they don't try hard enough, it's that they give up too fast.

That, and Jesus hates them.

FUCK YOU, JESUS

That is because if you were a very nerdy person with no social skills growing up, who at some point learned how to talk to people and relate to them, it's very difficult to take claims of autism seriously from someone who essentially looks and acts the same as you used to. It's easy to see that many of us would have most definitely been diagnosed with aspergers syndrome at some point in out lives much the same way everyone was diagnosed with ADD not too long ago.

This is especially frustrating when you know people who seem to only lack a strong social skill-set, who have given up on acquiring a social life, because they are convinced that they are disabled.

So there isn't anyone anywhere ever that has trouble socializing because they're simply bad at it?

And there are also quite a lot of people here who think if you're socially awkward, it must be BECAUSE you're autistic to some degree.

I can relate to a lot of this personally and I'm definitely not autistic. I definitely think it's "real" but I also think there are some major issues with the public face of it, especially the sort of "Asperger's pride" stuff that you see on the Internet, which seems like it could do as much harm as good.

I also thing that while people shouldn't be criticized for not "trying harder" to socialize, there are definitely some people - again most likely disproportionately represented in the media and especially on the Internet - who could maybe stand to work on being more self aware and ADAPTING to the world around them. It's obviously complicated since there are so many different ways it manifests, so one person with Asperger's/HFA could be mostly "normal," another could be borderline nonfunctional, and a third could be a huge drama queen who self diagnosed and drowns out the voices of 100 people who ACTUALLY have it. The last case is what I've been exposed to most on the Internet, and that's probably true of everyone here.

And hey, I don't remember anyone on Poe Red telling Ulillillia he should try harder to be "normal."

I meant "I can relate to a lot of this" re: the video, not the thread.

I see it as a matter of having the capacity to choose. If I knowingly and willingly choose to wear diapers and worship Sonic the Hedgehog while watching twelve cartoons never targeted towards anyone over 8, that doesn't mean I'm mentally broken (not here anyway). If these behaviors emerge against my will, then there's a problem. The same goes if I work really hard to become an oil exec and cause the deaths of millions globally by being a social darwinist Republican rape god. If I did it against my will, to my own horror or not, then I'm an out of control tempest of death who should be drugged up, locked away, and pitied in disgusted whispers and thinly veiled animosity. If I planned and did all that murder intentionally, I'm sane, but fucking evil and should be lynched by the common person in a town square somewhere after being read a list of my crimes and then stoned by children.

Never rule out the human capacity to just knowingly and willingly not get along, and rage against everything which does or looks like it might. The Internet's mislabeling of autism is nowhere near as bad as its mislabeling of shitty human beings, of which it is abundantly full.

I kind of feel like all the people you describe are just different flavors of broken.

Ragamuffin, in all seriousness, I was diagnosed with Aspergers back in '97, approaching the ass end of middle school and around the same time I was a practicing otherkin. Then my dad paid the shrink for our sessions and that was the last we ever heard of it.

Mitchell and Webb - Can People Levitate?
Bas Rutten fights a zombie puppet

Last I checked it's still being officially removed from the next DSM, but not because it doesn't exist so much as that there's no consensus on the difference between it and regular old high functioning autism.