As my friend Javier always says, “it’s hard to be so perfect all the time.” See who was right when she said that the voters don’t care about either Benghazi or the IRS-Tea Party scandal:
According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.
“That two-point difference is well within the poll’s sampling error, so it is a mistake to characterize it as a gain for the president,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Nonetheless, an approval rating that has not dropped and remains over 50% will probably be taken as good news by Democrats after the events of the last week.”
We can disagree on whether the voters should care, but the indisputable reality is that they don’t. As I said from the start.
Contrary to popular opinion, the autistics’ unsociability and incapacity to notice non-verbal clues don’t necessarily make them bad judges of either societal trends or individual people. Here is an example. Once, an administrator was being hired at my university and everybody attended introductory meetings with him.
“Well, he might be a tough administrator,” people agreed afterwards, “but at least he is completely honest and open about everything. You can just see that he is incapable of holding back his opinions.”
I was the only person in the entire group who disagreed.
“No,” I said, “this is a very insincere and fake person. When somebody repeats the words “honesty” and “openness” so many times in one encounter, this must mean he is conscious of possessing neither characteristic.”
Everybody stared at me with a barely concealed exasperation reserved for the deeply unsociable who pretend to understand how the “normal” humans function.
Years passed and the new administrator turned out to be the most dishonest and fake person most of us had ever seen. His capacity for lying and scheming was unparalleled. It turned out I had been completely right about him from the start for the simple reason that I never paid attention to the fake body language and facial expressions meant to convey honesty (and that sociopathic personalities know very well how to imitate) and concentrated only on the words.
The greatest mistake people make when analyzing others is believing that everybody has to be exactly like oneself and attributing one’s own beliefs to everybody else. If I care deeply about Benghazi, then everybody else surely must too, many people say to themselves. This is a mistake which an autistic, a person whose central life experience is that of being different, is a lot less likely to make.
Clarissa's Blog 
A professional cartoonist whose blog I comment regularly whose name is Eddie Fitzgerald couldn’t even tell that I had anything wrong based on my blog comments and was completely surprised when I told him about the autism diagnosis that I had. He told me that I seemed to have benefit from being able to focus for long periods of time. I never figured out exactly whether I have Asperger’s or high functioning autism, but I’m very fortunate that I turned out pretty alright in the end and that I had early treatment. Still suffer from insecurity and a tendency to worry quite often, but that’s a character defect that many people have whether they are autistic or not.
Sometimes I feel like I have too much to say now, so I’ve been working on making my comments and writings shorter and more concise. How could those people you worked with be so gullible about the guy they hired though? That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I guess their sense of intuition wasn’t working properly that day or the guy was a clever, sneaky chisler and a shyster.
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“He told me that I seemed to have benefit from being able to focus for long periods of time.”
– This is, indeed, one of the most beautiful and productive qualities one might have in today’s world. Given how short most people’s attention spans are, you and I are very lucky to have the gift of concentrating and not getting easily distracted. Yay for us! 🙂
“I never figured out exactly whether I have Asperger’s or high functioning autism, but I’m very fortunate that I turned out pretty alright in the end and that I had early treatment. Still suffer from insecurity and a tendency to worry quite often, but that’s a character defect that many people have whether they are autistic or not.”
– Exactly. There are crowds of completely neurotypical people who have high levels of anxiety. The good news is that insecurity and anxiety are something you can learn to manage very effectively with time.
“How could those people you worked with be so gullible about the guy they hired though? That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I guess their sense of intuition wasn’t working properly that day or the guy was a clever, sneaky chisler and a shyster.”
– There are people who actually study all of those books on how to make a good impression and how to modify your body language to make people trust you. This administrator was very good at that, so people believed him. One colleague said he had “a good smile.” Which, of course, can easily be faked.
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Good explanation! With abilities like that, he might as well have become an actor instead with that kind of talent. I’ve met many people actually that have had sociopathic or psychotic tendencies, particularly with egomania. It almost looks like they never learned how to socially interact with people the correct way and have screwed over their closest friends over multiple times.
Many of these people that I’ve encountered were also bitter, jealous, insecure, vindictive, or just plain paranoid about trying to get attention in an attempt to conform with society. It’s proof that just because someone doesn’t have a diagnosis or label for themselves doesn’t mean that they don’t have any personality problems themselves or any undesirable character traits!
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A key precept of public choice is that one should never take any notice of what a politician says, only evaluate what he has done. That is the only test, because politics invites liars and cheats and con-men into into its web, because the electorate is almost universally gullible to words and appearances.
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This is very true. But hiring decisions (especially when tenure is offered) have to be based on the most fleeting of impressions, and that is where people often blunder.
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The important question is not “Do people care about scandal X?” Most people I knew didn’t care about But can his enemies make hay with it and keep him from pursuring policies he wants to.
From what I remember, most people cared very little about Watergate or Iran Contra (or various Clinton scandals). But in those cases those in the opposition were able to largely derail (or slow down) what the presidents were able to do.
I have no idea if these (or future) scandals will play out in those terms.
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This is a beginning of a 2016 presidential campaign and, for a party that desperately needs to prove it is relevant to anybody younger than 60, it is a strikingly bad one. I’m very curious to see if the Republicans will manage to come up with anything better than this.
The biggest problem here is that the two issues are milked by the wrong party. The same party fails to catch bin Laden, declares catching him is irrelevant, invades Iraq AND expects anybody to listen to it about Benghazi? The same party gets the whole country to cheer for torture and governmental intrusion into citizens’ bank, medical, and library records AND expects that same country to be outraged about the IRS scandal?
This makes as much sense as if the Republicans suddenly started criticizing Obama’s statements about his intrusion into the sex lives of his daughters.
The Republicans would have done themselves a sea of good if instead of all this useless drama, they turned all their energy into attracting the Hispanics. It is not as impossible a task as it seems. And Hispanics will be the core constituency very soon.
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“Hispanics will be the core constituency very soon”
I’ve been hearing that for over 30 years, hasn’t come true yet and I’m not expecting it to any time soon. Traditionally Hispanics have low voting rates, unless they get themselves to the polls in larger numbers (like the AARP) or other groups start voting even less, then they can be safely ignored.
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“Latinos voted for President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney by 71% to 27%, according to an analysis of exit polls by the Pew Hispanic Center, a Project of the Pew Research Center. . . The Center’s analysis finds that Latinos made up 10% of the electorate, as indicated by the national exit poll, up from 9% in 2008 and 8% in 2004.2 The analysis also shows that as a group, non-white voters made up 28% of the nation’s electorate, up from 26% in 2008.3 . . . Hispanics made up a growing share of voters in three of the key battleground states in yesterday’s election—Florida, Nevada and Colorado.”
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/11/07/latino-voters-in-the-2012-election/
Of course, another key group is feminists of both gender but we all know how much hope Republicans have among them. 🙂
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1. All politicians lie. The sun rises in the east. Next?
2. Most voters care about pocketbook issues: their income, their taxes, the price of gas, the cost of groceries, the value (or lack thereof) of their house.
3. Most pocketbook issues are difficult to solve, even with willingness to compromise on the part of both parties.
4. Politicians use distractors to get the voters’ minds off pocketbook issues. Republicans are better than Democrats at this tactic at the moment. Guns, gays, God. Abortion, sluts, uppity women.
5. Wise people don’t trust politicians and don’t expect politicians to be miracle workers. The citizen activists’ jobs don’t stop after election day. Continual pressure needs to be applied.
Personal experiences gathered during years of academic interviewing (faculty and resident candidates):
6. Otherwise intelligent people often make decisions about personnel based on “gut feelings”, not on data and healthy skepticism. Flattery works surprisingly well on some interviewers. Politeness I appreciate, flattery just annoys me.
7. Candidates sharing the interviewer’s ethnicity, gender, social class are often assumed to be “A-OK” and not given the modicum of scepticism and fact-checking due every candidate.
I am not the most perceptive person in the world, but I have predicted some disasters.
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Good read on the administrator. Who knows, maybe youre psychic. 😉
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I’m just disillusioned. Right now I’m creeping into my own office, hoping not to be seen. Who could have said that we could so quickly go from a happy, friendly place to a place where one hates to be? 😦 😦
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Off-topic: http://atheism.about.com/b/2011/02/06/ayn-rand-welfare-queen-living-high-on-government-assistance.htm
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I would consider this to be an example of the “tu quoque” logical fallacy, were it not for the fact that Ayn Rand once cited herself as an example when someone suggested that no one could possibly behave like one of her heroes.
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You’re right, it’s almost a “tu quoque” fallacy, but her fans will not interpret as this.
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I’m not crazy about this stupid American bashing of smokers.
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“It turned out I had been completely right about him from the start for the simple reason that I never paid attention to the fake body language and facial expressions meant to convey honesty (and that sociopathic personalities know very well how to imitate) and concentrated only on the words.”
This is actually a very good observation, and one which I wish that I had thought of myself. I’ve been trying for a long time to reconcile my autism with the fact that (at the risk of sounding immodest) I am an uncanny judge of character.
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I also wondered for years why I could spot a sociopath so much faster than every body else, and now I think I found the reason.
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As my friend Javier always says, “it’s hard to be so perfect all the time.” See who was right when she said that the voters don’t care about either Benghazi or the IRS-Tea Party scandal:
I have never known a woman named Javier. Am I confised about the syntax here?
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The “she” here is me. 🙂 I don’t think Javier knows about these scandals because he is a poet and very other-worldly.
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Javier is another of my favorite names!
(I even thought about having it be my male name, when I was considering whether I needed to transition to maleness, but it would look WEIRD with my Germanic last name.)
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Truth!
I still fall into the they’re-just-like-me trap when I have nothing else to go on, though — otherwise I will try to draw on my prior knowledge of the person, or, most likely, treat them as a completely unpredictable black box. (Which, for me, means taking everything they say at face value and doing nothing that would affect them without asking them what they want. So I actually would’ve failed the test of the sociopathic administrator — I would’ve heard his talk about honesty and thought, “oh good. I like honesty too!” and trusted him.)
But your phrase about our “central life experience [being] that of being different” perfectly described my entire life, too.
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