Over the last few months, I’ve had a few things come up repeatedly in my interactions on Notes, so in the interest of saving time in the future, I’ve decided to address and clarify some of them here so that I can simply drop the link when they come up again. Fair warning, I’m about to write about myself a lot more than I usually allow in the interest of not seeming self absorbed, so it’s okay if you want to bail now.
I don’t really do “sources”, because in my experience nobody actually reads them, and people who demand them aren’t doing so because they’re curious, they’re doing it as a debate “tactic” to force someone to waste their time. If I’m discussing a specific article I’ll generally link to it so that people can go and look for themselves, and if I ever do an in depth article (not a a Note) on a topic that includes claims that require supporting evidence I will provide it, but I’m not trying to be a policy wonk and don’t care if randoms claim I can’t support my positions because I won’t do the homework they attempt to assign to me.
I don’t really use slurs, and when discussing anything trans related I won’t go out of my way to misgender good faith trans people, i.e. people who seem to be genuinely gender dysphoric and not just dudes in dresses attempting to leverage the identity. I do this for a number of reasons, one being that while trans is not one of my major topics, if I do write on it the people who I most need to reach are liberals who would be put off by blatant misgendering or tossing slurs around (for the record, I think troon is genuinely useful for distinguishing the “dudes in dresses being dicks” from trans people generally, but alas), and I just generally don’t like the edgelord feel of it.
As to nigger, my policy is that I don’t use it for Notes or at all flippantly. I’m not completely unsympathetic to the fact that the word causes genuine distress to people, and I hate the way it’s used by dudes trying to sound edgy, even if I think the taboo around it is out of control. I also just don’t want to be that guy who makes a big deal out of saying it, I don’t need to prove my “bravery” by saying it, even if I cringe at myself every time I type out “N-word” or “hard R” (the latter is less cringe to me for some reason). Also, I have to admit that years of progressives freaking out about it have rubbed off on me to the extent that I flinch a little bit when I hear someone say it, which it pains me to admit but is true.
Similarly, I mostly try to stay out of “race stuff” when writing, not because I don’t have opinions on it (more on that later), but because I don’t want to be one of those guys either, and I don’t really have anything original to contribute in this area. Most of my views in the controversial zone are downstream from me being solidly in the Nature camp of the Nature vs Nurture debate, and observing that inheritable traits like height and athletic or musical ability seem to have some obvious population group clusters and extrapolating from there. I’m more interested in the coverup than I am in the crime here, so to speak, as I was raised to judge everyone as individuals and have no desire to do otherwise, but I’m very curious about anything I’m told I’m not allowed to ask about or have an opinion on.
I am in fact autistic with ADHD, and not the fun kind that people fake for internet clout or to seem quirky. I don’t lead with it because I hate it when people try to leverage identity stuff for clout, but I also don’t make a secret of it, and knowing about it does make certain things I say and do make more sense. I’m considered on the high functioning end of high functioning, getting a diagnosis in my 20s required multiple interviews of both me and my parents along with videos of me as a child when my symptoms were more pronounced. It’s not like I’m Rain Man over here, but I do still struggle with tone and whether or not someone is being serious. Where you might notice it in my writing is a certain flatness of tone and matter-of-fact affect, along with a handful of linguistic quirks (I’m told that asides are a classic ADHD thing).
Where you’ll really see the autism are my occasional monomaniacal jihads against sneaky language games like using a loaded word to smuggle an emotional reaction into an argument, and the way that I like to analogize things through subjects that I know well, e.g. I’ll frequently refer back to tactics I’ve seen arguing about guns that are similar to those being used in an unrelated argument. The best example that captures both tendencies is calling people out for using “racism” to describe things that don’t involve malicious racial prejudice, as I find that analogous to describing a rifle with modern furniture as an “assault weapon” in order to weaponize an emotional reaction in the audience; who wants to argue in favor of racism, or for weapons that have the word assault right in the name?
The other Spergy thing that I alluded to earlier is an absolutely irresistible attraction to “forbidden” subjects; my brain is super optimized for pattern recognition, and when I encounter a pattern that I’m not supposed to notice, it’s like mental catnip to me. This is actually a very common autist thing, back in the late 00s when I was originally diagnosed it was specifically called out as a frequent workplace challenge with “Aspies” as we were then known, innocently stepping onto social landmines (“why are there so many black professional athletes? Is it genetic?"). Again, I don’t really want to make this my thing or become known for Noticing™, but yes, I do notice things.
The ADHD is a more recent diagnosis, and yes, it is partially why my publishing schedule has been a bit, uh, erratic, as I keep having to tune up my Adderall dosing with mixed results. The other half of that equation is what I fully understand to be a ridiculous personal standard for my own writing, which I’m working on getting over as it’s not serving me well, but old habits die hard. I do enjoy using Notes, mostly to springboard off of clever things I pick up elsewhere (I’m better at iterative innovation than blank sheet creation), but I would like to get back to publishing lengthier pieces, some of which are languishing in my Drafts folder.
Anyway, that’s probably more about me than anyone strictly needed to know, but it should answer a few of the recurring questions that come up in Notes. Back to stringing along trolls in my replies for fun and profit. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean.
All pretty reasonable.
TBH you seem thoughtful, genuine, and easygoing.