OK, so I’ve had a week off after completing California Dreaming — the paper formatting will take another week or so, but the book itself is done and all backers should have an ebook copy at the moment — and so I’m planning to get back to blogging every (or at least most) day(s). Proper writing (and podcasting) will resume tomorrow, but for now, links:
Slate Star Codex on people wrongly applying economics to psychiatry ETA I normally warn about the comments on Slate Star Codex and forgot to this time, but I am reliably informed that the comments on this article are toxic even by the normal standards there. A friend on Twitter says “That SlateStarCodex was excellent… And then the second comment was raving antisemitism, the next combined MRA logic with stereotyping autistic men as undateable with a touch of transphobia mixed in. And then I gave up. Not blaming you for linking – you’ve warned about SSC’s comments before just boggling at the intensity of the bullshit.”
So if you’ve not seen my warnings before, DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS ON SLATE STAR CODEX if you are likely to take offence at… well, basically, at anything at all…
Don’t blame mass shootings on mental illness
Tim Farron challenges Labour and SNP to back immigration bill amendment
Momentum and the future of political parties
Masculinity is an anxiety disorder: breaking down the nerd box
A very nice review of my Multiversity ebook
Read the comic adaptation of Illuminatus! online
On empathy, autism, and criticism
Proper post tomorrow
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! 
I’ve missed these.
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Not entirely sure how I got here, but your criticism of SSC commenters is pretty unfair in my opinion. Believing that autistic men are nearly undateable isn’t unfounded stereotype, it’s a very true general statement whose truth we shouldn’t ignore. The statistic that seems most common on the internet is that 70% of people with ASD will never have a partner, and only 10% will ever marry. Like the author of that comment, I would bet that the people who have least severe ASD or who go to the most effort to fight against their condition make up the majority of those who experience success in a relationship. I am saying this as someone who is on the spectrum, although that shouldn’t matter to you I know it will. I don’t appreciate being spoken for by someone for whom superficial respect is more important than actually speaking about and managing the difficulties of life with neurological disability.
It’s not true that autistic men are undateable. Pretty much every autistic man I know, myself included, is in a successful relationship. The NHS Adult Prevalence Study of 2007 showed that 30% of adult autistic men were married, and a further 7% divorced, widowed, or separated, instantly putting the lie to your bullshit about only 10% ever marrying (and that’s autistic *men* — the figures for all autistic adults were 33% and 10%. More autistic adults are thus *divorced, widowed, or separated* than your “statistic” claims ever marry at all.) https://web.archive.org/web/20110103163841/http://www.ic.nhs.uk/webfiles/publications/mental%20health/mental%20health%20surveys/APMS_Autism_report_standard_20_OCT_09.pdf is the source for this.
And given that you know absolutely nothing about either myself or the person who had that criticism of the Slate Star Codex commenter, to make the assumption that for *either* of us “superficial respect is more important than actually speaking about and managing the difficulties of life with neurological disability” is quite ludicrously presumptuous.
And frankly, I think the criticism of the comments on that post is understated, given that there is filth in there that even Scott Alexander, who has a notoriously lax comment policy, has rot13d into indecipherability (including such loveliness as “How long will gullible Whites cuckold for murderous anti-White elite, who suppress our fertility, plunder White jobs/wages/guns, infiltrate/subvert our banks/FBI/CIA, indoctrinate White kids in academia/mass media & butcher White soldiers in bankrupting wars?”) — that was one of the two comments referred to.
The other one, which you’ve spent more time discussing here, is full of MRA dogwhistles and odd ideas about trans people, but the passage you’re referring to is:
“From a male angle, males usually find dating difficult even if everything is working “normally” in them. Add something like autism or general anxiety disorder or even “just” social anxiety and basically you have a near undateable man who will always be unsatisfied with his romantic life.”
This is completely untrue. I’m an autistic man with generalised anxiety disorder, and I will be celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary two weeks from tomorrow. Literally millions of other autistic men are in similar situations.
Now that comment then goes on to advocate becoming a “PUA” — a community which is devoted to the rape and abuse of women with a thin veneer of plausible deniability. I find using my neurology — and therefore my supposed “undateableness” — to advocate for such communities *infinitely* worse than someone pointing out anti-autistic bigotry as part of a huge package of bigotries to be found in a single comments-thread cesspool.
I’m not sure how you got here either – Andrew usually gets a rather better class of commenter. Anyway, I’m also autistic – I don’t actually know anyone autistic who isn’t in a successful relationship or, in some cases, several. Just as an aside, I realise that I’m doing the whole “data is not the plural of anecdote”, but frankly your comment didn’t seem worth going to any trouble over.