SMBC Comics Forum

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2832#comic

Ugh, I'm so sick of the attitude that lots of people use mental illness as an excuse. Sure, that would be annoying if it actually happened all the time, but it doesn't. I don't know a single person who uses Asperger's as an excuse, but I know several who obviously have it but won't admit to it, and would probably function a lot better if they did. Those people probably don't want to get diagnosed because they know that as soon as they do, everybody will scream at them, "Don't use it as an excuse, now!" Even self diagnosis can be helpful, if you think of it as, "I recognize that I have the following weaknesses that I need to work on." And that is how most people think of it.

Now, I know somebody's going to say, "He never said that A LOT OF people who self diagnose with Asperger's use it as an excuse, just SOME." No, by calling attention to it, you're implying that it's a significant phenomenon. It would be like making the joke, "How about those false accusations of rape, huh? Isn't it annoying when women falsely accuse men of rape?" Zach wouldn't make a joke like that because it reinforces an attitude that's harmful - of course some accusations of rape are false, but not nearly as many as people assume. This is the same kind of thing, I think.

No it isn't. Shut up. Go away.

It's a significant phenomenon on the internet. Primarily, forums.

I object to this comic.

As someone who definitely but almost certainly doesn't have Aspergers, I think people suck.

I hope the next comic is about false accusations of rape.

A graph joke about false accusations of rape.

I for one, enjoyed this comic, if only because of OP's hilarious reaction.

Funfact: Specifically on the internet, Asperger's and other Social Skills-influencing disorders are used as a reason to not even try to have manners or the like in forums/comments/etc.

Funfact 2: Self-Diagnosis, and similarly Diagnosising someone else when you are in no way qualified to do so, is a very prevalent problem. There was recently a big to do about parents and teachers misdiagnosing kids as having ADD/ADHD.

Funfact 3: Since the dawn of time, people have reacted with an unjustified sense of offense and righteous anger towards jokes regarding such things, and shall likely do so until the end of days.

Funfact 4: Funfacts are Fun.

Funfact 5: ????

Funfact 6: Profit.

aw yiss memes I love memes



The troll meme



the angry face meme



this meme here, the consciousness meme

I love the memes

Assburgers is a meme too!

Everyone loves memes, they are the greatest

And so creative.

In my late teens and early twenties a lot of my friends were goths. Amazingly almost everyone they hung out with had an undiagnosed mood disorder, usually major depressive or course.

According to the NINDS, about 1 in 88 children age 8 will have an autism spectrum disorder, of which Asperger is one of the possible ASDs. There is no data for the incidence in adult populations, but it is probably about the same. So AbdominalSnowman must know a lot of people fairly well to know even several people with Aspergers unless AbdominalSnowman is a prodigy at diagnosing a complex syndrome after only a small amount of interaction with a person.

I've only ever met one person with it. He was very aware of it and made great effort to mitigate any social problems it would cause. He often did this by keeping his mouth shut around strangers or when dealing with large groups. I have though met a number of people who were socially inept and often assholes. The only thing that was wrong with them is that for a variety of reasons they were not well socialized as children.

Kaharz wrote:So AbdominalSnowman must know a lot of people fairly well to know even several people with Aspergers unless AbdominalSnowman is a prodigy at diagnosing a complex syndrome after only a small amount of interaction with a person.

No, it's neither of those things. You're not taking into account that people on the autism spectrum gravitate toward certain careers and hang out in the same circles. I'm an engineer and a musician.

Is that playing some kind of stereotyping card?

Lots of people gravitate to lots of jobs for a variety of reasons. You're forgetting that there is a wide variety of completely irrelevant factors that would influence them just the same as they would influence everybody else. Saying "People with x disorder are more likely to be x profession than people without x disorder" is just silly. Also hypocritical, given that hilarious opening rant of yours about reinforcing perceptions and all that.

I'm a musician and I don't know any autistic people irl. Therefore, autistic people are not musicians.

AbdominalSnowman wrote:No, it's neither of those things. You're not taking into account that people on the autism spectrum gravitate toward certain careers and hang out in the same circles. I'm an engineer and a musician.

I'm an engineer and close friends with a lot of musicians and artists. Since I deal with other engineers all day, I prefer not to be friends with them. While a number of the people I know in those professions have a variety issues and exhibit socially maladaptive behavior, none of them have an ASD. My anecdotal evidence contradicts your anecdotal evidence. Fortunately for us, that doesn't count for shit.