The Most Underrated Move in Chess

 I by no means have any qualification to assert the truth of the title of this post. I barely even play chess, and really like an angry conservative imagining the bad attitudes of snowflake liberals, I imagine the move that is the subject of this post, is not talked about much by people who are interested in chess.

The move is this, a player reaches out with one hand and topples their king piece so it lays on its side, conceding the match.

That's the move I will be talking about, and I am asserting its applicability to domains outside of chess, most of which chess has little to no applicability for all it is asserted to teach its enthusiasts to think strategically and spawn vacuous statements like 'he is playing chess while you're all playing checkers' etc. 

Beginning with Stein's Law

Stein's law is to me, your classical classical economists kind of law, it basically states that things that can't go on forever must inevitably stop. Unusually for a classical economist kind of thing to say, it kind of argues that the kind of economic activity you want is a sustainable one. Why I characterise it as pretty classical a thing to say, is its non-interventionist vibe, that in my opinion is the kind of classic thing an economist would say, being completely out of touch with reality: 'don't worry everyone, anything doomed to fail, will fail eventually so why stop it?'

Now I am going to apply Stein's law to economic phenomena, first I'll look at National Debt or Sovereign Debt then I'll look at financial bubbles.

When is national debt unsustainable? Consider this a semi-lay opinion, certainly not an expert one, but the intuition that debt becomes unsustainable and therefore the nation will go bankrupt, when national debt hits 100% of GDP or GNP, which is to say, the country has borrowed its entire economic output. I suspect actually that the rational limit is actually much much higher, it would logically be when the service cost (interest payments) of that debt are equal to GDP plus growth, which would mean that basically the entire national output has to be dedicated to interest repayments before it is even accomplished, such that should anything slow that economy in any way, so there is no growth to meet the interest obligations then you've hit the limits of national debt.

Of course, I'm not aware of this ever happening, or ever playing out that way, there's also a degree to which GDP doesn't map to national debt. For example in the Greek sovereign debt crisis, it was the Greek government issued bonds that could not be serviced with the government not bringing in revenue sufficient to pay the bond holders. But GDP and GNP generally include both government and private sector, and so here we begin to see a limit of Stein's law - economic phenomena doesn't simply collapse when it has to, in the case of national debt to reach the theoretical limit, first the government would basically have to change its tax code to capture 100% of present and future GDP which would likely precipitate much of the economy offshoring, or else we are talking about some pretty spectacular government services being available for people to go to work for the sole purpose of paying taxes.

So lets look at a financial bubble - I am partial, or partially sympathetic to anybody who just thinks assett/economic/financial bubbles are not even worth talking about. Its pretty easy to identify a bubble - the price of an asset doesn't make sense. While I say its easy, generally you need to compare it to the riskless rate of return - historically this is a treasury bond in the same currency, though obviously some treasuries are not considered 'riskless', but if a US treasury bond has a 4% yield it doesn't make sense to buy any asset that won't generate at least a 4.01% return on your investment. 

It's pretty easy to find a bunch of shares and other assets that do not generate anything near a 4% return. For example, right now SpaceX trades at a price far above any real revenue it generates, its price is with very little embellishment, based on a sci-fi story written by an amateur author. It's most profitable business activity is commercial launches of rockets to deliver satellites into orbit. This business activity accounts for something like 2% if it's IPO valuation with 98% based on shit that doesn't exist yet, I believe mainly Musk's AI business that is likely competing with Meta as least popular, least used, lowest quality LLM. 

Crypto or NFTs are another, now slightly dated example of a bubble. Bitcoin being the most capitalised in terms of its total conversion value to something like USD, is used less than 2% of the time to purchase goods and services, it is mostly just literally a token people buy and sell in exchange for varying amounts of real or 'fiat' currency that can be used for goods and services. There is a theoretical value for something like Bitcoin being 0, this is based on some kind of real-world value, but it is unlikely that Bitcoin's value in USD is going to hit 0 any time soon. It was well put by Bloomberg journalsit Zeke Faux when he appeared as a guest on Dan Toomey's Good Work episode and here I'm paraphrasing "Is Insane Clown Posse's music good or bad? I would argue it is bad. Am I going to bet that no juggalos turn up to this year's Dark Carnival? No."

If markets were efficient, any time an asset price rises forces the expected ROI below the riskless rate of return, the foolish purchaser should be punished for it. But that rarely happens. Often this is because nobody can agree on what the expected ROI will be, for example, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson, who is a believe an astrophysicist, announced he was joining forces with a bunch of MIT phd's to build a time machine, or faster than light spacecraft, there will probably be some level of differing opinions on whether it is even theoretically possible to build a time-machine. 

Some people holding phd's in physics, might be adamant that it simply isn't possible to travel backwards in time, some holders of the same or equivalently relevant phd's may just be crazy, just like it's possible to find a medical expert with a phd that served in a prestigious research lab who will endorse crazy medical quakery. Then there will be experts who will at least allow that based on their impression of Neil, maybe he has figured out something they haven't. Right down to 'the dumb money' people who have no idea about anything and say things like 'bro! in 2030 we'll all be time travelling to 2031!'

Next we have Cassandra

Here is what I learned the hard way. Australian real estate is almost certainly an asset bubble. Some even go so far as to describe it as a ponzi scheme. Uttering such a statement can be frankly shocking to many Australians. I was of this opinion in 2006, two decades later the Australian housing bubble still hasn't popped. I could go figure out exactly when I learned my lesson on this blog, but I probably had the crucial revelation by late 2008, early 2009 after the GFC where Australia almost singularly avoided any correction or rationalization of its housing prices unlike pretty much everywhere else in the world.

The unique problem with asset bubbles being this: If I can't rationally justify why price of Y is X today, then there's no reason why the price of Y would be rational or reasonable tomorrow.

Or more simply put - its almost impossible to predict when someone will stop being stupid or crazy, let alone a lot of people.

Any price in bubble territory, simply cannot be explained, which is not quite true, in the example of Australian house prices, explanations are offered constantly - supply is short of demand, the population is growing faster than the housing supply, too much red tape etc. etc. 

Depressingly often, these explanations have no basis in truth, there are also many explanations that are simply unmentionable domestically - house prices are high because of 'investment', negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts, low holding costs, a lack of attractive investment opportunities in productive sectors, self-managed superannuation policy etc.

Enter Cassandra, the prophetess of Troy cursed by Apollo for rejecting him sexually, who spat in her mouth such that while she had the gift of prophesy nobody would believe her.

This is very often the curse faced by anyone intelligent enough to extrapolate out to Stein's law. In the past decade we've seen a number of non-starters not only start but persist until utterly destitute. Now I want to point out, this is not limited to any particular pole of the political spectrum or any point along it, untenable ideas come from all directions, furthermore if I give a good broad diverse set of examples the odds that one of these ideas being one you yourself are firmly still committed to will go up, but anyway certainly not limited to: Identity politics, crypto, the metaverse, making America great again, antifa, UBI, "AI" etc.

In all cases, a few debbie-downers almost immediately lucidly described the inherit fatal flaws of such ideas, often citing historical precedents that are a matter of public record and even simply pointing out that the thing at hand was so commonly subjectively experienced as shit, that it was almost objectively shit. 

I don't have the time or space to break them down, just let me reassure you that it never takes long when any enthusiast starts promoting an idea, for a decent critic to come along and poke holes in it. 

So let me break this down instead, imagine your whole life every day you have to get up, pack up your camp and walk all day, stopping only to forage and hunt, your tribe hugging to a wall that extends up into the sky such that you can't make out the top of it.

After years of doing this, you finally say "Let's just dig under this wall." and a few of the other youngsters start saying 'yeah, yeah! (s)he's right, I'm tired of just migrating along this wall all our lives, lets tunnel under and see what's on the other side!" and then an older person in the group says 'No, it won't work, look at how high up it goes, all that material puts more and more compressive stress on the material below it, that wall is going to go down into bedrock."

Some of your fellow young ones are persuaded, losing their enthusiasm but you are undeterred. "well okay if it's so deep we can't go under it, then we'll build a ladder and go over it!" and you are pleased to see your friends perk up at the suggestion.

"We could, maybe but look we can't even see the top of that wall, we've never seen the top of it. We'll have to erect a ladder at least 200 maybe 300m tall, it will have to be strong enough to not collapse under its own weight, and we'd have to raise it to the wall, probably by building it in sections from the bottom up, we'd likely run out of food and starve in the process."

"Okay, then if it's so tall we can't get over it, and it's so deep we can't go under it, and obviously it's so wide we can't go round it, then we'll go through it!"

"With what tools? Again not only does a wall that tall have to run deep because of compressive stress, it has to withstand wind on a surface area that large, it's going to be immensely thick. Like digging a mine shaft through solid rock."

And so, I think this is what Cassandras and the public at large often experience as an impasse. People in general don't like Cassandras because they just seem to shit on our ideas, our solutions, our hope, just as the original Cassandra told the hopeful Trojans that if they brought the wooden horse into the city then Troy would fall. Nobody wanted to hear it after 10 long years of war (plus she was cursed to not be believed) but often a Cassandra is not saying that the situation is hopeless, it is only made hopeless if everyone rallies around a course of action doomed to fail.

And very few of the intelligent people that suggested very early that raising the salience of race up to more or less an ubiquitous daily topic of conversation would most likely result in a resurgence of racism, I think didn't want progress to be made toward a more egalitarian society. And very few of the intelligent people who pointed out that MAGA would make the modal struggles of United States Citizens harder not better, are firmly wedded to doing nothing about the growing economic inequality that arises naturally from the ordinary operation of neoliberal economic doctrine, just that there was no finish line defined by when America was "great" as a consensus period in history, and that walls both physical and metaphorical in terms of a boarder fence and tariffs were definitely not going to make the US any greater.

It Ends With Keynes

John Maynard Keynes was the remedy to Cassandra's suffering, if indeed Cassandra suffered being denigrated as a madwoman, locked up, sequestered eventually taken as a spoil of war before being murdered alongside her captor all of which, she saw coming and faced with no small portion of dignity.

But Keynes said:

"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

Which is equipping a Cassandra not just with the gift of prophecy, but the gift of cognitive empathy - perspective taking, which is what Cassandra's need to not be defeated by this world. For me this was the fundamental insight that if I can't use reason to explain the price of a SpaceX share, or a bitcoin, or pets.com, or a beanie baby, or an australian residential property today, then I have no reason to say expect it to crash tomorrow.

Patrick Boyle recently released a video that is good I feel, at diffusing some of the schadenfreude going on about the AI bubble - specifically the many claims of circular financing Nvidea is doing, pointing out that it is not shady accounting but a fairly ordinary practice of lending customers money with which to buy your products, the same thing many consumers do when they sign a two year contract for a new phone or purchase a vehicle on finance.

But specific to something Keynes said was that if you try to 'short' the "AI" companies who the Cassandras have built a pretty rock solid case that the needed revenue (something like figuring out a way to earn more from LLM generative "AI" than all the ad revenue of Alphabet, Meta, X, LinkedIn and Pinterest put together for the entirety of their history, and the increasing evidence base to suggest that as you build more powerful LLMs, costs go up, not down.) you will likely just lose money every time the bubble fails to pop, which could take years.

That may require some modicum of a technical explanation, as did "The Big Short" the movie about the few people who bet on the GFC, against the US economy which at the time was based on ever inflating real estate prices. Shorting something means like if the price of a share is $10 and someone thinks it will go up to $15 and you think its price will go down to like $2, you write up an options contract which says that by so-and-so a date you will sell your share for $8 if you exercise the contract, obliging the other partner to buy your share at that price. You are 'going short' because you make money if someone is obliged to buy something worth $2 for $8 giving you a $6 profit, but you lose money if the price goes up to $15 where you have to sell your shares well below market value giving them a $7 profit.

So say you USED YOUR EYES looking UP FROM YOUR PHONE anywhere in the past 5 years to notice that NOBODY USES CRYPTOCURRENCY AS CURRENCY. That all-caps statement is slightly hyperbolic, I'm sure on occassion people buy things with crypto, things like boats and houses and cars and not with the proceeds from crypto, but like a buyer finds a vendor who is willing to straight up swap a car for some bitcoin, a double coincidence of believers, but what anyone with eyes can notice is that crypto is not used to buy coffee, groceries, petrol, pay utility bills, pay taxes, buy street food, pay rent, pay wages, budget projects, keep accounts, value properties, buy shares etc. 

Right? It was pretty easy to use just basic sense information to see through the hype a long time ago. A fairly average smart person when confronted with the exchange rate between bitcoin and USD was capable of connecting the neurons necessary to point out that just because a bitcoin was valuable did not mean it was going to become a currency, as the same is true of baseball cards and comics. Furthermore, for a good 5 years, you didn't even have to think for yourself, there were plenty of credentialed people who had done the thinking for you, people who looked at crypto, looked at blockchain and could quickly and lucidly explain all the numerous reasons why it was not money. 

What I noticed, was that most of said commentators who looked at crypto and NFTs and said 'this is nothing' NEVER told people to go short on it, which is to say, actually bet on its price (or exchange rate if we want to humour the currency claims) would collapse.

Had you done so, you would have spent the last 5 years going broke, even though you are absolutely right and for good reason. Zeke Faux went to crypto conventions as a journalist and met a guy running a crypto bank who said he paid interest on deposits by his clients, but didn't charge any interest on loans to clients, and Zeke was like "that is like a business model for going bankrupt." Literally the best case scenario for that business, is that the owner is running a Ponzi scheme, I jumped the gun, had this owner clarified that the interest he paid was based on the historical deposit value of crypto...no because he has no means of generating income unless he sells other people's crypto, his only bulwark against bankruptcy would be to hold so much crypto himself and counting on it inflating in price faster than the interest rate offered that he could pay off his obligations by liquidating his crypto, by which he is almost certainly ruined by now.

But that gets me back to my point, if you wrote a sequence of short derivitives on bitcoin 5 years ago, you likely would have gone bankrupt well before you got to Oct 4 2025 the all-time high that defines bitcoins collapse from which it has never really recovered, and all but the die-hard juggalos can't find a reason to ever get excited about bitcoin ever again.

Now I said this ends with Keynes, and the point is the futility of trying to profit from being to see something's inevitable failure.

Knocking over your King

I asked my friends who are into games, particularly board games what term they used for the point in a game where the outcome looks inevitable. Like when somebody has a monopoly in Monopoly but the other players aren't bankrupt yet, or in chess when you are at such a disadvantage that the only argument is whether you are 2 or 3 moves from checkmate.

My friends suggested that this section was called 'the endgame' however, I don't think that was what I am trying to describe. For me the operative part of a term like 'endgame' is 'game' as in something is still at stake. Like the many board games, for example 'Trouble' with its pop-o-matic bubble, or Snakes and Ladders which the frightened people of the United States of America call 'Chutes and Ladders' or perhaps it is less so than that they are frightened of snakes so much as too literal minded, but games that have an endgame where a precise dice role is necessary and there is some ambiguity as to whether another player can catch up and overtake.

Of course, the ultimate game for 'endgame' is Tennis, where literally no matter how far a player is behind in games and/or sets and points, to win the game you must win match point and it is mathematically always possible for your opponent to come back from any match point and rob you of victory. It is a sport with infinite deuces and infinite sets (at least until 2019) which means even when you are 2 games down going into the fourth, you could be just 10 hours away from winning 70 sets to 68 in the 5th.

So what I propose instead is 'the epilogue' this is a theoretical and sometimes practical point in a game where the outcome is determined, but the rules technically allow someone to play out turns until the actual final conclusion. At this point though, I would suggest nobody should ever, in ethical game playing be obliged to play out the game for the gratification of the determined victor. Nobody should be obliged to sit around watching some immature moron gloat at how much monopoly money they are stacking up and how soon all of you will be ruined.

This does not, however mean that losers can 'rage quit' a term from online game playing  that may be motivated by various behaviours, but is definitely uncool when motivated by the ego-blow of losing.

But simply knocking over your king and conceding the match, offering a polite handshake I feel is humane and respectable. Now let us conclude by applying this to life.

The thing being that systems tend to fail before they have to fail. Democratic governments get ousted for example, when life gets expensive and not typically when people are actually starving. Steins law may suggest that things that cant go on forever must stop, and perhaps this is a reason not to get all het up and try and coordinate an intervention, but typically I think, uncoordinated interventions precipitate failure before concrete failure.

Soldiers desert the lines, civilians dodge the draft, fragging COs and going AWOL all happen before a battle or war is officially lost. In other words, habit fails before the institution does. 

The import, which makes the checkmate so underrated though, is that you have to zoom out from the chessmatch itself, to the infinite game. Knocking over your king and offerring the concessionary handshake means you may have saved yourself 8 minutes or 15 minutes to go get an icecream. Or maybe watch a rerun of Seinfeld, it is in this sense that by mitigating your loss of precious time, it is an increadibly powerful move. Furthermore, both players profit from the time saved.

As we head to the 2030s we are coming up to being a century removed from when Germany rather than admitting defeat on D-day, instead declared total war, by contrast after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered saving at least hundreds of thousands of lives. 

By contrast, I don't think you need to be a Cassandra, to see that Iran has the United States totally and utterly beat, and had them by the strait of Hormuz months ago. Everything since the initial US attack has been epilogue in that war, yet the decision makers cannot make, day after day, the single most powerful move available to them - to admit defeat. It has been, continues to be, and will be costly and will only grow in cost the longer it remains unresolved. In fact, it is possible that by not conceding defeat after the first two weeks, that the inevitable victor Iran may not have yet realised how much leverage they actually had. 

It's a seperate post, but I feel this is often a vulnerability in those who are victims of grift and scams and Faustian pacts - they do not realise how much they can yet lose. 

So when people will knock over their king is hard to predict, harder to predict than the outcome of a game. Cassandras should relax and get themselves some icecream, sorbet if you must.

On Not Getting Fleabag

I came to Fleabag eventually via Stath Lets Flats, and I was already late to Stath Lets Flats an incomprehensibly brilliant show that somehow uses all of everything Greek to out-nothing Seinfeld in a show where truly nothing happens, even most scenes nothing happens and along the way Stath becomes a father, a man dies and and two people fall in love.

But there isn't much Stath Lets Flats, and when one hungers for more, one discovers Jamie Demetriou is known for it, and Fleabag.

Ahora, people around me had raved about Fleabag calling it "brilliant" and saying things like "I love it" but knowing you knowing me, this is not typically the kind of thing that carries any weight with me in my consumption behaviour. Often quite the reverse, and not even in a contrarian way, but in like a 'do I need to render assistance? No, they've got it covered.' way.

I'd been told it was like something like a show about a woman who gives dating advice and she's grossly unqualified or something. I don't think that's a fair description.

Anyway sufficiently to say, I didn't get it, and having made my way to the end of season 1, don't get it.

I was disoriented in the opening sequence, where Phoebe as Fleabag breaks the fourth wall and describes in an anti-Ballardian way letting a guy insert his penis into her rectum resulting in him giving a tender and moving address the next morning about how much it meant to him to finally have anal sex, before cutting to Fleabag drinking tea in some kind of quaint sitting room looking pensive before she delivers a punchline now 3-4 scenes and 3 minutes in the making "do I have a massive arsehole?"

Here we arrive at where language fails me, because I get it, its just neither surprising nor funny nor interesting. Fleabag will get an audible laugh from me, by episode 6 of season 1 when Olivia Coleman at her exhibition asks Fleabag in front of a wall of moulded penises "Have you seen your father?" which like an innuendo based joke is made interesting by the sinister undertones of their relationship, so Fleabag initially plays into the double entendre by answering at face value that yes she's already seen her father, then Olivia introduces the paradigm shift, the "Jamaica?" turn of indicating she's referring to a mould of the father's dick and balls, then Fleabag taking the blow from the powerplay then proceeds to escalate the joke by correctly identifying her adult father's dick and balls on the wall, and Olivia gets her powerplay right back in her face and both women simply walk away.

That joke is brilliant, and absolutely dies dissecting it. Otherwise I would say that Fleabag is a drama, it reminds me tonally of "Kevin Can F*** Himself" but only the part where sitcom vision is subtracted and its just a bleak drama set in Providence about a poor woman's domestic hell.

Because it has some funny lines and funny scenes, and I mean genuine ones, Fleabag is not the great mystery to me that Bob's Burgers is, where people show me clips and scenes and episodes and act as if the show has jokes in it.

What then would I say Fleabag is a show of if describing it to a stranger, like what is it actually about? I'd say it is a show about putting a brave face on distress. This is essentially the arc of the first season and the tension that is released in the finale - spoiler ahead for a 10 year old show, but in episode 1 we are presented with Fleabag, a quirky, self-absorbed eccentric woman preoccupied with sex, and in an almost incongruous scene she lets slip that her best friend accidently killed herself, but its presented as just another quirky factoid that is incogruously dark in tone when compared to the opening question of "do I have a massive arsehole?"

In the season 1 finale, we finally have the full picture, where Fleabag's best friend who accidentally killed herself by walking into the bike lane with the intention to hurt herself and force her cheating boyfriend to visit her in hospital, the last piece being given is that Fleabag was the woman he cheated on her with. Fleabag is revealed to be a trainwreck, alone, alienated from her family, and wracked with guilt.

So the show is certainly about something. It isn't vacuous. It very much feels like a one-person show from the Edinburgh fringe, produced into a TV series.

So is Fleabag overrated? Is it simply a matter of taste? Is there something wrong with me that I don't get how brilliant Fleabag is from its opening scene?

Well one line of inquiry for me, was how old it is, season 1 released in 2016, it is a year before Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, became the biggest comedy special in the world. Maybe I didn't get Fleabag because I missed the boat, it was a proto-something that no longer has the impact because things have come along since.

It did remind me most of Nanette probably, though where Nanette is not so much intimately, but intrinsically linked with the person of Hannah Gadsby who kept making specials but subtracted the very thing that made Nanette, Nanette and just left her comedy, I feel it is a special that has aged like seafoam, it was a moment that was not frozen in time, it was a strange variant of the "Not!" "jokes" that followed the release of Wayne's World, but lacking the resurgence into public consciousness of Bohemian Rhapsody, it resembled "6-7" in being a thing, without being funny and it has all been landfilled by Gadsby's post-self-deprecating humour which is hard to describe without sounding hateful, when I think the consumer feet-based vote makes it more just a statement of fact - people flocked for the grief porn, and they didn't stay for the jokes.

Anyway, I'd seen this trick 9 years ago, and missed perhaps its first iteration 10 years ago. I was seeing things in the wrong order, Fleabag is actually a drama disguised as a comedy, it is perhaps a deconstruction of Sex & The City, I mean it quite literally is, and it's not clear where it stands on SATC, just that now Carrie has no friends, she is actually as poor as she would be, and she is a train wreck.

Like Springfield minus the Simpsons, everyone in the world is a tragic figure, the same 'prestige' of season 1 as Nanette is more morally ambiguous, Gadsby was unambiguously the victim of a heinous crime, Fleabag is both victim and perpetrator of human tragedy, not malicious but incompetent.

The trick is to 'get us laughing' which understanding that humour is a matter of taste, both Gadsby and Waller-Bridge are just not good at. Being a comic performance rather than a stand up set, her performance falls short of Molly Shannon, Amy Poehler, Olivia Coleman, Carrie Brownstein, Isy Suttie, obviously Julie Louis-Dreyfus (that's never really fair, but Veep while definitely being a comedy, was more dramatic and less a sitcom than Seinfeld) etc. 

Without the novelty, a novelty Phoebe Waller-Bridge may have pioneered ahead of Gadsby, the 'trick' of making someone think for most of 6 episodes, that they are watching a comedy when in fact it is a very dark drama is gone for me now. I've seen it before by consuming media out of sequence, as one might watch Moana now, before watching Pocahontas and not realize one is a soft reboot of the other, and its a bad example because Moana is probably on every level a superior film to Pocahontas with the benefit of two decades for the internet to autopsy everything wrong about Pocahontas.

The other show Fleabag reminded me most of, was "Baby Reindeer" which I could believe was actually commissioned by Netflix as an attempt to get on the Fleabandwagon. Both I believe were born of Edinburgh Fringe shows, and Fleabag certainly feels like an adaptation of a one-woman show, Waller-Bridge's performance feels more like a stage performance than a screen one. Particularly with how often she breaks the fourth wall, which in contrast to baby Reindeer which uses voiceover instead, is something I feel works better or is easier to tolerate on stage than on screen, with voiceover being the opposite.

It's hard, very hard, to describe "Baby Reindeer" as in any way superior to Fleabag, what I would say is that Reindeer's advantage is that it will likely always be a spectacle, less prone to aging out as a precedent by later antecedents. Baby Reindeer takes us on twists and turns, as Fleabag presents us with this low-key zany woman being 'hilariously' irreverent, Baby Reindeer presents us with a victim of stalking, an alt-comedy Hackney working as a bartender shows kindness to a deadbeat woman who then becomes obsessed with him.

Then eventually Reindeer reveals much more ambiguity, with his own backstory being a victim of grooming, dragging his innocent girlfriend into being victimised by his stalker by engaging her before eventually coming to terms with himself so he can eventually disengage from the stalker...I can't really remember it, but what stays with me from Baby Reindeer is that ambiguity where I don't know how I feel about any of the central characters.

Fleabag is much more cut and dry, while it is unusual for sexual infidelities that cross relationships with friendships to have such tragic outcomes. We can both understand Fleabag's guilt and see that while having sex with her best friend and business partner's boyfriend is a betrayal, it is more so his than hers and neither can be held responsible for the cuckold's reaction.

Leaving us simply with this story of 'woman went off the rails, pretends everything is fine' and perhaps in 'not getting' the humour in Fleabag, aside from that one great gag with the penis wall, I wasn't misdirected. I suspect the experience I am supposed to have, is to find the character of Fleabag enviously free, liberated, honest, truthful before I am to be confronted with the underlying distress that defines her.

If I were to give a really poor, a straw-plot analogy, then it would be captured in this old 'Kids In The Hall' sketch brutally titled for the purposes of this post 'Cheap, Crappy Art' with the crucial line being 'I've learned, that people who seem happy, are often unhappy.' Fleabag series one is a portrait of a crying clown, with the innovation such as it is being that we substitute happy/unhappy with free/trapped or confident/insecure.

The point being, that if you stand back far enough and consider what Fleabag is actually about, it's just a forest, I think you need to watch it from up close to be wowed by the novelty of trees. If you can infer forest from the presence/proximity of trees, without having to stand back or send a drone up, then Fleabag I think has become a DVD to be found at a flea market already. 

There simply isn't the quantity for it to be a Peepshow contemporary, or even Stath Lets Flats which at 3 x 6 episodes feels like a really short run sitcom. But I need to acknowledge that there's one whole more season of Fleabag I haven't watched, and perhaps one day I will.

But I notice again, the huge interval between seasons 1 & 2, such that I'm going to go ahead and just assume that season 2 has its own story arc. The one promising aspect of a second series of Fleabag is the delay between seasons 1 & 2 given that it was adapted from an Edinburgh Fringe show, prompting me to recall the massive drop off in the quality of Flight of The Conchords first and second season, which I suspect was the result of season 1 being based on a massively tried and tested body of work touring as a comedy folk-rock act, and season 2 being produced without that material. But Flight of the Conchords second season, while having musical numbers that were frankly shite most notably 'mermaids' for me it still had more laughs in it than Fleabag season 1.

Getting us to a fallacy I think consumers often make and crops up in other domains, the pithy 'Wagner is better than it sounds' fallacy, where the immediate experience of a thing is actually not that enjoyable or engaging, but a consumer becomes convinced that it, most commonly is 'clever' or that it is in some arbitrary way 'two-dimensional' (an example being Midsommer, which as a horror movie is kind of just a soft remake of the original 1970s 'The Wicker Man' and has similar characteristics like being very bright and gay for a horror movie, a genre that more often relies on darkness, the movie is well made but not mind-blowing, with characters that make dumb decisions in a way that the protagonist of the wicker man does not, but many I have come across seem, in my estimation, overly impressed by the trivia that Midsommer is a metaphor for the failure of a relationship.)

Fleabag is two-dimensional in terms of 'it makes you think this woman has no shame, but actually she is full of shame!' and it's the kind of thing I can't retrodict as to whether in 2016 by September, I would have in any way been impressed by this. I only got around to watching it in 2026 where my learnings since have left me at a place where I don't get it. 

I don't get it's 100% and 91% reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but then, I also don't get how one would review a show that doesn't really have any flaws, but for me, doesn't really have any selling points either. 

Here's what I will give it, especially over Baby Reindeer and Nanette, from all my research as far as I can tell Fleabag is not based on actual events. It feels plausible, and perhaps the fact that Pheobe Waller-Bridge appears to have comic talent commensurate to, if not exceeding Gadsby and Gadd, but far shy of Coleman, Sutty, Tarbuck, Whelan, Phillips, Morgan, Conaty, Godliman et al. it is very good simulacra as in, if you told me tomorrow that Fleabag was really Phoebe Waller-Bridge and she did sleep with her deceased best friend's boyfriend leading to her accidental suicide and the Fleabag Monologue was based on actual events, I'd believe it.

Otherwise, I'd say it was an example of alt-comedy from a point early in a period where the zeitgeist got obsessed with trauma, wearing it somewhat like a jaunty hat. And so maybe I do get it.

Tom Hanks wins Oscar for Playing Team Afflicted With LBJ in "Philadelphia"

 I do believe that Lebron is important, and I do believe he has eclipsed Michael Jordan in one crucial way:

Over the weekend I was trying to explain the importance to global culture to my niece and nephew of Michael Jordan. These are kids that have never lived in a world without GPU, without Pixar, without Gopros and Wingsuits, POV youtube videos of people base jumping. 

Sure they play retro-games, but it is hard to convey to them what the Super Mario Bros. jump did when the Nintendo Entertainment System came out in the late 80s, nor the impact Ryu throwing a Hadouken in Street Fighter II did. They are old enough to have the school force them to watch the Socceroos play in the World Cup, but they do not grasp the arcade, or the "Toy department" of a "department" store where people gathered once, like they do for the World Cup, to watch some punk kid who could break a $20 into coins and then set Zangeif on fire with Dhalsim's Yoga breath, together and be like "woah."

And their sensitivities to stimulus are so calibrated by swipeable vertical media, even with restrictions on their screen time, that I can't really show them Michael Jordan's Slam Dunk contest winner where he takes off from the free throw line and flies through the air to deposit the ball in the hoop and take home the hardware.

These kids don't understand, that more so than the simulated CG entertainment that has come to refine and define spectacle on screens small and large, that in the late 80s through to "The Last Dance" there was this moment where human possibility got blown open by one of the greatest athletes and phenomenons of all time.

I tried to explain to them the myth of "air time" that people used to believe and smear around this bullshit, that Michael Jordan essentially was somehow aerodynamic that he literally took flight rather than just jumped.

I failed.

Michael Jordan dared everyone that witnessed his greatness to dream and to strive for what was possible.

Lebron on the other hand, he expanded possibility in another way, and did so not by winning 6 championships in 11 healthy seasons, or even 4 championships in 24 seasons, but through being a kind of postmodern G.O.A.T. by showing children everywhere, that you don't have to achieve anything, what you have to do is grab hold of the microphone and never stop telling a story about yourself that is far more exciting than you've ever actually been.

 Now, there's a section of Lebronistan I want to cordon off here and give a pass - a generation of individuals stunted by a relentless marketing campaign born between Y2K (making them 8 by the time Lebron was drafted) and 2006...actually that's a huge cohort, larger than most marketing grifters would ever allow to generate just one set of articles, books and conferences to grift of how "gen bliz blaz are different, they're coming, and here's how they will shape the future..."

This segment though, were born too late to get Michael, but too soon to really comprehend the significance of Duncan, Nowitzki and then Duncan again, basically crushing Lebron's hopes and dreams of being like Mike or even Kobe. They can be forgiven, for not understanding that Kawhi and Steph sealed the nails on the coffin of his terminal "GOAT" campaign that Lebron torpedoed with "The Decision" where not only had Lebron been curb-stomped by the generation that preceded him in the forms of Nowitzki and Duncan, but he would be curb-stomped by the generation that came on his heels in Curry and Kawhi. 

John Lennon was once asked by a know-nothing reporter if Ringo Star was the best drummer in the world, and Lennon responded "he's not even the best player in the Beatles" this is more true of Lebron post "The Decision" his NBA MVPs really recognising, the minority of cases where he simply managed not to choke, which was the most valuable contribution to each of his 4 team trophies, and his choking has put two rings on Duncan's hand, one on Nowitzki, three on Steph's.

And there's certainly a case to be made that someone having a 4-6 record for finals appearances should not be held against them, that this is absurd, and it is certainly absurd to hold something like this against Jerry West who had to compete against Bill Russell's Boston Celtics.

A lot of people don't get something counter-intuitive about tournaments, the two teams that appear in the finals need not be the two best teams, just the one best team. We can't even really conclude that, because match-ups matter. 9 of Lebron's 10 trips to the NBA finals took place in the Eastern Conference, a sickly, malnourished conference, in part robbed of its nutrients by "The Decision"

For example, as the third seed in the west, the 2007 San Antonio Spurs had to defeat Denver Nuggets the 6th seed, then play the second seeded Pheonix Suns who had beaten the Los Angeles Lakers, the Suns did the best of any team that faced the Spurs that post season winning 2 games, furthermore, Denver (who had Carmelo Anthony, likely retrospectively the rightful owner of James' ROY award) won a game against the Spurs and Utah the fourth seeded team also won a game, before the Spurs went on to sweep the Lebron lead Cavs in the finals series. 

Lebron's series against 1st seeded Detroit out east, regardless probably stands as the pinnacle of Lebron's career, the only time really in 24 years that he put a whole team on his shoulders and willed it across the finish line, kind of like Michael Jordan did on every single possession of every single game he played as a professional.

I would argue though, that likely the point at which the two best teams faced off at the highest level of competition achieved that year, was when the Spurs played the Pheonix Suns, the rest of the post season, at that point, kind of becomes a formality. Though it is not likely the case, its also entirely possible that in 2007 the Cavs may have been only the 8th or 9th best team in the NBA, this is because the Conferences are not equal, and the records become hard to compare. 

What is incontrovertable though, is that the East has been the weaker conference for pretty much the entire time Lebron has been in the NBA. In fact once he transfers to Los Angeles post his second stint at the Cavs, and his longest continuous tenure with a single team in his career, he goes to the finals once, during Covid, ever. Being in the West, the conference was suddenly stacked against him, he is in the same conference as the Golden State dynasty, and even as they crumble, the Lakers fail to build into anything while the Denver Nuggets orbiting around the colossus that is Nikola Jokic, and the Minnesota Timberwolves get in the habit of dismissing the Lakers in the first round like a warm up. In the meantime the OKC and the Spurs grow into goliaths.

So while yes, I agree, it is absurd to hold 10 finals appearances against Lebron where Kobe Bryant only has 7, Jordan only 6...it is not as absurd as it seems. For one, Kobe is 5 from 7 including a 3-peat and a back-to-back, Jordan is 6-6 including two three-peats.

For 9 of Lebron's 10 finals appearances, where he racked up 5 of his losses, Lebron could have been not-the-best-player on anything down to the 9th best team in the NBA.

So anyway, Lebron got sent packing, now he has landed somewhere. Appropriate to his age, he is now earning the least money he has ever been paid in his NBA career, even without adjusting for inflation, he is earning less than his rookie season, after adjusting for inflation likely half as much as 2008, and due to cable television deals, the inflation of NBA player pay is likely way above regular inflation. NBA players are now paid so much it has become problematic. The only thing that might claw it back, is the likelihood that Lebron James will not play 65 games this season.

Now, in the interregnum between Lakers saying "get the fuck out of here already" and some Philadelphic bean counter assuring the team ownership group that sales of Lebron merch and ESPN obligatory coverage of Lebron James would mean they will make far more money off of Lebron than they pay him, there was like 6 weeks of bullshit obscuring what actually went down in Lebron's free agency.

The story told by Lebron's camp was that there was a bidding war from all but (presumably the Lakers) one team to acquire Lebron's services. The only sense in which this is plausible to me, is in the sense that by signing Lebron to a minimum Veteran's exception deal, most figure acquiring Lebron is just plain profitable in terms of selling tickets and merch to his idiot fanbase. And by that I mean the portion of his fanbase who truly are idiots. Not all of them are, many may like Lebron and just be a fan in terms of nostalgia, the idiots are the ones who do not realise that Lebron is thoroughly, and absolutely washed at this point.

Anyway, then the rumour mill ground out a shortlist of suitors - here was where it was interesting.

Sober people can recognise that Lebron is washed, dead weight, Christiano Ronaldo but in worse shape. One hopes NBA owners and their teams of people who manage them, understand basketball in some way shape or form, and do not simply listen to what ESPN says about Lebron James. One hopes the same person that scouts out draft picks, and puts together trade deals might watch Lebron James play in any year from 2021-2026 and realise he is an anchor. 

One hopes, in other words, that the same minds that went into shock when Nico Battersby traded Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers, for Anthony Davis, were not also shocked when the Lakers signed Austin Reeves for big $$$ leaving nothing for Lebron, and then told Lebron to walk.

One hopes, that there are people that recognise that in the past several seasons, the Lakers have kind of quietly required Lebron James to get injured sometime in February-March so the Lakers are free to win enough games to have a postseason before Lebron returns to get eliminated mostly in the first round in 5 games, and once or twice to get swept in the second.

Like when you are talking about serious organisations, paying big money not just to players, but to massueses, all with the end goal of not only being profitable, not only to be mindful that the owners want to sell the team one day for much much more than they paid for it, but with the end goal of winning an NBA championship and the windfall and long term benefits that confers, that they at least bother to look up Lebron James' winshare, defensive winshare, box +/-, his shot charts, his turnovers.

And yeah, even NBA franchises, big and small, make boneheaded decisions, like any team that acquired James Harden post 2018, the NBA BOAT in terms of the two best days of having Harden on your team being the day you acquire him and the day you trade him. 

Controversially, there may be some wisdom in trading for Paul George, because Paul George has built more championship teams by being traded from them than perhaps any NBA player ever, with the absolute culmination being 2025's OKC vs Indiana Pacers final series that went to 7 games and was actually settled by Tyrese Halliburton rupturing his Achilles tendon in heartbreak. In that sense, trading Jalen Brown to Philly for Paul George makes sense, but Philly got greedy where the Celtics have time now to trade Paul George for an immortal Kobe Bryant that has played his way out of hell and can only return to the mortal realm if he strikes a pact with Satan to win as many championships for the Celtics as he did for the Lakers, Philly have acquired Lebron James.

I watched a video trying to explain how Lebron might be "the 4th option" on the 76ers, with presumably Jaylen Brown being 1, Tyrese Maxey being 2...and see the video forgot about VJ Edgecombe, who enters his sophomore season and at times last season was looking like a ROY contender. The only way Lebron is even 4th option, realistically, is in the realistic scenario that Joel Embiid misses most of this season, just as he missed most of last season and most of his career.

I haven't been paying attention long enough, but the LAL have had at least 2 coaches in JJ Reddick and Darvin Ham that likely have resented the fact that they were basically obliged to start Lebron James, which is bad enough, but they also have to keep him out there. They had to play him in junk time so he can get his stats up, his team mates have to sprint away from uncontested rebounds so Lebron can gather them up. 

Lebron is now such a hindrance, and has been for at least three NBA seasons, that something I would have assumed, and found pretty much solely interesting about his free agency - is that any team that takes Lebron is basically not a contender.

This is why, on the short list of contenders, it was hard to even bet on Miami. The team that seemed most likely, was Golden State, Lebron does have history with Golden state - as the figurehead of rivalry through the 2010s. They are not contenders and would not become contenders by acquiring Lebron.

By far and away, perhaps the greatest honour an NBA player can receive is not a ring, a trophy or a statue but a farewell tour. Where a team can postpone rebuilding, on the grounds that a player is so beloved, not only by the hometeam, but all teams, that they defacto drop out of contention for a whole year and play 82 exhibition games so the player can say goodbye. Jordan got this with the Wizards, Kobe got it with the Lakers. 

Lebron could have had one, he could have had one right up to the moment that Davis was traded for Luka and lo-and-behold the Lakers were already rebuilding around Lebron, asking him to lift up his feet while they vacuumed under him, getting everything ready for the next era, hoping he would take the hint. 

I'm confident this was not intentional, I'm confident that the Luka trade was first hatched, and even approved by Lebron as an attempt to get him back to the finals, and it immediately lead the new Lakers ownership, and the old Buss legacy to sober up and realise that Lebron worked for them, they didn't work for Lebron, and they could fire him.

Golden State made sense in terms of being the oldest, shortest, crumbliest team in the West, Steph holding up well for his age, but now kind of trapped by his own legacy in a team that can't rebuild for him. What they could do, is rebuild into a kind of Harlem Globetrotters, albeit one that would lose more games than they win, by reaquiring a washed Klay Thompson, and acquiring a washed Anthony Davis and Lebron James and pairing them with Draymond "King of the Triple Single" Green and Steph Curry perhaps the last great shooter to bail out Lebron James, as he did in the Paris Olympics, joining a triumvirate that includes Ray Allen and Kyrie Irving. 

That makes sense. 

Otherwise, the tragedy was, that with Miami acquiring Giannis, and the Cavs having Donovan Mitchell and already being a top 4 team in the East, the other two teams that otherwise would make sense, are contenders and therefore, it made no sense to acquire them. There's a genuine question as to whether Minnesotta are contenders, or whether they are on their way down - they took out the Denver Nuggets in the first round, while Jokic finally had Jamal playing at an all-star level last season. 

But having looked at that series, watched it play out, I'm not sure if the T-Wolves can be credited with it, what was really strange, was that Jokic the best player in the world choked for the first time. Like he had some kind of mental health incident. Nikola Jokic is a player you can put on a team of brooms and it is going to finish 3rd in a wild Western Conference. So whether the Wovles stepped up or the Nuggets fell down is not obvious to me.

But the wolves acquiring Lebron would be a very clear, very loud act of giving up. It's like a long winded way of asking if you'd give up Karl Anthony Towns (now an NBA champion, and most impactful player in the series, if not the most valuable) for a 42 year old Lebron James, but its likely that the Wolves are simply not contenders anyway. So yeah, they could take on Lebron to try and fill some coffers.

What is COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE are the idiots who think Lebron James' addition to the Philidelphia 76ers in some way boosts the teams chances of being NBA champions.

There's only one argument for that proposition and it is this: The 76ers will acquire the Los Angeles Lakers' free throw disparity. That could help. If Jaylen Brown, Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe get to walk to the free throw line with the regularity Luka Doncic did last season, then that's a huge advantage having Lebron on the court gives you.

Alas, it was not enough for the Lakers to overcome the deficit of having to play 4-on-5 defence, even when Lebron bothers to fucking run down to affect the appearance of help, but actually just watch players blow by him. You also acquire 5-6 turnovers a game with Lebron. You acquire a player who fades in the 4th quarters, unless it is junk time.

Again, wanting to give Philidelphia the benefit of the doubt, I assume they also realise that Lebron isn't going to prove that useful as someone who has one championships as a role-player in the locker room inspiring this squad to get to the mountaintop. For one, Jaylen Brown has been there, and can lead both on and off the court. Furthermore, he has won a championship in the past 10 years, that was done outside of a Covid sporting bubble. For two, surely people in the know who actually understand basketball, find the idea of someone who since 2010 has basically had teams consisting of Olympic Gold medallists, NBA MVPs, Finals MVPs, NBA champions, All-Stars and Rookies of the Year carry him beyond his obvious deficits as a finisher, render his advice about as useful as the meme going around of Henry Caville that reads "If you like a girl, just ask her out, it's always worked for me."

The most inspiring thing Lebron can say to the team he is on, is to say "boys, now that I am here, the entire basketball world, with the exception of the team we are playing, is trying to make us win."

So this is what I think happens - Lebron's free agency was so drawn out, because his bargaining position was incredibly weak. He may have tried to get a farewell tour from the Cavs, the Heat, even GSW so he could at least exit the NBA under a pretence of dignity, having outstayed his welcome in LA by 6 seasons. But the Cavs said no, because they are eyeing a deep postseason run, not a throwaway season where Lebron waves goodbye each night. The Heat in terms of placement seem likely to be able to throw away a season, but you also have to factor in that it seems likely Pat Riley and Eric Spoelstra don't like Lebron James. 

GSW was a short helicopter ride away from Lebron's literal home in LA where his family is, but maybe he couldn't face being paid less money than Steph, and maybe a bunch of other conditions to ensure Lebron was on Steph's team, not an equal. Maybe too much came through to the Lebron camp, that they viewed the prospect of him joining now, as a kind of courtesy, he was there to play the savage Indian while Steph played Buffalo Bill doing a tour that was more about reminding the crowds of the 3 times Steph wiped the floor with Lebron in the 2010s and resolutely demolished his goat dreams.

 Maybe Lebron and Rich Paul soberly considered the fact, that Steph still looks good out there, in a way that Lebron doesn't. In fact, the system of simply saying Lebron is phenomenal at 41-42 years of age, kind of is dependent on very few people watching any more of his games than highlight reels.

Leaving the T-Wolves and Philly, I think T-Wolves possibly saw an easy return on a minimal salary, and Lebron saw a team with no real hope of overcoming Jokic's Nuggets with any reliability, the OKC and the revenge hungry Spurs in a Western Conference where the Suns are improving, Dallas have the ROY and might be hot on the Spurs heels and the Ant as the wolves best player, is short and suddenly doesn't look as good as Jalen Brunson.

Meanwhile, Phily got Brown, in a very lopsided trade deal with the Celtics, who honestly would have been better off getting Jamal Murray from the Nuggets for him. Forget Embiid, he's not even good for half a season, they have Maxey and Edgecombe too. Jaylen Brown has too much of a history being teamed up with a young talented squad with a good coach in the Boston Celtics to really be considered a legitimate contender at Philadelphia, Philly got much much better, better than they've probably been in the Embiid era, but for Philly that means getting to round 2 in the postseason, not realistically going all the way.

The East is also on the cusp of exploding now. They have the reigning champs in the New York Knicks, who I don't think will go back to back, but are more likely to return to the finals than Philly or Boston or the Cavs, and I also think Atlanta are coming now, the Pacers might be back. This is not the Taytum-Brown Boston Celtics, Giannis Bucks, an outside bet on Jimmy Butler and the Heat and an abyss anymore. The East is looking like having 5-6 strong teams now.

I think Philly might also be thinking that they can manhandle Lebron in a way the Lakers only just started doing post Luka. I mean Lebron already knows there's no way he's ever seeing another Finals MVP. I think by the end of the season Lebron is coming off the bench. He's getting a max 19 minutes of game time, and typically 10-15. I think Lebron is Philly's Bronny, and Lebron's only move is to do a Jimmy Butler and protest not "getting his damn respect" 

I think they are going to pay him his peanuts, pocket the profits, and sit his arse down as often as possible. Lebron is going to have to talk about how he's embraced his role as a mascot, as a teacher and an inspirer. I think he can't disappear with injuries like Embiid does, because he knows that leaves no narrative except that he's a bus-rider. 

I think he has fat chance of getting two rings before his contract is up, and then I think if he wants to ride another bus, he'll be even more hard pressed to find a home to do his farewell tour than he is now.

And then again, maybe everyone is as fucking dumb as they seem, and think Lebron James is some kind of top-10 player forming some kind of "Big 3" or "Big 4" instead of sitting on a three legged stool and assuring that it can't rise to the top of a table.

What Cloud Be Worng With Me Part Nein: On A Spectrum

 Disclaimer:

I'm just speculating, almost on the verge of making shit up, whole cloth. I am not a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or capable of making a diagnosis. 

The Quantity/Quality Trade Off

We all get a lot of practice talking about ourselves. I think I saw on Qi that there was an early psychology study that involved psychology majors hiding under dorm room beds to listen to what people spoke about in private when they didn't think they were being observed, and 80% of the time people talk about themselves.

Even with practice though, it is my experience that it can take a lot of time to figure out how to talk about yourself in a competent way. Like say a boy moves from the country to the city at age 16 goes to a big high school and discovers in the change room, that he has a really big penis.

It might take that kid a while to learn, that you don't talk about your really big penis in most contexts. 

This post is going to be about autism, and the TL;DR of it for me, is that I don't think we actually know much about it. In the sense that it might sound impressive to say our understanding of something has increased 300% in the last decade, but if the baseline was 1% then that means we are at 4% now.

What has exploded, is the number of people who are diagnosed with ASD, and the number of people who self-identify as autistic, And as life will remind you again and again at every opportunity, you can't just increase the quantity of something and expect the same quality. 

We actually have very little capital so under utilised that we can go from 10,000 to 10,000,000 with the push of a button and expect the same quality product we are used to.

So even if a great many people have found a great many answers and experienced a massive uptick in their quality of life in the past two decades thanks to learning about autism, this is wave upon wave of adults who do not know how to talk about it, and the people on the frontier like hometown hero Chloe Hayden I feel are still in the process of figuring it out, and 'figuring out' autism information communication is somewhat predicated on having an established body of knowledge that is going to be stable for a while, and even having some stability in our media consumption habits.

I feel that this is very very young, such that a concept like autism that has been researched by scholars and debated and peer reviewed and explored with emerging technologies like genome mapping, fMRIs etc. etc. is a body of knowledge that is likely a rounding error on some bullshit I made up myself in a previous post like my 'plutophobia.'

Being able to say it is definitely a thing is not to say that collectively, communally we actually know much about it, like the oarfish, or giant squid, or the moons of Saturn. And certainly I know almost nothing compared to people who are actually interested in these things.

The First time someone calls you a horse

“If one person tells you you're a horse , they are crazy. If three people tell you you're a horse, There's conspiracy afoot. If ten people tell you you're a horse,it's time to buy a saddle”

― Jack Rosenblum

In my life, for its total duration I've had one person suggest I was autistic. A second, much later, may have implied it but I was too mind blind to tell, and furthermore they were not independent from the same hobnobbing social circle as the first. When this person suggested it, they'd known me over a decade, so I was confused. Possibly shocked even. 

One thing I cannot recall, is what they based this on. I may not have even thought to ask, and may have assumed its because I have people in my family who are diagnosed on the spectrum.

Now, what I didn't do was dismiss the suggestion out of hand. I thought of this good old Keanu Reeves meme that possibly never got any traction, but I think about a lot where a picture of a confused Keanu is captioned with: "What if I actually have Down's Syndrome...and everyone's just being nice to me?" Our subjective states all being our benchmark of 'normalcy' that there are all kinds of things we cannot ourselves perceive.

Could it have been possible I wasn't able to perceive something so fundamental to myself?

I should also point out, this was way before like, 20% of the population diagnosed themselves as autistic, or paid for someone to diagnose them as autistic - and on this front I don't make light, I mean literally there is a problem in the Australian secondary education system now, where wealthy people's children are something like a bajillion times more likely to have a diagnosis of ASD and ADHD and whatever else. There are private (pay to play) schools in my town where over 50% of the student cohort qualify for 'special consideration' meaning they get extra time, can complete written assessments on a laptop etc. If the schools own staff won't give a diagnosis, parents often then pay top dollar to obtain one. There are real advantages above and beyond the private school advantages, so there's a kind of race-to-the-bottom to get diagnoses that confer advantages without debilitating treatment plans. 

Hence the abundance of ASD with no real growth in rates of bipolar or schizophrenia that can onset in symptoms prior to secondary graduation, that can come with medication that have debilitating side effects.

So I entertained it for a while, ran it past the psychologist I was seeing at the time, spoke to my parents about it and probably read the Wikipedia page on it. 

It just didn't really get any traction, it could be true I guess...

Other People's Testimony

I am sympathetic to videos I've watched by other people, particularly adults who often enough, discovered in the 21st century that they were autistic by having their children diagnosed with ASD. 

I haven't done a complex survey, only two or three, but these people testified that their lives changed for the better after their diagnosis. 

I'd also heard testimony from my parents that a diagnosis really helped the family member gain confidence and understand the world.

This isn't something I'm closed to, I think what I'm closed to is the scene. Most people on the spectrum I know don't behave like the person on the spectrum closest to me. That's a sentence to parse. We were discussing it and they shared with me their impression, which I also share 'most people I talk to who tell me they have autism its like the center of their identity." or core of their being, or whatever.

The Self-Diagnosis that Won't be The Diagnosis of Summer 2026

One morning I woke up to a message from my friend, she'd read a book about Autism in Women & Girls, and the book is called 'Women & Girls on the Autism Spectrum' by Sarah Hendrickx, her 'about the author' bio states she is an autistic writer, speaker, autism diagnostician and specialist living in the south of France.

OH DEAR FUCKING GOD

I apologise, just you know, these are the things that irritate me, so I tried to find a bio about the book's co-author and found more detailed descriptions, the authors are Sarah and Jess Hendrickx sisters, and while they are autism diagnosticians, their bios specify that both are 'non-clinically trained' now, I don't know what that leaves, and Jess is listed as having a PGCE (post graduate certificate) in Autism. 

So like, just fyi, if you ever want to not impress me with your credentials as an expert on a subject matter, like that's the way to go about it. I was expecting something like MD, at the very least a BA in psychology or maybe a PhD in nueroscience something like that.

The second bio I found actually contained the phrase 'diagnosed or self-identify as'

Anyway, this is a digression. When my friend brought it to me, via dms, I was left with a kind of two part lob into my court - part 1 being they thought they were autistic, and part 2 asking me what I thought.

I'll keep ensuing conversations private, but what I can divulge is I thought 'Oh god this is what I'm going to have to put up with at barbecues and parties all summer.' Living in Mexico as an illegal immigrant had spared me the summers of adult-onset ADHD, I had had to deal with a friend bringing to me their diagnosis based off youtube research once before, but that was way before it went viral.

As you can guess, I'm sceptical of both the frequency and significance of these diagnoses that spawn articles in news periodicals like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist etc. with cover stories like 'Why is everyone ADHD now?' but I'm not outright dismissive. The main thing I dread is having to hear about it, for the aforementioned 'center of their identity' impression.

I have a good friend that would describe what many of these people need is somebody to 'hold space' for them as they process the adjusted schema of their lives. I believe feminists refer to this as 'emotional labour' and that's not a concept I am skeptical of at all. We probably need a discussion around the (not-etiquette-but) manners of emotional labour, as in you can't just fucking demand it of people who approached you for conversation at a social gathering.

That's what I was thinking about when my friend asked me 'so what do you think?' and I knew that's not what they anticipated me thinking about, which was myself, and the fresh new hell the summer promised of the latest trending self-diagnoses. They were asking me what I thought of their epiphany about them, and I didn't really have any thoughts, and I pretty much still don't. 

Anticipation was the worst thing, and at Hathor's feast it was I that mentioned it in the context of remarking how delighted I was that nobody had mentioned that they thought they were an undiagnosed autistic woman at the party, because I'd been worried about it. One of the women in the group did not then step forward and say "actually I'm autistic" and I haven't experienced the explosion I was dreading. What a woman said was "yeah well a lot of women go undiagnosed/women are underdiagnosed because women tend to mask the symptoms." 

This is possibly even an excerpt from the blurb of Sarah and Jane's book, certainly the most common synopsis. I am not attuned to how word-of-mouth promotes such a book, but over the summer I would hear this assertion repeated pretty much verbatim again and again as received wisdom. It was even in the summary my first friend shared as to why they think they'd never been diagnosed until they diagnosed themselves just now.

"Girls go undiagnosed because they mask the symptoms" I feel, is dangerously close to the "Asymptomatic Tourette" syndrome mocked  by dromedy "The English Teacher"

Now before eventually getting to the point of this section, I just want to flag, that with any breakthrough in the discourse around historically stigmatised identities, conditions, disorders or whatever leading to an explosion in diagnoses, this is usually hypothesised (or at least notionally) explained as the reduction of stigma allowing people to come forward. I feel this should always be tested against the null-hypothesis of 'OR are teenage girls doing what teenage girls have always done?' (which is act as a social contagion vector)

Now before you panic, I don't have teenage girls slipping into my DMs, society rather has been infantilised such that adolesence can last until however old Gen Xers are now.

The promised point is, that the self-diagnosis that isn't going to sweep through small talk at this summer's forthcoming bbqs and garden parties and even dinner parties is this: Stupidity.

Right, even though the epiphany that someone is in fact, a moron, had tremendous sense-making and predictive power.

I am not going to meet someone who wants to bore me with everything they realised about themselves from a book or podcast: "So it turns out, all my life, I've been stupid, I'm a fucking moron. You see, I get around the fact that I don't understand what the fuck is going on, by just copying everyone else as best I can, and I've been exerting so much effort trying to conceal the fact that I'm stupid by like, just not taking responsibility for anything or taking any risks. And like, I just try and figure out what the smartest sounding people I know like, and they like the New York Times and PBS so I just listen to their podcasts and repeat the opinions on it as if they were my own, often verbatim. Other symptoms are like, that I find big words and jargon impressive and adopt it into my own speech, oh and like a language model marketed as 'AI' that uses personal pronouns, that will confuse me into thinking I'm speaking with a conscious being. I get impressed by horoscopes because I don't have the critical thinking skills to recognise a barnum statement when I see one, and the same applies to the personal, legal and medical advice I seek from chatbots..."

Stupidity is a robust, evidenced psychological construct. It has tremendous predictive power being able to predict up to 20% of our career outcomes, which is higher than a factor like conscientiousness/laziness. It is furthermore likely to be the case that as few as 50% of us, and as many as 95% of us, just aren't smart enough to make sense of the world we live in.

I am serious, when I think if people could read a book about stupidity and approach it with half the energy and enthusiasm they might apply to ADHD, Autism, the power of introverts, emotional intelligence, repressed childhood trauma or any of the myriad psychological constructs that have been made big by pop culture, I think many people would benefit.

But it's just not going to happen because aside from maybe the George W Bush presidency, nobody has really come close to making stupidity socially desirable.

I Miss Aspergers

My autistic relative was originally diagnosed with Aspergers, and they were not so much rediagnosed through any second opinion, but reclassified in the 2010s to being 'on the spectrum', and the clinically trained psychologist that had diagnosed them and specialised in Asperger's syndrome resented the reclassification citing that it was all because Hans Aspeger the Austrian physician that had first formulated the construct, and become posthumously famous in the 1980s, was alleged to have been involved in some way with the Nazis.

I'm not a believer in Ad Hominem generally, and under the auspices of Godwin's Law would use Hitler as an example - that if Hitler says 2 + 2 = 4, he's not wrong because he is Hitler.

I could accept this concept of an Autism spectrum, not because I had any expertise, but that it sounded plausible that Asperger's and Autism were closely related, and then it could develop such that they were the same thing at different degrees. One of the functional descriptions I had heard for Asperger's was that it was a 'high functioning form of Autism' 

So that's what I assumed the spectrum to refer to.

When my friend hit me up thinking she was autistic and wondering what I thought, and yeah, I was too annoyed to be flattered by someone being vulnerable with me about their recent change in self-perception, most of that annoyance comes from being old enough to remember when Autism described people who needed a lot of help. Not only did autistic people need a lot of help, but the people who cared for them needed a lot of help.

I can remember where progressive discourse about Autism was centered on how, it actually rarely conferred autistic-savant abilities as depicted in the movie "Rain Man" with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Many autistic people struggled to function like Dustin Hoffman's depiction, without being able to count cards or even the parlour trick of memorizing phone books or being able to tell what day of the week someone was born on just from dd-mm-yyyy.

By 1980s diagnostics, I don't know anybody with autism. By 2020s, I would say it is at least 50% of the children I know under 18 years of age, excluding Mexico where by 2020s standards, I don't know anybody autistic of the 200 or so people I met while over there, and I met some really weird people and even went to the local comic-con.

That though, is unambiguously a product of concept creep, one that has not reached the Latin America...

Leave Lionel Messi Alone

With the world cup on, Youtube is throwing up a lot of shorts, like things explaining why Haarland runs like an ostrich and many shitty "AI" ones, and then there was one that was titled "Lionel Messi top 5 Autism moments" and I was like what but didn't watch it, because I mean seriously, who fucking cares. But I was curious as to whether this was the now better known symptom of whiteness that is just diagnosing people as autistic with no real qualifications or evidence.

So I gave it a google, and you know, I do believe Argentina is like the global capital of engagement with psychoanalysts, it's not just in Envidiosa, so there is some plausibility that Messi may have got a diagnosis at some point and made it a matter of public record. But...no.

Messi has never publicly identified as autistic, and there is no confirmed diagnosis. What the speculation does open up, though, is a genuinely useful question...

That quote is taken from an 'Applied Behaviour Analysis' therapy website that I know too little about to promote right and this is the kind of to put it bluntly fucking pseudoscience by OG Karl Popper's definition that detracts from my interest in autism. Like I watched that youtube short, and what a nothing burger. 

One clip in particular lowers the credibility, which is Messi sitting at some awards ceremony, billed as 'staring into space' while someone next to him is talking to him, and I would assume Messi is looking either towards a monitor or a stage and nobody else is because he is the subject of that moment, something we see happen repeatedly at every awards show, everywhere all the time.

I will admit, that the first impression I ever got of Messi, was that he does look perpetually confused but this caused me to speculate on a story I'd heard about Babe Ruth's eyesight, like maybe they both had a condition that made them particularly coordinated.

If you work from the reverse, you can just establish as fact that Lionel Messi (and Babe Ruth) are particularly coordinated. They then also, likely have a condition. 

Having watched a few videos attempting some kind of data based analysis of Messi's play style, it seems there a hypothesis that he constructs and constantly updates his mental model of the playing field, 'scanning' at higher rates and also notably, spending far more time walking all of which suggest to me, speculatively, that Messi at least is showing symptoms of intelligence - playing with a high cognitive load.

It may even be, a particular manifestation of autism, but most people who identify as autistic do not manifest incredible coordination, they manifest tedious boorish conversations about autism and with late diagnoses this is often after having been previously capable of interesting conversations about movies, books, sport, the economy and current affairs. 

These are the people hard at work restigmatizing autism for those who suffer it to the debilitating extent that it creates sensory overload, emotional overload, distress and debilitation.

The Unique Problem of Whiteness

Okay this is total speculation now, but it seriously is a fairly accurate stereotype that 'white people call out autism' and I can certainly say, of the other cultures I'm most familiar with, it is not a thing Mexicans do, even whitexicans who are generally more fixated on securing their place in a gated community and a 4WD monster truck capable of crushing any boarder wall to escape socialism coming to Mexico. I have yet to see the Japanese comic, cartoon or videogame willing to surrender their obsession with fascist bloodlines to talk about autism in anyway. Certainly in popular culture it does appear to be a unique obsession of white people, whether you are a conspiratorial anti-vaxxer, a Karen who just wants their child to go to an Ivy League school or Queer whiteness seems to converge on autism.

I think it might be because, nobody is in charge. That's my speculation. Life is a confusing, frighteningly random semi-stable collision of social animals who are actually not being coordinated, they just aren't that creative.

If you are not white, you have to hand a sensemaking schema to oppose on the difficulty of life - colonialism, and yes, it is real, as is neoliberalism. What's unreal is the idea that Ronald Reagan sits down in the oval office with student of Hayek, Milton Friedman and has an intelligent discussion about neoliberalism. More likely, Milton is a blustering ideologue, pretending to know more than he feels he actually does, and enjoying the privileges afforded him by his confidence and having plenty of wealthy people wanting to believe in him as he dismantles open societies and nudges us back onto the road to serfdom. 

And this is what white people are privileged to experience, having greater access to the corridors of power, they get to see that nobody has any real idea what they are doing. They get enough time with the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, certainly the Trumps, the Gates, the Jobs, the Musks to realise a lot of the time these people are just pulling shit out of their asses. 

That's skewed toward a super structure. I think autism for white people, functions somewhat like racism for marginalised people - it is certainly a real phenomena, but one can fall prey to using confirmation bias and use it to diagnose everything that confuses you.

Which is to say, this is how white people explain the disorganised nature of white people, like if we just take a two factor personality model - whether people prefer to ask or tell (introversion/extraversion) and whether people prioritise tasks or people (concrete/abstract) we get a a 2 dimensional spread of 4 personality types.

Here we can go into a workplace and observe two extraverts - one motivated by esteem, the other motivated by productivity and I'll bet if they are ignorant or have left unprocessed the concept of personalities, they will be prone to diagnosing the analysts and support workers in their organisation as autistic or nuerodivergent.

Again, reminding you that this is unqualified speculation on my part, this is what I'd expect based on how many people I've encountered that don't realise there is sufficient variation in human populations that not-even most people share your motivations. This can commonly result in a fairly benign misanthropic view that everyone else is trying to do what you are doing and just getting it wrong, a kind of manifestation of the 'illusion of superiority' I believe.

It's what allows a high-school dropout who built up a property portfolio that they borrow against to fund conspicuous consumption to look down on a civil servant who dedicated ten years to getting asbestos safely removed from a local public school. The civil servant was likely not trying to get rich so they could have a beach house weekender and they just fucked it up brilliantly by going into a low-paying career that absorbed all their time to read books and attend seminars about property investment, but may instead be motivated by being of service to their community.

And in these mindsets of sense-making white people and their adoption of amatuer diagnostics should reflect on the cautionary tale of the previous two centuries of white racism. There is an abundance of documentation of white people misdiagnosing character flaws as inherent traits of the construct of race up to and including the Irish and Italian. People constantly diagnosing Mexicans as 'lazy' while they drive their SUV to a place to have someone make a coffee for them, and blatantly disregarding the millions of Mexicans who work 6 days a week at a minimum wage job, and may have worked since they were 6 or 8 years old walking from restaurant to restaurant selling fruit, stickers and pencils.

White people who have a quite bad track record of misdiagnosing a lack of inherited estates and an obligation to pay taxes and rents as laziness, should not get confident they can diagnose complicated psychological constructs like an autism spectrum that, it seems to me, relative to introversion-extraversion, or perhaps even sexuality experts barely understand, and lay people don't understand how to even identify an expert.

Thresholds

Part of why I miss Asperger's, was that it defined a threshold. Kids in that brief historical window where they would get an AS rather than an ASD, often faced the main difficulty of being perceived as difficult. That is how close to 'normal' they were in functioning. 

The language made it unambiguous to recognise, that some kids would get bullied because they had no innate ability to read the room, they would attract mockery and ridicule for being particular, and showing weakness over sensory stimuli that would not endear them to their peers.

And then you could talk about autistic people, in that historical time period, who needed a lot of support, like a designated human-adult support worker to sit next to them in class just to keep them included in society.

Bringing it back to me, I was open to the suggestion, indeed actively looking for answers with explanatory power.

What I found, is nothing autism could really explain, that helps me in any way. I for example, have never struggled with bullying, I do not have light sensitivity, nor sensitivity issues when it relates to clothing tags. I have all my life gravitated toward chaos, when choosing between institutions, often disorganisation is a big plus, as I dislike having to be organised myself.

I didn't struggle in school, at least not in a way that can't be better explained by being raised without a growth mindset understanding that ability was intrinsic and dismissing the idea that competence can be gained through effort. But for the most part that made school a joke, and I was fortunate to struggle through difficult maths subjects out of pride, learning the lesson of effort that would later help me rebecome an artist.

So the question of my placement on the spectrum, becomes a question of resource allocation. Both my own and communal - what is the cut off where my time is just better spent on other things?

To give an analogy, imagine a person who was diagnosed with schizophrenia age 25 and whose parents got acrimoniously divorced when they were 13. Now at age 26 for them the clear priority is to stabilize their schizophrenia in treatment though, were they to experience no effects of schizophrenia they would not coincidentally be happier and better adjusted than I, they would still probably benefit from something like talk therapy to work through the impact their parents divorce had on their life and how they view the world, how they meet and choose partners, how they approach relationships etc etc. 

All stuff that can significantly impact peoples' quality of life, but when you are experiencing scary auditory hallucinations, it is hard to address.

In my own case, from visiting and revisiting the autism spectrum, it doesn't rise to the explanatory power or impactfulness of the other shit I've written about in this series. It was worth some of my time, but not much more, admittedly I will probably have to invest more time, because this outcome is unsatisfactory to my white friends.

So while I thought I was wrapping up, in a disordered manner, I have to revisit loose threads of this question of resource allocation. How does someone wind up with a late diagnosis of Autism, or for that matter ADHD etc? 

Clearly this person has likely met some threshold of behaviour, where they 'passed' as ordinary in whatever dimension, and maybe because there wasn't an army of white people engaged in the habit of spotting them.

They need some contact with the construct in question, at which point they likely come across a list of symptoms and via confirmation bias - self-diagnose. eg. Yeah I really hate the smell of garbage, and I like putting my tools in order and I prefer playing video games than playing sport. etc.

After which, someone might then seek out a tool online, in the case of autism, the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' test, and another one.

This is still self diagnosis though, and I had a friend who upon learning of the RME test, self administered it in a gamified way trying to get higher and higher (and therefore, less autistic) scores. But I can easily imagine the scenario where the opposite is true, if one wanted a diagnosis of being 'on the spectrum' it would not be hard to recognise the emotion based on the picture and choose the obviously wrong answer.

But assuming someone engages with good faith, then I feel the results would dictate whether it is worth going any further like seeing a professional.

At which point, I'll introduce the stand up set by Janet McNamara where she talks about how many times she has failed to get a diagnosis of autism, after experiencing frequent suggestions she get tested for autism.

The set is funny, and while I'm sure it is embellished to create a more amusing world where people go to see an expert in autism and they use some simple heuristic like 'your IQ is too low for autism' or 'your clothing tags don't bother you therefore its a no' which I'm sure happens sporadically because dazzling incompetence is everywhere, but unlikely to happen systemically and Janet says she has taken the RME test and just aced it all.

What I'd draw attention to are comments that youtube helpfully cycled through while I watched the video that for me cause me to infer a bunch of muddiness in the diagnostic issue:

Man, the whole "everyone thinks you're autistic except for the person evaluating you for autism" thing is so relatable. I think I've counted five nurses/doctors/counselors/therapists etc who've mentioned that they think I'm autistic, but whenever I actually sit down to speak with someone for an evaluation, I'm always dismissed for one reason or another. It's really freaking annoying.

What annoys me about this comment, is this person is saying 'people who aren't experts think I might be this thing they've heard of, but when I talk to an expert in this thing they give me an expert opinion that I'm not. It's really freaking annoying.' what I don't know, is whether they are annoyed with the everyone, or if they are annoyed with the evaluators. It would be frustrating if people who do not know what they are talking about refused to accept the opinion of someone who does, let alone someones. But if its the reverse 'I'm so annoyed experts don't agree with people who don't know what they are talking about' then my sympathy is for everyone who has to live in this society.

Her therapist knew that the doctors didn't ask enough specific questions for a diagnosis of "being too specific" 😂

This comment when I first saw it, I only half read it so found it more inane than it actually turns out to be, which is pointing out a kind of irony. I must have originally only read the 'her therapist knew that the doctors didn't ask enough specific questions..." at which point I probably became insensed. This is Popper's original criticism of psychology - his comparisons of Freud to Einstein, where Einstein's theory of relativity was empirically falsifiable, Einstein bet big on being right or wrong and an eclipse of something proved it. By contrast, everything just proved Freud right, and this is a running joke I have with my Aunt whom I go to galleries with, and I insist that all art is phallic, and if you are looking for a way to prove any piece of art is actually about a penis, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to spot the penis in any artwork. But in this comment based on a bit about the therapist questioning whether Janet disclosed to the last autism diagnostician that she wore a life jacket for two years, we get this pseudoscientific mindset displayed that if you have convinced yourself that you or someone else is autistic, then you are not actually seeking a diagnosis of autism, but you are diagnosing autism expertise. That is just arse backward.

Honestly, this is why I haven't gotten officially tested. I know I'm autistic but those tests were created by people who observed autism in others, not people who actually know the inner experience of autism.

Yeah okay, but at some point we need some system to determine what private school girl gets 4 hours to sit her final exam and what private school girl gets the regular 3 hours.  So there's autism where the kid is like non-verbal, has sensory meltdowns, needs early intervention to even have a chance to live independently as an adult someday.

Thene there's kids that would previously have been diagnosed with AS, and they may get bullied, screw up their face at pungent foods, misread social cues, but historically provided the bullying doesn't reach levels where an adult would be charged with criminal assault. They do fine, they form social groups around playing DnD, they buy the box set of LOTR and actually watch it for fun, they don't get sports and work in IT or accounting or some shit and likely generally have better life outcomes than many of the kids that bullied them in primary school.

Then there's me, undiagnosed, loves the smell of wet dog, will try anything once, never been bullied, often wind up giving the toast, like sport but don't like stats and would probably rather die than ever have to sit through LOTR again in whole or part, unless its the cut where every time Sam Gamgee takes a step it cuts back to the scene where he says "with this step it'll be the furthest I've ever been from the shire."

What resources should be allocated to me from the spectrum? I would argue, almost none. What then is left? 

By my biases and prejudices, what appears to be left, is the opportunity to talk about yourself at length in a way that others, should not fucking care.

There is a moment right at the end of Janet McNamara's set, a set about how three times experts have rejected the diagnosis of ASD, including that she absolutely aced the reading the mind in the eyes test. The whole set is delivered in a cadence and posture and outfit that is evocative, to me, of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man, and then right at the very end, Janet kind-of empahasis kind-of code switches, to more of a "That's my time thank you you've been a wonderful audience." Like a Vegas magician or something.

It was too thin a slice, so I watched some of her appearance on a podcast to get a sense of how she comes across when she is not performing.  I cannot stress how little of this actual podcast interview I watched, largely because the subject matter is painful to me. 

The host, Kory Andreas, comes across as less autism coded than Janet. Literally the only cue locatable is that Kory tells us she is AuDHD. Janet comes across as (to my ear) culturally similar to comedian Robby Hoffman, whom to the public record is not autistic, but they have very similar accents, with Robby being Brooklyn and Janet being Boston. The eye contact and rapport, the cadence pretty much everything else I would describe as 'neurotypical'. 

Now I am atypical-white it seems, in that I don't have this hobby of trying to sniff out autism, so maybe I just don't see what I'm not looking for. In my life I've met one or two kids that remind me in any way of the one ASD person I personally know.

I've met a bajillion others that tell me about their autism, but that is just one of the many ways in which they do not resemble the ASD person I know. 

My End of The Spectrum Extends Beyond The Flying Fucks

So maybe, whatever, here's how I'd put this baby to bed. It's November 2008, and I'm ladelling soup on Wall Street. The person handing out the dinner rolls next to me, whispers to me what each person has suffered so I can dictate if they get soup or no soup, as the extraordinary times demand.

"This person lost their house, they had to move into their childrens basement." A ladle of soup. That's bleak. That's having what used to be called autism in the 80s and 90s.

"This person lost their job, a new graduate, their young but they are going to have to move home, their big city dreams are dead." A ladle of soup. Tough times don't last, tough people do. This is the kid that can function, but has to cognitively compensate for their mind blindness and was bullied in school, what would have been diagnosed as AS up until 2013.

"This person lost their brunch. They had a lovely brunch planned, but it took them so long to find a park, that then they were told they had to wait up to an hour for a table inside but they could sit el fresco but it's late fall, it's pretty cold and they were worried they'd get worse tableservice." Fuck these people, I don't fucking care. What they have, are the problems of having preferences, and somehow they've been enabled to bitch and fucking moan about it. No soup for them, these are people who are indistinguishable from somebody performing autism. They have no diagnosis, they just identify with liking habit and routine maybe, and don't like glare, and think beef rendang is a bit pungent.

If there's anywhere I am going to be on the spectrum, it is in that last group. I don't think anyone should give me soup, I'm not even interested in talking about my preferences, or medical conditions in general. I also have no fucking idea how many different potential explanations there could be, but I'm certainly not convinced by the most popular one.