Vox Day had recently posted on the controversial teaching methods of a certain college professor who has some rather controversial teaching methods involving anti-free speech rioting and bike locks. It was noted how it was the 4chan guys at /pol/ that tracked down the professor from various images of the event.
Two comments I found interesting.
/pol/ = weaponized autism
I f*cking love these guys.
Their ongoing persecution of the Le Barf fool, and the ease with which they’ve run rings around him, is just … delicious.
May they never grow up.
This is of course referring to the earlier exploits involving “actor” Shia LaBeouf who had created a livestreaming “art” project centered around how Trump “will not divide us.”
It was promptly crashed by various alt-right and alt-white types, some of the funniest being non-white minorities. In response, our intrepid “actor” had taken to hiding his installation. At one point in the middle of some field with the camera point straight up.
So /pol/ used a combination of real-time shots of the starfield and airline schedules cross-referenced to planes observed in the FOV to pinpoint the location of the camera.
Weaponized autism.
Then:
Autism has been weaponized for a long time, it’s just we used Ivory Towers and Monastaries before the internet. Remember, the old polite term for it is “touched by god”.
A core premise of the novel Anathem is that the monasteries were created to keep the “odds” and geniuses isolated and undistracted by real-world concerns. It’s not just to keep them safe from society, but to also keep society safe from *them *and the consequences of what they discover. Not only are they restricted in how much they can “own”, but very restricted in the kinds of modern, especially nano-based, technology they have access to.
As it turns out, that wasn’t as much of a limitation as would have been hoped. Weaponized autism will find a way.
