No, We Won’t Calm Down – Tone Policing Is Just Another Way to Protect Privilege

[hifiguy]

148. I consider the company I am in,

Last edited Wed Dec 9, 2015, 05:32 PM - Edit history (1)

try to never raise my voice unless strongly provoked and, when confronted with the grossest stupidities, like cretins who know me but insist on trying to convert me (questioner since 8 y.o., agnostic leaning-to-atheist by 13, full blown secular humanist/atheist since 20, "out" since early 20s) I simply ask to change the subject in the name of continued civility.

I was kind of kluzy as a kid but eventually developed enough coordination to be good at kickball and baseball. Loved playing marbles, which was a big thing for about half a year in 5th or 6th grade for some reason. Definitely a little professor as a kid and preferred the company of adults to kids my own age.

I always found a kid or two who though I was smart and funny, though a little odd, through elementary school but did get bullied a fair amount. I was accelerated two years when I started school - started a year early and was promoted to 2nd grade after a month because I was reading and writing at a 3d-4th grade level already; I'd been reading since I was 3. Being the smallest and the smartest kid in class was not a happy combination.

I've led a strange life even by Asperger's standards. Finally wound up back in the right grade for my age in my early teens - it's a long story - and dropped out of high school when I was 16. Played bass in bands and worked odd jobs, including vending herbal substances for a few years, and decided to go to college in my 20s. Got my GED on a dare, enrolled at my state's flagship public university and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in four years. Went on to an Ivy League law school - the same one as the POTUS and my classmate, the FLOTUS - and have bombed out at everything since.

Too geeky, too asocial, too weird and WAY too working-class for a very class-conscious and social profession. Now I'm just a broke, broken down crank on DU. If I could change one thing about myself, it wouldn't be the Asperger's - it would be my mathlexia, which is unusual for people on the spectrum. Then I'd have been an astronomer, astrophysicist or a cosmologist (NOT cosmetologist . In those fields being rather odd is not a disqualifier, it's practically a requirement.