Ultimately, the final judge of whether a special interest is deleterious is the autistic themselves. I personally wouldn't find being a furry to be particularly deleterious. The community is full of ND and queer people on top of having pretty progressive politics. I'm merely pushing back the idea that special interests can't be criticized or are entirely immutable. People can add or drop special interests. A special interest can also evolve over time so how a person experiences and understands their special interest as a 10 year old is different from how they experience and understand it as a 40 year old even if the actual special interest itself is still the same.
But it's not something that can - or should - be dropped because some Chapo dickhead thinks it's "cringe." Chapo is always going to find an autistic cringe, we are defined by how we annoy and inconvenience allistics, that is what gets pathologized as arrested development.
Media can and should be criticized, as I keep bringing up, but that isn't what is happening here. The very act of hyperfixation is what is being moralized here, that doing so makes you fail to be a man, that doing so makes you a reactionary (which was exactly what I had called out, because leftists still use autistic caricatures to talk about chuds), that someone here literally cannot connect with someone who is into Family Guy of all things because the idea of being into something in a way that even resembles autism is seen as abberant and creepy.
Now, I don't listen to CTH, but my guess is that this treat and slop meme had a lot more to do with talking about the bad shit people actually do to protect creature comforts at the expense of others like ignoring the pandemic to crowd into theaters. If you're losing that focus to just complain that people act and talk weird, like yeah the people who are always going to be treated as weird are gonna push back on that sort of reaction and call it out for what it is.
Ultimately, the final judge of whether a special interest is deleterious is the autistic themselves. I personally wouldn't find being a furry to be particularly deleterious. The community is full of ND and queer people on top of having pretty progressive politics. I'm merely pushing back the idea that special interests can't be criticized or are entirely immutable. People can add or drop special interests. A special interest can also evolve over time so how a person experiences and understands their special interest as a 10 year old is different from how they experience and understand it as a 40 year old even if the actual special interest itself is still the same.
But it's not something that can - or should - be dropped because some Chapo dickhead thinks it's "cringe." Chapo is always going to find an autistic cringe, we are defined by how we annoy and inconvenience allistics, that is what gets pathologized as arrested development.
Media can and should be criticized, as I keep bringing up, but that isn't what is happening here. The very act of hyperfixation is what is being moralized here, that doing so makes you fail to be a man, that doing so makes you a reactionary (which was exactly what I had called out, because leftists still use autistic caricatures to talk about chuds), that someone here literally cannot connect with someone who is into Family Guy of all things because the idea of being into something in a way that even resembles autism is seen as abberant and creepy.
Now, I don't listen to CTH, but my guess is that this treat and slop meme had a lot more to do with talking about the bad shit people actually do to protect creature comforts at the expense of others like ignoring the pandemic to crowd into theaters. If you're losing that focus to just complain that people act and talk weird, like yeah the people who are always going to be treated as weird are gonna push back on that sort of reaction and call it out for what it is.