Look, I understand the line you are trying to walk here, but encountering a vehicle like this and thinking "this guy just has different ideas than me, but is otherwise trustworthy" is not rational thinking.

There's a difference between believing in conspiracy theories and covering your van with warnings about the nanochips on your body that give you computer generated diseases.

If I learned that someone suffering extreme paranoid delusions like this were in charge of operating a passenger vehicle, I would be extremely concerned with the safety of those passengers.

This isn't some unreasonable thing. I have a lot of compassion for those who suffer from mental illness, but I also think that public safety should take precedent when it is clear that someone is mentally incapable of being trusted with things like heavy machinery.

It's not the ideas expressed on this vehicle that concern me. It's that every part of this indicates a serious and untreated mental health problem. The only way my opinion could be redeemed is if the owner of the van came forward and said it was a joke, or a prop for a movie or something, because nobody with a connection to reality is going to write those things all over a truck and parade around town trying to spread the word if they aren't severely dissociated from reality.

And I cannot stress this enough, nothing about this story has anything to do with Autism. Paranoid delusions are not a typical issue for Autistic people.

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And I cannot stress this enough, nothing about this story has anything to do with Autism. Paranoid delusions are not a typical issue for Autistic people.

Agreed, but I am autistic and I have had this language used against me to argue why I shouldn't be allowed to make my own decisions. I.e., it is a popular misconception and form of rhetoric that autistic people have paranoid delusions because we perceive the world differently. I brought it up because I'm arguing from my lived experience as a mentally ill and autistic person, i.e. I'm not just being an internet contrarian.

I did not mean to imply that autistic people typically do suffer from paranoid delusions. However, (at least in my view) we do suffer from neurotypical people believing we suffer from paranoid delusions.

encountering a vehicle like this and thinking "this guy just has different ideas than me, but is otherwise trustworthy" is not rational thinking.

I don't have to find someone completely trustworthy in order for them to be an acceptable driver. Actually, I typically don't fully trust the people I get in cars with. I only need to trust them enough to know that they're not going to veer into traffic, they're going to drive reasonably, and that they will take me to the place we promised to go. I think that the kinds of decisions that go into driving are completely different from those that drive a person to mark up their car.

Look, I understand the line you are trying to walk here

Yeah, I am trying to "walk a line" here and I think I understand where you're coming from, so I'm absolutely willing to agree to disagree.

[–] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago

I'm absolutely willing to agree to disagree.

This is called a "Thought-terminating cliche", specifically this one: I'm entitled to my opinion

"Where an objection to a belief is made, the assertion of the right to an opinion side-steps the usual steps of discourse of either asserting a justification of that belief, or an argument against the validity of the objection. Such an assertion, however, can also be an assertion of one's own freedom from, or a refusal to participate in, the rules of argumentation and logic at hand."

So, unlike you, I am not willing to "agree to disagree", because this is an intellectually bankrupt position. You are overreacting to concerns regarding schizophrenic people and being irrational because of a personal concern about perceptions of Autistic people, despite nobody saying anything about Autism (but you).

I am also on the spectrum, and I wish you would think before you drag Autism into this conversation, because Autistic people like us don't do crazy shit like this.