I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally of…
Ribbonfarm called this a couple years ago: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g... Specifically battlefront #8. He calls it consequential because the the neurodivergent/PC conflict highlights an inherent paradox in the PC worldview. Most applications of political correctness focus (at least on the surface) on defending a marginalized group against the verbal attacks of a privileged one. When a…
The social justice advocate's response to that is intersectionality: a defense mechanism of not engaging in advocacy that would benefit one oppressed group at the expense of another. They're not always great at this - some social conflicts are just difficult to actually make judgments on (e.g. Israel/Palestine). The thing is, though - I doubt "drop the autistics" is going to pick up steam in social justice circles. Autism, and neurodivergence in general, tracks very well with queer sexual orientations and gender identities. Social mores intended to enforce rigid gender roles and heteronormativity simply don't work on people who can't parse them. (The contrapositive of this is why there's a huge push for non-gendered children's toys.) Ergo, it's very unlikely that you'd see the social justice left tear itself apart like this, and more likely that you'd see people arguing that "drop the autistics" is bullshit.
I'm also going to point out that, as an autistic person myself, the stricter speech rules of the social justice left aren't terribly difficult to parse. The prior eras of social mores were far stricter because we didn't see them as coercive and thus didn't question their power, and it's somewhat troubling that people don't view it as an improvement from what we had before. It's sort of like how people coming from proprietary software sometimes argue that the GPL is non-free because it has some restrictions that don't conform to the unstated mores of proprietary licensing. Much of the reaction people have to these speech rules comes from two different places:
1. The people reacting to these rules are neurotypical, and used to invisible speech rules enforced by people with a common cultural heritage such that they wouldn't disagree on their unstated rules.
2. Many people in the social justice community are autistic (see above) and also had a hand in writing the rules. Of course, if people who can't parse social cues write the rules of a society, those rules are going to be explicitly stated rather than inferred.
In other words, the problem isn't that the social justice left is going to throw out neurodivergent people, it's that the social justice left is autistic, in cultural control, and writing the new rules of society in a way neurotypicals don't understand.
(Side note: #9 is a conflict that's been brewing in the back of my head for a while now. I love P2P tech but think the entirety of cryptocurrency has been a dead-end full of scams.)