He’s trying to normalise the idea of the US taking control of Canada. It’s utterly insane, but if he repeats it enough plenty of people will just switch off or subconscious accept that Canada “should” be part of the US.

Unfortunately if you’re high-masking they usually disagree with you and say you can’t possibly be autistic.

Burnout is a common experience for those of us with ASD. Autistic burnout in particular was only formally defined in 2019, even though the concept had existed for a couple of decades prior.

In your case I’m wondering if it’s the more classic occupational burnout since you’re feeling up to hobbies (which presumably you enjoy?) after just 48 hours away from work. My personal experience with autistic burnout is that it is really hard going and takes a long time to slowly climb out of.

I find it useful to distinguish between getting overwhelmed (which eventually will result in a meltdown) and burnout itself. Think of it this way: burnout drastically reduces the cognitive resources and energy you have available to deal with life. Effectively that means your available “bandwidth” to manage both sensory input and cognitively demanding situations is vastly reduced. That makes it much easier to get frustrated or overwhelmed. The reduction in cognitive resources also means that our ability to mask breaks down, so we more readily upset people (particularly NTs who don’t understand autistic behaviour).

On the work front, I can empathise with points #1 and #2 (not so much #3 as my interoception is apparently quite acute; if you struggle with determining your internal state then I recommended looking up some exercises to help with this, as you can improve it through practice). For years I was the single point of failure at my workplace so I was carrying a lot of stress. There were plenty of tasks that if I didn’t do them, nobody else could/would; there were also time-critical things that if I didn’t push myself to do in time, I would inevitably end up dealing with the clean-up. My manager did his best to work with me to reduce my workload (I even worked part-time for a while, much of work-from-home), but I was already too burnt out for this to enable me to recover. I eventually collapsed in a heap, prompting my employer to hire additional staff. My (very slow) staged return to work has started with just some knowledge-transfer and advice meetings so that they can continue working on the projects I’ve been involved with.

Determining when to return to work is not easy and it depends on how badly burnt out you are. If this is a repeated issue with your workplace, then I’d encourage you to talk to your manager/supervisor (if you can) to flag that the workload (and/or environment, if it provides high sensory input) is pushing you into burnout on a regular basis. It is in the interests of the business to avoid doing this, as it means you don’t work as effectively when you’re burning out and then have to take time off to recover. Usually employers can provide accommodations or restructure the work to some degree to help. The goal should be to avoid you burning out again, as not only is that the best for you and your health, but also gives your employer the best outcome (a productive, reliable employee).

You mention work-from-home, so that’s something to look into further - if your job allows (and your home environment is less demanding than your workplace), you could either try to get a regular WFH schedule or have a staged return to work starting with lots of WFH and slowly increasing the time in the office.

I don’t know if this applies to you, but I find meetings very draining and so avoiding back-to-back meetings is essential for me at the moment. If you have regular meetings, see if you can arrange with your colleagues to space them out a bit to give you time to recover inbetween.

On the home life front, prioritise your health. Sleep is crucial and anything that disrupts it must be addressed. After that focus on nutrition and exercise, but don’t push yourself - that only exacerabates burnout.

The toughest part of all of this is going to be learning to pace yourself. It takes time and practice to identify how much energy or bandwidth you have for a given day and how much you can realistically achieve without making the next day a write-off. Again, if you can look into some interoception exercises to help you better judge your internal state, I think it would help with this (and eventually help you prevent burning out again too).

This is very true. Several people who are close to me have mentioned feeling exactly this - that they had some personality defect, when in reality they were neurodivergent.

Unfortunately over the past 8+ years reality itself has demonstrated that it’s far too unbelievable to be a movie script.

Good to see sanity prevailing.

Next question is how the Trump administration will respond. My guess is that they’re not going to do anything about everyone they’ve deported illegally at this point.

It’s just British or Australian English.

The article itself notes that the mothers were not given adequate time and given the complexity of having children who are legally US citizens, it can be readily argued that due process was denied in these cases:

One of the US children removed from the country has “a rare form of metastatic cancer” and was deported without medication or medical consultations, the ACLU said.

Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project said the mothers weren’t given a fair opportunity to decide whether they wanted the children to remain in the United States. Willis said the 4-year-old and the 7-year-old were deported to Honduras within a day of being arrested with their mother.

The cruelty is the point.

If this gets to the courts and they determine that this was done illegally (which as far as I can tell it was), then I expect the Trump administration to refuse to do anything about it, just like they’re doing with Garcia.

Nice to meet you!

They’ve really doubled down on “evil is good and good is evil” (to paraphrase Isaiah 5:20).

The efforts to correct for historical systemic prejudice and provide actual equal opportunity (which is a step towards the meritocracy they claim to want) is painted as being evil, whilst a return to the “equal outcome” (for the rich and white, regardless of skill or effort) is represented as good. They have deliberately gotten the two scenarios backwards in that EO.

I think they’d start with the neurodiverse; a badge for them is more easily “explained” as “making it easy to identify people who need support”. That’s not what it would be used for, of course.

Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me. I expected something like this was coming.

Consigning Black people to live in filth is incompatible with serving all Americans with “dignity and respect,” unless Black people don’t count as Americans.

(emphasis mine)

Isn’t that the whole point?

His attorney said that as of 28 March, the day after his arrest, his F-1 visa was still active. [Harsono’s lawyer] Gad said the government revoked it without any notice to him, and then claimed he had overstayed. The revocation was backdated to 23 March and allegedly based on his 2022 misdemeanor conviction for graffitiing a semi-truck trailer. Gad said that this is not a deportable offense under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The completely unethical (and hopefully illegal, but I’m not familiar enough with US immigration law) behaviour by the government here clearly has one purpose: intimidate immigrants to get them to leave voluntarily.

Dr. Edwards should lose his medical licence and be banned from working with children forever. How sociopathic do you have to be to be working whilst knowing you are carrying one of the most infectious diseases in existence? This is utterly inexcusable, especially since he is supposedly a qualified doctor and should be well aware of the danger he is putting his patients in.

Finally a semblance of good news - confirmation of life. I’m not holding my breath that the Trump Administration will do anything to get him back, though.

They denied to let the visiting senator see him, so my gut feeling is that he’s been dead a while now, sadly.

I think you’re overgeneralising here. Those are genuine, high-priority concerns, but there are plenty of people (both in the real world protesting and online) who are concerned with the activity of the US government, amongst other things.

Firstly, I’m not American, so I have an outsider’s view of their impact on the world (albeit still a western one).

Secondly, I don’t think you’re going to get a clear yes/no answer to your questions. You’ve presented at least three different types of situation:

1. Citizens of a country (Israel) having restricted travel rights in a second country (US) due to objections raised by the second country with regards to how the first country (Israel) is treating a third group (Palestinians).
2. Wartime actions where a country (US) took action against an aggressor (Japan).
3. The violation of sovereignty of another nation (Iraq or Afghanistan) by a larger military power (US) due to terrorist activity and/or highly questionable security concerns (e.g. the false claim of WMDs in Iraq).

Each of these has different complicating factors and a different answer depending on whether you are looking at whether it would be understandable for a country to implement restrictions, or whether it would justifiable (particularly by some moral standard).

I feel like this is trying to ask if people have a consistent set of ethics or if they preference their own nation higher than others.