Mr. 0 said:
I mean, if Bob had the energy to put Chris on the other end of his belt in 2006 (and nip all that dumb shit in the bud), would you say corporal punishment is the worst thing for him (because we know Chris is a damn kid no matter the age).
Look man, I think there's a point here that you -- to be fair, not just you -- are missing. I have a learning disability called dyscalculia, which is potatoes compared to how different the autistic brain is, but the part of my brain responsible for arithmetic and simple algebra just does not work like yours does. Here I sit with a master's degree, on the first day of the year, and if you asked me what the date would be one week from today,
I would have to think about it. Later in the month I might wind up counting on my fingers, or using a calculator, and I might still get a wrong answer.
This is hard-"wired" (I hate the metaphor of brain wiring because it grossly oversimplifies things, but it's the one at hand). You could slap me for a week and it would not make me do long division, or apply the transitive property to some equation, any faster or better. In eighth-grade algebra in particular, I was pouring all of my mental energy into it, and my mother thought I was deliberately giving wrong answers to frustrate her. Holy hell. I would have given up state secrets if I'd had them just to get her the fuck off my back about it. I was trying. I was trying to do it right. I just wasn't believed about having a bona fide learning disability.
Now, in Chris's case, the different "wiring" comes from a toxic combo of nurture, endlessly discussed here,
and nature. Beating him would have done nothing to stop his insistence on communicating with his perceived fandase; his peculiar use of language while doing so; or, for that matter, the sensory defensiveness that led him to augment his

necklace with a Wilson wrist warmer at the back. Some of his difficulty is acquired, but he has numerous innate problems with cognition and social interaction that made him not understand, for example, the unfortunate effect of the Attraction Sign, or that putting
Mary Poppins in a dating profile would be seen as weird. Some people, through no fault of their own, do not immediately pick up on this shit like a baby bird learning to fly, and no amount of corporal punishment would speed up their understanding, in the same way that mascara won't unclog your drain. It just doesn't work like that.