Is Bushie a "pretty smart cookie"?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

With his track record of falling for scams...lean no.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Don't autistic people tend to over analyze things and overthink situations.

For all of Bushie ' flaws that isn't one of them.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I'm not a big fan of internet diagnosis of autism in general, primarily because it's so overdiagnosed (there's a fine line between "autistic" and "being socially awkward and having nerdy interests" that the Internet can't seem to distinguish), but also because it's hard to do so for someone you only know on the internet (though in Bushie's case yes his personal history is more revealing than just message board posts) and also because accusations of that and mental illness in general have become too much of an ad hominem attack thing. But above all no one on the forum is qualified to make such diagnoses anyway. Yeah there's clearly something up with Bushie and he needs to see a psychiatrist about it. But I really hope in addition to that he pays no attention to the anti-Updaters with their own completely unqualified claims.

Also none of the advice given to Bushie has been all that bad, even if not entire what he needs, it's true there's more to this than "Bushie needs to work harder and watch less TV", but if you read Update you'll see people actually have been asking him to see a psychiatrist, and things like trying to steer him away from that A+ Certification thing, which absolutely no one in their right mind could possibly think was even a remotely good idea...which is exactly why literally no one besides Bushie did.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

As I've pointed out before, how many people DON'T have some sort of weird quirk or strange obsessive interest? The truth is anyone who lacks any traits that commonly get accused of being autistic would actually just be a rather boring person.

Plus by the Internet standards for autism there are some jobs that you'd basically have to be autistic to do. Think of accountants just for starters. Is every single scientist working at CERN autistic? The average person off the street would probably find Atlas discussion on weird voting patterns in obscure counties to be more understandable than a CERN scientist trying to explain exactly what they do.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

It's actually fairly common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule