It’s interesting to muse about the larger picture here. What is it that makes autism so dangerous? To me it looks like part of an almost spiritual war against empathy/compassion by traumatized individuals trying to fight their own Jungian Shadow.
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
― G. M. Gilbert, American psychologist who worked on the Nuremberg trials
Even autistic people can be jerks. Elon Musk doesn't have empathy because he's an asshole not because he's autistic.
No one I've heard is saying Musk is an asshole because he's autistic. It's Musk himself that's making that claim by attempting to use it as a cover for his asshole moves.
It's only like my opinion, but I think a man who describes his father as a "terrible human being" has enough awareness for self awareness unless the claimed disorder is something self obsessed like narcissism.
That quote was massively taken out of context. His argument was that the west has too much empathy, not that empathy is bad, period. He even specifically prefaced that with saying that empathy is a good thing.
Musk: Yeah, [Gad Saad is] awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
To me, “suicidal empathy“ (if that exists) is a lack of empathy (for self) — not “too much of it“. It’s not zero sum.
You could go as far as to say that empathy only occurs in moments where there is no me or other, just an “us“. Which includes me.
His statements and behavior make me question whether he really experiences empathy or whether he lost that too early in his life to consciously remember.
>To me, “suicidal empathy“ (if that exists) is a lack of empathy (for self) — not “too much of it“. It’s not zero sum.
"Empathy" in the form of thoughts and prayers might not be zero sum, but that's probably not the "empathy" that Musk is talking about. He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.
Like l said, I doubt he experientially knows what he’s talking about. Or he means what he says and expresses the desire to paint empathy in a bad light and by that continue to dehumanize the other to justify violence.
Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.
>Like l said, I doubt he experientially knows what he’s talking about.
What does that even mean? You can't defund USAID without yourself first going on a trip to Africa to dig a well?
>Or he means what he says and expresses the desire to paint empathy in a bad light and by that continue to dehumanize the other to justify violence.
How did you go from "so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" to "dehumanize the other to justify violence"? Presumably he's talking about refugees and foreign countries, but there's a pretty wide gulf between putting the interests of your own polity ahead of others, and "dehumanize the other to justify violence".
>Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.
I doubt Musk is upset all the people tweeting prayer emojis whenever a natural disaster hits a foreign country, when he's talking about "we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on".
> He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.
This is highly debatable. I would say it's not zero sum, because these costs further enrich the country in the long-run, just in not obvious ways. This is especially true for domains that naturally cross inter-country. Diseases don't care about borders, so it's to your benefit to prevent outbreaks outside of your country.
You might not agree with his statement even with the full context, but at the very least it's a very different statement than the initial quote of "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy".
There's a pretty big difference between "I think the west has too much empathy" and "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", even if both are directionally anti-empathy. It's not any different than "I think the US's free speech regulations are too lax" and "The fundamental weakness of the US is free speech". Even though both are directionally anti-free speech, and a free speech opponent would object both premises, it would be wholly irresponsible to paint someone who wants hate speech laws passed as the latter, when their position is more accurately portrayed as the former.
He literally says "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy" at one point in the larger quote, while your comment makes it sound like that was a paraphrase of his comment.
>He literally says "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy" at one point in the larger quote
I never claimed that he didn't say that, only that selectively quoting that part conveys an entirely different message than if you quoted the whole thing.
> They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization,
Who are? Did he say?
Sorry for not listening through the whole thing. There's a lot of pointless rambling going, which I guess is something inherent to the format more than it is to him.
Hence "Western". Makes sense. Same reason why Europe is doomed and the US will flourish. It's never that simple though, is it? There are numerous counter examples all thoughout history.
How does "there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" violate "Kantian ethics"?
Also, if we accept that "dogwhistle" framing, what should we make of the average leftist commenter saying that greed/inequality is a weakness of US's economic system? Maybe that's actually a "dogwhistle" for hyper-collectivism, radical Bolshevism, and stepping over rich people? Or is the "dogwhistle" characterization only a thing you apply to the Other Side?
In Kantian ethics stealing a loaf of bread is wrong even if done by or for a starving person. In utilitarian ethics stealing bread in that context would be justified. The "civilizational suicide by empathy" narrative is rooted in a utilitarian ethics--empathy is good until the negative consequences outweigh the positive; whereas in Kantian ethics if empathy is good, it's always good, and if that possibly leads to civilizational suicide, so be it.
I think that's the point the poster was trying to make. I make no claim about what the practiced ethics are of Musk, of the cultural circles he travels in, or of the cultural circles he opposes (e.g. identity politics, social justice movements, etc); or even that Musk or any of these circles practice a consistent or coherent set ethics.
That's one take. A counter argument is that utilitarian calculus is highly subjective, individually and socio-culturally, resulting in movements like Social Darwinism, Eugenics movement, etc. And someone like Musk might even argue the ethics of identity politics and contemporary social justice movements are fundamentally similar to those earlier examples, relying on a present day calculus (whether nominally utilitarian or otherwise) that in time, if not already, will prove no less backward, unempathetic, and harmful. Kantian ethics is one attempt to restrain that kind of unconscious, self-serving discretion.
You can go back and forth, poste, riposte, ad nauseum. Abstract ethical philosophy and discourse are their own kind of tarpit, in some ways worse than the rhetoric behind the modern culture wars. To avoid getting drawn into them--the tarpits, if not the philosophies themselves--it pays to know how to identify them and how they interact.
The problem with being on the public stage, is that Every. Single. Word. They. Utter. has the ability to be reframed. With Deepfakes, they can now have words put in their mouths, in a realistic manner.
That's why so many politicians and C-suite execs are "weasely." They learn to choose their words carefully. The Fed Chair can crash the markets, by wincing at the wrong time.
I empathize with him (see what I did, there?), but he's in a position where his utterances can either do great good, or great harm.
Many of these mega-rich folks keep their mouths shut, and that's for a reason.
That is not what happened here. The quote is completely consistent with who Musk is. And is exactly the same in the context. This is not Musk misspoking and experiencing unfair consequences.
It is Musk saying something that is perfectly consistent with everything he does.
It's crazy we got all those lessons figured out, clear as can be and right in the history books, that every kid is supposed to learn. And yet, here we are, back to square one.
As if most college students (never mind kids) know anything about history worth a dime? They couldn't tell you who did what to whom in WWII, never mind getting into any nuance. At best the majority misremembers some stuff they "learned" from movies.
Just because we sit them in front of textbooks and lectures for 8 hours a day for 12 years (plenty of kids drop out of highschool or take fairly nonstandard "get to work" programs that de-emphasize education.) doesn't mean they learn anything.
Plenty of kids sat next to me in precalc learning how to calculate mortgage rates and then complain that school doesn't teach useful skills like how to calculate a mortgage. At the end of the day, learning cannot be forced. You can put all the info in front of the person you want, they can just ignore it.
This is especially true after Bush Jr. made it impossible to hold kids back, which was the primary way we worked around a stubborn kid.
We are roughly one generation after No Child Left Behind, and a lot of kids have been educationally left behind. IMO this is not coincidence. Good teachers knew right away the negative effects that program caused.
Obama reformed NCLB a bit, but did not fix the part that incentivizes schools to prefer just pushing kids forward if they are struggling.
To be fair, even though I never had trouble in school and was generally a good student, I had a very poor and surface level understanding of fascism (what it is, what causes it) until I actually decided to learn about it a few years ago. I wonder how much of it is simply due to public education's incompetency (I live outside the US) or because of a willfulness to not engage with the root causes of fascism (material conditions, etc.) from fear of repercussions by the right-wing.
Conditioning is a powerful thing. I'm autistic, but my mother refuses to accept it, every 5/10 years she comes up with a new reason I'm not autistic, the latest one is that it's "hip to have autism now", hah. I think she thinks it's a failing of her parenting maybe, who knows, but the older I get, the more I realize lack of empathy does not arise spontaneously, but from repeated conditioning to mistrust empathy itself. When my mother wanted to be a special needs teacher, my grandmother couldn't understand why she wanted to look after "spastics".
My former best friend, despite having $100MM++ is paranoia about kindness, he theoretically should be liberate to express generosity, but his father taught him anyone being kind or receiving kindness is about someone taking from him. His father’s voice has become his own internal voice creating huge amounts of mistrust and suspicion, ultimately robbing him of any connection unless he paid for it directly, so zero meaningful connection.
In higher support needs, reduced autonomy (to the point of total dependency for ASD 3 cases), plus reduced social and intellectual capacity. Plus several commorbidities, in mental and bodily health.
It can be beneficial for society to have laser-focused and social-consensus challenging individuals with higher intelligence, but that's hardly the only or even the main way autism manifests - just the pop culture popular one (and the one whose members can more easily advocate for themselves, and present their cases as the sole representative, summed up in the "autism is a superpower" slogan).
You’re really wondering why the administration that’s rejected habeas corpus, a right which pre-dates the Magna Carta in our system of law, is creating lists of undesirables?
That the parents of severe cases eventually pass away and unless they figure out to take the kid with them, he is condemned at best to a life in mental health institutions - and usually they make One Flew Upon Cuckoo's Nest look like Teletubbies.
Add to that more and more people are single kids and usually born out of geriatric pregnancy (which also increases the chances of autism somewhat) - aka above 35, so they really are alone.
There are very good state and society interests in preventing autism. Mental disabilities are way worse than physical in today's society. Thankfully not every case is severe. But severe one's do exist.
He’s being incredibly clear that when he talks about people that have trouble participating in society, he is talking about the 26% of people with profound autism.
Online autism conspiracy theory channels turn this into some kind of eugenics purge.
He's not being "incredibly clear" because he speaks about autistic people with one broad brush.
And in calling this "a conspiracy theory" and "some kind of eugenics purge", you seem to be intentionally downplaying the very real and very legitimate worries of autistic people, a group who has historically been subjected to eugenics purges in the past, which started using the language and rationale Kennedy espouses.
If Kennedy wants to be taken seriously and with good faith, he should put autistic people and experts in charge of this effort. That he doesn't speaks volumes about his true intentions.
Sorry if that sounds like a conspiracy theory to you, but autistic people like myself see the obvious parallel here and we aren't going to just be quiet and allow it to happen again.
No, this is always the defense people come up when RFK says something insane.
It's not deepfake, it's not edited, he is just actually a crazy person. Yes, he truly believes HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Yes, he truly believes vaccines don't work.
We should not be listening to him on anything, let alone things that actually matter. There are people living on the side of the road with more credibility and reasonableness than him. And, we will not be gaslit by his defenders who, I can only assume, are equally as insane as him.
It’s edited. Watch the full thing, he says ‘to be clear I’m not talking about (high functioning people)’ but rather a group of children who seem to have a sudden onset of autistic symptoms at two. Seriously just watch it.
As far as I can tell I've heard all the words from that man and his surrogates. What are the words that have been said which I have not heard, which would clear all this up?
So about 25% of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet trained, and have other stereotypical features, headbanging, tactile and light sensitivities, stimming, toe-locking, et cetera.
Aside from not being toilet trained, the rest of that applies to me. So am I "profoundly autistic"? I mean, maybe but at the same time I don't think that's really what he means. So you can see my confusion. Is he talking about me or isn't he? Because he's listing off things I do all the time, and calling the these features of "profound autism".
He also says:
"with full-blown autism, headbanging, non-verbal, non-toilet trained, stimming, toe walking, these other stereotypical features. "
Again, not incredibly clear by my reading. Very broad brush being applied here.
In the whole speech, he doesn't refer to autism as a "spectrum" disorder once until he's prompted by a reporter in those terms. Telling, because he clearly views autism as a binary of high/low functioning or high/low needs, which it's not. So again, painting autism with a broad brush.
Then there's this:
Then you have to ask yourself, why is it so pervasive? Why has it been thrown up against us for so many years? Clearly, there are industries. This is coming from an environmental toxin. Somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food. It’s to their benefit to normalize it, to say, this is all normal. It’s always been here.
Yeah, so let me get this straight, RFK says this and yet it's the autism community who you think are the conspiracy theorists?
Yes, I would consider an adult that bangs their head to stim to have profound autism.
Yes, RFK said that and then I do think some extreme members of the autism community are conspiracy theorists. Literally nothing that he has said that you have quoted indicates that he wants to create concentration camps or kill everyone or anything else said on the autism community channels we have both read.
Let's assume they were planning to create concentration camps, do you naively expect them to publicly admit that in plain language or how do you think that would look?
Even the Nazis didn't have the political capital to plainly admit to their own atrocities. They tried to keep it secret for as long as they could, then they denied the camps' existence, denied the abuse in those camps, denied the genocide, falsified medical records to make it appear that people died from pneumonia and unfortunate medical complications.
In reality they were injecting children with pathogens, experimenting on them, torturing them, starving them and ultimately killing them. In the end they even tried to make their families pay for their "care". Officially, nobody knew anything terrible was happening. Unofficially, everyone was complicit.
Normally I agree but Godwin's law is officially suspended the moment they threw a Nazi salute.
Regardless, Godwin's Law is a thought terminating cliche, which is shielding us from the truth. The person you responded to wasn't calling them Nazis (although I am), they were asking you to engage in a hypothetical to try to make sense of a problematic issue: for 70 years since the Holocaust we have heard the slogan "never again", as a cry to the future to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again.
The question to all those who hear that cry is: how? How do you prevent a holocaust from happening again?
The problem the parent is pointing out is that the perpetrators of a holocaust don't say that is their intent. They will say they are "punishing criminals", "deporting illegals", "purging drug dealers", "cleaning up the streets", "bringing order", "causing peace", "uniting the nation", "restoring glory" etc.
Therefore in order to prevent a holocaust, one has to necessarily stand in the way of people who claim to be doing good. No one doing a holocaust claims to be doing evil.
If you wait for undeniable proof of a holocaust before you act to stop it, you will fail. That kind of proof only comes after the fog of war has cleared.
Therefore if you really want to prevent a holocaust, you have to do so before they consolidate power, before they operationalize their intent, at the stage when they still have plausible deniability, and when they can make their plans seem reasonable. You prevent them from laying the groundwork for the holocaust, despite all the deniers.
Trying to equate any random hand gesture that just happens to have their arm extended at some point isn't fooling anyone, but it's a strong signal for your true feelings on the matter so I appreciate the time-saving part of it.
This would be my cue to dip out of this conversation, and I will actually stay out -- if random people reading through these replies feel compelled to tell you this, and your response is to put a crown on your own head, I will leave you to it.
A random low karma troll account that believes in the same conspiracy theory you do spouted garbage in response to me pointing out that dns_snek has revealed their own inconsistency, then I replied. The crown is mine, I did not place it there.
What I had said was "shows the same thing as the link I provided". In the link is a video of a neo nazi group doing a Nazi salute, which consists of two strokes:
1) hand on heart
2) thrust hand outward from body
Which is exactly the 1-2 gesture that Musk makes. Juxtaposing the neo Nazi group and Musk doing the salute at the same time makes clear just how similar they are.
As for your proof, what you have brought is as follows:
1) AOC waving her hand across her body three times. When juxtaposed next to the neo Nazis, it's clear what she is doing is not what they are doing.
2) Tim Walz pats his chest twice and then outstretches his hand in a wave. This again is not the 1-2 gesture heart->outstretch arm that the neo Nazis do.
3) A still of a man with his arm outstretched. Obviously not the 1-2 motion because there is no motion at all.
So far, you have no examples that demonstrate people doing the gesture that the neo Nazis are doing. Yet we do have a video of Musk doing the same gesture the neo Nazis are doing.
But fine, for the sake of argument, let's take the best example, Tim Walz, and just presume what he did is exactly a Nazi salute. What I had said was, now the presumption is Nazi until proven otherwise. So then let's look at both men and see if they exhibit other prevalent behaviors that Nazis exhibit.
What are Nazis best known for? Unbridled megalomania. Is Elon Musk a megalomaniac? Yes, he clearly is. He's quoted as saying empathy is a weakness. He's quoted saying if we want minerals there's nothing other countries can do to prevent us from orchestrating a coup to get them. His leadership style is decidedly authoritarian. Checking a lot of Nazi boxes.
Meanwhile Tim Walz is not a megalomaniac. He was democratically elected and follows the rule of law. He ran in a free and fair election, lost, and didn't foment an insurrection. He leads by example and building consensus rather than fiat and sheer force of will. Not a lot of Nazi behavior exhibited...
> But I bet you have already seen them and you just don’t care
Another wrong bet, I've seen everything under the sun and nothing yet has come close the what Musk is doing. That's because Musk is doing the real actual genuine thing, and these "gotchas" are people bending over backwards to try to normalize genuine Nazis.
> What I had said was "shows the same thing as the link I provided".
Which showed Elon raising his hand.
> In the link is a video of a neo nazi group doing a Nazi salute, which consists of two strokes:
> 1) hand on heart
> 2) thrust hand outward from body
Oh you wanted the specific 'new' gesture of some weird group of people, rather than a traditional Nazi salute? Why is that?
> 1) AOC waving her hand across her body three times.
So raising her palm in a traditional nazi salute. You don't want a traditional nazi salute though, you want the new nazi salute.
> When juxtaposed next to the neo Nazis, it's clear what she is doing is not what they are doing.
Yes it’s only similar to traditional nazis.
> 2) Tim Walz (1) pats his chest twice and then (2) outstretches his hand in a wave.
> This again is not the 1-2 gesture heart-
>outstretch arm that the neo Nazis do.
Sure looks like it to me. I added one and two to help you spot it.
> What I had said was, now the presumption is Nazi until proven otherwise.
That's silly. You know that's silly.
> What are Nazis best known for? Unbridled megalomania.
This doesn't seem logical. Many people want power, and are not nazis.
> He's quoted as saying empathy is a weakness.
No. He is saying people exploit empathy. You know that and are truncating the quote.
> He's quoted saying if we want minerals there's nothing other countries can do to prevent us from orchestrating a coup to get them.
lol the "we will coup whoever we want?" remark? It was a joke, in reply to an online conspiracy theorist that tweeted "You know what wasn’t in the best interest of people? The U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.". As on online conspiracy theorist you should already know this.
> Meanwhile Tim Walz is not a megalomaniac. He was democratically elected
Wait - he wanted power? I thought you meant that meant he was a megalomaniac?
> didn't foment an insurrection
Nobody fomented an insurrection. Some dickheads had a riot, even though Trump told them to stop. Stop watching MSN and CNN - the lefts equivalent of Fox - and read something mainstream center like WSJ.
> (Walz doesn't rule by fiat)
How do you know? Do you work for Walz?
>> But I bet you have already seen them and you just don’t care
> Another wrong bet, I've seen everything under the sun
So a right bet. You have seen AOC and Walz make salutes that equally could be determined to be Nazi by the same silly comnspiracy theorists, don't care because you have decided Elon is a nazi, though a series of bizarre twists like:
- "only a specific red shirted neo nazi group salute counts so AOCs salute is OK but Elons salute is not"
- "Walz two part salute was different from Elon's two part salute"
- A deliberate misquote about 'empathy is a weakness'
- Another misquote from Elon replying to an online conspirary theorist
You manipulate the truth. If one were to following your own logic, since Nazis manipulate the truth, they would conclude that you are a Nazi.
Look, a lot of reasonable people are identifying what Musk did as a Nazi salute. The worldwide drop in Tesla sales and the massive protests prove that. I don't have to do a single thing to make Musk look like a Nazi, he does that all himself. It's up to you if you want to spend your time defending clearly indefensible actions. You really should save your breath though, because words from you won't convince me; at this point I'll need to see actions from Musk to believe otherwise.
But it is notable that you are willing to bend yourself into knots to justify Musk. This reply is the most substantive one you've written in this whole conversation, by a wide margin. Most others have been perfunctory, but you really warmed up your keyboard with this one. Like the other poster, I find that very interesting and telling.
> In 2023, Godwin published an opinion in The Washington Post stating "Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you." In the article, Godwin says "But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy."
> He’s being incredibly clear that when he talks about people that have trouble participating in society
Is that supposed to make it better? This distinction between autistic individuals who are productive and those who have trouble participating in society goes back to Nazi Germany where they sent the latter group to "reform camps" and "hospitals" to be murdered and eradicated. That's where the distinction of "Asperger syndrome" comes from.
2) propose to send them to a concentration camp where where they will be treated
Then you had better damn well be prepared to answer specifically how what you're doing is different from what the Nazis did. If you're not prepared to deal seriously and substantively with that very relevent historical precedent, you have no business proposing the registry and the camps in the first place.
This entire term so far has been one ratchet after another of "they will never do that" followed promptly by "wow, they just did that, nothing we can do about it now except deal with the fallout!"
On the one hand they've proposed the autism database.
On the other hand they've proposed the "wellness farms" for drug addicts.
All that's left is for the right hand to start picking up what the left hand is putting down and we are there.
Moreover, they have been demonstrating that they're willing to torture those they consider "subhuman". Look at how they are treating immigrants.
Autistic people are used to being abused in awful ways, so when we see those immigrants being abused and abducted by the Trump administration, it's not very hard to see they would be willing to do this to autistic people. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize they're all awful people who are currently unrestrained by the law and general decency.
The conspiracy theory, such as it is, is this: these people look like Nazis, they sound like Nazis, and they act like Nazis, so their proposals related to autism are to be taken with a giant Nazi sized grain of salt.
Are you thinking about the guy the politicians are meeting with, that jumped the border and has two separate domestic violence cases? Agreed that somebody isn’t seeing the full picture here.
No, I'm thinking specifically about the student that was abducted off the street and terrorized. But you bring up another good example of immigrant cruelty. I'm aware of the context you mention, but that doesn't change the fact that with what they're doing, they are highlighting and putting on full display the level of cruelty they are willing to engage in as they wield power.
It's only a matter of time before that level of depravity is directed at American citizens on American soil.
Also I thought you were going to bow out of this discussion?
I bet that didn't happen. Someone on a visa probably waved a Hamas flag or told people how they can support Hamas and then had their visa appropriately yanked. I have no idea, I just know BS when I read it.
Edit: oh you're the same person from the other thread. Figures.
This kind of display terrorizing force directed at normal people for exercising their speech is exactly the kind of excessive force that autistic people are hypervigilant about. We can see they started doing this first to illegal immigrants, then they moved on to legal residents, then they moved to citizens like US citizen immigration attorneys and the us-born children of migrants. If this trajectory holds, they will eventually turn on actual US citizens as a whole.
> Online autism conspiracy theory channels turn this into some kind of eugenics purge.
No, people in leadership positions have a duty to lead - justifying themselves and attempting to get buy in from everyone. Especially so on sensitive topics that we're societally squeamish about due to some very real historic horrors.
I know the memetic field is a bit hazy from the sensationalist media pushing divisive whole-cloth nonsense like Joe Biden is going to make you eat bugs etc, but there is a huge difference when that schizophrenia is actively encouraged from the top.
So this idea that we're just supposed to trust the Trump administration, when many of their actions have already been completely unhinged and senseless (eg huge tariff taxes), when Trump's last time at the helm was completely divisive and destructive, and when he's picked the most unhinged type of charlatans for his cabinet this time around? Sorry, trust needs to be earned - especially the amount required for pulling on rightfully sensitive threads - and they're not even doing the basics of attempting to.
> sensationalist media pushing divisive whole-cloth nonsense like Joe Biden is going to make you eat bugs
This is exactly the same thing. In the full speech RFK makes it clear who he is and is not talking about, I’m torn on whether our leaders need to rewrite their speeches for sound bites.
Maybe? I haven't listened to his speech directly, because I'm burnt out from having to dissect the sheer volume of dog whistles this movement relies upon.
Maybe that's a civically irresponsible take, but it is extremely civically irresponsible for Trump to cause this fatigue by sowing division to create a segment of fervent support. We've had too many years of "4d chess" with everyone trying to read good intentions and coherent reasoning out of the word salad. At this point most reasonable people are only trying to read the tea leaves to know how they might have to protect themselves.
And sure, RFK is not Trump. Except it's clear Trump has no concept of delegation or keeping his hands off of something. Even if RFK has the purest of motivations, it's very easy to see Trump seeing a few edgelord social media comments saying we need to send $whomever to the camps as well, noticing that the topic "drives engagement", and running away with the idea. At this point it's just generally bad to be in the crosshairs of state legibility in any way.
This is like saying what makes cerebal palsy so dangerous. Why is trying to find out causes so dangerous? The dangers of empiricism in the 21st century.
In the UK, there are regions where 50% of children born in the early 2000s have special needs, and more children than adults are claiming disability benefits. It is going to have a very big impact on the labour market when 20-30% of these cohorts cannot work and, therefore, need to obtain income support from everyone else.
> It is going to have a very big impact on the labour market when 20-30% of these cohorts cannot work
"Cannot work" has more to do (imo) with the American Welfare Cliff where if you accept disability, you're forced to not have a job because if you make even a small piddling of money (it's something like $600/mo), you lose all your disability.
It's very disgusting, imo, and rejecting people's admission of a very real struggle they have because admission "does more harm than good" is, itself, harmful.
This is an interesting narrative. I think competition has something to do with it in our modern society. If I work at a company and someone is so competitive that I end up getting fired for whatever reason. I'm not going to all of a sudden care what happens to that person. Because they didn't care what happens to me. So you extrapolate this to the societal level, mix in the different cultural and clan ideological backgrounds of the occupants on the society and you can see how autism is a scapegoat for side effects of competition in many levels of our lives. Then you add the time dimension into the mix and yeah, maybe it looks like autism but maybe it's just, hey were all competing in many different ways and at some point. You stop giving a f*^k.
> It’s interesting to muse about the larger picture here.
I love the idea that, upon seeing the government compiling a database of undesirables under the pretense of fighting autism(?), one can zoom out and discover that the “big picture” is, uh, about autism. That is like watching The Sixth Sense and then writing about how it is a movie about the challenges of being a bald guy.
an interesting book related to this discussion is "Speed of Dark" by Elisabeth Moon. It tells the story of an autistic person and their struggles while faced with the possibility of a "cure"
A tenant is somebody paying to lease property, for example if you have a landlord, you're their tenant, and by analogy e.g. an Azure tenant is an organisation within the Azure cloud with a unique identifier.
A tenet is a belief or principle that is important to some group, for example the IETF's Best Common Practice series are not just RFCs describing a protocol or technology but instead statements of principle such as BCP 188 "Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack".
It's also helpful shorthand. One of the reason there is no RSA KEX† in TLS 1.3 is that under BCP 188 obviously aiding bulk surveillance technology isn't acceptable, so when you have a liaison from the ACLU saying yes, get rid of RSA KEX and a representation from EDCO (Enterprise Data Center Operators, basically big old financial companies) saying it'll cost them too much money to lose RSA KEX so it should be reinstated in the late drafts for the RFC, there was no need to re-explain in great detail why the ACLU are right here because there's already a document explaining to anybody who is new to this.
† The RSA Key Exchange goes like this: We get the public key of a server from their certificate which they sent us, we pick a symmetric key at random and we encrypt our chosen key using that public key with the RSA algorithm, so that only the legitimate owner of the certificate can decrypt it, then we send that encrypted key to the server. Because they know the Private Key corresponding to the public key in the certificate they can decrypt the symmetric key we sent. This symmetric key is used for all further communication. This means if say, the Mad King's Secret Police obtain a copy of the RSA private key for the server at any time the Secret Police can decrypt every communication, even if the communications they're decrypting happened weeks, months or years before they obtain the key.
The funny thing is it is the autists, who don't respond well to emotional appeals. Is that all it is? That it is harder to influence high functioning ones?
Was he ever diagnozed? Because all his success is charizma and social skills based. This claim appears only when he needs to be excused. Also, it is super possible to be a harmful asshole and autist at the same time.
Musk also do not care about morals, ethics or laws based appeals.
I do not think he ever was. As you note, most of the 'accusations' come up without any real evidence. It is all basically the same story as with most remote diagnosis of all politicians that 99% talk show hosts play with their audiences.
FWIW, I personally do not think he has autism. I do think his mind works differently from a good chunk of the population though.
The previous silicon valley giants were to a large degree followers of Ayn Rand. This society selects, grooms and idealises a certain psychological profile.
A cadre of billionaires appears determined to institute fascism in the United States; there’s a very real chance they will succeed. Meanwhile, the climate crisis threatens the long-term survival of our species, yet efforts to steer us away from self-destruction are being actively sabotaged by the fossil fuel industry. This is to say nothing of the warmongering with China, another nuclear power.
The concentration of wealth (and by extension, power) really has become an existential threat to humanity.
More often than not, it's the other way around. Being born in the bourgeoisie, like Trump and Musk, grooms you into a certain way of thinking. You're told your whole life you are exceptional, above everyone else. No wonder they turn out like that. Read up on both of these guys' educations if you're interested in this.
Both Trump and Musk may have been born into “bourgeoisie“, but the connecting and relevant factor here is a highly traumatizing childhood with highly traumatized parents.
I don't know why you put bourgeoisie in quotes like it's a ridiculous concept.
With the kind of analysis you give we're stuck with surface level "oh they're just a bad batch", when they're pure products of a system that makes series of them. It's not like they are thousands just like Trump, ready to step in if he loses power.
The bourgeoisie has a material interest in installing fascism, which is why we're here. Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg are among the only ones to profit from the current circus.
It's not the first time it happens either, this has been proven times and times again. Look up the relations of Hitler and Mussolini with the capitalist class of their times.
I am not saying them having a shitty childhood had no influence on their politics, simply that it is not nearly enough to understand our current state of affairs.
From my understanding, it is not wealth that creates sociopathy, it is a traumatic childhood. For me it points to the origin, and thus the fix, which is why I find that distinction not only relevant but crucial. After studying a broad body of literature around the connection between trauma and violence and politics, I do believe this would indeed be “nearly enough to understand the current state of affairs“. What connects Hitler and Mussolini and Trump and Putin is not wealth but severe early childhood violence.
But by what mechanism can they attain power? That's what matters. Many sociopaths remain in the shadows.
Material support from the oligarchy absolutely connects Hitler, Mussolini, Trump and Putin. It is how they find the funding to get into power, how media is made to relay fascist propaganda 24/7, etc.
Serving the interests of the capital class, and only theirs, is what defines and enables fascism.
Some people considered being a jew abnormality and found their way to fix it.
We're moving same direction, mostly by people wishing for a strong arm, and being consumed by hate. And it's definitely not empathy and compassion in play here.
> Some people considered being a jew abnormality and found their way to fix it.
They were wrong. Does that mean that human developmental abnormalities don't exist and we shouldn't be looking for ways to prevent them? Of course not.
I can't believe you're making me defend RFK, but characterizing this as being motivated by "hate" is completely absurd. RFK is a kook, but he's a kook motivated by compassion and empathy. His entire career has been driven by compassion for people affected by environmental poisons. And the people in his camp are crunchy granola parents who can't analyze statistical data, who are grasping at straws trying to find out why their kid has a developmental abnormality that science doesn't have a ready explanation for.
Are you referring to the Trump government's treatment of trans people?
RFK views autistics as undesirables, so it's absurd to believe that he'll be any nicer to us.
> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”
What makes more sense is that he's collecting our personal information for imprisonment and execution.
>> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”
This is true of people with severe autism. I know someone whose autism is severe enough she'll probably never be able to live independently. Doesn't everyone view that medical condition--the condition, not the person--as undesirable? Doesn't everyone view being healthy as better than being unhealthy?
I have ADHD. I'd rather not have ADHD. I take a pill every day to control it. My kid has it too. He'll have to take a pill every day for the rest of his life. I'd love to avoid that outcome. Avoiding disease is a good thing!
Your comparison makes no sense. Bangladeshi Americans, as a group, are normal and healthy. They don't suffer from a medical condition that could be cured.
But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.
> Your comparison makes no sense. Bangladeshi Americans, as a group, are normal and healthy. They don't suffer from a medical condition that could be cured.
I was trying to give you a sense of why I interpret his comments as a threat. He's described all of us as if we're a burden when I've been supporting myself for decades.
Some autistics would want a cure, but others feel that their perspective is equally as valid as neurotypicals. They don't see themselves as sick and in need of a cure.
> But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.
My main impairments are face blindness and a severe difficulty with reading facial expressions - I'm in the bottom 5% of the population. I would happily take a cure for either of these if it was offered. If it's a more general personality change, then I'm not interested. I'm comfortable with who I am.
There isn't an opt-out for me and there's a long history of eugenics in this country, that's why I'm concerned about this.
And I'm saying you shouldn't compare people of different ethnicities to people with medical conditions. I'm normal where I'm from. My skin color is an adaptation to the tropical climate I'm from. It's not a medical condition that's maladaptive to normal functioning, or something that ideally we could cure.
Your use of the term "eugenics" is nonsensically broad. Society should seek to cure diseases and maladaptive medical conditions. That's not "eugenics."
Your problem is that you fail to understand that autism isn't a disease, it's a neurodivergence, their brains are just wired slightly differently. Many autists live their whole lives without even suspecting of their conditions, and most of those who are aware of it live absolutely normal lives. The only way we could potentially "cure" autism is if we somehow altered peoples' brains while in the womb, if that's not eugenics I don't know what is.
Reducing the incidence of undesirable or maladaptive medical conditions is a good thing. That's why we have vaccines, for example. That's why we perform second trimester screening, for example.
This is why autistic people are wary of efforts to "cure" autism -- because the people leading the charge always use dehumanizing language to frame their cause. It becomes a moral imperative. "We have to cleanse humanity of this scourge! We have to save the children!"
And what do we have to do to accomplish this goal? The solutions are always the same: register us all in a database, send us to a camp or a farm for "curing", and prevent us from reproducing through forced sterilization and/or euthanasia.
Unless and until autistic people are in charge, then all such efforts to "cure" autism and "find the cause" should be treated with extreme skepticism.
The problem is not fixing diseases. The problem is what is defined as a disease or abnormality. The problem is people who are clearly choosing abnormalities based on politics, power grabs, and anti-science rhetoric.
Science and medicine is what has defined autism as a disease or abnormality. Science and medicine are telling us that the rates of these diseases are growing dramatically, for decades now.
RFK isn’t the one who made autism concern happen. My three year old’s teacher asked us to get him tested with the county for autism. It’s a very common thing parents are dealing with these days. I’d argue that what you’re saying is exactly backward. The medical community has defined a lot of normal behavior as autism.
Now, I agree RFK’s views on what’s causing autism are anti-scientific, and I doubt he’ll be able to figure out what’s causing it. But RFK has a platform because the medical community has diagnosed all these kids as autistic but doesn’t have an explanation for what’s causing it. So looks like RFK fill the void.
It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.
The fact that high functioning people like Asperger got merged with it and changed to a spectrum is precisely science at work, achieving to improve our understanding of the phenomenon. We previously believed that only the extreme cases were autistic, but we now understand that this limit was arbitrary and wrong, because autism is a broader spectrum of people with a wide range of possible characteristics.
Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently. The proof being that outside of a minority of extreme cases, autistic people does not have issues communicating or socializing with other autistic people.
Trying to categorize people as "normal" and "abnormal" and then pretending to "fix" the abnormal ones is dangerous and drifts towards eugenism, because there is not a single definition of normal, and there is probably not a single person on earth that is "normal".
If 97% of the population was autistic, then autistic people would not have any issues. The remaining 3% of what is currently considered neurotypical would be the ones having difficulties socializing, communicating and experiencing severe anxieties and psychological problems due to it.
This is why the solution is not to "fix" autism, but to help them find an environment where they can strive, be understood and live comfortably.
>It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.
I see this idea thrown around whenever this topic is brought up, but this is just a contemporary opinion of certain researchers and science commentators. It is both unprovable and unfalsifiable.
>Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently.
A teacher I had in high school has an adult child with severe autism who is still living with her, because he can't take care of himself. He's not simply functioning differently, nor is anyone else that has the condition so severely that they can't perform any job.
"We can be certain that autism rates have gone up for artefactual reasons—diagnosis, changing awareness and incentives, etc. rather than real increases in the number of people with autism—by exploiting policy changes. For example, above, I mentioned the Massachusetts saw autism reports increase 400% in one year due to a change in school reporting."
This is exactly the issue that I'm getting at, which is shared with the above user's assertion. We cannot be certain of any of this. Especially not because of some handpicked examples by the author. None of this is provable or falsifiable, even if a the handful of disparate examples picked by the author seem compelling. Besides the examples of reporting changes, the author's arguments almost wholly rely on untestable counterfactuals.
Also:
"A single piece of evidence indicates that there is no real epidemic of autism. As remarked in a review in a 2020 Nature Reviews Disease Primers article:
No significant evidence is available supporting that autism is rarer in older people, which provides further evidence against the suggestion that autism is increasing in prevalence over time."
This doesn't provide evidence of anything. The absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. This is just an argument from ignorance. This is little different from saying that there is no significant evidence that people 500 years ago had lower rates of being diagnosed with a given disease, therefore the rates of people with that disease were likely the same as now.
If you ask any high-functioning or late-diagnosed autistic person who knows about the topic, you can bet that he will tell you his family (parents and grand-parents included) shows the same signs of autism, but that they do not wish to aknowledge it or be diagnosed. These people will never be included in any proper statistics because they see themselves as "normal" or "just a little different", despite being widely known as "weird".
Previous generations didn't grow up with all the comfort that we have today, such as games, internet and technology, and thus didn't have as many ways to isolate themselves in more comfortable hobbies. Because of this, they could develop stronger masking skills, which helps them a bit more than current generations, but does not fix the problem and made the understanding of it more difficult.
What were the symptoms your 3 yr old were exhibiting to be asked to screen them? Was the teacher right to say something or are they handing out these diagnoses like candy?
He was a little speech delayed, has somewhat below age level fine motor function, can sight read a lot of words, and has some odd behaviors, like taking to his hand pretending its Toodles from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The county said he was borderline. There is some gaming of the system going on for sure. They said they were ready to diagnose him with something and give him an IEP if he were going to public school where he could get extra services, but since we’re planning to send him to private K-12 they recommended against it.
I’ll be honest, my first thought was that it was white women (everyone in this story besides me) overreacting. In our circle of friends, several of the kids are diagnosed with something on the spectrum. By contrast I don’t know a single person from my immigrant group whose child has a diagnosis. So I was skeptical. But ultimately, I figured that the teachers see dozens of these kids every year and I trust their judgment.
Yeah I have observed the same re: lack of immigrant mental health access/diagnosis, but it seems to be changing in subsequent generations that are more privy to mental health disorders in general. Why not help a child get accommodations they need to thrive in school, there is no shame in that in my opinion. It narrows/evens the playing field for neurodivergent folks who need a little more help to be their best selves in school.
>Science and medicine is what has defined autism as a disease or abnormality.
Not really. DSM is not really scientific, its more statistical.
You could make arguments that autism is actually evolutionary, as people who are on the spectrum in certain ways are often better in select areas than neuro typical people.
The administration's (and R party's) entire M.O. is now to find relatively small, easy-to-target demographic groups that can't fight back, exact cruelty on them to marginalize them even more or (in their view even better) stamp them out, and then go carve out another small, vulnerable group and repeat. We're going to see this pattern repeat over and over in the near future, and there will be many targeted groups.
My prediction will be that ADHD people are next. Only 2% of the population and the social conservative supporters of RFK Jr have always hated giving kids stimulants despite the clear evidence supporting its use. There is STILL an ideology among conservatives that the current crop of people being diagnosed as ADHD is "wrong" and that people "with ADHD" are just junkies abusing stimulants or otherwise "overprescribed", despite clear and obvious evidence that people diagnosed with ADHD struggle to get their medicine for utterly stupid reasons and that we objectively do not have the capacity to evaluate everyone who needs it.
They will claim that ADHD people are a drain on society and are unproductive and are just being lazy.
One thing this will do is disincentivize high functioning autists from identifying themselves as autists, which is a very good thing IMO. Just look at this channel https://www.youtube.com/@NationalAutisticSoc/videos. There is a lot of survivor-ship bias on this channel towards high functioning autists who can talk in front of a camera.
Just to give an idea to those not familiar with the difference between high functioning and low functioning autism, high functioning autists face problems like not being able to communicate properly some of the time, and low functioning autists face problems like not even being able to tell their caretaker which part of their body is in pain, or which kid in the group punched them.
Edit: The National Autistic Society is UK based but the situation is not that different in other countries.
Yup, these people are perfectly fine. They don't need to identify each other and band together. No one is targeting them[0]. They need to stop making mountains out of molehills[1]. It's not like anything bad has ever happened to these 'high functioning' whiners[2]. I mean who cares if they are 'treated' by withholding food to force them to pretend to not be traumatized[3]. They should understand that if they stop identifying with the label or as oppressed victims it will be better for them[4]. Just like all those people with drapetomania[5] who don't realize what's best is a tough hand to guide them. Don't you miss how things used to be?[6] Back when there was more tough love[7].
This will unpopular, but I would recommend that anyone who can manage it to avoid any sort of formal psychological diagnosis. Unless you strictly need it for medication, it is always something which could potentially drag you down. Anyone can use the DSM (alongside an actual doctor) to get something of an "informal diagnosis" which will help them understand themselves better and to work with a doctor to form coping strategies. The formal diagnosis could potentially be used against you in the future, whether it's related to autism or not. For some people as well, the formal diagnosis does not seem to help and instead feels like a modern form of astrology; it becomes part of their internal view of themselves, and they trap themselves within the boundaries of their diagnosis.
Autism, high functioning or not, rarely comes on its own. It often has comorbidities like PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder and ADHD. Many of these extra disorders, like the former 3 in my list happens due to how autistic people interact with the general society. Bullying, abuse, SA, etc are reported at higher than average rates by autistic people. A diagnosis often helps to deal with them and plan for the future. In addition, medication is used for these conditions. Autism doesn't really have a treatment as far as I know (could use a fact check). There are some therapies available, but they have limited effects.
Another matter is that 'high functioning autism' doesn't mean freedom from hardships. They learn and work differently and don't fit well in regular classrooms. If you search online, you'll find several hilarious accounts of puzzled and perplexed autistic students in their classrooms. Despite being 'high functioning', they really could use accommodations. This is true at home too. If you leave them alone, many would simply starve to death without even ordering food online. Another matter is 'masking' - something high functioning autistic people do in public. It makes them more approachable to others. But it also creates enormous cognitive loads that can later develop into other disorders. Diagnosis really helps in these cases.
It's interesting that you said this, because I know someone with a psychological problem and their therapist basically does something similar. The therapist just says he prefers not to label things, as it might get in the way more than help.
activities that would result in "identifying themselves as autists" include: seeking a diagnosis in the first place, getting the help of a mental health professional, frequenting support groups and forums, and wearing a fitbit or smart watch.
It's really not a good thing when people, high functioning or not, are forced to choose between getting the help they need and being targeted by their government.
Autistic or not, giving that kind of health information to private for-profit companies who collect that data to use it against you or sell to third parties was never a good idea even before the government wanted to take it for themselves.
"high" or "low" functioning is not a constant. I'm autistic and I've been low functioning and high functioning. I can hold a job and had a wife at one point. But sometimes circumstances in my life change my ability to function. Sometimes I will go periods where I can't speak, and this caused me to almost lose my job... but for the fact they knew I was autistic and had compassion for me.
I understand that sometimes people want high needs autistic people to be the only ones who are visible, because it perpetuates the (false) narratives people have about autistic people -- that we can't function in society, we are essentially children, we need to be "cured" to "save the children", but people need to realize this is a) a spectrum and b) your place within the spectrum is always in flux. Low functioning autistic people can become more high functioning with support, and high functioning autistic people who are abused can become low functioning very quickly.
Channels about autism also disproportionally cover people who are willing to talk about their autism. Recently I've been reading The Lost Girls of Autism. Something that stood out in the anonymous accounts is the fear of being "discovered" and the associated anxiety and depression. Since reading that I'm not super comfortable with the idea of incentivising high-functioning people to hide.
Autism is seen as a large and wide spectrum of many different symptoms all called "autism". Using terms like "high functioning autism" is probably not a helpful way to talk about some color on the spectrum, however.
Because it creates a binary when a) it's a spectrum and b) high/low functioning dichotomy is not a constant. Every day needs can be different. Sometimes people are low functioning during child hood and become more functioning into adulthood. Sometimes high functioning autistic people become low functioning later in life. Some people can function very well when they had adequate support but the can't function at all when support levels fall below a threshold.
Reducing the conversation to high/low functioning also limits people's understanding and compassion of autistic people. The sibling commenter to you said they believe high functioning autistic people don't deserve to have a say over matters concerning autistic people, which is incredibly troubling because that just becomes and avenue for silencing autistic people; if having the ability to speak up for yourself means your opinion isn't valid, then that gives license to use and abuse a population, as autistic people often are.
If the public face of autism is someone who needs no support or accommodations and is in fact very successful - people will understandably be confused when someone with the same diagnosis needs substantial support.
In my opinion, people need to learn - and in many things, already know - that things have scale. For example, with "pain": a bruise, cavities in teeth, kidney stones, migraines all hurt, but the level of effect on someone's life is vastly different.
Also, people have no problem minimizing the things as well, where pain again is a good example. In many situations, if it cannot be seen, secondary parties easily disregard it.
So, in conclusion, this confusion with the autism levels should not be a problem.
I assume that you don't have direct experience with autism? Success is a very misleading criterion. Even the very successful autistic people often suffer from significant distress. Level 1 autism (the most independent one), is also listed as requiring help. They too need accommodations - but it might be different from what you imagine. And their life situation can change drastically and dramatically at any stage.
Low functioning peers can't participate and high functioning peers shouldn't participate. So all discussions about autism should include only non-autistic people? Weird logic doesn't compute!
But what if low functioning and high functioning peers share many symptoms, but at different intensities? Won't that make the 'high functioning' peers more capable of understanding and thus speaking for their low functioning peers? In fact, there is a specific term for this - 'the double empathy problem'. Perhaps you should try a less 'ablist' approach to autism.
How does high functioning autistic people speaking up for the autistic community "pollute" the conversation?
First of all, the reason this registry isn't going through is because autistic people who are functioning enough to speak out did so in solidarity with the entire autistic community. So far from polluting anything we are advocating for ourselves and our peers.
Secondly, this "high functioning low functioning" dichotomy is wrong so your framing it as a "us vs them" situation is off. It's a spectrum not a binary.
Third, presumably if they can't speak for themselves, and "high functioning" autistic people are discouraged, then the only people speaking for them are allistic people speaking about what's best for autistic people. When that happens, you get bone-headed characterizations like autistic people "never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." and suggestions of registries, wellness farms, and soon enough genetic cleansings.
Finally, it's autistic acceptance and awareness month, and the autistic community has been under attack for a week. You're spending your Sunday calling autistic people "selfish" and characterizing their input as "pollution". Have some compassion please.
It's cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. The societal damage that the anti-autism measures do are much, much greater and sinister than whatever the high-functioning autists could ever do.
Basically, only completely healthy people should be allowed to talk about themselves. Those with milder issues are selfish when they talk ... and those with large issues cant anyway.
So, the only people allowed to talk about autism are people like you - those who do not have it.
There isn’t a definitive test for autism. High functioning autists would have been considered quirky or odd in the past. We label everything now though
Are "quirky" and "odd" not labels? How about "weirdo" and "creep", are those not labels?
These romanticized ideas of what autism is (or used to be) hit a brick wall when you consider that 2/3 of people with autism have contemplated suicide and 1/3 of people with autism have attempted it. Most of it could probably be attributed to social rejection, exclusion, and isolation perpetuated by people who don't suffer from these disorders.
The amount of condescension in this thread is astounding. People who have zero experience with autism have decided to split the autistic community into 'high-functioning' and 'low-functioning' groups and declare that the former is perfectly fine. I don't even understand what their problem is.
We also just used to chain the "weird" family members in the attic and pretend they didn't exist.
For a while, the popular treatment was mulching their brain matter through their eyeball. This was done to a lady kennedy for being too weird. The doctor who suggested we scramble people's brains if they had certain diseases that were hard to treat in other ways got a Nobel Prize.
How well would your IQ score reflect your actual intelligence if you were to take an IQ test in a language you have trouble understanding and expressing yourself with?
You're yet to establish the link between IQ score and "
burden.
That said, valuing people by their economic output is sick to me, and is a page from the Eugenicists playbook. How much of a "burden" are injured veterans, those who suffered horrific work-place accidents, or those with mental health challenges due to burn out?
"Actually, it's good they're registering every autistic persons in the country in a national database, under a president who is overtly eugenicist [1]."
No it's not. At minimum this is a horrible invasion of privacy, that I can't believe anyone on HN would defend. At worst this is straight Nazi shit, preparing the ground for extermination.
On this site, you can hold pretty much any opinion you like as long as you coach it in the most neutral-sounding "Modest Proposal"-esqe language you can.
To expand on what you said - you can post some grotesque things here as long as you don't provoke flagging or offending the ~90th percentile into down-voting your comment in the first 24 hours, and language plays a big part in this, such as hiding bigotry behind big words and playing into confirmation bias. Low-level down-voting can be countered if you can get <1% of HNers, who may be fellow-travelers in the fringe ideology to vociferously agree & up-vote your comment.
I think this is a side-effect of HNs voting rules, what counts as "adding to the conversation", and the limited window for voting down comments and unlimited time to vote up.
Very much so, HNers pride themselves in this "enlightened centrist" aesthetic, while giving extremely fringe analysis and opinions on any subject under the sun.
Everything that touches to genetics or education is a sight to behold.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in recognizing this. I've had literal holocaust denial and neo nazizm show up in comment threads before and I end up the one warned about "maintaining a spirit of curiosity"
I usually only lurk anyway as a physicaly disabled autist but this thread made me have to push thru typing pains.
The high functioning folk are supposedly >6x more at risk of suicidal thoughts... and they're the folks society gets something back from.
I'm all for shaking our heads at young high functioning people flaunting it, but nobody gets the labels by having a good time. It's very rarely beneficial to disclose, even if disclosure is a choice.
I suspect the US will become like Germany in the next few decades where the paranoia about handing any data over is justifiably high. I hope this burns the unethical side of the tech industry to the ground. It deserves it.
Half of that point occurred to me too. While I have not considered how much taxes Musk actually pays, I do remember this from my school history lessons 25 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Röhm_scandal
This poster (published in the NSDAP's Office of Racial Policy's monthly magazine Neues Volk around 1938) urges support for Nazi eugenics to control the public expense of sustaining people with genetic disorders. The poster says: "This person who suffers a hereditary disease has a lifelong cost of 60,000 Reichsmarks to the National Community. Fellow German, that is your money as well."
Already the US can serve as a good example when discussing the need for unbreakable cryptography and e2e systems. The current decline nicely illustrates how quickly you can go from "The police have legitimate needs to break encryption to find heinous criminals" to something far more dystopian.
No amount of crypto is going to protect you from this mess. Technical safeguards work as long as it is backed by the law and the constitution. But when they are suppressed, the people in power will just find someone smarter than you and bribe, gaslight, bully, blackmail or beat them into helping them compromise such safeguards. And not to mention the fact that they love playing hideous psyops games. This is a social and political problem. You need social and political solutions. Technical solutions are just band-aids.
> No amount of crypto is going to protect you from this mess. Technical safeguards work as long as it is backed by the law and the constitution. But when they are suppressed, the people in power will just find someone smarter than you and bribe, gaslight, bully, blackmail or beat them into helping them compromise such safeguards.
I don't agree. Having unbreakable crypto is the absence of a tool. My point is that a democratic government can create the tool with good intentions, but you are only one election and a few months of backsliding away from the tool being used for nefarious purposes. You are right that technical solutions are just band-aids, but if you never create the tool it cannot be abused by a new authoritarian government.
What makes you think this isn't it? I know that the primary reason for his fixation with autism is to attack vaccines. But have you listened to him talk about autistic people? It's pretty clear that he considers autistic individuals as unproductive (the tax remark) burden who destroys families. It's very clear that he considers them as subhuman. Sounds very close to 'life unworthy of life' argument made by the Nazis. While at it, the Nazis also had a register of disabled people and used the 'economic burden' argument to sell the idea of mass murder. Honestly, I'm struggling to find a difference here. To understand the full scale of the danger, this is how the Holocaust originated - with the murder of a single child in 1939 under their involuntary euthanasia program for disabled children. It gradually made the system comfortable with mass murder as the scope of the program expanded to teens, then adults and to whole races in the end. That's exactly what I see now as well - people tolerating more and more transgressions that would have been unthinkable just a year ago!
People sometimes tend to shutdown comparison of any situation with Nazism using the hideous Godwin's law. Apparently it's a sacrilege towards the Holocaust victims to compare their plight with any emerging threats. But there is no guarantee that the horrors of the past won't repeat in the future. In fact, that is one of the reasons we learn history - to recognize the repeating patterns of similar mistakes. And I think the situation is very perilous already. Perhaps I'm paranoid. But remember that people are arbitrarily getting deported to some foreign detention camp and judges are being arrested within 3 months of this regime coming into power. How long before we find ourselves haunted by the dreadful events of the past?
Hasn’t RFK Jr spent his entire life trying to find the cause and cure for autism?
My life is pretty close to this community and I can verify that all of his comments are 100% accurate.
Parents who insist on traveling separately as a safeguard to ensure one of them is able to care for their adult child in the event of an accident, living with the knowledge that both of them passing away will mean the child moves to a group home most likely.
Others who cannot handle the demands as caregiver and simply get divorced over it. Some who call CPS because they can’t handle the danger that their child poses to their other children. Some who are flight risks that will literally just take off running (usually right to bodies of water) given the chance, putting parents completely on guard.
These are just a few of the issues before getting into “the autism diet” and chronic digestive issues. The fact that somehow a gluten free, casein free diet usually results in significant behavioral improvements leading many people to suspect that what we’re eating environmentally is contributing to the problem.
RFK Jr is giving a voice to parents who are scared, confused and fully aware that nobody is listening to them. If you had any idea the number of parents who are afraid to tell you when the symptoms started because they know you don’t want to believe them, it would shock you.
If you want to know what most people in the community believe is the root cause, it’s aluminum.
I realize that all things associated Trump are destined to get this crazy narrative but RFK Jr has been fighting for these families for at least 20 years. His desire to help people is genuine and not something in question.
> Hasn’t RFK Jr spent his entire life trying to find the cause and cure for autism?
He was an environmental lawyer, not a doctor or scientist, so no.
> RFK Jr is giving a voice to parents who are scared, confused and fully aware that nobody is listening to them
It's far more likely (and reasonable to believe) that his brainstorm is an alien entity attempting to weaken the human race for an upcoming invasion, or he's a foreign asset for geopolitical reasons, or he's the biblical Pestilence Horseman of the Apocalypse, than that he's a voice that represents people in the autism community.
Just look at his history. He's caused/causing multiple measles outbreaks. He's already a massmurderer.
> Hasn’t RFK Jr spent his entire life trying to find the cause and cure for autism?
Has he? That 'cure' part makes it pretty clear what his background with autism is. He has no clue about it. It's certainly not a disease nor a brain injury that can be cured. And it's too complex to be caused by something like a vaccine. All I see is that he has a particular disdain for autistic people and he wants to use autism to target something else - perhaps vaccines.
> My life is pretty close to this community
Do you have an academic or professional background on the condition? Or are you someone with autism? If so, you may claim some credibility. There are even associations of parents of autistic kids who spout pseudo-scientific nonsense about autism. And they routinely get fact-checked and opposed by associations of autistic people themselves.
> I can verify that all of his comments are 100% accurate.
CDC falls under HHS, right? They published the results about a week ago and it clearly said that the higher incidence of autism is due to improved diagnosis. And then he went on to trash those findings publicly. Why should I believe a career politician over a whole bunch of career medical professionals on this? Considering his past and political stance as well, he has exactly zero credibility on this matter.
> Parents who insist on traveling separately as a safeguard to ensure one of them is able to care for their adult child in the event of an accident, living with the knowledge that both of them passing away will mean the child moves to a group home most likely.
Am I to assume that you're a parent of an autistic kid? If so, let me warn you now. You're doing something more harmful to your kid than what you described. And one more thing. Your view of autism is still very narrow. What you're describing is level 3 autism at best. Some symptoms don't even sound like autism, and could be some other condition. You should perhaps check with a specialist or a level 1 autistic to learn what autism really is and what it feels like (higher level kids often find it hard to communicate their feelings).
> Some who call CPS because they can’t handle the danger that their child poses to their other children.
Very much on point with what I said above. Harmful and hurtful behavior is not an autistic symptom. That sounds more like a cluster-B personality disorder. Not that they can't coexist, but this is a very harmful stereotype. But I'm not surprised.
> These are just a few of the issues before getting into “the autism diet” and chronic digestive issues.
Autism is a neuro-developmental condition. Autistic brains are wired differently, if you will. There are many environmental factors that influence autistic people's behavior - albeit temporarily. Food is one of the less important ones among them. And if you think it is a cure, you are in for big disappointment.
> RFK Jr is giving a voice to parents who are scared, confused and fully aware that nobody is listening to them.
Instead of a politician vying for attention, you should try to understand your kid first. If they have difficulty expressing it, try to talk to a specialist or someone with more verbal autism. They are very common - that's why the 1 in 31 statistics. Then you may get some idea about what to really focus on.
> If you had any idea the number of parents who are afraid to tell you when the symptoms started because they know you don’t want to believe them, it would shock you.
I have investigated various matters throughout my career. That statement has all the symptoms of confirmation bias. The way to get an unbiased result is to do a large-scale, randomized (double-)blind study. You need quantified data, not emotional anecdotes. And if you have something specific in mind and the quantified info to back it up, then we can discuss. Otherwise, those assertions are moot. And for that matter, do you know that these symptoms are extremely hard to identify in infants? The timing of recognition of those symptoms is a rather unreliable indicator for anything.
And remember what I said before - a lot of autistic parents' associations are in the business of spreading misinformation. They're widely opposed and debunked by associations of autistic people themselves.
> If you want to know what most people in the community believe is the root cause, it’s aluminum.
Let me guess. The adjuvant in vaccines? I know where that comes from. If you fancy your own research, try searching up the research papers on that topic. Pay special attention to the authors and the citations. Then check the affiliations of those authors, including funding sources. That will tell you a very enlightening story. To summarize the technical argument, the aluminum used in vaccines don't reach neurotoxic levels even for infants.
> His desire to help people is genuine and not something in question.
His actions at the HHS indicate otherwise. I would rather trust the qualified career medical professionals and researchers he fired. And let's not forget the disastrous way in which he's handling the measles outbreak. I can see how you're emotionally invested in this matter. But please don't assume that the people on the other side aren't.
That takedown was boss. Thank you. As a parent of two autistic children, and uncle to many more in my family, I can say that it is clear their minds develop differently, and many high-functioning autists successfully mask it and make it later in life. And these are quite often extremely gifted intellectually and academically, to the degree that while life is a struggle for them socially, they are far better than their 'norm' peers in other areas. I've not seen anything from RFK Jr beyond trying to support his anti-vaccine stance and what I would at best call evidence for 'othering' autistic people. And if he thinks he is going to make them victims, I can assure you he will find myself, my family, and the community at large ready and eager to destroy him. One could make a more coherent argument that we should create a database of those who lack empathy, the narcissistic sociopaths among us, and place them in camps and let them tear each other apart.
It really wasn’t any sort of “takedown”. It was the same stuff people have been saying on the internet for years that’s disconnected from what is reality for so many parents.
It absolutely refuted every inane speculation you made. I understand you clearly aren’t here to listen or change your mind, so it unfortunately passed right over your head.
It didnt, It was a list of wishful thinking. I have more exposure to families with previously called "low functioning as it relates to children, and plenty of adults who are very capable and high functioning.
What I do not see people willing to discuss
Parent getting called to school 3-4x a week, causing issues with work
Child running from school or aide and requiring a tracker program
Police/CPS involvement from "runners"
Destruction of marriage from constant state of stress
Violence to siblings
Inability to give attention equally in the family
Incredible high divorce rates, parents and any non a to a pairing.
RFK's speech had some issues, but if you read the transcript it does not match the sound bytes
All of his references to negative autism behaviors/impacts were in regards to the 25% of profound autism.
As I said, I know at least a dozen families where the above is their experience. Single moms breaking down on FB because they have no support and stressed to the max, Dad losing out on projects and sales because it cant be trusted he'll be in the office when needed. Siblings hiding away, sick of outbursts,yelling, non stop activity.
It is a disservice to all of those people to act as if the spectrum does not have a far range of activities.
That sure as hell doesnt mean we need to start trying to end "autistic people" and I think it is manipulation to say RFK's prevailing theme has ever been "autism", it has been a belief that the weaknesses in our food and drug systems are increasing chronic illnesses, mutations etc. Some headlines travel longer, the AIDS/HIV denial and Faucci hate should have got way more attention.
Its not RFK's words, its the media's practice of hyperbolic language that causes any real or perceived damage to the community.
I dont believe there is a connection to find, but maybe this will end the snipe hunt and that funding can just go towards creating spaces and education that allow for a range of interaction and social styles after September. But to ignore both sides of the experience is disingenous and is certainly a slap in the face to the families experiencing real hardship from their child's divergence.
I am not even a fan, I just despise the lazy characterizations that get slung around in all emotional spaces, he is mostly a careful speaker, especially compared to the norms now.
It's interesting because that list you provide ("Parent getting called to school 3-4x a week" etc.) is a good summary of my household growing up. Me, my sister, and my father are neurodivergent and on the spectrum.
But we are people that others would not consider to be in the 25% RFK is referring to. Yet, at some point in our lives we were. Growing up I was less verbal than I am now, and I was often paired to play with other autistic kids who were totally non verbal and died early because of their autism. So I'm well aware of the extent of the spectrum.
So I agree with this:
> It is a disservice to all of those people to act as if the spectrum does not have a far range of activities.
However I find it is RFK and not the poster you are replying to who fails to recognize autism as a spectrum. Indeed, if you read the transcript of his speech he does not refer to autism as a spectrum until the end, when a reporter frames it in those terms as part of a question. Instead, he very clearly keeps referring to autism as a binary of "profound" versus I suppose "regular" autism, which is not at all how autistic people experience autism.
What RFK does is juxtapose debilitative autistic behavior (nonverbal) with very normal autistic behavior (toe walking) and he lumps it into a category he calls "profound autism" which is not recognized as a category of autism, nor is it precise or descriptive enough to have a clear meaning. I'm already in an argument with another poster about that, I don't want to open up another front on that issue, you can read my thoughts about that in my comment history.
> Its not RFK's words
For me, it is his words. I've read the transcript free of any media filtering and the actual words he uses are causing real damage to the autistic community.
> snipe hunt and that funding can just go towards creating spaces and education that allow for a range of interaction and social styles after September. But to ignore both sides of the experience is disingenuous
You frame their concerns as a "snipe hunt" -- the opposite of genuine; yet characterize refusing to entertain them as being disingenuous and a slap in the face of autistic people. I don't understand, wouldn't dragging autistic people into a farcical excuse to prove some nonsense about the food system be far more damaging to autistic people and their families? Why can't we just not do the snipe hunt and use the money right now for creating spaces and education?
> lazy characterizations that get slung around in all emotional spaces, he is mostly a careful speaker, especially compared to the norms now.
I think this is a lazy characterization because you don't support it with any evidence. In my post history I highlight several examples from the transcript in which RFK is not careful with his language, and instead paints autistic people with a broad brush and engages in strange conspiracy theorizing in his official capacity as HHS director. Again, this is free from any media bias as it is the direct transcript from this press conference.
> As a parent of two autistic children, and uncle to many more in my family, I can say that it is clear their minds develop differently, and many high-functioning autists successfully mask it and make it later in life. And these are quite often extremely gifted intellectually and academically, to the degree that while life is a struggle for them socially, they are far better than their 'norm' peers in other areas.
This is one of the most uplifting thing I have heard in a while! Your children and the autistic kids in your family are very lucky to have such insightful, empathetic and caring adults like you around. Your presence make a huge difference in their lives. And as they grow up, they'll gift you a lot of unexpectedly sweet and proud moments. Good Luck!
> And if he thinks he is going to make them victims, I can assure you he will find myself, my family, and the community at large ready and eager to destroy him.
That's a very heartwarming and empowering statement! Some people argue that high-functioning autistics shouldn't talk for low-functioning autistics. But the autistic and the medical communities doesn't hold that distinction. Only 3 levels of disabilities exist. When I see the 'low-functioning' autistic people, I recognize in them the intense versions of the emotions and feelings that I'm all too painfully familiar with. That's why I decided to make an impassioned stance here. Yes! I'm seriously concerned about the safety and welfare of my peers - the only people I could ever understand.
All this dogma, greed and misinformation threatens the lives of millions of kids, a huge number of very innocent individuals and the very roots of the knowledge and profession we held dear throughout our lives. I don't know why some people hold on to false promises and rhetoric. But the final result of that is recorded very clearly in history. If only they did a bit of research on that too. It's very disturbing that many still can't see the very obvious danger signs. However, the stakes are too high to just watch and worry. Now is the time our voices and actions matter!
I'm bowing out of this debate. I have no illusions of being able to break people out of their artificial realities. But I think I made the point I wanted to - to record a sample of the false information about autism out there and its hollowness. Thank you again for being a decent and awesome human being! I hope we will have more allies like you. Thanks!
> I have investigated various matters throughout my career. That statement has all the symptoms of confirmation bias. The way to get an unbiased result is to do a large-scale, randomized (double-)blind study. You need quantified data, not emotional anecdotes. And if you have something specific in mind and the quantified info to back it up, then we can discuss. Otherwise, those assertions are moot. And for that matter, do you know that these symptoms are extremely hard to identify in infants? The timing of recognition of those symptoms is a rather unreliable indicator for anything.
If you have investigated then you already understand the biggest challenge to double blind studies here: control groups because of the variety of issues on the spectrum and the difficulty in measuring the severity of each of them. There’s a doctor in Indiana who’s been trying to categorize them all and has it narrowed to about 140 or so. It’s not an easy group to run studies on.
Autism is very much a digestive issue. People who just observe the behaviors without being close to treatment believe it’s purely neurological.
The core issue with everything you’re saying is that we have an information vacuum. With cancer, for example, we as a society are more than comfortable saying almost everything causes cancer. With autism, we’re not allowed to even speculate publicly. If we do it’s a simple “I don’t know what causes it but it’s DEFINITELY not the thing that I don’t want to believe is involved.”
Autism is a spectrum and there are a lot of severe cases. The severe cases often result in exactly what I’m describing above. Therapy helps in most cases but the experience described above is very real. In many cases it’s much less severe and kids are mainstreamed with some social awkwardness. The violent outbursts described in a scenario above, again, aren’t in most situations but they do happen consistently for some certain kids and when they do it’s a nightmare.
It’s not harmful to tell the truth, but it is to ignore it.
The problem with watching this discussion in real time on social media is seeing people who know one or two people who have a child who is autistic and that shapes their entire perspective. The parents who have children who are more severe on the spectrum often have very few people who know them because just the idea of time to socialize with others is often difficult to obtain.
The information vacuum is very real though and until we get a definitive answer on the cause of autism, people are going to speculate. You watch discussion of it be suppressed for over a decade and it creates trust issues.
> With autism, we’re not allowed to even speculate publicly. If we do it’s a simple “I don’t know what causes it but it’s DEFINITELY not the thing that I don’t want to believe is involved.”
I think that communication could be improved on both sides.
I have had non-confrontational and earnest discussions with the kinds of people who believe vaccines cause autism. I couldn't escape the conclusion I eventually arrived at - these sorts of people started with a gut feeling or belief and worked backwards to find the justification for it.
This realization is what I feel is missing from a lot of science communication. People who are distrustful of the science aren't going to be swayed by more science unless it dovetails with their underlying gut feelings - so assuming that you can simply out-evidence any concerns is a fools errand.
But by the same token, if critics want a productive conversation, I think it's incumbent on them to be more honest about where their concerns are rooted. What is it about vaccines that makes them predisposed to not want to have them?
That doesn't matter _at all_ when the government comes knocking at Google's door - in the best case, they have a subpoena that can at least be appealed afterwards, in the worst case it's DOGE teens backed by a bunch of heavily armed guys in camouflage.
Indeed. No data is safe or secure in such environments.
This has become an issue big enough that the US company I work for is actually removing data from US cloud providers to make it harder to get at. The European divisions have started data sovereignty projects because it's now a principal risk.
“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, repeatedly said before taking office that vaccines cause autism, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they do not. He has declined to disavow his statements and has continued to promote a possible link.”
Having worked directly with autism researchers, I can confidently tell you that RFK is making a wild guess not based in current evidence. All the data we have indicate autism is a multifactorial condition with a genetic/developmental component that may or may not be affected by the environment.
RFK is genuinely a danger to health care in the United States.
I don't know much about RFK Jr, I hope he is just stupid. But if you dig into the origins of the vaccine situation, much of it was driven simply by a desire to make money using vaccine manufacturers, and the "proof" was retrofitted to the goal with junk science that was essentially abusing disabled children. (Horribly invasive medical procedures with no medical necessity).
> Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official
I just loooove that our "top health official" has absolutely zero medical or public heathcare education, openly believes and advocates for discredited and fraudulent medical perspectives and more.
> RFK is genuinely a danger to health care in the United States.
The head of most healthcare systems are administrators. An Environmental Lawyer with decades of experience suing corporations using science as evidence is one of the best matches we've had. Is he good? I dont know, but it is misperception and I think fairly illogical to expect an admin/leadership role to be done by a MD or research scientist. Not seeing many tech firms run by a lead developer either.
The USA has always had a system of "social credit" similar to what we describe in China. Nobody calls it that here; nobody itemizes and articulates it the same way because we do not want to admit how similar we are to the Chinese, but we do have a very real system of "social credit" right here, and it's actively being used in all calculations.
Here are a few examples of positive social credit:
Do you serve your nation in the military?
Do you bear and raise children? Are you a caregiver for other types of dependents (parents, disabled)?
Are you able-bodied and employed or at least employable? How stable is your job?
Are you currently enrolled as a student, seeking a degree or graduation?
Are you in stable housing; can you meet your personal needs daily without difficulty?
Are you free of mental illness, and medications thereof?
Have you got a criminal record, imprisonment or legal troubles in your past?
So you can see that autistic people will typically start with poor social credit, and it will not be possible for them to get on top of that.
Now a wealthy nation in peacetime can afford to do the "Welfare State" thing and support people with negative social credit, due to pro-life values and the fact that you can indeed exploit the poor and infirm for Medicaid and SNAP bucks, no matter what (RFK's claim that "they don't pay taxes" is specious if they're consumers).
But I think the USA can no longer claim to be "wealthy" and our claim on peace is tenuous at best. When those two run out then what is left? Nothing but a little Aktion T4. Difficult decisions will need to be made and this is why people with "poor social credit" are going to be under the microscope.
The criteria for diagnosing ASD today are vastly different from those that would’ve resulted in an autism diagnosis shortly after the abolishment of lobotomy, it is hardly surprising the rate keeps going up as you widen the net.
That's an important bit of context whenever RFK Jr. talks about how conditions like Autism and ADHD weren't a thing when he was growing up - his own aunt, who may well have had one of those conditions, was dealt with by giving her a lobotomy and then hiding her away. Those are the supposedly better times he's harkening back to.
This is a huge factor, in ASD and in mental/behavioral issues in general. Not saying it's a bad thing but it makes comparison over time to be apples to oranges.
> The criteria for diagnosing ASD today are vastly different
Not that much.
The difference between now and 50 years ago is that a) we don't just throw them into asylums, b) we actually have accessibility of getting diagnosed, c) employment opportunities suitable for many people with mental disabilities (such as factory line assembly) have gone down the drain.
No, they are related to the pool of people being diagnosed.
You're only getting a diagnosis if a) you have access to a psychiatrist and b) you are running into enough issues in your daily life to warrant having it looked into.
Life has gotten a lot more complex over the past few decades, so people run into issues more often - and earlier in life. Someone who would've just been "a bit of a weird guy" 50 years ago is getting an autism diagnosis today, simply because these days they run into issues as a child and are being put in front of a psychiatrist.
Even 50 years ago they weren't just slightly odd people who were otherwise happy to exist in a simpler society. Those people ran into the same issues and turned to alcohol, drugs, and suicide. The only difference is that nobody understood why they were suffering.
Very much so. What we now call Autism Spectrum Disorder was referred to as "childhood schizophrenia" in the DSM-2 [1], things only started moving in the right direction with the DSM-3 [2] when it was finally sort-of recognized as an independent disorder of "infantile autism", but some core elements of ASD like sensory processing differences were only recognized in the DSM-5.
There's a good overview at [3]. It's good that criteria are different today, the criteria from decades ago failed to include majority of ways that autism expresses itself, many of which benefit from support and accommodations even though they're not obviously debilitating.
And let’s not forget that until the DSM-V, a child could not be diagnosed with both autism and ADHD (see section E at the bottom of this table [0] showing changes from the DSM-IV to DSM-V):
> The symptoms do not occur exclusively during the course of a pervasive developmental disorder, schizophrenia, or other psychotic disorders and is not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, or a personality disorder).
The DSM-V states that they can exist together. In fact something like 28-44% of people with Autism exhibit some form of ADHD. [1]
It just goes to show that we’re still evolving in how we understand things. And then we can get into things like twice exceptionality and Asperger’s…and yeah. Lots to learn.
Yes, but is that a feature or a bug? Certainly those who define these things understand the need and value of historic tracking. And yet the target keeps moving.
If expanding the definition is the feature required action should be taken to mitigate the bug. True?
I think he's just trying to choose a point in time when mental healthcare was more primitive to go along with saying the diagnosis is more sophisticated now.
A main thing is that people with autism would just be classified as generally mentally disabled and the rise in autism is highly tied a drop in that general diagnosis. I don't think that covers 100% of the rise but does seem to make up the big majority.
U.S. special-education autism classification was created in 1994 and tied to a big rise in diagnosis.
> understanding of various areas increased due to the stopping of this practice
Yes, this absolutely. You can't study something after altering it.
The "treatments" for people with any kind of neurodivergence (real, or imagined) in the past were often interventions that destroyed enough of their brain or body to prevent them from exhibiting any neurodivergent symptoms (e.g. lobotomy, EST/ECT, teeth-pulling[1], etc).
There is no direct link, but the point is that an increasing trend in diagnosis of ASD is not surprising when the baseline is coming from a time when doctors thought cutting out parts of your brain to make you more calm was a good idea. Basically, we shouldn't look at numbers reported by doctors willing to perform lobotomies for depression as a reliable indicator of the incidence of ASD in the population at the time.
We understood more about various conditions and treatments, so we stopped doing harmful things like lobotomies and refined the definitions on some conditions as needed. Those are not directly related though.
If they come out with a list of twenty adjustments they're going to make based on the study (things like but not necessary including: banning certain fire retardents, attempt to reduce break/tire pollution, adjusting the timing of (but not eliminating) the vaccine schedule, banning specific food additives, reducing/modifying specific pesticide use) I will believe this is a legitimate and well intentioned effort from someone who is orientationally correct but frequently epistemologically incorrect. If it's just "eliminate all vaccines" then I'll be very disappointed.
The third reich response a lot of other commenters are having is interesting. I'm no expert and have not investigated autism, but if the messaging in response to RFK JR is "yeah he says 1 in 36 kids have autism now but actually that's fine and how it always has been and actually autism is good and he's actually Eichmann" you're going to drive a lot of people right to every unsubstantiated thing he says.
Regardless of any so called good that could supposedly come of this..... Why does the federal government get to seize my medical records and data for this list without my consent??? Are autistic people not full citizens? What about rule of law??? If we can take such drastic measures and shit all over things like hippa and medical ethics....where is the sweeping federal database of obese people .
I know I have created a few dozen "registries" for research and stat analysis with my team. All data is depersonalized and HIPAA compliant. I dont understand how a generic statement made to the public becomes a recipe for the next reich. I get how the FB crowd would just go hyperbolic, would not have expected it here. Ive worked with medical, insurance, legal, banking and finance data for a decade. It would be easy to scare a normie by describing nearly any of those projects, but its the exact opposite, everything is done with a preponderance of caution to ensure privacy compliance.
I think 1 in 36 kids having autism is similar to how breast cancer diagnosis shot up when we had better imaging ability or when we figured out prostate cancer was actually fairly common in older men but not usually something worth doing anything about. When we merged in aspergers and autism together that obviously makes autism rates higher and as research continues on diagnosing autism it makes sense rates increase from there too? I mean in the past we thought autism was only common in boys!
I sincerely hope this is the explanation and I will be frustrated if this information is not presented as a percentage of the increase as part of the report. If it fully explains the increase, even better.
I agree that I’m frustrated that this isn’t being coveted. Asperger’s being moved into autism was huge news at the time, so idk how RFK missed something so obvious and is pointing to quackery like vaccines. I don’t understand how we got to the point where cranks are trying to to prove their assumptions instead of real scientists.
It's pretty much impossible to control for, because you don't know what you don't know. Meaning, you can't estimate how many people haven't been diagnosed in the past because, well, they weren't being diagnosed.
Some of those proposed adjustments are already in place in EU like the dyes. Regardless of possible autism link, it’s a good thing. But some are blinded by politics and can’t see that two things can be true. Trump Admin does bad things and good things
Why would a list of random "adjustments" lend legitimacy to their effort? If they told you that going barefoot and talking in Pig Latin would solve autism, would that give it legitimacy? Maybe soap is actually suppressing our natural bio-film so we should all forsake showering. I mean, someone could contrive a laughable explanation to justify that, and maybe make a graph that hygiene improvements worldwide correlated with the rise of ASD, so start stinkin' evenyone.
We know, with utter certainty, that the conclusion of this farce will be completely unproven lazy correlations that are so common in the scammer industry. Maybe it's seed oils, or HFCS, or the chemicals, etc. There is no outcome of RFK Jrs farce that won't be an absolute joke.
>The third reich response
Anyone who doesn't see incredible parallels with the rise of Hitler's heinous crimes is not paying attention. Oh look, they're going after the press and judges now, but don't worry until they're not suffixing the Hitler salutes with "my heart to yours" or something it surely can't be real. Further, the "they're going to make me believe this garbage person" argument is always laughable. No one buys it. People who like these creeps should just be honest about it and save the tired "you made me" bit that positively no one believes.
But sure, the only thing I can agree with you on is that the "autism is actually great" fringe is not helpful. Autism is not good, and most people with autism, even the ones who don't need around the clock care, would rather they didn't. ASD is likely basically a manifestation of evolution, and is biology playing random variations to test survivability, as it has done through human history. It gives us some super-intellectually focused individuals that contribute massively to humanity, but it also gives us a lot of very sad people who can't connect and sometimes need enormous levels of care.
Indeed, genetics are widely considered the prevalent "cause" of ASD. It's possible that autism really has become more common -- if it actually has and it isn't simply increased or more inclusive diagnoses -- because our information/engineering age has given people who carry ASD genetics more, errr, marketability on the reproduction market. Instead of being outcasts, what we used to call "Aspergers" sufferers, such as myself, suddenly make lots of money and get to be high status. But that's a lazy guess at most. But we do know that people on the ASD spectrum, including the most successful ones who found ways to make it work, are much more likely to have children on the spectrum, no outside environmental cause being necessary.
As a very liberal parent of a profoundly autistic child, there has never been article I've related to more. The condescension of fellow liberals and advocates for level 1 autism for us, much of which is present in this thread already, is incredibly frustrating and in many ways harder to stomach than RFK Jr.
RFK Jr is at a minimum a misguided nutjob - but he's also the only one to ever recognize our plight on a national stage.
I feel for you, because I am not sure how I would fare in that circumstance. That said, the opinion piece is in itself a frustrating.
<< Autism has become an identity, a different way of thinking and existing.
I think, this sentence, more than anything else in that article aggravates me the most and I am not entirely certain why. It is not some sort of rhetorical question. I simply struggle to understand the obsession US denizens have with identity. Everyone is 2% cherokee indian, 2/5 italian and maybe a little dutch on non-pagan holidays. And this does not spare the parents. They are X parents. Puppy parents. Teenager parents. Autist parents. All in an attempt to establish some sort of identity that can be displayed to the society at large.
<< Children with autism have a right to an appropriate education, to accommodations, changes in the classroom to help them succeed; we have sensory-friendly days at the zoo.
Sure, but at the expense of the non-autistic kids? What does that statement actually mean?
<< I don’t care if my child ever pays taxes
In case there is any kind of doubt, the society does. If the registry is not intended as an intentionally bad thing(tm) by RFK jr himself, you can rest assured it is absolutely seen as a way to ensure that more taxpayers exist ( and this is the charitable parsing of that registry ).
<< She did not destroy my family,
This is an interesting one. There are people who do derive meaning from service such as this, but they do not strike me as a majority of the population. At best, it puts a heavy strain on the familial ties.. and for a very obvious reason.. it is not a light cross to bear. And we do like easy mode. But to actively deny that it is a strain is silly.. because while it did not break the author, the same issue definitely took some families down.
<< I want to know why regressive autism happens
I think most of us on this forum can agree that knowledge can be useful.
Why is a comment like this downvoted? I found value in it since I likely wouldn't have come across this information otherwise.
The comment is simply sharing an article from someone directly affected. What happened to intellectual curiosity? Diversity of opinion? It's comments like this we need more of on HN, not less of.
To start with, someone directly affected by autism is someone experiencing it themselves. Parents, educators, and caregivers have historically been granted primacy in these discussions, largely because so many autistic people cannot effectively advocate for themselves, either at all or in the current systems that exist for it. That doesn't change our obligation to center the experiences of autistic people, who are having the most direct one possible.
Parent- and caregiver-focused approaches are how we've ended up with things like ABA¹ being fairly mainstream, and sympathy for parents pursuing experimental or simply crank treatments to "cure" their children, frequently with extremely harmful results. Support and advocacy groups run by autistic people are absolutely full horrific stories of abuse in this vein.
Which is, I believe, a large part of RFK's interest² in it. I think he wants to make more ad hoc, extreme, and experimental and frankly abusive "treatment" supported for parents of autistic children.
So the comment you're responding to isn't a curious or "diverse opinion", it is basically the standard view of this up until the last 10-15 years or so. Autistic people had to fight very hard to have our own views and experiences taken seriously. RFK's focus here is part of an even-more-recent backlash against that.
¹ Essentially conversation therapy for autism. It can be effective at teaching us how to behave like "normal" people which can be comforting for parents of autistic children. But autistic people overwhelmingly experience it as extremely distressing or worse.
² He has also signaled that he will use it as a justification to ban vaccines. I don't have enough of a read on the guy to reckon which of these is a bigger motivation to him. There's also an understudied but impossible-to-deny correlation between transness and autism. A lot going on here.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia...
"On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree requiring all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability."
"Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. In reality, the clinics were children's killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation."
The type of person driving this pointless cultural war would like to make it seem that this is essentially all about men dressing up as women telling children things they shouldn't know — both erasing the fact that trans men exist, and deliberately linking both drag and transgenderism to sexual perversion and implied paedophilia while lumping the two groups together.
So let's keep the words we use sensible and devoid from (intended or unintended) bigotry.
Besides, drag queens and kings usually are not transgender¹. It is a type of performance featuring a carefully crafted, over-the-top persona, not a full-time endeavour, and it is, crucially, an act. A transgender person isn't acting.
1: I would guess not more so than other groups of people.
Even if you are a current supporter of this administration this all should give you a moment of pause really. Even if you think the current administration isn’t about this, and it’s fear mongering by the media to you, what if the next administration goes a step further than you like, and this is where the door was set open?
There is a reason the constitution was set up the way it was in the light of not having a King and not being unfairly treated.
Nit, nobody actually cares all
that much about transvestites. Vest like from vestments meaning clothes. They're cross-dressers. Historically transsexual or transgender (depends on the country which one is the more prominent term) people have been called transvestites but it was a mischaracterization. Someone born with XX chromosomes but who lives his life full-time as a man is very different from a woman who likes to dress up like a man for sexual or other pleasure.
While you're right on the terms, you're wrong about the stigma on cross-dressing. There is really very little distinction bigots make between their hate for cross-dressing and their hate for trans people. It all falls under a big umbrella of "degeneracy" to them. Even actors in cross-dressing roles are often hated by these people.
I mean there certainly is a stigma, the stigma is probably on average greater than the current stigma surrounding trans people because even Republicans understand gender dysphoria as an illness. Ohio's Republican governor DeWine is, even by Democrat standards a huge trans rights and treatment supporter even for minors. It's legitimately uncanny to read stories about him from back home. But cross-dressers occupy an almost exclusively sexual connotation now that femboy/butch/tomboy/andro occupy the common term for just casually dressing in a manner defying gender norms.
But when it comes to policy actions taken by bigots they pretty narrowly target transgender people. If for no other reason than trying to legislate dress is going to (and has) run into 1A issues for anything not extremely narrowly scoped. Project 2025, arguably the comprehensive policy manifesto for the new GOP only really outlines policy targeting transgender persons.
The controversy seems to be stemmed from American's relationship with their government. Most European countries do have many different(including autism and other stuff) centralized book keeping and registries to help with monitoring and management of certain deceases and conditions. During Covid-19 UK and Turkey were able to quickly iterate their response based on the centralized data collected and most of the EU also had similar stuff and later they were able to look back into the data to see if Covid or the vaccines caused further issues down the road. IMHO vaccines are much less controversial in those societies because it's pretty easy to look ot up when a Twitter influencer claims something.
But hey, considering what happened the last few months maybe Americans have a point for their case. In most of the Europe governments collapse and streets burn for much less all the time, in US they don't appear to have a recourse for at least 4 years.
Maybe its a good idea not to give the data to government affiliated billionaires that can crunch some numbers, feed the data to a machibne and come up with an optimization solutions like "If we can get rid of those suboptimal humans we can pay less income taxes". What are you going to do if the machine tells you that if an autist isn't making x amount of money by the age y it is drain to the society and the formula suggest that a deportation yields better outcomes financially?
I'll quote Kennedy's dehumanizing comments for context, that people can compare the two styles of rhetoric:
- "Kennedy said many autistic children were “fully functional” and “regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”"
- "He also said, “Most cases now are severe. Twenty-five percent of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, and have other stereotypical features.”"
He's specifically talking about nonverbal kids like mine. I'm sorry, it's a disability, and I'm terrified what's going to happen to my kid when I'm gone. I don't think RFK Jr's policies will help and I didn't vote for them. But the amount of frustration I have towards comments like yours that ignore our worlds is immense. At least RFK Jr speaks honestly and candidly.
The challenges a level 1 autistic person faces are well recognized and good for network TV. finally - finally! - someone is talking about the rest of the population that face far greater challenges.
That's a very strange take considering he's known to spread lies. The very comment you replied to demonstrated that. He says that vaccines cause autism - they don't. He says that "Most cases now are severe." - they aren't.
I wouldn't say his record shows that he is either honest or candid:
The kindness, sincerity and honestly that you attribute to his words are distinctly not there. Otherwise, he wouldn't be pitching pseudo-scientific views after ignoring and firing career professionals in the field. You have an autistic kid. Weren't you still able to recognize the dozen or so absolute falsehoods about autism that he spouted in that half an hour? What's even worse it that his tone and behavior has a very familiar and dreadful analogue from the past. Read your GP's top-level comment. At this point, people are simply ignoring the dozen flashing red lights. Do you really believe that he cares more about people's health than all the researchers who were working on several topics like this, whom he fired?
> The challenges a level 1 autistic person faces are well recognized and good for network TV.
Those level 2 and 3 people you seem to be so worried about are the ones who are going to suffer the most. At least we know how to mask it in public.
He's not "acknowledging their existence" though, he listed a series of very typically human activities and experiences, and then said autistic people don't get to experience them due to their innate differences.
First of all that is false, because even profoundly autistic people do the things he said they don't do.
Secondly, it's dehumanizing because the reason he lied (yes what he said was a lie) was so that the listener would feel sorry for autistic people, and would thereby support Kennedy to do whatever he wants to them to restore their humanity, whether that be a registry, concentration camps (or as he calls them, "wellness farms") or whatever else he has planned.
Most profoundly autistic people don’t go the bathroom unassisted, or pay their own taxes. That’s true.
> Kennedy to do whatever he wants to them to restore their humanity, whether that be a registry, concentration camps (or as he calls them, "wellness farms") or whatever else he has planned.
Wild conspiracy theories help nobody, and also harm autistic people.
> Most profoundly autistic people don’t go the bathroom unassisted, or pay their own taxes. That’s true.
As long as you define "ability to go to bathroom and pay taxes" as profound autism, that's true. But as I said, autism is a spectrum -- there is no such thing as "profoundly autistic". That's not a thing. You're again trying to make a dichotomy, and this is a misconception both you and Kennedy share.
> Wild conspiracy theories help nobody, and also harm autistic people.
We are at the point where it's no longer wild. They are literally planning a database, and planning "wellness farms", and using dehumanizing language to talk about the worth of autistic people within society. I'm really glad that for you, these concerns autistic people have about these plans are esoteric and "wild", but for the people they are targeting with registries and camps, we cannot afford to be so flippant.
No one else is going to advocate or look out for autistic people, so we have to do it ourselves, and if that means people think we are overreacting so be it. We're used to being told that anyway.
> As long as you define "ability to go to bathroom and pay taxes" as profound autism, that's true
Yes. That's literally the meaning of profound - has trouble with common functioning. Your position seems to be that a group - profound autistic people - that is defined by it's functional ability is being mischaracterised as having low functional ability. Mine is that that is literally what profoundly autistic' means.
> No one else is going to advocate or look out for autistic people, so we have to do it ourselves, and if that means people think we are overreacting so be it.
Likewise, which is why I support efforts to investigate the causes of something that is currently very ill defined. I do have resevations about RFK, it reminds me of working at Google where people find research to support their pre-drawn conclusions. But conspiracy theories about death camps are not one of my concerns.
No my position is that you've created a tautology, and so the phrase "profoundly autistic" doesn't mean anything. You're profoundly autistic if you can't function, and if you can't function you're profoundly autistic. So what?
How does one measure "functional ability" -- functioning how and where and when? In a capitalist context? Academic context? social context? Where is the line? What's the cut off? Who is doing the assessing? Who is coming up with the criteria?
> But conspiracy theories about death camps are not one of my concerns.
I understand you don't think it's likely and don't care to discuss such matters, but you're not going to convince me these people are looking out for the best interests of autistic people. They're looking to be "right" about vaccines, and they're going to use autistic people however they can to get the answers they want.
> You're profoundly autistic if you can't function, and if you can't function you're profoundly autistic
That is a definition, not a tautology. Though I suspect the way this conversation will go is that we will argue over the definition of definition.
I’ll bow out, but I do share your concerns about people looking to be right about vaccines. I feel they may be right (and also that they may be wrong), but as I’ve mentioned in another thread, I’m concerned they’re finding research to support their conclusion (mercury and aluminium poisoning) rather than approaching the problem more rigorously.
> That is a definition, not a tautology... we will argue over the definition of definition.
We shall.
Given your circular definition of profound autism, what I had said is a tautology. And that's my point, the way you've defined this thing doesn't make logical sense.
A shame to bow out on a semantic quibble, I made a number of substantive points I'll that I guess will have to remain unanswered. At the end of the day this definition is circular and is of no use to anyone.
> Given your circular definition of profound autism
No. It's not circular. Matching a name to a value and then saying that value has that name isn't a tautology. We're on a forum for programmers, if you work in this industry you do it all the time. I'd hoped by discussing shared values we'd end civilly but I guess not.
How have I been uncivil to you? I have not called you names, nor have I engaged your arguments in bad faith, nor have I attacked your character, your reputation, nor impugned you in any way. I've done nothing but engage you civilly.
And it is circular because you still haven't given a definition for "profound autism" -- all you have said is that "profound autism" is autism that profoundly disables a person. But what does that mean? Because all autism is profoundly disabling if you ask autistic people.
How does one go about determining if an autistic person is "profoundly" disabled? What's the test? What's the measure? How disabled can one be before they are considered not just regularly disabled, but "profoundly" disabled?
You've already said "you would say someone who headbangs has profound autism" but I headbang, and most people are surprised to learn I'm autistic. So I shouldn't be someone RFK is referring to in his speech, but according to the symptoms he lists off and your apparent concurrence here, I am someone he would be talking about.
Which brings me back to my original point: he was not clear at all in his speech.
The lack of civility I feel is that you’re either not reading what I write before replying or not feeling the need to address the points in the comment you’re replying to.
You’re right there is a spectrum of abilities and this changes over time. However we can define a threshold. I think a self-harming stim as an adult like head banging is sufficient to qualify as profound.
Not responding to all the points you raise is not an act of incivility. You've done the same (e.g. when you just responded "Godwin") -- you're psyching yourself out. I'm substantively responding to your posts, so it's up to you if you want to emphasize a specific argument that you feel I'm not picking up.
> However we can define a threshold. I think a self-harming stim as an adult like head banging is sufficient to qualify as profound.
Yeah I agree, we can define a threshold. Meaning someone has to determine where the line is, and so my question is still: where is that line? Who determines it and how? The answer is that there is no line and no one determines it, RFK is just using vague nebulous terms, which are not clear at all.
> I think a self-harming stim as an adult like head banging is sufficient to qualify as profound.
Lots of autistic people self-harm as a stim, through skin picking, scraping, pinching, cutting, hair pulling, etc. So if "self-harming as a stim is sufficient to qualify as profoundly autistic", then they can sweep up pretty much any autistic person.
And that's the problem when autistic people are cut out of the conversation entirely and painting autistic people with a broad brush as RFK is doing.
If it's not the answer, then where is the line and who determines it?
> Disagree. I think your stats are off.
I didn't provide any statistic, I made a generalized observation based on the autistic people I know. If you have stats, provide them.
But my observation is every autistic person I know has engaged in some level of self-harm stimming, and my generalization is that means lots of autistic people stim in this way, and this means if self-harm is a criteria for being "profoundly autistic", that will cause a lot of false positives.
What would you suggest Americans actually do? They voted this in knowing this would happen.
It’s one thing to shout into a void about some vague disagreement, but it’s entirely different to actually take some form of real action. What should that action comprise?
2. Continue speaking loudly about the various criminal acts of this administration and continue reinforcing the importance of not tuning it out
3. Find promising candidates and fund their run in 2026 to flip the house and strangle the administration with impeachments over their long list of violations of the Constitution
4. Arm yourselves in general before the GOP finally decides they're okay with preventing certain people from buying firearms (specifically "mentally ill" people who don't like Trump, i.e. https://thehill.com/homenews/5200463-trump-derangement-syndr...)
A lot of libs don't know this, but shooting is also extremely fun and gun people are extremely friendly and welcoming. Get a gun, book a lesson at your local range, and enjoy an afternoon learning how to use it. Guns are also a lot of fun for the gear-junkie types that I'm sure are overrepresented here on HN.
EDIT: I changed the order of these, apologies to the commenter below!
#1: Not available in New York - if you're in the wrong red county, trying to apply for a semi-automatic rifle permit means having to argue with the GOP about your "good moral character" and have your permit get denied. This also assumes your county will process your application in a timely manner - mine's a nearly 11-12 month wait to process. Even hardcore red areas are becoming a nightmare to gain access to 2A rights :)
Obviously, locality matters - but in most of the country you can walk into a gun show, hand a random guy a fist full of cash, and walk out with a firearm.
And yes the more general point is obviously gun ownership laws are highly localized. You should look up the requirements in your area and navigate them to acquire your very own check and balance, given that Congress has abdicated its role as such.
It is very dangerous that so much of the right wing thinks that liberals are afraid of (and therefore do not own) firearms. The meme needs to be that liberals are just as armed as anyone else and are a credible backstop on tyranny.
if nothing else,vote with your wallet, buy used, eat a bit lower on the food chain, wear t shirts that might get you in trouble, spend more time on personal care so that you have the stamina and energy to help where you see that you can.
You should stop it from happening by any means necessary like last time. Organize. Talk to each other and figure out what all your options are. Do your threat modelling. Then act.
I really believe it’s a messaging problem and a money problem. There is money guiding media to rally around a message/figure and it’s rewarded handsomely in return. That’s the problem to fix.
There will always be insane amounts of money towards right-wing propaganda in media. If it is ever made illegal, it will be lobbied into legality again. If lobbying is made illegal, politicians will be corrupted into allowing it.
It would take something very radical to fix the massive imbalance of power in this world. Something I fear Amercians are not ready for. So let it burn, maybe something better will emerge from the ashes.
Be more like the Serbians. Don't just let things happen. You have agency. The government is supposed to be for the people, by the people - democracy doesn't only happen once every four years.
It should be noted that the Nazis took a lot of US policies from 1920/30s and ran with them just a little bit further. The Nazis were famous for eugenics, but it was quite big in the US as well, see for example:
> Sorry, why should it be noted? What is the relevance of your comment other than whataboutism?
It is worth noting because nowadays the Nazis are treated as evil incarnate, and the Allied side of WW2 the side of justice, but the history of the ideas behind the Nazis does not lie (entirely) with-in Germany. There is darkness in every society (including the US) and certain tendencies, and worth reminding people that these things can take hold anywhere, and not just "over there".
That is neither here nor there. Nobody has ever claimed evil started (or ended) with the Nazis. The US has committed unspeakable evil before and after, as have many other governments.
The parent presumably singled out the Gestapo because it is one of the prime examples of a secret police detaining and punishing citizens without due process. The fact that the Gestapo didn't spring out of completely new ideas doesn't seem particularly relevant in this context.
There are more apposite comparisons: The US internment programs of 1942–1945, or McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
it needs to be pointed out that the medical "profesion", especialy anything related to psychology does not let anyone who comes in, and leave, without a diagnosis.....unless it is someone getting a mandatory check for a security clearance, in which case it's sunshine and happyness. The best anyone else can hope for is ....."inconclusive", nobody gets an all clear, except money and power, for whom, a full psychotic break will be spun into something virtuously overcome and meritable.
History, might not repeat, but it sure as fuck rhymes.
The two year old child of an American citizen was deported last week, so this is already gone completly off the rails.
It’s interesting to muse about the larger picture here. What is it that makes autism so dangerous? To me it looks like part of an almost spiritual war against empathy/compassion by traumatized individuals trying to fight their own Jungian Shadow.
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Didn't someone recently mention that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy"?
Sounds familiar...
I didn’t know who that was, so googled. Apparently, Musk said that.
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Even autistic people can be jerks. Elon Musk doesn't have empathy because he's an asshole not because he's autistic.
No one I've heard is saying Musk is an asshole because he's autistic. It's Musk himself that's making that claim by attempting to use it as a cover for his asshole moves.
It's only like my opinion, but I think a man who describes his father as a "terrible human being" has enough awareness for self awareness unless the claimed disorder is something self obsessed like narcissism.
That quote was massively taken out of context. His argument was that the west has too much empathy, not that empathy is bad, period. He even specifically prefaced that with saying that empathy is a good thing.
Context:
Musk: Yeah, [Gad Saad is] awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/yes-musk-said-the-...
To me, “suicidal empathy“ (if that exists) is a lack of empathy (for self) — not “too much of it“. It’s not zero sum.
You could go as far as to say that empathy only occurs in moments where there is no me or other, just an “us“. Which includes me.
His statements and behavior make me question whether he really experiences empathy or whether he lost that too early in his life to consciously remember.
>To me, “suicidal empathy“ (if that exists) is a lack of empathy (for self) — not “too much of it“. It’s not zero sum.
"Empathy" in the form of thoughts and prayers might not be zero sum, but that's probably not the "empathy" that Musk is talking about. He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.
Like l said, I doubt he experientially knows what he’s talking about. Or he means what he says and expresses the desire to paint empathy in a bad light and by that continue to dehumanize the other to justify violence.
Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.
>Like l said, I doubt he experientially knows what he’s talking about.
What does that even mean? You can't defund USAID without yourself first going on a trip to Africa to dig a well?
>Or he means what he says and expresses the desire to paint empathy in a bad light and by that continue to dehumanize the other to justify violence.
How did you go from "so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" to "dehumanize the other to justify violence"? Presumably he's talking about refugees and foreign countries, but there's a pretty wide gulf between putting the interests of your own polity ahead of others, and "dehumanize the other to justify violence".
>Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.
I doubt Musk is upset all the people tweeting prayer emojis whenever a natural disaster hits a foreign country, when he's talking about "we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on".
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> He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.
This is highly debatable. I would say it's not zero sum, because these costs further enrich the country in the long-run, just in not obvious ways. This is especially true for domains that naturally cross inter-country. Diseases don't care about borders, so it's to your benefit to prevent outbreaks outside of your country.
How does this context somehow exonerate him?
It reads like absolute paranoia to me.
>How does this context somehow exonerate him?
You might not agree with his statement even with the full context, but at the very least it's a very different statement than the initial quote of "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy".
With the larger context of the quote it still seems like a distinction without a difference.
>distinction without a difference
There's a pretty big difference between "I think the west has too much empathy" and "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", even if both are directionally anti-empathy. It's not any different than "I think the US's free speech regulations are too lax" and "The fundamental weakness of the US is free speech". Even though both are directionally anti-free speech, and a free speech opponent would object both premises, it would be wholly irresponsible to paint someone who wants hate speech laws passed as the latter, when their position is more accurately portrayed as the former.
He literally says "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy" at one point in the larger quote, while your comment makes it sound like that was a paraphrase of his comment.
>He literally says "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy" at one point in the larger quote
I never claimed that he didn't say that, only that selectively quoting that part conveys an entirely different message than if you quoted the whole thing.
Are we even reading the same thing? The rest of his statement is simply a justification for this explicitly stated position!
> They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization,
Who are? Did he say?
Sorry for not listening through the whole thing. There's a lot of pointless rambling going, which I guess is something inherent to the format more than it is to him.
Migrants
Hence "Western". Makes sense. Same reason why Europe is doomed and the US will flourish. It's never that simple though, is it? There are numerous counter examples all thoughout history.
Republicans and oligarchs for starters
It's a dog whistle for hyper-individualism, radical selfishness, violating Kantian ethics, and stepping over homeless people.
>violating Kantian ethics
???
How does "there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" violate "Kantian ethics"?
Also, if we accept that "dogwhistle" framing, what should we make of the average leftist commenter saying that greed/inequality is a weakness of US's economic system? Maybe that's actually a "dogwhistle" for hyper-collectivism, radical Bolshevism, and stepping over rich people? Or is the "dogwhistle" characterization only a thing you apply to the Other Side?
In Kantian ethics stealing a loaf of bread is wrong even if done by or for a starving person. In utilitarian ethics stealing bread in that context would be justified. The "civilizational suicide by empathy" narrative is rooted in a utilitarian ethics--empathy is good until the negative consequences outweigh the positive; whereas in Kantian ethics if empathy is good, it's always good, and if that possibly leads to civilizational suicide, so be it.
I think that's the point the poster was trying to make. I make no claim about what the practiced ethics are of Musk, of the cultural circles he travels in, or of the cultural circles he opposes (e.g. identity politics, social justice movements, etc); or even that Musk or any of these circles practice a consistent or coherent set ethics.
>The "civilizational suicide by empathy" narrative is rooted in a utilitarian ethics
So in actually working ethics, and not some inflexible abstract principles posed by some German philosopher?
That's one take. A counter argument is that utilitarian calculus is highly subjective, individually and socio-culturally, resulting in movements like Social Darwinism, Eugenics movement, etc. And someone like Musk might even argue the ethics of identity politics and contemporary social justice movements are fundamentally similar to those earlier examples, relying on a present day calculus (whether nominally utilitarian or otherwise) that in time, if not already, will prove no less backward, unempathetic, and harmful. Kantian ethics is one attempt to restrain that kind of unconscious, self-serving discretion.
You can go back and forth, poste, riposte, ad nauseum. Abstract ethical philosophy and discourse are their own kind of tarpit, in some ways worse than the rhetoric behind the modern culture wars. To avoid getting drawn into them--the tarpits, if not the philosophies themselves--it pays to know how to identify them and how they interact.
The problem with being on the public stage, is that Every. Single. Word. They. Utter. has the ability to be reframed. With Deepfakes, they can now have words put in their mouths, in a realistic manner.
That's why so many politicians and C-suite execs are "weasely." They learn to choose their words carefully. The Fed Chair can crash the markets, by wincing at the wrong time.
I empathize with him (see what I did, there?), but he's in a position where his utterances can either do great good, or great harm.
Many of these mega-rich folks keep their mouths shut, and that's for a reason.
That is not what happened here. The quote is completely consistent with who Musk is. And is exactly the same in the context. This is not Musk misspoking and experiencing unfair consequences.
It is Musk saying something that is perfectly consistent with everything he does.
I was being generous. Didn't feel like arguing with the stans.
"I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people [...] empathy is good" - Elon Musk
There I had my money on infinite navel gazing while being completely unaware of the rest of the world
It's crazy we got all those lessons figured out, clear as can be and right in the history books, that every kid is supposed to learn. And yet, here we are, back to square one.
As if most college students (never mind kids) know anything about history worth a dime? They couldn't tell you who did what to whom in WWII, never mind getting into any nuance. At best the majority misremembers some stuff they "learned" from movies.
Just because we sit them in front of textbooks and lectures for 8 hours a day for 12 years (plenty of kids drop out of highschool or take fairly nonstandard "get to work" programs that de-emphasize education.) doesn't mean they learn anything.
Plenty of kids sat next to me in precalc learning how to calculate mortgage rates and then complain that school doesn't teach useful skills like how to calculate a mortgage. At the end of the day, learning cannot be forced. You can put all the info in front of the person you want, they can just ignore it.
This is especially true after Bush Jr. made it impossible to hold kids back, which was the primary way we worked around a stubborn kid.
We are roughly one generation after No Child Left Behind, and a lot of kids have been educationally left behind. IMO this is not coincidence. Good teachers knew right away the negative effects that program caused.
Obama reformed NCLB a bit, but did not fix the part that incentivizes schools to prefer just pushing kids forward if they are struggling.
To be fair, even though I never had trouble in school and was generally a good student, I had a very poor and surface level understanding of fascism (what it is, what causes it) until I actually decided to learn about it a few years ago. I wonder how much of it is simply due to public education's incompetency (I live outside the US) or because of a willfulness to not engage with the root causes of fascism (material conditions, etc.) from fear of repercussions by the right-wing.
Really ,did we ? The marching morons havw nukes now..
He said that because he couldn't empathize with those defendants...
This is the paradox of tolerance and it’s pretty cringe.
Conditioning is a powerful thing. I'm autistic, but my mother refuses to accept it, every 5/10 years she comes up with a new reason I'm not autistic, the latest one is that it's "hip to have autism now", hah. I think she thinks it's a failing of her parenting maybe, who knows, but the older I get, the more I realize lack of empathy does not arise spontaneously, but from repeated conditioning to mistrust empathy itself. When my mother wanted to be a special needs teacher, my grandmother couldn't understand why she wanted to look after "spastics".
My former best friend, despite having $100MM++ is paranoia about kindness, he theoretically should be liberate to express generosity, but his father taught him anyone being kind or receiving kindness is about someone taking from him. His father’s voice has become his own internal voice creating huge amounts of mistrust and suspicion, ultimately robbing him of any connection unless he paid for it directly, so zero meaningful connection.
>What is it that makes autism so dangerous?
In higher support needs, reduced autonomy (to the point of total dependency for ASD 3 cases), plus reduced social and intellectual capacity. Plus several commorbidities, in mental and bodily health.
It can be beneficial for society to have laser-focused and social-consensus challenging individuals with higher intelligence, but that's hardly the only or even the main way autism manifests - just the pop culture popular one (and the one whose members can more easily advocate for themselves, and present their cases as the sole representative, summed up in the "autism is a superpower" slogan).
You’re really wondering why the administration that’s rejected habeas corpus, a right which pre-dates the Magna Carta in our system of law, is creating lists of undesirables?
>What is it that makes autism so dangerous?
That the parents of severe cases eventually pass away and unless they figure out to take the kid with them, he is condemned at best to a life in mental health institutions - and usually they make One Flew Upon Cuckoo's Nest look like Teletubbies.
Add to that more and more people are single kids and usually born out of geriatric pregnancy (which also increases the chances of autism somewhat) - aka above 35, so they really are alone.
There are very good state and society interests in preventing autism. Mental disabilities are way worse than physical in today's society. Thankfully not every case is severe. But severe one's do exist.
Surely you can see that this isn't going to be about preventing autism?
Autists (and neurodivergent people in general) tend to think more freely and follow the crowd less than average.
I’d say they’re dangerous in the same way as librarians are dangerous.
RFK has been quite clear that autistic people are undesirables. They're collecting our personal information so that we can be imprisoned or killed.
He’s being incredibly clear that when he talks about people that have trouble participating in society, he is talking about the 26% of people with profound autism.
Online autism conspiracy theory channels turn this into some kind of eugenics purge.
He's not being "incredibly clear" because he speaks about autistic people with one broad brush.
And in calling this "a conspiracy theory" and "some kind of eugenics purge", you seem to be intentionally downplaying the very real and very legitimate worries of autistic people, a group who has historically been subjected to eugenics purges in the past, which started using the language and rationale Kennedy espouses.
If Kennedy wants to be taken seriously and with good faith, he should put autistic people and experts in charge of this effort. That he doesn't speaks volumes about his true intentions.
Sorry if that sounds like a conspiracy theory to you, but autistic people like myself see the obvious parallel here and we aren't going to just be quiet and allow it to happen again.
> He's not being "incredibly clear" because he speaks about autistic people with one broad brush.
You’re watching edited videos.
No, this is always the defense people come up when RFK says something insane.
It's not deepfake, it's not edited, he is just actually a crazy person. Yes, he truly believes HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Yes, he truly believes vaccines don't work.
We should not be listening to him on anything, let alone things that actually matter. There are people living on the side of the road with more credibility and reasonableness than him. And, we will not be gaslit by his defenders who, I can only assume, are equally as insane as him.
It’s edited. Watch the full thing, he says ‘to be clear I’m not talking about (high functioning people)’ but rather a group of children who seem to have a sudden onset of autistic symptoms at two. Seriously just watch it.
As far as I can tell I've heard all the words from that man and his surrogates. What are the words that have been said which I have not heard, which would clear all this up?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43826940
Like I said, I've heard all those words already. They don't clear anything up. I'm asking you if there are more words I haven't heard.
Here's the transcript: https://singjupost.com/rfk-jr-holds-press-conference-on-new-...
When he speaks here he says things like:
Aside from not being toilet trained, the rest of that applies to me. So am I "profoundly autistic"? I mean, maybe but at the same time I don't think that's really what he means. So you can see my confusion. Is he talking about me or isn't he? Because he's listing off things I do all the time, and calling the these features of "profound autism".He also says:
Again, not incredibly clear by my reading. Very broad brush being applied here.In the whole speech, he doesn't refer to autism as a "spectrum" disorder once until he's prompted by a reporter in those terms. Telling, because he clearly views autism as a binary of high/low functioning or high/low needs, which it's not. So again, painting autism with a broad brush.
Then there's this:
Yeah, so let me get this straight, RFK says this and yet it's the autism community who you think are the conspiracy theorists?Yes, I would consider an adult that bangs their head to stim to have profound autism.
Yes, RFK said that and then I do think some extreme members of the autism community are conspiracy theorists. Literally nothing that he has said that you have quoted indicates that he wants to create concentration camps or kill everyone or anything else said on the autism community channels we have both read.
Let's assume they were planning to create concentration camps, do you naively expect them to publicly admit that in plain language or how do you think that would look?
Even the Nazis didn't have the political capital to plainly admit to their own atrocities. They tried to keep it secret for as long as they could, then they denied the camps' existence, denied the abuse in those camps, denied the genocide, falsified medical records to make it appear that people died from pneumonia and unfortunate medical complications.
In reality they were injecting children with pathogens, experimenting on them, torturing them, starving them and ultimately killing them. In the end they even tried to make their families pay for their "care". Officially, nobody knew anything terrible was happening. Unofficially, everyone was complicit.
> Let's assume they were planning to create concentration camps
Godwin’s law.
You're using this wrong. Godwin's law is an observation and not a fallacy you can use to shutdown discussion.
Normally I agree but Godwin's law is officially suspended the moment they threw a Nazi salute.
Regardless, Godwin's Law is a thought terminating cliche, which is shielding us from the truth. The person you responded to wasn't calling them Nazis (although I am), they were asking you to engage in a hypothetical to try to make sense of a problematic issue: for 70 years since the Holocaust we have heard the slogan "never again", as a cry to the future to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again.
The question to all those who hear that cry is: how? How do you prevent a holocaust from happening again?
The problem the parent is pointing out is that the perpetrators of a holocaust don't say that is their intent. They will say they are "punishing criminals", "deporting illegals", "purging drug dealers", "cleaning up the streets", "bringing order", "causing peace", "uniting the nation", "restoring glory" etc.
Therefore in order to prevent a holocaust, one has to necessarily stand in the way of people who claim to be doing good. No one doing a holocaust claims to be doing evil.
If you wait for undeniable proof of a holocaust before you act to stop it, you will fail. That kind of proof only comes after the fog of war has cleared.
Therefore if you really want to prevent a holocaust, you have to do so before they consolidate power, before they operationalize their intent, at the stage when they still have plausible deniability, and when they can make their plans seem reasonable. You prevent them from laying the groundwork for the holocaust, despite all the deniers.
> is officially suspended the moment they threw a Nazi salute.
But they didn't. You know that. Unless you think Tim Waltz, AOC and everyone else who did that is a Nazi. I bet you don't.
White supremacists worldwide recognized it as a Nazi salute (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250121-musk-salute-a...).
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Here's a video of Musk doing the same gesture as a group of avowed neo Nazis:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91266228/musk-roman-salute-histo...
That's a practiced and very intentional Nazi salute, don't tell me otherwise. He put his back foot into that.
Like I said, if a person does that salute, Godwin goes out the window and it's time to presume they are a Nazi until proven otherwise.
> Unless you think Tim Waltz, AOC and everyone else who did that is a Nazi.
Do you have video that shows the same thing as the link I provided? I bet you don't.
>> Unless you think Tim Waltz, AOC and everyone else who did that is a Nazi.
> Do you have video that shows the same thing as the link I provided? I bet you don't.
Of course I do. Everyone does. I’m sure you have seen a bunch of them.
https://x.com/wildbarestepf/status/1881841494925201840
https://x.com/joshwalkos/status/1882228610712658356
https://x.com/gunthereagleman/status/1917160882146070869
If you don’t like these there are many others. But I bet you have already seen them and you just don’t care.
Trying to equate any random hand gesture that just happens to have their arm extended at some point isn't fooling anyone, but it's a strong signal for your true feelings on the matter so I appreciate the time-saving part of it.
> Trying to equate any random hand gesture that just happens to have their arm extended at some point isn't fooling anyone
Yes, exactly. You understand the bald faced lie of the people trying to pretend they think Elon Musk is a Nazi.
You're embarrassing yourself all over this thread.
Amazing, from here it looks like I just won the argument. You’re new here, you should probably read the HN guidelines.
This would be my cue to dip out of this conversation, and I will actually stay out -- if random people reading through these replies feel compelled to tell you this, and your response is to put a crown on your own head, I will leave you to it.
A random low karma troll account that believes in the same conspiracy theory you do spouted garbage in response to me pointing out that dns_snek has revealed their own inconsistency, then I replied. The crown is mine, I did not place it there.
> Of course I do.
What I had said was "shows the same thing as the link I provided". In the link is a video of a neo nazi group doing a Nazi salute, which consists of two strokes:
1) hand on heart
2) thrust hand outward from body
Which is exactly the 1-2 gesture that Musk makes. Juxtaposing the neo Nazi group and Musk doing the salute at the same time makes clear just how similar they are.
As for your proof, what you have brought is as follows:
1) AOC waving her hand across her body three times. When juxtaposed next to the neo Nazis, it's clear what she is doing is not what they are doing.
2) Tim Walz pats his chest twice and then outstretches his hand in a wave. This again is not the 1-2 gesture heart->outstretch arm that the neo Nazis do.
3) A still of a man with his arm outstretched. Obviously not the 1-2 motion because there is no motion at all.
So far, you have no examples that demonstrate people doing the gesture that the neo Nazis are doing. Yet we do have a video of Musk doing the same gesture the neo Nazis are doing.
But fine, for the sake of argument, let's take the best example, Tim Walz, and just presume what he did is exactly a Nazi salute. What I had said was, now the presumption is Nazi until proven otherwise. So then let's look at both men and see if they exhibit other prevalent behaviors that Nazis exhibit.
What are Nazis best known for? Unbridled megalomania. Is Elon Musk a megalomaniac? Yes, he clearly is. He's quoted as saying empathy is a weakness. He's quoted saying if we want minerals there's nothing other countries can do to prevent us from orchestrating a coup to get them. His leadership style is decidedly authoritarian. Checking a lot of Nazi boxes.
Meanwhile Tim Walz is not a megalomaniac. He was democratically elected and follows the rule of law. He ran in a free and fair election, lost, and didn't foment an insurrection. He leads by example and building consensus rather than fiat and sheer force of will. Not a lot of Nazi behavior exhibited...
> But I bet you have already seen them and you just don’t care
Another wrong bet, I've seen everything under the sun and nothing yet has come close the what Musk is doing. That's because Musk is doing the real actual genuine thing, and these "gotchas" are people bending over backwards to try to normalize genuine Nazis.
> What I had said was "shows the same thing as the link I provided".
Which showed Elon raising his hand.
> In the link is a video of a neo nazi group doing a Nazi salute, which consists of two strokes:
> 1) hand on heart
> 2) thrust hand outward from body
Oh you wanted the specific 'new' gesture of some weird group of people, rather than a traditional Nazi salute? Why is that?
> 1) AOC waving her hand across her body three times.
So raising her palm in a traditional nazi salute. You don't want a traditional nazi salute though, you want the new nazi salute.
> When juxtaposed next to the neo Nazis, it's clear what she is doing is not what they are doing.
Yes it’s only similar to traditional nazis.
> 2) Tim Walz (1) pats his chest twice and then (2) outstretches his hand in a wave.
> This again is not the 1-2 gesture heart-
>outstretch arm that the neo Nazis do.
Sure looks like it to me. I added one and two to help you spot it.
> What I had said was, now the presumption is Nazi until proven otherwise.
That's silly. You know that's silly.
> What are Nazis best known for? Unbridled megalomania.
This doesn't seem logical. Many people want power, and are not nazis.
> He's quoted as saying empathy is a weakness.
No. He is saying people exploit empathy. You know that and are truncating the quote.
> He's quoted saying if we want minerals there's nothing other countries can do to prevent us from orchestrating a coup to get them.
lol the "we will coup whoever we want?" remark? It was a joke, in reply to an online conspiracy theorist that tweeted "You know what wasn’t in the best interest of people? The U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.". As on online conspiracy theorist you should already know this.
> Meanwhile Tim Walz is not a megalomaniac. He was democratically elected
Wait - he wanted power? I thought you meant that meant he was a megalomaniac?
> didn't foment an insurrection
Nobody fomented an insurrection. Some dickheads had a riot, even though Trump told them to stop. Stop watching MSN and CNN - the lefts equivalent of Fox - and read something mainstream center like WSJ.
> (Walz doesn't rule by fiat)
How do you know? Do you work for Walz?
>> But I bet you have already seen them and you just don’t care
> Another wrong bet, I've seen everything under the sun
So a right bet. You have seen AOC and Walz make salutes that equally could be determined to be Nazi by the same silly comnspiracy theorists, don't care because you have decided Elon is a nazi, though a series of bizarre twists like:
- "only a specific red shirted neo nazi group salute counts so AOCs salute is OK but Elons salute is not"
- "Walz two part salute was different from Elon's two part salute"
- A deliberate misquote about 'empathy is a weakness'
- Another misquote from Elon replying to an online conspirary theorist
You manipulate the truth. If one were to following your own logic, since Nazis manipulate the truth, they would conclude that you are a Nazi.
Is this OG enough for you lol?
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...
Look, a lot of reasonable people are identifying what Musk did as a Nazi salute. The worldwide drop in Tesla sales and the massive protests prove that. I don't have to do a single thing to make Musk look like a Nazi, he does that all himself. It's up to you if you want to spend your time defending clearly indefensible actions. You really should save your breath though, because words from you won't convince me; at this point I'll need to see actions from Musk to believe otherwise.
But it is notable that you are willing to bend yourself into knots to justify Musk. This reply is the most substantive one you've written in this whole conversation, by a wide margin. Most others have been perfunctory, but you really warmed up your keyboard with this one. Like the other poster, I find that very interesting and telling.
> Is this OG enough for you lol?
No, it was just demolished in the comment you were replying to but didn’t bother reading.
I’ll stop reading there myself.
> Look, a lot of reasonable people…
No. Popularity doesn’t prove truth you know that Christ why did I continue reading?
> In 2023, Godwin published an opinion in The Washington Post stating "Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you." In the article, Godwin says "But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy."
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> He’s being incredibly clear that when he talks about people that have trouble participating in society
Is that supposed to make it better? This distinction between autistic individuals who are productive and those who have trouble participating in society goes back to Nazi Germany where they sent the latter group to "reform camps" and "hospitals" to be murdered and eradicated. That's where the distinction of "Asperger syndrome" comes from.
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If you are going to
1) propose to make a list of people with autism
2) propose to send them to a concentration camp where where they will be treated
Then you had better damn well be prepared to answer specifically how what you're doing is different from what the Nazis did. If you're not prepared to deal seriously and substantively with that very relevent historical precedent, you have no business proposing the registry and the camps in the first place.
> propose to send them to a concentration camp
Nobody is doing that.
This entire term so far has been one ratchet after another of "they will never do that" followed promptly by "wow, they just did that, nothing we can do about it now except deal with the fallout!"
On the one hand they've proposed the autism database.
On the other hand they've proposed the "wellness farms" for drug addicts.
All that's left is for the right hand to start picking up what the left hand is putting down and we are there.
Moreover, they have been demonstrating that they're willing to torture those they consider "subhuman". Look at how they are treating immigrants.
Autistic people are used to being abused in awful ways, so when we see those immigrants being abused and abducted by the Trump administration, it's not very hard to see they would be willing to do this to autistic people. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize they're all awful people who are currently unrestrained by the law and general decency.
The conspiracy theory, such as it is, is this: these people look like Nazis, they sound like Nazis, and they act like Nazis, so their proposals related to autism are to be taken with a giant Nazi sized grain of salt.
I’m an immigrant and I’ve been treated fine, as has every other immigrant I know that has not broken the law.
Wellness farms for drug users seems reasonable.
They’ve cancelled the tracking database due to people’s concerns about privacy.
Maybe you're the one watching edited clips if you're not seeing instances of innocent immigrants being mistreated.
Are you thinking about the guy the politicians are meeting with, that jumped the border and has two separate domestic violence cases? Agreed that somebody isn’t seeing the full picture here.
No, I'm thinking specifically about the student that was abducted off the street and terrorized. But you bring up another good example of immigrant cruelty. I'm aware of the context you mention, but that doesn't change the fact that with what they're doing, they are highlighting and putting on full display the level of cruelty they are willing to engage in as they wield power.
It's only a matter of time before that level of depravity is directed at American citizens on American soil.
Also I thought you were going to bow out of this discussion?
> that was abducted off the street and terrorized
I bet that didn't happen. Someone on a visa probably waved a Hamas flag or told people how they can support Hamas and then had their visa appropriately yanked. I have no idea, I just know BS when I read it.
Edit: oh you're the same person from the other thread. Figures.
So worse than seeing edited news, you're not even seeing the news at all.
No. I see so many cases of people falsely claiming people were kidnapped and didn’t violate the terms of their visas I see the pattern.
I guess you haven't seen this case then, although it's been all over the news and HN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Rümeysa_Öztürk
This kind of display terrorizing force directed at normal people for exercising their speech is exactly the kind of excessive force that autistic people are hypervigilant about. We can see they started doing this first to illegal immigrants, then they moved on to legal residents, then they moved to citizens like US citizen immigration attorneys and the us-born children of migrants. If this trajectory holds, they will eventually turn on actual US citizens as a whole.
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> Online autism conspiracy theory channels turn this into some kind of eugenics purge.
No, people in leadership positions have a duty to lead - justifying themselves and attempting to get buy in from everyone. Especially so on sensitive topics that we're societally squeamish about due to some very real historic horrors.
I know the memetic field is a bit hazy from the sensationalist media pushing divisive whole-cloth nonsense like Joe Biden is going to make you eat bugs etc, but there is a huge difference when that schizophrenia is actively encouraged from the top.
So this idea that we're just supposed to trust the Trump administration, when many of their actions have already been completely unhinged and senseless (eg huge tariff taxes), when Trump's last time at the helm was completely divisive and destructive, and when he's picked the most unhinged type of charlatans for his cabinet this time around? Sorry, trust needs to be earned - especially the amount required for pulling on rightfully sensitive threads - and they're not even doing the basics of attempting to.
> sensationalist media pushing divisive whole-cloth nonsense like Joe Biden is going to make you eat bugs
This is exactly the same thing. In the full speech RFK makes it clear who he is and is not talking about, I’m torn on whether our leaders need to rewrite their speeches for sound bites.
Maybe? I haven't listened to his speech directly, because I'm burnt out from having to dissect the sheer volume of dog whistles this movement relies upon.
Maybe that's a civically irresponsible take, but it is extremely civically irresponsible for Trump to cause this fatigue by sowing division to create a segment of fervent support. We've had too many years of "4d chess" with everyone trying to read good intentions and coherent reasoning out of the word salad. At this point most reasonable people are only trying to read the tea leaves to know how they might have to protect themselves.
And sure, RFK is not Trump. Except it's clear Trump has no concept of delegation or keeping his hands off of something. Even if RFK has the purest of motivations, it's very easy to see Trump seeing a few edgelord social media comments saying we need to send $whomever to the camps as well, noticing that the topic "drives engagement", and running away with the idea. At this point it's just generally bad to be in the crosshairs of state legibility in any way.
This is like saying what makes cerebal palsy so dangerous. Why is trying to find out causes so dangerous? The dangers of empiricism in the 21st century.
In the UK, there are regions where 50% of children born in the early 2000s have special needs, and more children than adults are claiming disability benefits. It is going to have a very big impact on the labour market when 20-30% of these cohorts cannot work and, therefore, need to obtain income support from everyone else.
> It is going to have a very big impact on the labour market when 20-30% of these cohorts cannot work
"Cannot work" has more to do (imo) with the American Welfare Cliff where if you accept disability, you're forced to not have a job because if you make even a small piddling of money (it's something like $600/mo), you lose all your disability.
It's very disgusting, imo, and rejecting people's admission of a very real struggle they have because admission "does more harm than good" is, itself, harmful.
This is an interesting narrative. I think competition has something to do with it in our modern society. If I work at a company and someone is so competitive that I end up getting fired for whatever reason. I'm not going to all of a sudden care what happens to that person. Because they didn't care what happens to me. So you extrapolate this to the societal level, mix in the different cultural and clan ideological backgrounds of the occupants on the society and you can see how autism is a scapegoat for side effects of competition in many levels of our lives. Then you add the time dimension into the mix and yeah, maybe it looks like autism but maybe it's just, hey were all competing in many different ways and at some point. You stop giving a f*^k.
> It’s interesting to muse about the larger picture here.
I love the idea that, upon seeing the government compiling a database of undesirables under the pretense of fighting autism(?), one can zoom out and discover that the “big picture” is, uh, about autism. That is like watching The Sixth Sense and then writing about how it is a movie about the challenges of being a bald guy.
> The Sixth Sense ... a movie about the challenges of being a bald guy.
wow, am I going to have to go back and watch it a third time?
an interesting book related to this discussion is "Speed of Dark" by Elisabeth Moon. It tells the story of an autistic person and their struggles while faced with the possibility of a "cure"
"Do not commit the sin of empathy"
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — Elon on Joe Rogan
It’s a core tenant of this Curtis Yarvin / neo reactionary ideology that seems to be shared by a lot of VCs
The word you want is tenet
A tenant is somebody paying to lease property, for example if you have a landlord, you're their tenant, and by analogy e.g. an Azure tenant is an organisation within the Azure cloud with a unique identifier.
A tenet is a belief or principle that is important to some group, for example the IETF's Best Common Practice series are not just RFCs describing a protocol or technology but instead statements of principle such as BCP 188 "Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack".
Pedant (noun) - a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning.
<< "Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack".
Hmm, thank you. This is by far the best pithy argument for privacy I have found thus far.
It's also helpful shorthand. One of the reason there is no RSA KEX† in TLS 1.3 is that under BCP 188 obviously aiding bulk surveillance technology isn't acceptable, so when you have a liaison from the ACLU saying yes, get rid of RSA KEX and a representation from EDCO (Enterprise Data Center Operators, basically big old financial companies) saying it'll cost them too much money to lose RSA KEX so it should be reinstated in the late drafts for the RFC, there was no need to re-explain in great detail why the ACLU are right here because there's already a document explaining to anybody who is new to this.
† The RSA Key Exchange goes like this: We get the public key of a server from their certificate which they sent us, we pick a symmetric key at random and we encrypt our chosen key using that public key with the RSA algorithm, so that only the legitimate owner of the certificate can decrypt it, then we send that encrypted key to the server. Because they know the Private Key corresponding to the public key in the certificate they can decrypt the symmetric key we sent. This symmetric key is used for all further communication. This means if say, the Mad King's Secret Police obtain a copy of the RSA private key for the server at any time the Secret Police can decrypt every communication, even if the communications they're decrypting happened weeks, months or years before they obtain the key.
Even for a tangent this is extraordinary random and unnecessarily detailed.
Answer truthfully, are you an llm or any form of bot?
> “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — Elon on Joe Rogan
Also probably Nietzsche (not on Joe Rogan).
And then he cries on TV because people are not buying his cars.
Can't make that crap up...
The funny thing is it is the autists, who don't respond well to emotional appeals. Is that all it is? That it is harder to influence high functioning ones?
Was he ever diagnozed? Because all his success is charizma and social skills based. This claim appears only when he needs to be excused. Also, it is super possible to be a harmful asshole and autist at the same time.
Musk also do not care about morals, ethics or laws based appeals.
I do not think he ever was. As you note, most of the 'accusations' come up without any real evidence. It is all basically the same story as with most remote diagnosis of all politicians that 99% talk show hosts play with their audiences.
FWIW, I personally do not think he has autism. I do think his mind works differently from a good chunk of the population though.
He said he had Asbergers in 2021 on SNL. There is no reason any further detail would be public.
"I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people [...] empathy is good" — Elon on Joe Rogan
The previous silicon valley giants were to a large degree followers of Ayn Rand. This society selects, grooms and idealises a certain psychological profile.
There's a name for that psychological profile: Sociopathy.
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A cadre of billionaires appears determined to institute fascism in the United States; there’s a very real chance they will succeed. Meanwhile, the climate crisis threatens the long-term survival of our species, yet efforts to steer us away from self-destruction are being actively sabotaged by the fossil fuel industry. This is to say nothing of the warmongering with China, another nuclear power.
The concentration of wealth (and by extension, power) really has become an existential threat to humanity.
More often than not, it's the other way around. Being born in the bourgeoisie, like Trump and Musk, grooms you into a certain way of thinking. You're told your whole life you are exceptional, above everyone else. No wonder they turn out like that. Read up on both of these guys' educations if you're interested in this.
Both Trump and Musk may have been born into “bourgeoisie“, but the connecting and relevant factor here is a highly traumatizing childhood with highly traumatized parents.
I don't know why you put bourgeoisie in quotes like it's a ridiculous concept.
With the kind of analysis you give we're stuck with surface level "oh they're just a bad batch", when they're pure products of a system that makes series of them. It's not like they are thousands just like Trump, ready to step in if he loses power.
The bourgeoisie has a material interest in installing fascism, which is why we're here. Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg are among the only ones to profit from the current circus.
It's not the first time it happens either, this has been proven times and times again. Look up the relations of Hitler and Mussolini with the capitalist class of their times.
I am not saying them having a shitty childhood had no influence on their politics, simply that it is not nearly enough to understand our current state of affairs.
I put it in quotes because I quoted you.
From my understanding, it is not wealth that creates sociopathy, it is a traumatic childhood. For me it points to the origin, and thus the fix, which is why I find that distinction not only relevant but crucial. After studying a broad body of literature around the connection between trauma and violence and politics, I do believe this would indeed be “nearly enough to understand the current state of affairs“. What connects Hitler and Mussolini and Trump and Putin is not wealth but severe early childhood violence.
But by what mechanism can they attain power? That's what matters. Many sociopaths remain in the shadows.
Material support from the oligarchy absolutely connects Hitler, Mussolini, Trump and Putin. It is how they find the funding to get into power, how media is made to relay fascist propaganda 24/7, etc.
Serving the interests of the capital class, and only theirs, is what defines and enables fascism.
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Fixing diseases and abnormalities in humans is empathy and compassion.
Some people considered being a jew abnormality and found their way to fix it.
We're moving same direction, mostly by people wishing for a strong arm, and being consumed by hate. And it's definitely not empathy and compassion in play here.
> Some people considered being a jew abnormality and found their way to fix it.
They were wrong. Does that mean that human developmental abnormalities don't exist and we shouldn't be looking for ways to prevent them? Of course not.
I can't believe you're making me defend RFK, but characterizing this as being motivated by "hate" is completely absurd. RFK is a kook, but he's a kook motivated by compassion and empathy. His entire career has been driven by compassion for people affected by environmental poisons. And the people in his camp are crunchy granola parents who can't analyze statistical data, who are grasping at straws trying to find out why their kid has a developmental abnormality that science doesn't have a ready explanation for.
He's a kook who claimed that COVID-19 was ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazim. That's not a claim motivated by compassion and empathy.
Are you referring to the Trump government's treatment of trans people?
RFK views autistics as undesirables, so it's absurd to believe that he'll be any nicer to us.
> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”
What makes more sense is that he's collecting our personal information for imprisonment and execution.
> RFK views autistics as undesirables
>> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”
This is true of people with severe autism. I know someone whose autism is severe enough she'll probably never be able to live independently. Doesn't everyone view that medical condition--the condition, not the person--as undesirable? Doesn't everyone view being healthy as better than being unhealthy?
I have ADHD. I'd rather not have ADHD. I take a pill every day to control it. My kid has it too. He'll have to take a pill every day for the rest of his life. I'd love to avoid that outcome. Avoiding disease is a good thing!
If he had made the same statement about Bangladeshi-Americans and was collecting their personal information, how would you feel about it?
Your comparison makes no sense. Bangladeshi Americans, as a group, are normal and healthy. They don't suffer from a medical condition that could be cured.
But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.
> Your comparison makes no sense. Bangladeshi Americans, as a group, are normal and healthy. They don't suffer from a medical condition that could be cured.
I was trying to give you a sense of why I interpret his comments as a threat. He's described all of us as if we're a burden when I've been supporting myself for decades.
Some autistics would want a cure, but others feel that their perspective is equally as valid as neurotypicals. They don't see themselves as sick and in need of a cure.
> But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.
My main impairments are face blindness and a severe difficulty with reading facial expressions - I'm in the bottom 5% of the population. I would happily take a cure for either of these if it was offered. If it's a more general personality change, then I'm not interested. I'm comfortable with who I am.
There isn't an opt-out for me and there's a long history of eugenics in this country, that's why I'm concerned about this.
And I'm saying you shouldn't compare people of different ethnicities to people with medical conditions. I'm normal where I'm from. My skin color is an adaptation to the tropical climate I'm from. It's not a medical condition that's maladaptive to normal functioning, or something that ideally we could cure.
Your use of the term "eugenics" is nonsensically broad. Society should seek to cure diseases and maladaptive medical conditions. That's not "eugenics."
Your problem is that you fail to understand that autism isn't a disease, it's a neurodivergence, their brains are just wired slightly differently. Many autists live their whole lives without even suspecting of their conditions, and most of those who are aware of it live absolutely normal lives. The only way we could potentially "cure" autism is if we somehow altered peoples' brains while in the womb, if that's not eugenics I don't know what is.
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Reducing the incidence of undesirable or maladaptive medical conditions is a good thing. That's why we have vaccines, for example. That's why we perform second trimester screening, for example.
> undesirable or maladaptive medical conditions
This is why autistic people are wary of efforts to "cure" autism -- because the people leading the charge always use dehumanizing language to frame their cause. It becomes a moral imperative. "We have to cleanse humanity of this scourge! We have to save the children!"
And what do we have to do to accomplish this goal? The solutions are always the same: register us all in a database, send us to a camp or a farm for "curing", and prevent us from reproducing through forced sterilization and/or euthanasia.
Unless and until autistic people are in charge, then all such efforts to "cure" autism and "find the cause" should be treated with extreme skepticism.
The problem is not fixing diseases. The problem is what is defined as a disease or abnormality. The problem is people who are clearly choosing abnormalities based on politics, power grabs, and anti-science rhetoric.
Science and medicine is what has defined autism as a disease or abnormality. Science and medicine are telling us that the rates of these diseases are growing dramatically, for decades now.
RFK isn’t the one who made autism concern happen. My three year old’s teacher asked us to get him tested with the county for autism. It’s a very common thing parents are dealing with these days. I’d argue that what you’re saying is exactly backward. The medical community has defined a lot of normal behavior as autism.
Now, I agree RFK’s views on what’s causing autism are anti-scientific, and I doubt he’ll be able to figure out what’s causing it. But RFK has a platform because the medical community has diagnosed all these kids as autistic but doesn’t have an explanation for what’s causing it. So looks like RFK fill the void.
It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.
The fact that high functioning people like Asperger got merged with it and changed to a spectrum is precisely science at work, achieving to improve our understanding of the phenomenon. We previously believed that only the extreme cases were autistic, but we now understand that this limit was arbitrary and wrong, because autism is a broader spectrum of people with a wide range of possible characteristics.
Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently. The proof being that outside of a minority of extreme cases, autistic people does not have issues communicating or socializing with other autistic people.
Trying to categorize people as "normal" and "abnormal" and then pretending to "fix" the abnormal ones is dangerous and drifts towards eugenism, because there is not a single definition of normal, and there is probably not a single person on earth that is "normal".
If 97% of the population was autistic, then autistic people would not have any issues. The remaining 3% of what is currently considered neurotypical would be the ones having difficulties socializing, communicating and experiencing severe anxieties and psychological problems due to it.
This is why the solution is not to "fix" autism, but to help them find an environment where they can strive, be understood and live comfortably.
>It is well understood already that the number of autistic people is not actually increasing. What is increasing is our understanding of it and the number of diagnostics.
I see this idea thrown around whenever this topic is brought up, but this is just a contemporary opinion of certain researchers and science commentators. It is both unprovable and unfalsifiable.
>Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently.
A teacher I had in high school has an adult child with severe autism who is still living with her, because he can't take care of himself. He's not simply functioning differently, nor is anyone else that has the condition so severely that they can't perform any job.
Please read through this page shared here on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43813441
From the linked article:
"We can be certain that autism rates have gone up for artefactual reasons—diagnosis, changing awareness and incentives, etc. rather than real increases in the number of people with autism—by exploiting policy changes. For example, above, I mentioned the Massachusetts saw autism reports increase 400% in one year due to a change in school reporting."
This is exactly the issue that I'm getting at, which is shared with the above user's assertion. We cannot be certain of any of this. Especially not because of some handpicked examples by the author. None of this is provable or falsifiable, even if a the handful of disparate examples picked by the author seem compelling. Besides the examples of reporting changes, the author's arguments almost wholly rely on untestable counterfactuals.
Also:
"A single piece of evidence indicates that there is no real epidemic of autism. As remarked in a review in a 2020 Nature Reviews Disease Primers article:
No significant evidence is available supporting that autism is rarer in older people, which provides further evidence against the suggestion that autism is increasing in prevalence over time."
This doesn't provide evidence of anything. The absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. This is just an argument from ignorance. This is little different from saying that there is no significant evidence that people 500 years ago had lower rates of being diagnosed with a given disease, therefore the rates of people with that disease were likely the same as now.
If you ask any high-functioning or late-diagnosed autistic person who knows about the topic, you can bet that he will tell you his family (parents and grand-parents included) shows the same signs of autism, but that they do not wish to aknowledge it or be diagnosed. These people will never be included in any proper statistics because they see themselves as "normal" or "just a little different", despite being widely known as "weird".
Previous generations didn't grow up with all the comfort that we have today, such as games, internet and technology, and thus didn't have as many ways to isolate themselves in more comfortable hobbies. Because of this, they could develop stronger masking skills, which helps them a bit more than current generations, but does not fix the problem and made the understanding of it more difficult.
What were the symptoms your 3 yr old were exhibiting to be asked to screen them? Was the teacher right to say something or are they handing out these diagnoses like candy?
He was a little speech delayed, has somewhat below age level fine motor function, can sight read a lot of words, and has some odd behaviors, like taking to his hand pretending its Toodles from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The county said he was borderline. There is some gaming of the system going on for sure. They said they were ready to diagnose him with something and give him an IEP if he were going to public school where he could get extra services, but since we’re planning to send him to private K-12 they recommended against it.
I’ll be honest, my first thought was that it was white women (everyone in this story besides me) overreacting. In our circle of friends, several of the kids are diagnosed with something on the spectrum. By contrast I don’t know a single person from my immigrant group whose child has a diagnosis. So I was skeptical. But ultimately, I figured that the teachers see dozens of these kids every year and I trust their judgment.
Yeah I have observed the same re: lack of immigrant mental health access/diagnosis, but it seems to be changing in subsequent generations that are more privy to mental health disorders in general. Why not help a child get accommodations they need to thrive in school, there is no shame in that in my opinion. It narrows/evens the playing field for neurodivergent folks who need a little more help to be their best selves in school.
>Science and medicine is what has defined autism as a disease or abnormality.
Not really. DSM is not really scientific, its more statistical.
You could make arguments that autism is actually evolutionary, as people who are on the spectrum in certain ways are often better in select areas than neuro typical people.
Autists are just an easy group to target that can't fight back too hard.
It's just the next step on the escalation ladder. They'll come for all of us eventually
The administration's (and R party's) entire M.O. is now to find relatively small, easy-to-target demographic groups that can't fight back, exact cruelty on them to marginalize them even more or (in their view even better) stamp them out, and then go carve out another small, vulnerable group and repeat. We're going to see this pattern repeat over and over in the near future, and there will be many targeted groups.
That famous Martin Niemöller quote comes to mind:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
If we don't aggressively fight this at every step, it'll be our turn eventually.
> When the Nazis came for the communists, I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.
> When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn't a trade unionist.
> When they locked up the Social Democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn't a social democrat.
> When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn't a Jew.
> When they came for me, there was no one left to protest
My prediction will be that ADHD people are next. Only 2% of the population and the social conservative supporters of RFK Jr have always hated giving kids stimulants despite the clear evidence supporting its use. There is STILL an ideology among conservatives that the current crop of people being diagnosed as ADHD is "wrong" and that people "with ADHD" are just junkies abusing stimulants or otherwise "overprescribed", despite clear and obvious evidence that people diagnosed with ADHD struggle to get their medicine for utterly stupid reasons and that we objectively do not have the capacity to evaluate everyone who needs it.
They will claim that ADHD people are a drain on society and are unproductive and are just being lazy.
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One thing this will do is disincentivize high functioning autists from identifying themselves as autists, which is a very good thing IMO. Just look at this channel https://www.youtube.com/@NationalAutisticSoc/videos. There is a lot of survivor-ship bias on this channel towards high functioning autists who can talk in front of a camera.
Just to give an idea to those not familiar with the difference between high functioning and low functioning autism, high functioning autists face problems like not being able to communicate properly some of the time, and low functioning autists face problems like not even being able to tell their caretaker which part of their body is in pain, or which kid in the group punched them.
Edit: The National Autistic Society is UK based but the situation is not that different in other countries.
Yup, these people are perfectly fine. They don't need to identify each other and band together. No one is targeting them[0]. They need to stop making mountains out of molehills[1]. It's not like anything bad has ever happened to these 'high functioning' whiners[2]. I mean who cares if they are 'treated' by withholding food to force them to pretend to not be traumatized[3]. They should understand that if they stop identifying with the label or as oppressed victims it will be better for them[4]. Just like all those people with drapetomania[5] who don't realize what's best is a tough hand to guide them. Don't you miss how things used to be?[6] Back when there was more tough love[7].
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0: lol
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-h...
2: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9087551/
3: https://autisticadvocacy.org/policy/briefs/intervention-ethi...
4: citing a source for this one would be an insult to the reader's intelligence
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot
7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dully
This will unpopular, but I would recommend that anyone who can manage it to avoid any sort of formal psychological diagnosis. Unless you strictly need it for medication, it is always something which could potentially drag you down. Anyone can use the DSM (alongside an actual doctor) to get something of an "informal diagnosis" which will help them understand themselves better and to work with a doctor to form coping strategies. The formal diagnosis could potentially be used against you in the future, whether it's related to autism or not. For some people as well, the formal diagnosis does not seem to help and instead feels like a modern form of astrology; it becomes part of their internal view of themselves, and they trap themselves within the boundaries of their diagnosis.
Autism, high functioning or not, rarely comes on its own. It often has comorbidities like PTSD, depression, anxiety disorder and ADHD. Many of these extra disorders, like the former 3 in my list happens due to how autistic people interact with the general society. Bullying, abuse, SA, etc are reported at higher than average rates by autistic people. A diagnosis often helps to deal with them and plan for the future. In addition, medication is used for these conditions. Autism doesn't really have a treatment as far as I know (could use a fact check). There are some therapies available, but they have limited effects.
Another matter is that 'high functioning autism' doesn't mean freedom from hardships. They learn and work differently and don't fit well in regular classrooms. If you search online, you'll find several hilarious accounts of puzzled and perplexed autistic students in their classrooms. Despite being 'high functioning', they really could use accommodations. This is true at home too. If you leave them alone, many would simply starve to death without even ordering food online. Another matter is 'masking' - something high functioning autistic people do in public. It makes them more approachable to others. But it also creates enormous cognitive loads that can later develop into other disorders. Diagnosis really helps in these cases.
It's interesting that you said this, because I know someone with a psychological problem and their therapist basically does something similar. The therapist just says he prefers not to label things, as it might get in the way more than help.
activities that would result in "identifying themselves as autists" include: seeking a diagnosis in the first place, getting the help of a mental health professional, frequenting support groups and forums, and wearing a fitbit or smart watch.
It's really not a good thing when people, high functioning or not, are forced to choose between getting the help they need and being targeted by their government.
> and wearing a fitbit or smart watch.
Since when is wearing smart watches only for autists?
It's one of the many private data sources they were planning to use to track and collect data on autistic people for their database. https://people.com/rfk-jr-to-launch-autism-registry-using-pr...
Autistic or not, giving that kind of health information to private for-profit companies who collect that data to use it against you or sell to third parties was never a good idea even before the government wanted to take it for themselves.
Ah, I didn't know that. To me your sentence read like autists out themselves by wearing a smartwatch.
Fully agree with you on that, the less data they have, the better.
"high" or "low" functioning is not a constant. I'm autistic and I've been low functioning and high functioning. I can hold a job and had a wife at one point. But sometimes circumstances in my life change my ability to function. Sometimes I will go periods where I can't speak, and this caused me to almost lose my job... but for the fact they knew I was autistic and had compassion for me.
I understand that sometimes people want high needs autistic people to be the only ones who are visible, because it perpetuates the (false) narratives people have about autistic people -- that we can't function in society, we are essentially children, we need to be "cured" to "save the children", but people need to realize this is a) a spectrum and b) your place within the spectrum is always in flux. Low functioning autistic people can become more high functioning with support, and high functioning autistic people who are abused can become low functioning very quickly.
Channels about autism also disproportionally cover people who are willing to talk about their autism. Recently I've been reading The Lost Girls of Autism. Something that stood out in the anonymous accounts is the fear of being "discovered" and the associated anxiety and depression. Since reading that I'm not super comfortable with the idea of incentivising high-functioning people to hide.
Autism is seen as a large and wide spectrum of many different symptoms all called "autism". Using terms like "high functioning autism" is probably not a helpful way to talk about some color on the spectrum, however.
Source: I am the parent of a child with autism.
Thanks. I much prefer "typically low support needs" because high functioning removes the imperative that I need help at times.
Can you clarify? How should one talk about and differentiate between the frequencies?
Because it creates a binary when a) it's a spectrum and b) high/low functioning dichotomy is not a constant. Every day needs can be different. Sometimes people are low functioning during child hood and become more functioning into adulthood. Sometimes high functioning autistic people become low functioning later in life. Some people can function very well when they had adequate support but the can't function at all when support levels fall below a threshold.
Reducing the conversation to high/low functioning also limits people's understanding and compassion of autistic people. The sibling commenter to you said they believe high functioning autistic people don't deserve to have a say over matters concerning autistic people, which is incredibly troubling because that just becomes and avenue for silencing autistic people; if having the ability to speak up for yourself means your opinion isn't valid, then that gives license to use and abuse a population, as autistic people often are.
I believe there is a methodology for distinguishing high and low functioning autism. Level 1 is high functioning. Level 3 is most severe.
Why do you consider that a good thing?
If the public face of autism is someone who needs no support or accommodations and is in fact very successful - people will understandably be confused when someone with the same diagnosis needs substantial support.
In my opinion, people need to learn - and in many things, already know - that things have scale. For example, with "pain": a bruise, cavities in teeth, kidney stones, migraines all hurt, but the level of effect on someone's life is vastly different.
Also, people have no problem minimizing the things as well, where pain again is a good example. In many situations, if it cannot be seen, secondary parties easily disregard it.
So, in conclusion, this confusion with the autism levels should not be a problem.
I assume that you don't have direct experience with autism? Success is a very misleading criterion. Even the very successful autistic people often suffer from significant distress. Level 1 autism (the most independent one), is also listed as requiring help. They too need accommodations - but it might be different from what you imagine. And their life situation can change drastically and dramatically at any stage.
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Low functioning peers can't participate and high functioning peers shouldn't participate. So all discussions about autism should include only non-autistic people? Weird logic doesn't compute!
But what if low functioning and high functioning peers share many symptoms, but at different intensities? Won't that make the 'high functioning' peers more capable of understanding and thus speaking for their low functioning peers? In fact, there is a specific term for this - 'the double empathy problem'. Perhaps you should try a less 'ablist' approach to autism.
How does high functioning autistic people speaking up for the autistic community "pollute" the conversation?
First of all, the reason this registry isn't going through is because autistic people who are functioning enough to speak out did so in solidarity with the entire autistic community. So far from polluting anything we are advocating for ourselves and our peers.
Secondly, this "high functioning low functioning" dichotomy is wrong so your framing it as a "us vs them" situation is off. It's a spectrum not a binary.
Third, presumably if they can't speak for themselves, and "high functioning" autistic people are discouraged, then the only people speaking for them are allistic people speaking about what's best for autistic people. When that happens, you get bone-headed characterizations like autistic people "never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." and suggestions of registries, wellness farms, and soon enough genetic cleansings.
Finally, it's autistic acceptance and awareness month, and the autistic community has been under attack for a week. You're spending your Sunday calling autistic people "selfish" and characterizing their input as "pollution". Have some compassion please.
It's cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. The societal damage that the anti-autism measures do are much, much greater and sinister than whatever the high-functioning autists could ever do.
Thanks for answering that, I now see where you are coming from.
Basically, only completely healthy people should be allowed to talk about themselves. Those with milder issues are selfish when they talk ... and those with large issues cant anyway.
So, the only people allowed to talk about autism are people like you - those who do not have it.
There isn’t a definitive test for autism. High functioning autists would have been considered quirky or odd in the past. We label everything now though
> We label everything now though
Are "quirky" and "odd" not labels? How about "weirdo" and "creep", are those not labels?
These romanticized ideas of what autism is (or used to be) hit a brick wall when you consider that 2/3 of people with autism have contemplated suicide and 1/3 of people with autism have attempted it. Most of it could probably be attributed to social rejection, exclusion, and isolation perpetuated by people who don't suffer from these disorders.
The amount of condescension in this thread is astounding. People who have zero experience with autism have decided to split the autistic community into 'high-functioning' and 'low-functioning' groups and declare that the former is perfectly fine. I don't even understand what their problem is.
We also just used to chain the "weird" family members in the attic and pretend they didn't exist.
For a while, the popular treatment was mulching their brain matter through their eyeball. This was done to a lady kennedy for being too weird. The doctor who suggested we scramble people's brains if they had certain diseases that were hard to treat in other ways got a Nobel Prize.
About a fourth of kids diagnosed with autism have IQ at 75 or below.
How well would your IQ score reflect your actual intelligence if you were to take an IQ test in a language you have trouble understanding and expressing yourself with?
It's well agreed that multiple factors contribute to IQ score. What I'm trying to convey is how much burden is predicted by the autism diagnosis.
You're yet to establish the link between IQ score and " burden.
That said, valuing people by their economic output is sick to me, and is a page from the Eugenicists playbook. How much of a "burden" are injured veterans, those who suffered horrific work-place accidents, or those with mental health challenges due to burn out?
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"Actually, it's good they're registering every autistic persons in the country in a national database, under a president who is overtly eugenicist [1]."
No it's not. At minimum this is a horrible invasion of privacy, that I can't believe anyone on HN would defend. At worst this is straight Nazi shit, preparing the ground for extermination.
[1] https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all...
> I can't believe anyone on HN would defend.
On this site, you can hold pretty much any opinion you like as long as you coach it in the most neutral-sounding "Modest Proposal"-esqe language you can.
To expand on what you said - you can post some grotesque things here as long as you don't provoke flagging or offending the ~90th percentile into down-voting your comment in the first 24 hours, and language plays a big part in this, such as hiding bigotry behind big words and playing into confirmation bias. Low-level down-voting can be countered if you can get <1% of HNers, who may be fellow-travelers in the fringe ideology to vociferously agree & up-vote your comment.
I think this is a side-effect of HNs voting rules, what counts as "adding to the conversation", and the limited window for voting down comments and unlimited time to vote up.
Very much so, HNers pride themselves in this "enlightened centrist" aesthetic, while giving extremely fringe analysis and opinions on any subject under the sun.
Everything that touches to genetics or education is a sight to behold.
I'm glad to see I'm not alone in recognizing this. I've had literal holocaust denial and neo nazizm show up in comment threads before and I end up the one warned about "maintaining a spirit of curiosity"
I usually only lurk anyway as a physicaly disabled autist but this thread made me have to push thru typing pains.
The high functioning folk are supposedly >6x more at risk of suicidal thoughts... and they're the folks society gets something back from.
I'm all for shaking our heads at young high functioning people flaunting it, but nobody gets the labels by having a good time. It's very rarely beneficial to disclose, even if disclosure is a choice.
Aktion T4 next? This is a dark dark road.
I suspect the US will become like Germany in the next few decades where the paranoia about handing any data over is justifiably high. I hope this burns the unethical side of the tech industry to the ground. It deserves it.
It was notable that he started with "these people will never pay taxes" when announcing this.
*looks at Elon Musk*
I suppose he has a point.
Half of that point occurred to me too. While I have not considered how much taxes Musk actually pays, I do remember this from my school history lessons 25 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Röhm_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life#/media/F...
This poster (published in the NSDAP's Office of Racial Policy's monthly magazine Neues Volk around 1938) urges support for Nazi eugenics to control the public expense of sustaining people with genetic disorders. The poster says: "This person who suffers a hereditary disease has a lifelong cost of 60,000 Reichsmarks to the National Community. Fellow German, that is your money as well."
Already the US can serve as a good example when discussing the need for unbreakable cryptography and e2e systems. The current decline nicely illustrates how quickly you can go from "The police have legitimate needs to break encryption to find heinous criminals" to something far more dystopian.
No amount of crypto is going to protect you from this mess. Technical safeguards work as long as it is backed by the law and the constitution. But when they are suppressed, the people in power will just find someone smarter than you and bribe, gaslight, bully, blackmail or beat them into helping them compromise such safeguards. And not to mention the fact that they love playing hideous psyops games. This is a social and political problem. You need social and political solutions. Technical solutions are just band-aids.
> No amount of crypto is going to protect you from this mess. Technical safeguards work as long as it is backed by the law and the constitution. But when they are suppressed, the people in power will just find someone smarter than you and bribe, gaslight, bully, blackmail or beat them into helping them compromise such safeguards.
I don't agree. Having unbreakable crypto is the absence of a tool. My point is that a democratic government can create the tool with good intentions, but you are only one election and a few months of backsliding away from the tool being used for nefarious purposes. You are right that technical solutions are just band-aids, but if you never create the tool it cannot be abused by a new authoritarian government.
True, while not panacea, there is a reason why 'going dark' was perceived as an issue.
What makes you think this isn't it? I know that the primary reason for his fixation with autism is to attack vaccines. But have you listened to him talk about autistic people? It's pretty clear that he considers autistic individuals as unproductive (the tax remark) burden who destroys families. It's very clear that he considers them as subhuman. Sounds very close to 'life unworthy of life' argument made by the Nazis. While at it, the Nazis also had a register of disabled people and used the 'economic burden' argument to sell the idea of mass murder. Honestly, I'm struggling to find a difference here. To understand the full scale of the danger, this is how the Holocaust originated - with the murder of a single child in 1939 under their involuntary euthanasia program for disabled children. It gradually made the system comfortable with mass murder as the scope of the program expanded to teens, then adults and to whole races in the end. That's exactly what I see now as well - people tolerating more and more transgressions that would have been unthinkable just a year ago!
People sometimes tend to shutdown comparison of any situation with Nazism using the hideous Godwin's law. Apparently it's a sacrilege towards the Holocaust victims to compare their plight with any emerging threats. But there is no guarantee that the horrors of the past won't repeat in the future. In fact, that is one of the reasons we learn history - to recognize the repeating patterns of similar mistakes. And I think the situation is very perilous already. Perhaps I'm paranoid. But remember that people are arbitrarily getting deported to some foreign detention camp and judges are being arrested within 3 months of this regime coming into power. How long before we find ourselves haunted by the dreadful events of the past?
Hasn’t RFK Jr spent his entire life trying to find the cause and cure for autism?
My life is pretty close to this community and I can verify that all of his comments are 100% accurate.
Parents who insist on traveling separately as a safeguard to ensure one of them is able to care for their adult child in the event of an accident, living with the knowledge that both of them passing away will mean the child moves to a group home most likely.
Others who cannot handle the demands as caregiver and simply get divorced over it. Some who call CPS because they can’t handle the danger that their child poses to their other children. Some who are flight risks that will literally just take off running (usually right to bodies of water) given the chance, putting parents completely on guard.
These are just a few of the issues before getting into “the autism diet” and chronic digestive issues. The fact that somehow a gluten free, casein free diet usually results in significant behavioral improvements leading many people to suspect that what we’re eating environmentally is contributing to the problem.
RFK Jr is giving a voice to parents who are scared, confused and fully aware that nobody is listening to them. If you had any idea the number of parents who are afraid to tell you when the symptoms started because they know you don’t want to believe them, it would shock you.
If you want to know what most people in the community believe is the root cause, it’s aluminum.
I realize that all things associated Trump are destined to get this crazy narrative but RFK Jr has been fighting for these families for at least 20 years. His desire to help people is genuine and not something in question.
> Hasn’t RFK Jr spent his entire life trying to find the cause and cure for autism?
He was an environmental lawyer, not a doctor or scientist, so no.
> RFK Jr is giving a voice to parents who are scared, confused and fully aware that nobody is listening to them
It's far more likely (and reasonable to believe) that his brainstorm is an alien entity attempting to weaken the human race for an upcoming invasion, or he's a foreign asset for geopolitical reasons, or he's the biblical Pestilence Horseman of the Apocalypse, than that he's a voice that represents people in the autism community.
Just look at his history. He's caused/causing multiple measles outbreaks. He's already a massmurderer.
> Hasn’t RFK Jr spent his entire life trying to find the cause and cure for autism?
Has he? That 'cure' part makes it pretty clear what his background with autism is. He has no clue about it. It's certainly not a disease nor a brain injury that can be cured. And it's too complex to be caused by something like a vaccine. All I see is that he has a particular disdain for autistic people and he wants to use autism to target something else - perhaps vaccines.
> My life is pretty close to this community
Do you have an academic or professional background on the condition? Or are you someone with autism? If so, you may claim some credibility. There are even associations of parents of autistic kids who spout pseudo-scientific nonsense about autism. And they routinely get fact-checked and opposed by associations of autistic people themselves.
> I can verify that all of his comments are 100% accurate.
CDC falls under HHS, right? They published the results about a week ago and it clearly said that the higher incidence of autism is due to improved diagnosis. And then he went on to trash those findings publicly. Why should I believe a career politician over a whole bunch of career medical professionals on this? Considering his past and political stance as well, he has exactly zero credibility on this matter.
> Parents who insist on traveling separately as a safeguard to ensure one of them is able to care for their adult child in the event of an accident, living with the knowledge that both of them passing away will mean the child moves to a group home most likely.
Am I to assume that you're a parent of an autistic kid? If so, let me warn you now. You're doing something more harmful to your kid than what you described. And one more thing. Your view of autism is still very narrow. What you're describing is level 3 autism at best. Some symptoms don't even sound like autism, and could be some other condition. You should perhaps check with a specialist or a level 1 autistic to learn what autism really is and what it feels like (higher level kids often find it hard to communicate their feelings).
> Some who call CPS because they can’t handle the danger that their child poses to their other children.
Very much on point with what I said above. Harmful and hurtful behavior is not an autistic symptom. That sounds more like a cluster-B personality disorder. Not that they can't coexist, but this is a very harmful stereotype. But I'm not surprised.
> These are just a few of the issues before getting into “the autism diet” and chronic digestive issues.
Autism is a neuro-developmental condition. Autistic brains are wired differently, if you will. There are many environmental factors that influence autistic people's behavior - albeit temporarily. Food is one of the less important ones among them. And if you think it is a cure, you are in for big disappointment.
> RFK Jr is giving a voice to parents who are scared, confused and fully aware that nobody is listening to them.
Instead of a politician vying for attention, you should try to understand your kid first. If they have difficulty expressing it, try to talk to a specialist or someone with more verbal autism. They are very common - that's why the 1 in 31 statistics. Then you may get some idea about what to really focus on.
> If you had any idea the number of parents who are afraid to tell you when the symptoms started because they know you don’t want to believe them, it would shock you.
I have investigated various matters throughout my career. That statement has all the symptoms of confirmation bias. The way to get an unbiased result is to do a large-scale, randomized (double-)blind study. You need quantified data, not emotional anecdotes. And if you have something specific in mind and the quantified info to back it up, then we can discuss. Otherwise, those assertions are moot. And for that matter, do you know that these symptoms are extremely hard to identify in infants? The timing of recognition of those symptoms is a rather unreliable indicator for anything.
And remember what I said before - a lot of autistic parents' associations are in the business of spreading misinformation. They're widely opposed and debunked by associations of autistic people themselves.
> If you want to know what most people in the community believe is the root cause, it’s aluminum.
Let me guess. The adjuvant in vaccines? I know where that comes from. If you fancy your own research, try searching up the research papers on that topic. Pay special attention to the authors and the citations. Then check the affiliations of those authors, including funding sources. That will tell you a very enlightening story. To summarize the technical argument, the aluminum used in vaccines don't reach neurotoxic levels even for infants.
> His desire to help people is genuine and not something in question.
His actions at the HHS indicate otherwise. I would rather trust the qualified career medical professionals and researchers he fired. And let's not forget the disastrous way in which he's handling the measles outbreak. I can see how you're emotionally invested in this matter. But please don't assume that the people on the other side aren't.
That takedown was boss. Thank you. As a parent of two autistic children, and uncle to many more in my family, I can say that it is clear their minds develop differently, and many high-functioning autists successfully mask it and make it later in life. And these are quite often extremely gifted intellectually and academically, to the degree that while life is a struggle for them socially, they are far better than their 'norm' peers in other areas. I've not seen anything from RFK Jr beyond trying to support his anti-vaccine stance and what I would at best call evidence for 'othering' autistic people. And if he thinks he is going to make them victims, I can assure you he will find myself, my family, and the community at large ready and eager to destroy him. One could make a more coherent argument that we should create a database of those who lack empathy, the narcissistic sociopaths among us, and place them in camps and let them tear each other apart.
It really wasn’t any sort of “takedown”. It was the same stuff people have been saying on the internet for years that’s disconnected from what is reality for so many parents.
It absolutely refuted every inane speculation you made. I understand you clearly aren’t here to listen or change your mind, so it unfortunately passed right over your head.
It didnt, It was a list of wishful thinking. I have more exposure to families with previously called "low functioning as it relates to children, and plenty of adults who are very capable and high functioning.
What I do not see people willing to discuss
Parent getting called to school 3-4x a week, causing issues with work
Child running from school or aide and requiring a tracker program
Police/CPS involvement from "runners"
Destruction of marriage from constant state of stress
Violence to siblings
Inability to give attention equally in the family
Incredible high divorce rates, parents and any non a to a pairing.
RFK's speech had some issues, but if you read the transcript it does not match the sound bytes
All of his references to negative autism behaviors/impacts were in regards to the 25% of profound autism.
As I said, I know at least a dozen families where the above is their experience. Single moms breaking down on FB because they have no support and stressed to the max, Dad losing out on projects and sales because it cant be trusted he'll be in the office when needed. Siblings hiding away, sick of outbursts,yelling, non stop activity.
It is a disservice to all of those people to act as if the spectrum does not have a far range of activities.
That sure as hell doesnt mean we need to start trying to end "autistic people" and I think it is manipulation to say RFK's prevailing theme has ever been "autism", it has been a belief that the weaknesses in our food and drug systems are increasing chronic illnesses, mutations etc. Some headlines travel longer, the AIDS/HIV denial and Faucci hate should have got way more attention.
Its not RFK's words, its the media's practice of hyperbolic language that causes any real or perceived damage to the community.
I dont believe there is a connection to find, but maybe this will end the snipe hunt and that funding can just go towards creating spaces and education that allow for a range of interaction and social styles after September. But to ignore both sides of the experience is disingenous and is certainly a slap in the face to the families experiencing real hardship from their child's divergence.
I am not even a fan, I just despise the lazy characterizations that get slung around in all emotional spaces, he is mostly a careful speaker, especially compared to the norms now.
It's interesting because that list you provide ("Parent getting called to school 3-4x a week" etc.) is a good summary of my household growing up. Me, my sister, and my father are neurodivergent and on the spectrum.
But we are people that others would not consider to be in the 25% RFK is referring to. Yet, at some point in our lives we were. Growing up I was less verbal than I am now, and I was often paired to play with other autistic kids who were totally non verbal and died early because of their autism. So I'm well aware of the extent of the spectrum.
So I agree with this:
> It is a disservice to all of those people to act as if the spectrum does not have a far range of activities.
However I find it is RFK and not the poster you are replying to who fails to recognize autism as a spectrum. Indeed, if you read the transcript of his speech he does not refer to autism as a spectrum until the end, when a reporter frames it in those terms as part of a question. Instead, he very clearly keeps referring to autism as a binary of "profound" versus I suppose "regular" autism, which is not at all how autistic people experience autism.
What RFK does is juxtapose debilitative autistic behavior (nonverbal) with very normal autistic behavior (toe walking) and he lumps it into a category he calls "profound autism" which is not recognized as a category of autism, nor is it precise or descriptive enough to have a clear meaning. I'm already in an argument with another poster about that, I don't want to open up another front on that issue, you can read my thoughts about that in my comment history.
> Its not RFK's words
For me, it is his words. I've read the transcript free of any media filtering and the actual words he uses are causing real damage to the autistic community.
> snipe hunt and that funding can just go towards creating spaces and education that allow for a range of interaction and social styles after September. But to ignore both sides of the experience is disingenuous
You frame their concerns as a "snipe hunt" -- the opposite of genuine; yet characterize refusing to entertain them as being disingenuous and a slap in the face of autistic people. I don't understand, wouldn't dragging autistic people into a farcical excuse to prove some nonsense about the food system be far more damaging to autistic people and their families? Why can't we just not do the snipe hunt and use the money right now for creating spaces and education?
> lazy characterizations that get slung around in all emotional spaces, he is mostly a careful speaker, especially compared to the norms now.
I think this is a lazy characterization because you don't support it with any evidence. In my post history I highlight several examples from the transcript in which RFK is not careful with his language, and instead paints autistic people with a broad brush and engages in strange conspiracy theorizing in his official capacity as HHS director. Again, this is free from any media bias as it is the direct transcript from this press conference.
> As a parent of two autistic children, and uncle to many more in my family, I can say that it is clear their minds develop differently, and many high-functioning autists successfully mask it and make it later in life. And these are quite often extremely gifted intellectually and academically, to the degree that while life is a struggle for them socially, they are far better than their 'norm' peers in other areas.
This is one of the most uplifting thing I have heard in a while! Your children and the autistic kids in your family are very lucky to have such insightful, empathetic and caring adults like you around. Your presence make a huge difference in their lives. And as they grow up, they'll gift you a lot of unexpectedly sweet and proud moments. Good Luck!
> And if he thinks he is going to make them victims, I can assure you he will find myself, my family, and the community at large ready and eager to destroy him.
That's a very heartwarming and empowering statement! Some people argue that high-functioning autistics shouldn't talk for low-functioning autistics. But the autistic and the medical communities doesn't hold that distinction. Only 3 levels of disabilities exist. When I see the 'low-functioning' autistic people, I recognize in them the intense versions of the emotions and feelings that I'm all too painfully familiar with. That's why I decided to make an impassioned stance here. Yes! I'm seriously concerned about the safety and welfare of my peers - the only people I could ever understand.
All this dogma, greed and misinformation threatens the lives of millions of kids, a huge number of very innocent individuals and the very roots of the knowledge and profession we held dear throughout our lives. I don't know why some people hold on to false promises and rhetoric. But the final result of that is recorded very clearly in history. If only they did a bit of research on that too. It's very disturbing that many still can't see the very obvious danger signs. However, the stakes are too high to just watch and worry. Now is the time our voices and actions matter!
I'm bowing out of this debate. I have no illusions of being able to break people out of their artificial realities. But I think I made the point I wanted to - to record a sample of the false information about autism out there and its hollowness. Thank you again for being a decent and awesome human being! I hope we will have more allies like you. Thanks!
> I have investigated various matters throughout my career. That statement has all the symptoms of confirmation bias. The way to get an unbiased result is to do a large-scale, randomized (double-)blind study. You need quantified data, not emotional anecdotes. And if you have something specific in mind and the quantified info to back it up, then we can discuss. Otherwise, those assertions are moot. And for that matter, do you know that these symptoms are extremely hard to identify in infants? The timing of recognition of those symptoms is a rather unreliable indicator for anything.
If you have investigated then you already understand the biggest challenge to double blind studies here: control groups because of the variety of issues on the spectrum and the difficulty in measuring the severity of each of them. There’s a doctor in Indiana who’s been trying to categorize them all and has it narrowed to about 140 or so. It’s not an easy group to run studies on.
Autism is very much a digestive issue. People who just observe the behaviors without being close to treatment believe it’s purely neurological.
The core issue with everything you’re saying is that we have an information vacuum. With cancer, for example, we as a society are more than comfortable saying almost everything causes cancer. With autism, we’re not allowed to even speculate publicly. If we do it’s a simple “I don’t know what causes it but it’s DEFINITELY not the thing that I don’t want to believe is involved.”
Autism is a spectrum and there are a lot of severe cases. The severe cases often result in exactly what I’m describing above. Therapy helps in most cases but the experience described above is very real. In many cases it’s much less severe and kids are mainstreamed with some social awkwardness. The violent outbursts described in a scenario above, again, aren’t in most situations but they do happen consistently for some certain kids and when they do it’s a nightmare.
It’s not harmful to tell the truth, but it is to ignore it.
The problem with watching this discussion in real time on social media is seeing people who know one or two people who have a child who is autistic and that shapes their entire perspective. The parents who have children who are more severe on the spectrum often have very few people who know them because just the idea of time to socialize with others is often difficult to obtain.
The information vacuum is very real though and until we get a definitive answer on the cause of autism, people are going to speculate. You watch discussion of it be suppressed for over a decade and it creates trust issues.
> With autism, we’re not allowed to even speculate publicly. If we do it’s a simple “I don’t know what causes it but it’s DEFINITELY not the thing that I don’t want to believe is involved.”
I think that communication could be improved on both sides.
I have had non-confrontational and earnest discussions with the kinds of people who believe vaccines cause autism. I couldn't escape the conclusion I eventually arrived at - these sorts of people started with a gut feeling or belief and worked backwards to find the justification for it.
This realization is what I feel is missing from a lot of science communication. People who are distrustful of the science aren't going to be swayed by more science unless it dovetails with their underlying gut feelings - so assuming that you can simply out-evidence any concerns is a fools errand.
But by the same token, if critics want a productive conversation, I think it's incumbent on them to be more honest about where their concerns are rooted. What is it about vaccines that makes them predisposed to not want to have them?
I agree generally but I hope we make as much real anonymous health data available for research.
Google is certified and runs the biggest medical database with (I believe without googling this) the biggest hospital operator in the USA.
I have a condition which is rare enough that it doesn't get enough funding and data is missing
> Google is certified
That doesn't matter _at all_ when the government comes knocking at Google's door - in the best case, they have a subpoena that can at least be appealed afterwards, in the worst case it's DOGE teens backed by a bunch of heavily armed guys in camouflage.
Indeed. No data is safe or secure in such environments.
This has become an issue big enough that the US company I work for is actually removing data from US cloud providers to make it harder to get at. The European divisions have started data sovereignty projects because it's now a principal risk.
I'm out of the cloud as well.
Ha. My company was advising having a burner phone when traveling to US in a company-wide meeting. There has been something of a shift.
Yeah similar. My company is US and have banned all travel to US. Said we can do stuff over Teams instead.
Didn’t they already show that these data can’t really be anonymized if it should still be useful?
I would leave that in the hands of professionals though.
Which is evidentially not this lot. Not even remotely.
“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, repeatedly said before taking office that vaccines cause autism, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they do not. He has declined to disavow his statements and has continued to promote a possible link.”
Having worked directly with autism researchers, I can confidently tell you that RFK is making a wild guess not based in current evidence. All the data we have indicate autism is a multifactorial condition with a genetic/developmental component that may or may not be affected by the environment.
RFK is genuinely a danger to health care in the United States.
Calling it a "guess" seems very generous at this point, saying it is a "lie" is more accurate I think.
Never attribute to malice what cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. And he is one stupid fuck.
Never attribute to stupidity what looks ambiguous between stupidity and malice but makes a shit ton of money.
Add a new rule: Don't assume that that rule is always true. Especially when the subject's income depends on either.
"Grift" might be a more appropriate term and so the more appropriate aphorism might be:
> "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair"
That's completely fair.
I don't know much about RFK Jr, I hope he is just stupid. But if you dig into the origins of the vaccine situation, much of it was driven simply by a desire to make money using vaccine manufacturers, and the "proof" was retrofitted to the goal with junk science that was essentially abusing disabled children. (Horribly invasive medical procedures with no medical necessity).
> Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official
I just loooove that our "top health official" has absolutely zero medical or public heathcare education, openly believes and advocates for discredited and fraudulent medical perspectives and more.
> RFK is genuinely a danger to health care in the United States.
I could not agree with you more.
The head of most healthcare systems are administrators. An Environmental Lawyer with decades of experience suing corporations using science as evidence is one of the best matches we've had. Is he good? I dont know, but it is misperception and I think fairly illogical to expect an admin/leadership role to be done by a MD or research scientist. Not seeing many tech firms run by a lead developer either.
[flagged]
Why guess? Isn’t that basically what RFK is accused of doing?
The USA has always had a system of "social credit" similar to what we describe in China. Nobody calls it that here; nobody itemizes and articulates it the same way because we do not want to admit how similar we are to the Chinese, but we do have a very real system of "social credit" right here, and it's actively being used in all calculations.
Here are a few examples of positive social credit:
Do you serve your nation in the military?
Do you bear and raise children? Are you a caregiver for other types of dependents (parents, disabled)?
Are you able-bodied and employed or at least employable? How stable is your job?
Are you currently enrolled as a student, seeking a degree or graduation?
Are you in stable housing; can you meet your personal needs daily without difficulty?
Are you free of mental illness, and medications thereof?
Have you got a criminal record, imprisonment or legal troubles in your past?
So you can see that autistic people will typically start with poor social credit, and it will not be possible for them to get on top of that.
Now a wealthy nation in peacetime can afford to do the "Welfare State" thing and support people with negative social credit, due to pro-life values and the fact that you can indeed exploit the poor and infirm for Medicaid and SNAP bucks, no matter what (RFK's claim that "they don't pay taxes" is specious if they're consumers).
But I think the USA can no longer claim to be "wealthy" and our claim on peace is tenuous at best. When those two run out then what is left? Nothing but a little Aktion T4. Difficult decisions will need to be made and this is why people with "poor social credit" are going to be under the microscope.
The criteria for diagnosing ASD today are vastly different from those that would’ve resulted in an autism diagnosis shortly after the abolishment of lobotomy, it is hardly surprising the rate keeps going up as you widen the net.
> shortly after the abolishment of lobotomy
That's an important bit of context whenever RFK Jr. talks about how conditions like Autism and ADHD weren't a thing when he was growing up - his own aunt, who may well have had one of those conditions, was dealt with by giving her a lobotomy and then hiding her away. Those are the supposedly better times he's harkening back to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
Lobotomy was not given to young children even when it was a thing...
> who was one of the youngest survivors of the transorbital lobotomy, a procedure performed on him when he was 12 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dully
You can detect autism in kids before they are 5... So my point still stands
In this case lobotomy was put on a non consenting 23 year old. So much better?
This is a huge factor, in ASD and in mental/behavioral issues in general. Not saying it's a bad thing but it makes comparison over time to be apples to oranges.
Also... the picture of left-handed people would fit in here.
https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2021/11/08/rate-of-left-handedn...
The very much same applies here I think.
> The criteria for diagnosing ASD today are vastly different
Not that much.
The difference between now and 50 years ago is that a) we don't just throw them into asylums, b) we actually have accessibility of getting diagnosed, c) employment opportunities suitable for many people with mental disabilities (such as factory line assembly) have gone down the drain.
None of those points are related to diagnostic criteria.
No, they are related to the pool of people being diagnosed.
You're only getting a diagnosis if a) you have access to a psychiatrist and b) you are running into enough issues in your daily life to warrant having it looked into.
Life has gotten a lot more complex over the past few decades, so people run into issues more often - and earlier in life. Someone who would've just been "a bit of a weird guy" 50 years ago is getting an autism diagnosis today, simply because these days they run into issues as a child and are being put in front of a psychiatrist.
Even 50 years ago they weren't just slightly odd people who were otherwise happy to exist in a simpler society. Those people ran into the same issues and turned to alcohol, drugs, and suicide. The only difference is that nobody understood why they were suffering.
> Not that much.
Very much so. What we now call Autism Spectrum Disorder was referred to as "childhood schizophrenia" in the DSM-2 [1], things only started moving in the right direction with the DSM-3 [2] when it was finally sort-of recognized as an independent disorder of "infantile autism", but some core elements of ASD like sensory processing differences were only recognized in the DSM-5.
There's a good overview at [3]. It's good that criteria are different today, the criteria from decades ago failed to include majority of ways that autism expresses itself, many of which benefit from support and accommodations even though they're not obviously debilitating.
[1] https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSM-...
[2] https://aditpsiquiatriaypsicologia.es/images/CLASIFICACION%2...
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8531066/
And let’s not forget that until the DSM-V, a child could not be diagnosed with both autism and ADHD (see section E at the bottom of this table [0] showing changes from the DSM-IV to DSM-V):
> The symptoms do not occur exclusively during the course of a pervasive developmental disorder, schizophrenia, or other psychotic disorders and is not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, or a personality disorder).
The DSM-V states that they can exist together. In fact something like 28-44% of people with Autism exhibit some form of ADHD. [1]
It just goes to show that we’re still evolving in how we understand things. And then we can get into things like twice exceptionality and Asperger’s…and yeah. Lots to learn.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Yes, but is that a feature or a bug? Certainly those who define these things understand the need and value of historic tracking. And yet the target keeps moving.
If expanding the definition is the feature required action should be taken to mitigate the bug. True?
What's the link between ASD and lobotomies?
I think he's just trying to choose a point in time when mental healthcare was more primitive to go along with saying the diagnosis is more sophisticated now.
A main thing is that people with autism would just be classified as generally mentally disabled and the rise in autism is highly tied a drop in that general diagnosis. I don't think that covers 100% of the rise but does seem to make up the big majority.
U.S. special-education autism classification was created in 1994 and tied to a big rise in diagnosis.
https://news.wisc.edu/data-provides-misleading-picture-of-au...
Thanks. That helps.
Progress of understanding.
Sorry, still not that clear to me.
Are you saying that there is no direct link but rather understanding of various areas increased due to the stopping of this practice?
> understanding of various areas increased due to the stopping of this practice
Yes, this absolutely. You can't study something after altering it.
The "treatments" for people with any kind of neurodivergence (real, or imagined) in the past were often interventions that destroyed enough of their brain or body to prevent them from exhibiting any neurodivergent symptoms (e.g. lobotomy, EST/ECT, teeth-pulling[1], etc).
[1]: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/01/henry-cotton-psychiatr...
There is no direct link, but the point is that an increasing trend in diagnosis of ASD is not surprising when the baseline is coming from a time when doctors thought cutting out parts of your brain to make you more calm was a good idea. Basically, we shouldn't look at numbers reported by doctors willing to perform lobotomies for depression as a reliable indicator of the incidence of ASD in the population at the time.
We understood more about various conditions and treatments, so we stopped doing harmful things like lobotomies and refined the definitions on some conditions as needed. Those are not directly related though.
Ultimately, whether one thinks that having more volume of and more or less fragmented statistics is good or bad depends on their opinion of the State.
Olivier Ray wrote a great book about the history of statistics : Quand le monde s’est fait nombre (fr)
https://archive.org/details/OlivierReynombre/
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-chemin....
https://www.fnac.com/a9931250/Olivier-Rey-Quand-le-monde-s-e...
The state has made their intentions crystal clear…
If they come out with a list of twenty adjustments they're going to make based on the study (things like but not necessary including: banning certain fire retardents, attempt to reduce break/tire pollution, adjusting the timing of (but not eliminating) the vaccine schedule, banning specific food additives, reducing/modifying specific pesticide use) I will believe this is a legitimate and well intentioned effort from someone who is orientationally correct but frequently epistemologically incorrect. If it's just "eliminate all vaccines" then I'll be very disappointed.
The third reich response a lot of other commenters are having is interesting. I'm no expert and have not investigated autism, but if the messaging in response to RFK JR is "yeah he says 1 in 36 kids have autism now but actually that's fine and how it always has been and actually autism is good and he's actually Eichmann" you're going to drive a lot of people right to every unsubstantiated thing he says.
Regardless of any so called good that could supposedly come of this..... Why does the federal government get to seize my medical records and data for this list without my consent??? Are autistic people not full citizens? What about rule of law??? If we can take such drastic measures and shit all over things like hippa and medical ethics....where is the sweeping federal database of obese people .
I know I have created a few dozen "registries" for research and stat analysis with my team. All data is depersonalized and HIPAA compliant. I dont understand how a generic statement made to the public becomes a recipe for the next reich. I get how the FB crowd would just go hyperbolic, would not have expected it here. Ive worked with medical, insurance, legal, banking and finance data for a decade. It would be easy to scare a normie by describing nearly any of those projects, but its the exact opposite, everything is done with a preponderance of caution to ensure privacy compliance.
I think 1 in 36 kids having autism is similar to how breast cancer diagnosis shot up when we had better imaging ability or when we figured out prostate cancer was actually fairly common in older men but not usually something worth doing anything about. When we merged in aspergers and autism together that obviously makes autism rates higher and as research continues on diagnosing autism it makes sense rates increase from there too? I mean in the past we thought autism was only common in boys!
I sincerely hope this is the explanation and I will be frustrated if this information is not presented as a percentage of the increase as part of the report. If it fully explains the increase, even better.
I agree that I’m frustrated that this isn’t being coveted. Asperger’s being moved into autism was huge news at the time, so idk how RFK missed something so obvious and is pointing to quackery like vaccines. I don’t understand how we got to the point where cranks are trying to to prove their assumptions instead of real scientists.
This is a very valid point, but one RFK has mention he controls for in the past
It's pretty much impossible to control for, because you don't know what you don't know. Meaning, you can't estimate how many people haven't been diagnosed in the past because, well, they weren't being diagnosed.
Some of those proposed adjustments are already in place in EU like the dyes. Regardless of possible autism link, it’s a good thing. But some are blinded by politics and can’t see that two things can be true. Trump Admin does bad things and good things
Why would a list of random "adjustments" lend legitimacy to their effort? If they told you that going barefoot and talking in Pig Latin would solve autism, would that give it legitimacy? Maybe soap is actually suppressing our natural bio-film so we should all forsake showering. I mean, someone could contrive a laughable explanation to justify that, and maybe make a graph that hygiene improvements worldwide correlated with the rise of ASD, so start stinkin' evenyone.
We know, with utter certainty, that the conclusion of this farce will be completely unproven lazy correlations that are so common in the scammer industry. Maybe it's seed oils, or HFCS, or the chemicals, etc. There is no outcome of RFK Jrs farce that won't be an absolute joke.
>The third reich response
Anyone who doesn't see incredible parallels with the rise of Hitler's heinous crimes is not paying attention. Oh look, they're going after the press and judges now, but don't worry until they're not suffixing the Hitler salutes with "my heart to yours" or something it surely can't be real. Further, the "they're going to make me believe this garbage person" argument is always laughable. No one buys it. People who like these creeps should just be honest about it and save the tired "you made me" bit that positively no one believes.
But sure, the only thing I can agree with you on is that the "autism is actually great" fringe is not helpful. Autism is not good, and most people with autism, even the ones who don't need around the clock care, would rather they didn't. ASD is likely basically a manifestation of evolution, and is biology playing random variations to test survivability, as it has done through human history. It gives us some super-intellectually focused individuals that contribute massively to humanity, but it also gives us a lot of very sad people who can't connect and sometimes need enormous levels of care.
Indeed, genetics are widely considered the prevalent "cause" of ASD. It's possible that autism really has become more common -- if it actually has and it isn't simply increased or more inclusive diagnoses -- because our information/engineering age has given people who carry ASD genetics more, errr, marketability on the reproduction market. Instead of being outcasts, what we used to call "Aspergers" sufferers, such as myself, suddenly make lots of money and get to be high status. But that's a lazy guess at most. But we do know that people on the ASD spectrum, including the most successful ones who found ways to make it work, are much more likely to have children on the spectrum, no outside environmental cause being necessary.
https://archive.is/TEAAk
I get a cloudflare puzzle when I try to visit this link :(
https://archive.is/20250425234110/https://www.washingtonpost...
As a data point, the archive.is link is working for me.
I'm usig Orion (browser) on macOS (Apple Silicon) presently if that helps. With UBlock Origin installed in it.
gift link to a related NYT Opinion piece by an actual (very liberal) parent living this reality that may surprise some people
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/opinion/autism-rfk-parent...
As a very liberal parent of a profoundly autistic child, there has never been article I've related to more. The condescension of fellow liberals and advocates for level 1 autism for us, much of which is present in this thread already, is incredibly frustrating and in many ways harder to stomach than RFK Jr.
RFK Jr is at a minimum a misguided nutjob - but he's also the only one to ever recognize our plight on a national stage.
I feel for you, because I am not sure how I would fare in that circumstance. That said, the opinion piece is in itself a frustrating.
<< Autism has become an identity, a different way of thinking and existing.
I think, this sentence, more than anything else in that article aggravates me the most and I am not entirely certain why. It is not some sort of rhetorical question. I simply struggle to understand the obsession US denizens have with identity. Everyone is 2% cherokee indian, 2/5 italian and maybe a little dutch on non-pagan holidays. And this does not spare the parents. They are X parents. Puppy parents. Teenager parents. Autist parents. All in an attempt to establish some sort of identity that can be displayed to the society at large.
<< Children with autism have a right to an appropriate education, to accommodations, changes in the classroom to help them succeed; we have sensory-friendly days at the zoo.
Sure, but at the expense of the non-autistic kids? What does that statement actually mean?
<< I don’t care if my child ever pays taxes
In case there is any kind of doubt, the society does. If the registry is not intended as an intentionally bad thing(tm) by RFK jr himself, you can rest assured it is absolutely seen as a way to ensure that more taxpayers exist ( and this is the charitable parsing of that registry ).
<< She did not destroy my family,
This is an interesting one. There are people who do derive meaning from service such as this, but they do not strike me as a majority of the population. At best, it puts a heavy strain on the familial ties.. and for a very obvious reason.. it is not a light cross to bear. And we do like easy mode. But to actively deny that it is a strain is silly.. because while it did not break the author, the same issue definitely took some families down.
<< I want to know why regressive autism happens
I think most of us on this forum can agree that knowledge can be useful.
Why is a comment like this downvoted? I found value in it since I likely wouldn't have come across this information otherwise.
The comment is simply sharing an article from someone directly affected. What happened to intellectual curiosity? Diversity of opinion? It's comments like this we need more of on HN, not less of.
To start with, someone directly affected by autism is someone experiencing it themselves. Parents, educators, and caregivers have historically been granted primacy in these discussions, largely because so many autistic people cannot effectively advocate for themselves, either at all or in the current systems that exist for it. That doesn't change our obligation to center the experiences of autistic people, who are having the most direct one possible.
Parent- and caregiver-focused approaches are how we've ended up with things like ABA¹ being fairly mainstream, and sympathy for parents pursuing experimental or simply crank treatments to "cure" their children, frequently with extremely harmful results. Support and advocacy groups run by autistic people are absolutely full horrific stories of abuse in this vein.
Which is, I believe, a large part of RFK's interest² in it. I think he wants to make more ad hoc, extreme, and experimental and frankly abusive "treatment" supported for parents of autistic children.
So the comment you're responding to isn't a curious or "diverse opinion", it is basically the standard view of this up until the last 10-15 years or so. Autistic people had to fight very hard to have our own views and experiences taken seriously. RFK's focus here is part of an even-more-recent backlash against that.
¹ Essentially conversation therapy for autism. It can be effective at teaching us how to behave like "normal" people which can be comforting for parents of autistic children. But autistic people overwhelmingly experience it as extremely distressing or worse.
² He has also signaled that he will use it as a justification to ban vaccines. I don't have enough of a read on the guy to reckon which of these is a bigger motivation to him. There's also an understudied but impossible-to-deny correlation between transness and autism. A lot going on here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Crit...
This is just another angle of placing people in camps.
Combine this with the overzealous focus on transvestites and the so called "illegal aliens" you should see a pattern with where the Nazis began.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia... "On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree requiring all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability." "Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. In reality, the clinics were children's killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation."
> transvestites
The focus seems to lie on transgender people, not cross dressers.
I don't think there's much discern, given the outrage around the Drag Queen Story Hour.
The type of person driving this pointless cultural war would like to make it seem that this is essentially all about men dressing up as women telling children things they shouldn't know — both erasing the fact that trans men exist, and deliberately linking both drag and transgenderism to sexual perversion and implied paedophilia while lumping the two groups together.
So let's keep the words we use sensible and devoid from (intended or unintended) bigotry.
Besides, drag queens and kings usually are not transgender¹. It is a type of performance featuring a carefully crafted, over-the-top persona, not a full-time endeavour, and it is, crucially, an act. A transgender person isn't acting.
1: I would guess not more so than other groups of people.
Yeah, my bad.
I think the point was to use a "historical" term to evoke how the nazis would have spoken about trans people.
Don't forget the obsession with IQ, even if it died down recently.
Even if you are a current supporter of this administration this all should give you a moment of pause really. Even if you think the current administration isn’t about this, and it’s fear mongering by the media to you, what if the next administration goes a step further than you like, and this is where the door was set open?
There is a reason the constitution was set up the way it was in the light of not having a King and not being unfairly treated.
No he is saying putting people in camps like murder camps / forced labor camps / concentration camps.
Not in camps like divided by opinion.
Nit, nobody actually cares all that much about transvestites. Vest like from vestments meaning clothes. They're cross-dressers. Historically transsexual or transgender (depends on the country which one is the more prominent term) people have been called transvestites but it was a mischaracterization. Someone born with XX chromosomes but who lives his life full-time as a man is very different from a woman who likes to dress up like a man for sexual or other pleasure.
While you're right on the terms, you're wrong about the stigma on cross-dressing. There is really very little distinction bigots make between their hate for cross-dressing and their hate for trans people. It all falls under a big umbrella of "degeneracy" to them. Even actors in cross-dressing roles are often hated by these people.
I mean there certainly is a stigma, the stigma is probably on average greater than the current stigma surrounding trans people because even Republicans understand gender dysphoria as an illness. Ohio's Republican governor DeWine is, even by Democrat standards a huge trans rights and treatment supporter even for minors. It's legitimately uncanny to read stories about him from back home. But cross-dressers occupy an almost exclusively sexual connotation now that femboy/butch/tomboy/andro occupy the common term for just casually dressing in a manner defying gender norms.
But when it comes to policy actions taken by bigots they pretty narrowly target transgender people. If for no other reason than trying to legislate dress is going to (and has) run into 1A issues for anything not extremely narrowly scoped. Project 2025, arguably the comprehensive policy manifesto for the new GOP only really outlines policy targeting transgender persons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy
The controversy seems to be stemmed from American's relationship with their government. Most European countries do have many different(including autism and other stuff) centralized book keeping and registries to help with monitoring and management of certain deceases and conditions. During Covid-19 UK and Turkey were able to quickly iterate their response based on the centralized data collected and most of the EU also had similar stuff and later they were able to look back into the data to see if Covid or the vaccines caused further issues down the road. IMHO vaccines are much less controversial in those societies because it's pretty easy to look ot up when a Twitter influencer claims something.
But hey, considering what happened the last few months maybe Americans have a point for their case. In most of the Europe governments collapse and streets burn for much less all the time, in US they don't appear to have a recourse for at least 4 years.
Maybe its a good idea not to give the data to government affiliated billionaires that can crunch some numbers, feed the data to a machibne and come up with an optimization solutions like "If we can get rid of those suboptimal humans we can pay less income taxes". What are you going to do if the machine tells you that if an autist isn't making x amount of money by the age y it is drain to the society and the formula suggest that a deportation yields better outcomes financially?
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I'll quote Kennedy's dehumanizing comments for context, that people can compare the two styles of rhetoric:
- "Kennedy said many autistic children were “fully functional” and “regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”"
- "He also said, “Most cases now are severe. Twenty-five percent of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, and have other stereotypical features.”"
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-robert-f...
He's specifically talking about nonverbal kids like mine. I'm sorry, it's a disability, and I'm terrified what's going to happen to my kid when I'm gone. I don't think RFK Jr's policies will help and I didn't vote for them. But the amount of frustration I have towards comments like yours that ignore our worlds is immense. At least RFK Jr speaks honestly and candidly.
The challenges a level 1 autistic person faces are well recognized and good for network TV. finally - finally! - someone is talking about the rest of the population that face far greater challenges.
> At least RFK Jr speaks honestly
That's a very strange take considering he's known to spread lies. The very comment you replied to demonstrated that. He says that vaccines cause autism - they don't. He says that "Most cases now are severe." - they aren't.
I wouldn't say his record shows that he is either honest or candid:
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-jr-samoa-measles-kennedy-vacc...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rfk-jr-disqualified-from-ne...
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jul/19/robert-f-k...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/rfk-jr-fact-check-co...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/debunking-some-of-rfk-...
It is that old joke from Seinfeld's Constanza:
It is not a lie, if you believe in it.
From context, I thought he was talking about 1 in 31 eight-year olds (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/ss/ss7402a1.htm?ACSTrack...)
The kindness, sincerity and honestly that you attribute to his words are distinctly not there. Otherwise, he wouldn't be pitching pseudo-scientific views after ignoring and firing career professionals in the field. You have an autistic kid. Weren't you still able to recognize the dozen or so absolute falsehoods about autism that he spouted in that half an hour? What's even worse it that his tone and behavior has a very familiar and dreadful analogue from the past. Read your GP's top-level comment. At this point, people are simply ignoring the dozen flashing red lights. Do you really believe that he cares more about people's health than all the researchers who were working on several topics like this, whom he fired?
> The challenges a level 1 autistic person faces are well recognized and good for network TV.
Those level 2 and 3 people you seem to be so worried about are the ones who are going to suffer the most. At least we know how to mask it in public.
I didn’t realise until other people replied to you that you weren’t using dehumanising sarcastically.
There is nothing dehumanising about acknowledging the existence of the profoundly autistic.
He's not "acknowledging their existence" though, he listed a series of very typically human activities and experiences, and then said autistic people don't get to experience them due to their innate differences.
First of all that is false, because even profoundly autistic people do the things he said they don't do.
Secondly, it's dehumanizing because the reason he lied (yes what he said was a lie) was so that the listener would feel sorry for autistic people, and would thereby support Kennedy to do whatever he wants to them to restore their humanity, whether that be a registry, concentration camps (or as he calls them, "wellness farms") or whatever else he has planned.
Most profoundly autistic people don’t go the bathroom unassisted, or pay their own taxes. That’s true.
> Kennedy to do whatever he wants to them to restore their humanity, whether that be a registry, concentration camps (or as he calls them, "wellness farms") or whatever else he has planned.
Wild conspiracy theories help nobody, and also harm autistic people.
> Most profoundly autistic people don’t go the bathroom unassisted, or pay their own taxes. That’s true.
As long as you define "ability to go to bathroom and pay taxes" as profound autism, that's true. But as I said, autism is a spectrum -- there is no such thing as "profoundly autistic". That's not a thing. You're again trying to make a dichotomy, and this is a misconception both you and Kennedy share.
> Wild conspiracy theories help nobody, and also harm autistic people.
We are at the point where it's no longer wild. They are literally planning a database, and planning "wellness farms", and using dehumanizing language to talk about the worth of autistic people within society. I'm really glad that for you, these concerns autistic people have about these plans are esoteric and "wild", but for the people they are targeting with registries and camps, we cannot afford to be so flippant.
No one else is going to advocate or look out for autistic people, so we have to do it ourselves, and if that means people think we are overreacting so be it. We're used to being told that anyway.
> As long as you define "ability to go to bathroom and pay taxes" as profound autism, that's true
Yes. That's literally the meaning of profound - has trouble with common functioning. Your position seems to be that a group - profound autistic people - that is defined by it's functional ability is being mischaracterised as having low functional ability. Mine is that that is literally what profoundly autistic' means.
> No one else is going to advocate or look out for autistic people, so we have to do it ourselves, and if that means people think we are overreacting so be it.
Likewise, which is why I support efforts to investigate the causes of something that is currently very ill defined. I do have resevations about RFK, it reminds me of working at Google where people find research to support their pre-drawn conclusions. But conspiracy theories about death camps are not one of my concerns.
> Your position seems to be
No my position is that you've created a tautology, and so the phrase "profoundly autistic" doesn't mean anything. You're profoundly autistic if you can't function, and if you can't function you're profoundly autistic. So what?
How does one measure "functional ability" -- functioning how and where and when? In a capitalist context? Academic context? social context? Where is the line? What's the cut off? Who is doing the assessing? Who is coming up with the criteria?
> But conspiracy theories about death camps are not one of my concerns.
I understand you don't think it's likely and don't care to discuss such matters, but you're not going to convince me these people are looking out for the best interests of autistic people. They're looking to be "right" about vaccines, and they're going to use autistic people however they can to get the answers they want.
> You're profoundly autistic if you can't function, and if you can't function you're profoundly autistic
That is a definition, not a tautology. Though I suspect the way this conversation will go is that we will argue over the definition of definition.
I’ll bow out, but I do share your concerns about people looking to be right about vaccines. I feel they may be right (and also that they may be wrong), but as I’ve mentioned in another thread, I’m concerned they’re finding research to support their conclusion (mercury and aluminium poisoning) rather than approaching the problem more rigorously.
> That is a definition, not a tautology... we will argue over the definition of definition.
We shall.
Given your circular definition of profound autism, what I had said is a tautology. And that's my point, the way you've defined this thing doesn't make logical sense.
A shame to bow out on a semantic quibble, I made a number of substantive points I'll that I guess will have to remain unanswered. At the end of the day this definition is circular and is of no use to anyone.
> Given your circular definition of profound autism
No. It's not circular. Matching a name to a value and then saying that value has that name isn't a tautology. We're on a forum for programmers, if you work in this industry you do it all the time. I'd hoped by discussing shared values we'd end civilly but I guess not.
How have I been uncivil to you? I have not called you names, nor have I engaged your arguments in bad faith, nor have I attacked your character, your reputation, nor impugned you in any way. I've done nothing but engage you civilly.
And it is circular because you still haven't given a definition for "profound autism" -- all you have said is that "profound autism" is autism that profoundly disables a person. But what does that mean? Because all autism is profoundly disabling if you ask autistic people.
How does one go about determining if an autistic person is "profoundly" disabled? What's the test? What's the measure? How disabled can one be before they are considered not just regularly disabled, but "profoundly" disabled?
You've already said "you would say someone who headbangs has profound autism" but I headbang, and most people are surprised to learn I'm autistic. So I shouldn't be someone RFK is referring to in his speech, but according to the symptoms he lists off and your apparent concurrence here, I am someone he would be talking about.
Which brings me back to my original point: he was not clear at all in his speech.
The lack of civility I feel is that you’re either not reading what I write before replying or not feeling the need to address the points in the comment you’re replying to.
You’re right there is a spectrum of abilities and this changes over time. However we can define a threshold. I think a self-harming stim as an adult like head banging is sufficient to qualify as profound.
Not responding to all the points you raise is not an act of incivility. You've done the same (e.g. when you just responded "Godwin") -- you're psyching yourself out. I'm substantively responding to your posts, so it's up to you if you want to emphasize a specific argument that you feel I'm not picking up.
> However we can define a threshold. I think a self-harming stim as an adult like head banging is sufficient to qualify as profound.
Yeah I agree, we can define a threshold. Meaning someone has to determine where the line is, and so my question is still: where is that line? Who determines it and how? The answer is that there is no line and no one determines it, RFK is just using vague nebulous terms, which are not clear at all.
> I think a self-harming stim as an adult like head banging is sufficient to qualify as profound.
Lots of autistic people self-harm as a stim, through skin picking, scraping, pinching, cutting, hair pulling, etc. So if "self-harming as a stim is sufficient to qualify as profoundly autistic", then they can sweep up pretty much any autistic person.
And that's the problem when autistic people are cut out of the conversation entirely and painting autistic people with a broad brush as RFK is doing.
> The answer is that there is no line and no one determines it
Why is that the answer?
> So if "self-harming as a stim is sufficient to qualify as profoundly autistic", then they can sweep up pretty much any autistic person.
Disagree. I think your stats are off.
> Why is that the answer?
If it's not the answer, then where is the line and who determines it?
> Disagree. I think your stats are off.
I didn't provide any statistic, I made a generalized observation based on the autistic people I know. If you have stats, provide them.
But my observation is every autistic person I know has engaged in some level of self-harm stimming, and my generalization is that means lots of autistic people stim in this way, and this means if self-harm is a criteria for being "profoundly autistic", that will cause a lot of false positives.
> If it's not the answer, then where is the line
Scroll up. We’ve discussed this already.
What percentage of the millions of twiteraty proudly putting autism in their bio would you guess are "non-toilet trained"?
Seeing some of them still wear diapers, I'm going to assume percentage higher than 0%.
PS. I'm aware what it is.
What would you suggest Americans actually do? They voted this in knowing this would happen.
It’s one thing to shout into a void about some vague disagreement, but it’s entirely different to actually take some form of real action. What should that action comprise?
> They voted this in knowing this would happen.
Many of them mocked anyone saying this would happen. And even now, there are people cheering on the idea of ignoring due process.
1. Join up on your local 50501 protest, next one is on May 1: https://www.fiftyfifty.one/events
2. Continue speaking loudly about the various criminal acts of this administration and continue reinforcing the importance of not tuning it out
3. Find promising candidates and fund their run in 2026 to flip the house and strangle the administration with impeachments over their long list of violations of the Constitution
4. Arm yourselves in general before the GOP finally decides they're okay with preventing certain people from buying firearms (specifically "mentally ill" people who don't like Trump, i.e. https://thehill.com/homenews/5200463-trump-derangement-syndr...)
There's a great deal on an AR-15 at Palmetto State Armory right now — only $400!: https://palmettostatearmory.com/psa-pa15-16-phos-a2-mid-leng...
A lot of libs don't know this, but shooting is also extremely fun and gun people are extremely friendly and welcoming. Get a gun, book a lesson at your local range, and enjoy an afternoon learning how to use it. Guns are also a lot of fun for the gear-junkie types that I'm sure are overrepresented here on HN.
EDIT: I changed the order of these, apologies to the commenter below!
#1: Not available in New York - if you're in the wrong red county, trying to apply for a semi-automatic rifle permit means having to argue with the GOP about your "good moral character" and have your permit get denied. This also assumes your county will process your application in a timely manner - mine's a nearly 11-12 month wait to process. Even hardcore red areas are becoming a nightmare to gain access to 2A rights :)
Obviously, locality matters - but in most of the country you can walk into a gun show, hand a random guy a fist full of cash, and walk out with a firearm.
All the more reason to start today!
And yes the more general point is obviously gun ownership laws are highly localized. You should look up the requirements in your area and navigate them to acquire your very own check and balance, given that Congress has abdicated its role as such.
It is very dangerous that so much of the right wing thinks that liberals are afraid of (and therefore do not own) firearms. The meme needs to be that liberals are just as armed as anyone else and are a credible backstop on tyranny.
Is it peace, to point the gun?
Is it war, to fire the gun?
if nothing else,vote with your wallet, buy used, eat a bit lower on the food chain, wear t shirts that might get you in trouble, spend more time on personal care so that you have the stamina and energy to help where you see that you can.
You should stop it from happening by any means necessary like last time. Organize. Talk to each other and figure out what all your options are. Do your threat modelling. Then act.
If this is all really the case… which is hard to tell these days. You had better get to know your community quick because things they are a coming.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
This country needs to crumble on itself, 30% of Americans are still behind Trump, whatever he does. This will not be fixed easily.
I really believe it’s a messaging problem and a money problem. There is money guiding media to rally around a message/figure and it’s rewarded handsomely in return. That’s the problem to fix.
There will always be insane amounts of money towards right-wing propaganda in media. If it is ever made illegal, it will be lobbied into legality again. If lobbying is made illegal, politicians will be corrupted into allowing it.
It would take something very radical to fix the massive imbalance of power in this world. Something I fear Amercians are not ready for. So let it burn, maybe something better will emerge from the ashes.
Look at what the Serbians are doing.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1jc0y...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%93present_Serbian_a...
Be more like the Serbians. Don't just let things happen. You have agency. The government is supposed to be for the people, by the people - democracy doesn't only happen once every four years.
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> ICE is gearing up to be the Gestapo.
It should be noted that the Nazis took a lot of US policies from 1920/30s and ran with them just a little bit further. The Nazis were famous for eugenics, but it was quite big in the US as well, see for example:
* https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/4694780...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
Their initial treatment/segregation of the Jews wasn't much different than treatment of blacks in the US.
Sorry, why should it be noted? What is the relevance of your comment other than whataboutism?
> Sorry, why should it be noted? What is the relevance of your comment other than whataboutism?
It is worth noting because nowadays the Nazis are treated as evil incarnate, and the Allied side of WW2 the side of justice, but the history of the ideas behind the Nazis does not lie (entirely) with-in Germany. There is darkness in every society (including the US) and certain tendencies, and worth reminding people that these things can take hold anywhere, and not just "over there".
That is neither here nor there. Nobody has ever claimed evil started (or ended) with the Nazis. The US has committed unspeakable evil before and after, as have many other governments.
The parent presumably singled out the Gestapo because it is one of the prime examples of a secret police detaining and punishing citizens without due process. The fact that the Gestapo didn't spring out of completely new ideas doesn't seem particularly relevant in this context.
There are more apposite comparisons: The US internment programs of 1942–1945, or McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
it needs to be pointed out that the medical "profesion", especialy anything related to psychology does not let anyone who comes in, and leave, without a diagnosis.....unless it is someone getting a mandatory check for a security clearance, in which case it's sunshine and happyness. The best anyone else can hope for is ....."inconclusive", nobody gets an all clear, except money and power, for whom, a full psychotic break will be spun into something virtuously overcome and meritable. History, might not repeat, but it sure as fuck rhymes. The two year old child of an American citizen was deported last week, so this is already gone completly off the rails.
Wanna bet?
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s/out/in/g
...for another senile fool and much worse cronies. Congrats! See you in the camps.