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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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'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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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...
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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.
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He said that because he couldn't empathize with those defendants...
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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.
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.
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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?
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.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
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"
>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?
"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
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Fixing diseases and abnormalities in humans is empathy and compassion.
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.
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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.
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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].
--
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
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?
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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.
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?
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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.
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High functioning people pollute the discussions about the problems of their low functioning peers who can't speak for themselves. It's selfish.
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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?
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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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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https://archive.is/TEAAk
I get a cloudflare puzzle when I try to visit this link :(
https://archive.is/20250425234110/https://www.washingtonpost...
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.
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."
*looks at Elon Musk*
I suppose he has a point.
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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.
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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.
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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
Didn’t they already show that these data can’t really be anonymized if it should still be useful?
> 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.
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I would leave that in the hands of professionals though.
Which is evidentially not this lot. Not even remotely.
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.
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.
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This is a very valid point, but one RFK has mention he controls for in the past
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 .
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.
“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.
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I'd guess it's ultra-processed foods.
Why guess? Isn’t that basically what RFK is accused of doing?
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...
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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.
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> 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/
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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?
Progress of understanding.
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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...
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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...
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…
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
What percentage of the millions of twiteraty proudly putting autism in their bio would you guess are "non-toilet trained"?
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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.
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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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
This country needs to crumble on itself, 30% of Americans are still behind Trump, whatever he does. This will not be fixed easily.
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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?
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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.