Comment by ohgr
1 day ago
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.
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
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.
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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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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I would leave that in the hands of professionals though.
Which is evidentially not this lot. Not even remotely.