“No one in my generation had autism”
Sure thing. Uncle Barry, who collects every issue of Mechanics Monthly, and has spent over $10,000 on his model train set that is a perfect scale recreation of King’s Cross Station, is completely neurotypical.
I have a staunchly leftist but older co-worker who thinks no one she knew growing up had autism.
“I still think something is causing it” despite being pro-vaxx.
The propaganda is extremely effective unfortunately
Considering how provaxx they where back then, it’s insane seeing people who grew up with polio repeating antivax shit.
Like back in the day. No one got cancer…cause they didn’t know wtf it was, doesn’t mean the shit wasn’t around. Science didn’t stop in 1904.
Just on cancer as an example, there’s a solid argument to be made that it was historically diagnosed as a consumptive disease. My great great aunt died of cancer awhile back and she was practically wasting away.
consumptions usually refers to TB, its has been called wasting sickness forever, because one of the symptoms of cancer(terminal) was cachexia which is your body wasting away. i found it interesting inuyasha mentioned its old term"wasting sickness" which immediately knew it was cancer.
Sorry I got my Ye Olde disease mixed up.
i remember consumption being the old name for Tuberculosis, its also known as the white death, due to people looking sickly and pallor when having the final stages of tb.
wasting was always associated with cancer, and then HIV/AIDS. if you hear films using old terms like wasting sickness, you can bet its cancer.
Even bronze agers knew what cancer was, they just called it weird things.
I’ll never forget looking at a virally trending obituary from the 15th century and seeing “Cancer, and Wolf” as a cause of death.
If you look it up you’ll see other things like “King’s Evil” aka scrofula or jawfaln (lock jaw from tetanus)
I’m pretty sure the over 1,000 atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons over the last hundred years had zero effect on background radiation levels and on levels of human contamination from eating radioactive fallout…
I’m not saying we didn’t have cancer before but I would be very surprised if the rates are not elevated. Even counting misdiagnosises as consumptive illness.
On a similar note, I do suspect that our current petrochemical heavy environment has changed the human microchoism enough to possibly make it more likely for some of the classical autism traits to be passed on generation to generation influencing their heritability in society at large. Sincerely, an artist with two autistic parents in denial. And at least three autistic grandparents.
So I’ve talked to my elderly union dem mom about this recently. Maybe it’s just her, and she did vax me completely, but she said something along the lines of how even in the 70s and 80s it was a personal decision that people thought about before executing, while most went ahead with it. But I was never exposed to a single skeptical thought at home, at school, in my community, or anywhere
What’s causing the rise in cases is actual diagnosis. For many generations. Theirs and mine included. Either you were institutionalized. Or you were undiagnosed. People would just refer to you as Quirky or eccentric. There was no Spectrum to be on. It was treated as largely binary. Only in the last 40 years at the earliest did they start to fully understand the condition. And even now they still have a long way to go. But they’ve at least started recognizing the larger condition.
Thinking that the rise in diagnoses at this point is some sort of crisis/pandemic or Healthcare emergency that needs to be addressed. Is like blaming the Exterminator coming out and finding your house is filled with termites. It wasn’t filled with termites before they came just a few odd little ones that you saw skittering about on the surface. All these other ones must have been brought by them or someone else right? It’s not like they could have been there all along and we just didn’t notice?
I really do think autism and cancer have gotten much more common. And it’s very likely something is causing it.
Not vaccines. Vaccines are fine.
Could be plastic. Could be pfas (forever chemicals). Could be lots of things, or a combination. But there’s most likely an environmental cause rather than genetic or just an increase in diagnosis. (Though the increase in diagnosis and recognition is also real.)
Modern society is making both mild autism and ADHD more obvious. It both brings out traits associated with them, and makes it more acceptable to have them and not mask completely.
As for cancer, that’s mostly an age and treatment thing. People with cancer live longer, due to treatment, so you hear far more about it. Also, if you live longer, you get cancer. Therefore an older population has more cancer cases.
My personal concern is neurological and plastics. People with degenerative neurological conditions tend to have more micro plastics in their brains. We’ve no idea of the long term implications of this. It could possibly be the modern equivalent of leaded petrol.
Cancer is rising rapidly in younger people unfortunately
https://www.mskcc.org/news/why-is-cancer-rising-among-young-adults
If it is environmental pollution, the current administration would never admit it anyhow.
There’s also the fact that we have WAY better technology and techniques for discovering and understanding both autism and cancer nowadays compared to even 20 years ago.
I’m disappointed that Lemmy feels the need to downvote such a mild differing opinion that doesn’t even conflict with your own.
All these things can be true. Diagnosis, treatment, and recognition are all much better; we agree there.
looks like she bought into the partly anti-vax prop, probably heard jenny mcarthny once about vaccines and she was hooked.
This response vexes me because while Uncle Barry here is certainly an example, what these people are forgetting (and what this thing about Uncle Barry glosses over) is that until the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the fights from the 70s onward, if a family in the US had a child with an IQ of under 70, they were often shipped off to an institution.
Deinstitutionialization didn’t really begin to gain steam until relatively recently in our collective history- here in Tennessee we still had one of these facilities open until the nineties. These people didn’t believe there were people with severe mental disabilities, because our society hid them away!
Look up Clover Bottom. But don’t, because it’s horrifying. I’ve met people who lived there their entire lives. What was done to them was disgusting.
It is awful what was done to them. But it’s awful that people with a greater severity of condition, a greater need for care, are often glossed over in these comment sections. It feels like they’re made invisible in these conversations just like they were in those institutions! And I’m terrified that assholes like RFK Jr will disappear them for real!
State institutions are still hellholes.
There needs to be a federal investigation in to Oklahoma’s congregate care homes. Kids still get shipped off to institutions, which are unsafe and unregulated.
The one good thing Reagan did was deinstitutionalization, even if he did it the dumbest way possible.
Thatcher did the same over here. Called it ‘Care in the Community’ which translates as ‘Vastly increasing the at risk and vulnerable unhoused population’.
and shoots steroids regurlarly, and is obssesed with playing with animal carcasses.
It’s so funny because you look at the guy and think he’s fit. But I saw a video of him doing pushups and it’s honestly so unimpressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOGNznbJPY0 like all that gear to not be able to do 10 full straight pushups? Ok dude
Lol that last one looked real difficult, and he looked a little wobbly getting up
‘He Cannot Be This Stupid’
He’s even more stupid than they are acknowledging.
Yes, I was going to post “hearing CAN be that stupid”.
Hey, that 65 year old neighbor with the $200k model trainset? Yeah, probably autistic.
But in his defense, trains are cool.
“He was in fact, exactly that stupid…” - Ron Howard
Are people just realizing now that he’s unfit for his job?
Yeah. That’s how stupid America really is. Worse than Carlin ever thought possible.
The inside of RFK Jrs head be like……
Yeah, I don’t think The Brain is in there.
Don’t insult Brain like that! He is legitimately smart and does what he can given his circumstances (he is a literal lab rat in a lab that he has to escape from every night… and his only companion is barely functional).
Sure but when they used pinkies plan pinky took over the world. Then brain had to get involved and ruin it.
Tell me that episode. I agvent watched that show since the 90s (at least beyond clips on YouTube) i think a binge is in order.
Short answer: if they got it bad, they’re dead or in a nursing home. That’s why they aren’t walking in a mall. They ran out of health.
Long answer: in recent times, there seems to be lower threshold of diagnosis.
But if he truly thinks he can pinpoint exposures that increase autism - things like the exposure to tetraethyl lead which probably increased criminality and decreased mental health - good luck for combing scientific studies. There may be some. But if he’s gonna rewind the age old “vaccines cause” record and replay it, nah, I won’t be listening.
It’s not that there’s a lower threshold. It’s that the definitions and our understanding of Autism changed. People who formerly would have been labeled with Asperger’s are now labeled (correctly) with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Plus we’ve learned how Autism can present differently in other communities that aren’t white male children. Acknowledging that girls can even be Autistic is a relatively recent development (the 90s).
The truth is that there are likely a ton of people out there with undiagnosed Autism, because they wouldn’t have met the criteria to be diagnosed as kids based on our understanding at the time. It’s why there are so many adults now getting late life diagnoses.
I suspect my grandmother has undiagnosed autism
Yeah, my uncle who passed definitely had Autism, and so does my dad. They’re half-brothers, which means it’s highly likely my grandmother was as well (which my dad also agrees with).
It’s definitely hereditary in my family. I also clearly get my ADHD from my mom.
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They’re going to blame flouride for sure
Way too many rural (i.e. well water) cases for that to even make a good scapegoat.
I’m sorry but if you can listen to RFK speak for longer than 10 seconds without becoming enraged then you really are just fucking dumb.
The moment has reignited broader concerns about Kennedy’s qualifications and judgment…
He has no qualifications and an exactly equivalent amount of judgement.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
He may have 0 qualifications, but I wouldn’t say his judgement is exactly equivalent. His judgment goes much more into the negatives, since everything he says and every decision he makes is actively causing harm. We would be better off simply having the role vacant, or giving the job to someone in a coma.
Ironically, even the most profoundly autistic people, the ones that resemble his characterization of the condition, would still be better at the job than he is.
He is a cis white male. Pretty sure thats all the qualifications he needs unless you are one of those “woke” people who think we should have experts running things.
his worms are doing all the talking./
I love how this is the hill people finally die on, and not the other absolutely wild shit this guy has said before he even got this gig, like collecting roadkill or his extremely well documented conspiracy-esque, anti-vaccine history.
Look, he’s killing people. He should be arrested and go to trial for criminal negligence and manslaughter. Like the rest of the bunch.
But they can’t even say it lol. “oh, some people touted!”
There was a thread on reddit that had someone speculate that he is an indirect serial killer. Meaning he tries to influence people into doing ‘healthy’ things that are anything but and keep bullying them into them until he results in their health declining to the point that they die. He had a relative that he did this to. The justice system isn’t built for that kind of stuff and proving it there would be damn near impossible unless he somehow confesses to it.
Plenty of older people have ASD. I know a couple personally. They have childhood stories of being beaten, yelled at, difficulty with teachers and peers. They claim to be fine today, but telling horror stories of your trauma as a kid really says otherwise. If ASD was bad enough to be “retarded”, they were kept from society and/or put in State Homes. RFK is ADHD, and the only thing that kept him out of jails due to the untreated effects when he was younger is hs family name and wealth.
the only thing that kept him out of jails due to the untreated effects when he was younger is hs family name and wealth.
That and having a penis. Rosemary wasn’t so lucky.
Exactly. His frickin aunt was institutionalized and lobotomized for her intellectual disability.
“cannot be this stupid?” This is a kakistocracy, it’s only stupid.
It’s an administration of “well, I haven’t seen it, so obviously it isn’t real.”
It’s an administration made up of people who aren’t smart enough to get better jobs, which assures their loyalty. There’s definitely other people who love trump who are actually qualified for these positions, but they would have said no to some of this at some point.
The lady doth protest too much… I’m calling it now, some psychiatrist tried to diagnose Rfk Jr with autism and he lost his fucking shit about it. I mean the dudes been obsessed with dead animals since he was a child always been known as “eccentric”.
He’s dumber than most people can imagine. Jack, Ted, and Bobby might have been morally bankrupt but they weren’t stupid. Something went seriously wrong with this one.
