RFK Jr. Touted as 'Unfit' After Rant About Lack of Autism in 'Older People': 'He Cannot Be This Stupid'
RFK Jr. Touted as 'Unfit' After Rant About Lack of Autism in 'Older People': 'He Cannot Be This Stupid'
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. incited backlash after questioning why autism is "only happening in young people" during a televised news briefing.
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"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
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
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.
If it is environmental pollution, the current administration would never admit it anyhow.
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?
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