Quotulatiousness

October 5, 2025

The New York Times finally decides that there’s a case for “splitting the Autism spectrum”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer on the stereotyped way that the “Gray Lady” — the New York Times — once again lets the independent media do all the serious work to investigate an issue before “the Grey Lady squats down on that issue and says ‘this is mine now'”:

You may groan! You may say, “Again?” You may roll your eyes. But I’m going to talk about this one more time, and then I think I’m done. But I’ve always been right about all of this, and it needs to be said.

The Times has once again parachuted into a conversation that has been going on for decades, planted its flag, and declared itself the discoverer of new territory. Yesterday they published a piece on autism, neurodiversity, RFK Jr., and whether the autism spectrum should be split up — split back up, that is, to reflect on the massive differences between those with profound autism and those for whom “neurodiversity” is mostly a social badge, a tidbit to be displayed on a Bumble profile. (The answer is yes, of course the spectrum should be split up again, for reasons I’ve written about at great length.) That issue, unusually raw, will bubble on, as it sits at a genuinely uncomfortable intersection of liberal identity norms, online culture, and the genuinely debilitating reality of severe autism. In terms of progressive discourse rules, the plight of the severely autistic and their loved ones is truly a problem from hell: those rules insist that you can’t ever question someone’s diagnosis, no matter how dubious; they demand that you acquiesce to claims made from a position of disability, no matter if they cut directly against the claims made by others from their own position of disability; they have long ago lost sight of any distinction between identity and disorder; and they’re governed by a selective and incoherent vision of standpoint theory that insists that only the autistic can speak out about autism – which perversely empowers the least-afflicted and silences the interests of the most-afflicted, as the most-afflicted literally cannot speak for themselves. You know my rap on all this.

In meta terms, though? This tendency of the NYT to helicopter in to long-simmering debates and bless them with the paper’s attention, and in so doing anoint those debates as worthy of attention by grownups, is only the latest example in an old, ugly dynamic. The little people in independent media ask difficult questions and engage in rancorous debates and stick their necks out in the service of ideas, which is what the media is supposed to do. Then, once the heavy lifting is done, the Grey Lady squats down on that issue and says “this is mine now”. The paper’s consolidation of both prestige and financial security — its status as both far and away the most prestigious publication in world media and maybe literally the only financially healthy newspaper left in the United States — has all manner of pernicious, perverse consequences in an industry that can only function when people within it are engaged in debates with real stakes and real hurt feelings. Again, nothing you haven’t already heard from me. But when there is only one endpoint for the ambitious to aspire to, there’s an inherent and unavoidable silence about that endpoint’s myriad failings. The Times, for its part, has walled off criticism within its own pages with its “we don’t do media criticism” rule, a profoundly self-interested and cynical policy that helps them evade ever having to justify their own widely-criticized practices. And for all manner of complex reasons, the broader world of stodgy old media, dying though it may be, still holds all the cards when it comes to defining debates that involve institutional stakeholders, as the debate about autism’s future certainly does.

I don’t begrudge any writer for wanting to weigh in on these issues — God knows they matter and need more attention — but what’s striking about the Times‘s coverage is how effortlessly it erases the long history of people already fighting these battles, and the richness of the debate that preceded them. Whole archives of independent writing, analysis, and advocacy disappear when the Paper of Record decides that a question now exists. Until then, the issue is marginal, unserious, relegated to the sidelines; afterward, it’s real, it’s official, it’s legitimate … and therefore too important to be left up to those of us in the cheap seats. This is the paradox, you see; no issue that independent media concerns itself with can be considered truly serious, and no issue that they (eventually) deign to be truly serious is something that they trust the independent media to engage with responsibly. Quite a little trap, there. And when the grownups in the room walk in, we’re meant to feel blessed by their presence, happy to have our pet issues taken seriously. Everyone else who’s been in the trenches for years is supposed to be grateful for their newfound recognition.

September 27, 2025

Dislike of Trump prompts the CBC to spread faulty medical advice

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s a long-running joke that US progressives — and the legacy media, BIRM — are programmed to respond to anything Donald Trump says by doing the exact opposite of what he says:

The CBC apparently felt the need to do the meme:

It was not controversial for news outlets like CBC to report in 2016, and later 2021, on new medical research raising concerns about the impact of Tylenol use on pregnancy and fetal development. But in 2025, those studies (among others) have become the basis for a new cautionary approach by the U.S. government that critics and media are trying to debunk.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that, as part of a bigger strategy in quelling autism, it would be issuing a “physician notice and begin the process to initiate a safety label change for acetaminophen”.

President Donald Trump relayed this to the press, stating the medication “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism”.

“So taking Tylenol is not good, all right? I’ll say it; it’s not good. For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary. That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever that you feel you can’t tough it out.”

[…]

The statement was reported in the mainstream news — including CBC, which found Canadian doctors who seemed to support the cautionary approach. The impression from these experts was that this wasn’t cause for panic and that more evidence was needed, but it was an occasion for discussion. The advice back then? Take the smallest amount for the shortest period of time, and don’t use it as a first resort to managing pain, which is consistent with the U.S. guidance.

Indeed, no major figure in this story is advocating for total avoidance because unmitigated pain and fever are bad for pregnancy, and in small amounts, Tylenol seems to be fine. That said, the manufacturer doesn’t recommend it for pregnant women (which they can’t really do without extensive testing, even if doctors generally consider it safe for mothers in minimized amounts when medically indicated).

More recently, a review of other studies by a team including Harvard University’s public health dean found similar “evidence of an association” between the drug and neurodevelopmental conditions. The dean released a statement saying that the “association is strongest when acetaminophen is taken for four weeks or longer”. That should be uncontroversial, because nobody is supposed to take Tylenol for that long, pregnant or not.

But perhaps, as the Babylon Bee suggests, it’s all Trumpian 4D Chess:

July 25, 2025

Autism, then and now

Filed under: Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Psychobabble, Hannah Spier traces the rise of autism from its first formal definition to something that 1 in 36 kids is diagnosed with:

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group.

From experts, instead of raised alarms or calls for serious public health investigation (as would be expected for any other childhood disorder) we get calls for inclusivity and a self-congratulatory attitude toward their advancement in diagnostic understanding and tools. Another example of ideological capture of psychiatry by cultural sentiment.

Characters like Sheldon Cooper and Sherlock Holmes have helped turn the image of autism into a badge of honour. It means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.

People with narcissism and psychopathic traits exploit wherever they can, we know this. And yet again, psychiatry, the ones who should be the best at recognizing these, made it easy pickings by flinging the diagnostic gates wide open. Longtime readers will recognize the pattern: I’ve written before about the diagnostic creep in trauma, expanding definitions that blur the line between disorder and ordinary variation. The same diagnostic creep has unfolded here. Autism, once narrowly defined, was steadily loosened through each revision of the DSM.

The Great Diagnostic Expansion

Originally, Kanner’s autism was unmistakable: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures. These were not quirky introverts. These were children who required full-time care and specialized schooling. In the DSM-III of the 1980s, it was called infantile autism. The criteria required clear onset before 30 months, marked language delays, gross deficits in social interaction, and repetitive behaviours. These were developmental dysfunctions, not misunderstood personalities. And neither clinicians nor parents had a problem naming them as such.

Then came the DSM-III-R in 1987, which introduced pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and broadened the field significantly. Suddenly, language delay and intellectual disability were no longer central. Subclinical cases were included. Asperger’s Syndrome followed in the DSM-IV in 1994, adding high-IQ individuals with no language delays but poor social functioning. A child who spoke on time but didn’t understand jokes, had poor eye contact, and rigid routines was now also autistic.

But the most dramatic change came with DSM-5 in 2013. The subtypes were eliminated. Autism became one spectrum. The criteria were thinned down to two domains: social communication difficulties and restrictive, repetitive behaviours. A person needed to meet just six out of twelve traits, spread across these two clusters. Language and cognitive delay? Optional. Even the requirement for early onset was removed. A diagnosis could now be given based on historical symptoms. Questionnaires like the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) are so broad and subjective they can be easily gamed. This made it possible for 30-year-olds to recall feeling “socially overwhelmed” in school and not liking itchy clothing to receive the same diagnosis as a nonverbal child requiring lifelong care.

The diagnostic category has become a black hole, pulling in people with no clinical resemblance, collapsing distinction into sameness. From what I’ve observed, three distinct autism “patients” now account for much of the increased prevalence, none of whom would have qualified under the original criteria.

June 22, 2025

QotD: “Autism stolen valor”

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Autism stolen valor”. What a concept.

The very concept that anyone would ever claim to be autistic as a status move would have seemed incomprehensibly bizarre to me when I was growing up.

I get it, though. In the intervening decades, somehow a lot of people have developed the notion that anybody above the middle range of IQ must be autistic-spectrum.

It’s not true. I’ve met enough autists, brights and super-brights to know differently. I’ve read a fair bit of the literature on psychometrics and MBD syndromes. And I’ve been a guest for faculty tea at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is very illuminating if you’re even a little bit observant about people.

Here’s what I think I know:

Many autists are seriously damaged and non-functional, to the point where they need to be institutionalized or have semi-institutional special care. Few people outside the mental-health profession know this. The “autists” we encounter in daily life are a selected high-functioning group.

HFAs (high functioning autists) have one advantage over average-IQ neurotypicals: they can really concentrate on things that aren’t social-status games or sexual maneuvers.

Average-IQ neurotypicals can only just barely manage that, so it’s difficult for them to compete with HFAs in fields where you have to be able to concentrate for long periods in order to do decent work.

Like, say, writing software. The upper reaches of software engineering are stiff with HFAs. This has become well known.

This doesn’t mean your typical HFA is actually brighter than a median average-IQ neurotypical. In fact, if you put a whole bunch of HFAs through a psychometric battery you’ll find their average IQ is lower than for neurotypicals, not higher.

HFA is actually a drag on general intelligence that HFAs overcome by being obsessive — grinding really hard on intelligent-people stuff.

The result is that HFAs as a population excel over average-IQ neurotypicals, compete fairly evenly with bright neurotypicals, but top out lower than super-bright neurotypicals do.

This is hard to notice because there are so few super-brights that many people never meet one at all. Very few people have observed enough super-brights to make valid generalizations about them. And of the few people who have a large enough observational sample, still fewer are themselves bright enough to comprehend what they see.

But I have been to faculty tea at the IAS. (I had been an invited speaker that day.)

Most of my friends and peers are people in the tippy-top end of the HFA cohort. Top 1% software engineers and people like that. So at the IAS, people-watching a bunch of Nobel laureates and people bright enough to work with Nobel laureates day-to-day, my jaw dropped open.

Because compared to who I usually hang out with, these people are mostly *normal*. Neurotypical. As near as I can tell, the people in the crowd showing HFA tells are the slow ones.

Imagine if you can being so natively intelligent that even though your brain is constantly trying to distract you into playing monkey socio-sexual status games, you can still think rings around 99.9% of the people in the world.

That’s what actual super-brights are like. They’re not brain-damaged. They’re not obsessive or compulsive or neurotic. They don’t have sensory disabilities. And they leave high-functioning autists in their dust.

Because I know this, I find the concept of people faking being autists amusing. They think they’re positioning themselves as the superior, smartest people. They are hilariously wrong.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-27.

March 20, 2025

QotD: “[T]here is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it”

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I had an acquaintance in college who was a dedicated leftist and who also believed in substantial group differences in average IQ.1 One day she was fretting at me that advances in data science, genetics, etc. were going to make this unpalatable reality impossible to ignore, with detrimental consequences for both racial justice and social harmony. Facts and logic were going to explode the noble lie, oh no!

Obviously I had to physically restrain myself from laughing at her. Assuming for the sake of argument that such differences exist and are easily measurable, only somebody totally autistic would think that mere scientific evidence for them would cause them to be acknowledged.2 Just look at all the ridiculous “sky is green” type beliefs that society already successfully forces everybody to internalize. You mentioned biological and cognitive differences between men and women, which are far more obvious and noticeable than those between populations, but which we successfully force everybody to pretend do not exist. And that’s far from the silliest thing everybody pretends to believe, in our society or in others.

Put it another way: there is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it. Were there people in Tenochtitlan who secretly believed that blood pouring down the sides of the great step pyramid day and night wasn’t actually necessary to placate the gods? Yeah probably, but if any of them had tried to point that out, they would have been laughed at (and sacrificed). Were there people in the Soviet Union who privately doubted whether dialectical materialism was the true engine of history? Probably, yes, but everybody besides Leonid Kantorovich was smart enough not to mention it.

What are the religious precepts on which our society is founded? There are a few, but a belief in absolute racial equality is clearly one of them, and that view is now enshrined in the “real” constitution (civil rights caselaw and its downstream effects on corporate HR). Anything which contradicts that precept is just a total nonstarter. If a few nerds somewhere found irrefutable evidence of important differences between groups, they would quietly hide it, and if some among them were like Reich too autistic or principled to do that, they would be ignored, shouted down, or persecuted. Possibly this would even be a good thing — every society needs its orthodoxies, and sometimes those who corrupt the youth need to drink the hemlock.

We’ve gotten far afield, though. As an inveterate shape-rotator, my favorite part of the book was Reich’s description of the statistical and mathematical techniques that can be used to determine when population bottlenecks occurred, how recently two populations shared a common ancestor, and when various mixing events occurred.

Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.

    1. Not to get all “Dems are the real racists”, but anecdotally this view does seem slightly more prevalent among my left-wing friends than my right-wing friends, though that seems to currently be changing.

    2. Somebody totally autistic or somebody who had already drunk the kool-aid on literally every other ridiculous official viewpoint imposed by our society. In her case it was probably the latter. As I said she was a leftist, and women in general are much less likely to be autistic but much more likely to value social conformity.

June 28, 2024

The weird and the W.E.I.R.D. gather at Vibecamp

Filed under: Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kulak, just back from a road trip to visit two pretty far offbeat gatherings, writes about what she heard and saw at Vibecamp:

VibeCamp is maybe the extreme intersection of Rationalist, Post-Rat, Effective Altruism, Silicon Valley, Quant Finance, and 5-10 other Cyber-Left, Grey-Tribe, autistic-centrist, techno-optimist blogging/twitter world. […]

Given that setup you could probably imagine the two overwhelming facts about Vibecamp:

  1. With rare exception everyone in attendance was shockingly intelligent. At random points throughout the festival I was having deep dive conversation on the geostrategic situation in Israel, the effects of Interest rate increases on venture capital, early 20th century Canadian poetry, and the fate of the petrodollar and the nature of Foreign Exchange markets.
  2. With rare exception everyone in attendance was incredibly weird. Some in very obvious ways visible at 100 paces, some in little uncanny ways it might take you an hour to isolate and identify.

[…]

The shape of the people jumps out at you. There were an incredible number of normal and average looking people, and a much lower portion of obese and Amerifat body-types than almost anywhere else in the US… Perhaps owing to the extreme intelligence and incomes of those involved … But in about 30-45% of people in attendance there’s just some unusual distortion of body proportions that would be remarkable and memorable encountered in an individual, but when assembled together gave the White and Jewish attendees (a combined 90+% of the total) the look that they were all descended from some unusual gothic ethnicity you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Some strange isolated country bordering The Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, Romania, and the Basque region of Spain … That they’d all come from whatever part of the old country the Adams Family comes from.

[…]

These unusual heights (or lack there-of) were exaggerated by recurring extremes of bodyfat percentage, with several of the attendees (male, female, and between) having a spider-like absence of body fat entirely denoting some unusual hormonal profile expressed in a true kaleidoscope of personalities and interests.

This was expressed most keenly in the faces in which latent autism, and the aforementioned hormonal oddities, were expressed in large eyes and other unusual features, resting positions, and expression creases. Which weren’t all necessarily unattractive, but gave most of the women (and a good percentage of the men) a rather spaced out looks which remained somehow unique in each instance … As if they were all on another planet, but each a very different one from the one each other was on.

Thankfully with psychedelics and other pharmaceuticals they seemed able to meet up on a few mutually agreeable worlds.

[…]

Vibecamp attracts a great deal of biohackers and supplements freaks. Men, women, and others of extreme nutritional theories … and while some of them look like their theories haven’t panned out (the vegans) some look like they’ve discovered the Holy Grail.

This extreme bifurcation and assemblage of extremes was expressed right down to their vehicles… Walking through the parking lot there were $100,000 CyberTrucks and sportscars, whereas 1-2 cars down the line from them there were vehicles practically ripped apart with the engine showing under bodywork that’d long ago been scattered across some guardrail, reassembled just enough to (somehow) get back on the road but with not a dime spent on restoring it’s appearance. This wasn’t 1 car, this was a TYPE of car at the festival. Denoting in the owners some combination of MacGyver resourcefulness, Chadlike indifference, autistic obliviousness, and Victorian Frugality that I can’t but admire … (Or I suppose, possibly, extreme motor impairment. I don’t know that these accidents didn’t happen ON THE WAY to the festival)

[…]

The broken heterosexual male-nerd anxiety and tentativeness around sex and other forms of human interaction and intimacy could be cut with a knife … And it wasn’t like everyone had all been corralled and lectured night one or anything of the sort, somehow this broken progressive Dysgenic (actively failing to generate) culture had infected the urban male technological elite, from Bay Area techfounders, to New York Medical Experts, to DC Military Industrial Complex people, to British Forex Traders, to Dutch and Australians visiting the US for the first time … All of them had had that instinctive flinch trained into them … Some of the Wealthiest, Oddest, Most intelligent, and a small handful of the most attractive men in the world … had all been broken like horses, to flinch and start moving the minute the riding crop is grabbed.

Heartbreaking.

There’s an irony that the places which most engage in therapy language and most proudly proclaim their “acceptance” are almost always the most unforgiving … My friend continued to crash VibeCamp events after they tried to kick him out, and he might have been one of the only people in VibeCamp history to start dating a girl at the festival … (not a man to receive a priestly censor), but the sensitive nerdy men I encountered, with well meaning hearts and souls for poetry, hopeless.

So while I had a blast and enjoyed myself I certainly don’t expect it to be a culture that’s still there in 20-30 years, The people there will maybe produce 100-200 offspring in that time for every 500 that actually attended. If that.

February 19, 2023

Andrew Sullivan on the legacy media’s coverage of transgender issues

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free portion of his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at how the legacy media chooses to cover (or ignore) different aspects of pre-teen and teenage transgenderism:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

One more criticism of the letter. It uses the terrible history of the [New York Times] on coverage of gay men and AIDS in the 20th century as equivalent to the reporting of Bazelon, Baker, et al, today. This is unhinged. Transgender people today are fully covered under the Civil Rights Act; in the 1980s, gays had nothing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the NYT opposed using the word “gay” because it legitimized homosexuality in some way; today the NYT prints “queer” or “trans” or LGBTQ+ in almost every other article.

Today, the paper has published a mountain of empathetic coverage of trans people — over 800 stories in the past year. Since January 1, the NYT has run a moving profile about a trans man in Mexico; a celebration of “queer” life in Alabama by a trans staffer; an exploration of nonbinary fashion; a critical orgasm over “queer” theater; and a news story explaining that “the flood of [trans-related] legislation is part of a long-term campaign by national groups that see transgender rights as an issue on which they can harness voter anger”. Comparing this with A.M. Rosenthal’s reign of homophobic terror and censorship is just obscene.

One historical analogy does seem salient to me, though: the drugs they now give to gender-dysphoric teens are very closely related to the drugs they used to “cure” Alan Turing of his gayness. Every time I think of that I shudder.

And this attempt to suppress reporting on the subject comes at a very strange time. Next week, a new book will be published about the Tavistock Centre, the place responsible for the medical and psychological treatment of children with gender dysphoria in Britain. It’s written by a liberal female journalist, Hannah Barnes, of a flagship British documentary show, Newsnight.

Her book exposes a huge medical scandal, in which countless children were put on puberty blockers with almost no psychological evaluation, and with rates of autism and domestic abuse that were already through the roof. It shows what happened when the new affirmation-only puberty-blocker experiment, only begun in the late 1990s, was left to run its course, with no opposition and no dissent allowed. Check out an extract here. Here’s where I sat up straight:

    Clinicians recall multiple instances of young people who had suffered homophobic bullying at school or at home, and then identified as trans. According to the clinician Anastassis Spiliadis, “so many times” a family would say, “Thank God my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.” Girls said, “When I hear the word ‘lesbian’ I cringe”, and boys talked to doctors about their disgust at being attracted to other boys.

    When Gids [the Gender Identity Development Service] asked adolescents referred to the service in 2012 about their sexuality, more than 90 per cent of females and 80 per cent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual. Bristow came to believe that Gids was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and there was a bleak joke on the team that there would be “no gay people left at the rate Gids was going”.

Just think about that for a second. And remember that gay groups cheer this on; and several gay writers put their names to the letter. What a massive reckoning may be in store for them. If any of this pans out, and gay groups have endorsed it, it could easily be the greatest scandal in the history of the gay rights movement.

More than a third of the kids pushed onto the trans track had autism, sometimes severe. Others were victims of domestic abuse: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe”, one clinician at the center said. No questions about other aspects of a child’s mental health were considered if the kid was identifying as the opposite sex. And this took place in a socialized system, with constant oversight, and no massive financial incentives to treat children. Just imagine what could be happening in the US private system where trans patients are among the most lucrative to have in your care, and are under treatment their entire life.

[…]

One obvious area for research: why have the sex ratios shifted so radically in the past decade or so — with girls now vastly outstripping boys in the young patients involved? Why the explosion in requests? It’s far more dramatic and skewed to one sex than it would be if merely a function of declining stigma. Yet for woke journalists, it’s all Principal Skinner: “Let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up.”

Something is going on among teen girls more generally. The CDC just issued a frightening new report:

    Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls (57%) said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless”. That’s the highest rate in a decade. And 30% said they have seriously considered dying by suicide — a percentage that’s risen by nearly 60% over the past 10 years.

Now check out Jamie Reed’s and Tavistock’s overwhelmingly female, often deeply unhappy, clients. Is there a connection? I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s the job of the media to find out, and not to shut itself down.

The lobby groups and often well-intentioned doctors who have pioneered this massive experiment on children will naturally resist any idea they have been facilitating abuse, or concede any points — because as soon as they confess doubt, the whole house of cards can come tumbling down; and lawsuits alone could end the practice very quickly. The Democrats and the Biden administration have locked themselves to the idea that this kind of treatment is a no-brainer and never does any harm — and they just keep repeating that like a mantra and never address the recent restriction of these experimental practices in progressive Europe. The far right can use the issue to gin up homophobic tropes and cruel treatment of trans people.

April 5, 2020

QotD: The fear of “becoming” your job

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In fact, “losing ourselves in the part” used to be our big worry. Maybe I am just a customer service rep …? The office, the commute, my neckties all laid out for me at the start of each week … is that really all there is to life? What happens when the long nights start taking their toll — as they must — and I have to give up the bar band? What happens when the kids grow up?

You could see this worry everywhere in our culture, our art. Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Judge Reinhold’s character is wrestling with this type of question, and he’s in high school, fer chrissakes. See what I mean about that movie being made on Mars? Remember that; it’ll be on the final.

There’s a certain type of person, though, who just couldn’t grok those worries, because the very notion of social roles was incomprehensible. We didn’t know about the autism spectrum back then, but that’s what that type of person effectively is: A high-functioning autistic. For the autistic, what’s now is forever. Bob’s nametag says “customer service representative.” Therefore, Bob is a customer service representative, and only a customer service representative, now and forever. Bob the family man, Bob the stamp collector, Bob the bar-band strummer … all those fry the autistic’s circuits. It says “customer service representative,” damn it! The train is fine.

Two sides of the same coin. Normal people were worried that they were becoming their jobs. The autistics couldn’t grasp that anyone could be anything else.

The autistics all went into the ivory tower, which gave us identity politics. “Identity politics” only makes sense to the autistic — that is, to people who can’t process change. Normal people have such a hard time with it because we can’t see the logical connection between, say, being gay and being pro-abortion. I mean, if you’re gay it’s a moot point, right? Nor is there any logical connection between being gay and favoring redistributive economics, or worrying about global warming, or whatever. Maybe you do believe in redistributive economics and are worried about global warming, but those are just individual opinions, right? I’m not obliged to vote Republican because I dig blondes. It’s a non sequitur.

Not to the autistic, it isn’t. They’re told that this — pro-abortion, being “green,” the whole Liberal schmear — just is gayness, and they go with it, because that’s the only way the world makes sense to them. Just how “gay” came to mean all that is above my pay grade, but we all know it’s true. More importantly, we all know they believe it, with all their hearts and souls.

That’s the situation in which we find ourselves, my young friends, here in the Current Year. Most of us would like to be team players, but we have no role models. Because the autistics control the culture, we’ve internalized their worries. If I’m a member of the team, we instinctively feel, then somehow I am the team, and only the team, now and forever. It’s a stark choice: Either I give up my individuality completely to advance the team’s goals, or I take my ball and go home.

But it’s a false choice, kameraden, one that could only be beaten into us by very long, very expensive training — i.e. the American “education” system, K-thru-PhD.

Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.

June 28, 2014

Autism and vaccines infographic

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

Click to see full infographic

Click to see full infographic

H/T to Nils Werner for the link.

June 23, 2014

QotD: Modern Autism

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

There are, I believe, a few reasons to suppose that autism is a particularly fascinating area to be studying at the moment. What are those reasons? Firstly, prevalence rates of autism have soared in recent decades, from 1:2,500 in 1978 to around 1:100 today: a staggering 25-fold increase. Secondly, and simultaneously, the nature of those receiving a diagnosis of autism has changed considerably. To give just one example, in the 1980s no more than twenty percent of individuals diagnosed with autism had an I.Q. above 80. Today, by contrast, it is widely argued that “intellectual disability is not part of the broader autism phenotype… [and] the association between extreme autistic traits and intellectual disability is only modest” (Hoekstra et al. 2009: 534). Whatever you make of I.Q. scores, this changing profile means that it is reasonable to assume that when you meet somebody with autism today they are quite unlikely to be similar to someone you would’ve met with the same diagnosis just thirty years ago. Thirdly, as the number of people diagnosed with autism has increased, and as the capabilities of those individuals has increased, a (self-)advocacy network of enormous importance and influence has arisen, perhaps on a scale hitherto unseen. When woven together, these dynamic elements have led Ian Hacking to claim that, in autism, “we are participating in a living experiment in concept formation of a sort that does not come more than once in a dozen lifetimes” (Hacking 2009: 506). This, I think, is quite exciting.

Gregory Hollin, “Autism, sociality, and human nature”, Somatosphere, 2014-06-18.

April 9, 2014

QotD: “Perhaps being a boy is a learning disorder”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

… more children are being diagnosed with “autism spectrum disorders” than ever, specifically that diagnoses have gone from one in about a hundred and fifty to about one in sixty eight. A lot of these diagnoses are for children with extremely mild Aspergers, right at the borderline between normal (whatever that is) and Aspergers. Now this may be a result of more people suffering from ASD’s, especially extremely mild Aspergers, as a result of cumulative mutations and pregnant women being exposed to environmental risks. Or it could be that ever since the Fed’s started throwing money at diagnosing and providing educational services for kids with ASD’s they have become the diagnoses de jour. In fact, it is worth noting that since the Feds started throwing more money at ASD’s and less at ADD and ADHD the number of children diagnosed with the former has increased and the latter two decreased. Apparently getting more Federal funding causes learning/psychological disorders and getting funding cut cures them.

That or educators are blowing off the needs of kids with disorders that are not “getting the love.” My own personal opinion is that favored problems get over-diagnosed and those not blessed with Fed money get under-diagnosed. Shame on the education establishment either way.

It should also be noted that whichever disorder is getting attention it seems to hit males about four times as often as females. In fact, it seems that a lot of the descriptors of symptoms for various ASD’s and ADD read like pretty normal behavior for boys.

Perhaps being a boy is a learning disorder (there’s a large number of females who would nod their head in agreement with this thesis).

A.X. Perez, “Old News Interpreted”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2014-04-06

May 22, 2013

The controversy over the DSM-V

Filed under: Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

The science writers at The Economist discuss the American Psychiatric Association’s new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (below the fold because it auto-plays when you load the page):

(more…)

December 16, 2012

The domestic terror: “I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.”

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Anarchist Soccer Mom has a story to tell. It’s neither pleasant nor uplifting, but it needs to be told:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan — they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

[. . .]

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

[. . .]

No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”

I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

H/T to Drew M. for the link.

September 25, 2012

A bit more progress in autism research

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

An article at the Wall Street Journal discusses some recent advances in uncovering the causes of autism:

Scientists say that roughly 20% of autism cases can be linked to known genetic abnormalities, and many more may be discovered.

Pinpointing a genetic explanation can help predict whether siblings are likely to have the disorder — and even point to new, targeted treatments. Last week, for example, researchers reported that an experimental drug, arbaclofen, reduced social withdrawal and challenging behaviors in children and adults with Fragile X syndrome, the single most common genetic cause of autism.

[. . .]

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a collection of conditions that can range in severity from the social awkwardness and narrow interests seen in Asperger’s to severe communication and intellectual disabilities. ASD now affects 1 in every 88 U.S. children — nearly double the rate in 2002 — according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

No single blood test or brain scan can diagnose autism spectrum disorders — in part because environmental factors also play a major role. But once a child is diagnosed, on the basis of symptoms and behavioral tests, researchers can work backward looking for genetic causes.

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Medical Genetics recommend that all children diagnosed with ASD be tested for Fragile X Syndrome and other chromosome abnormalities. The newest tests, called chromosomal microanalysis, can identify submicroscopic deletions or duplications in DNA sequences known to be associated with autism. Together, these tests find genetic explanations for more than 10% of autism cases.

September 11, 2012

More evidence that a bit of dirt can be a healthy thing for kids

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Matt Ridley reviews a new book by Moises Velasquez-Manoff:

In a remarkable new book, “An Epidemic of Absence,” Moises Velasquez-Manoff draws together hundreds of such studies to craft a powerful narrative carrying a fascinating argument. Infection with parasites prevents or ameliorates many diseases of inflammation. The author briefly cured his own hay fever and eczema by infecting himself with hookworms-before concluding that the price in terms of diarrhea and headaches was too high.

I’ve touched on the “hygiene hypothesis” in these pages before. In its cartoon form the argument-that in a clean world our immune system gets bored and turns on itself or on harmless pollen-isn’t very convincing. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff makes a far subtler, more persuasive case. Parasites have evolved to damp our immune responses so that they can stay in our bodies. Our immune system evolved to expect parasites to damp it. So in a world with no parasites, it behaves like a person leaning into the wind when it drops: The system falls over.

Moreover, just as brains outsource much of their development to the outside world-the visual system is refined by visual input, the language system can only develop in a language-using society — so the immune system seems to have happily outsourced much of its regulation to friendly microbes. Without them, the immune system becomes unbalanced.

[. . .]

One of Mr. Velasquez-Manoff’s most surprising chapters is on autism, a disorder that almost exactly parallels asthma in its recent rise among affluent, urban, mainly male, disproportionately firstborn people. Better diagnosis explains perhaps half the rise, but the brains of people with autism are often inflamed, and there’s anecdotal evidence that infection with worms or viruses can tame autistic symptoms, at least temporarily.

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