The future of Autisim!

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Yikes...

I will answer any question that you direct to me out here. If I do not answer a post it is because I did not see it so go ahead and PM the link to that thread. I don't have time to mentor single people in my PM box though.

WRT critical and rational thinking here are some of my own personal mentors... Study, read and learn.

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interv ... novich.htm
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2 ... hat-to-do/
http://jamiehalesblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/06/1 ... dies-hard/

People who would insult you for asking questions are not people to ask. You have the internet and can "play" on WP so you certainly can also study and find facts. Come to any conversations with as many facts as possible.

What I meant is that there are people who would certainly propose forced treatment.

[quote=["kfisherx"]

1. I don't get this first bullet
2. Chasing a cure that may never happen doesn't preclude the research from providing us very useful information. If you read the current studies on autism cure, there are all manners of information and technologies and advances being made from the information. Research has many, many objectives outside of the BIG CURE ones.
3. History suggests that technology is always out of reach expensive when it first comes out and as it is developed and as manufacturing of items becomes understood the costs decrease and it eventually is released to the general masses. Just because it begins expensive doesn't mean it will never be available and history has shown us that normally it is.

Can you explain how it is that understand the pressure that medical pros are putting on woman with down syndrome babies?[/quote]

1. Talking about expanding support and services for autistic adults. This could probably be done by finding better ways to spend the money that is allocated to supporting autistic people in the first place, or standardizing accommodations that would likely help more people than just autistic adults.

2. This is true, and I've pointed to such research in another thread (although that research was ignored for some reason).

3. This is true, but points to a much more endemic problem, such as the idea that resources should be allocated in the manner they currently are, and that some people just have to do without for up to a generation or two while the wealthiest benefit the most. This is a symptom of a culture where people really believe they need millions of dollars to be financially secure, given that no one needs that much money to live on, and probably doesn't even need it for luxuries.

Again it is a matter of drilling down into the detials and facts. There are "exclusion" clauses for people who have true medical reasons for these things. For eveyone else these are choices. By the way, I am a victim of both smoking and obesity in my life so I get it on a more personal level just in case anyone is wondering...

False choice, gross oversimplification, etc.

Actually it points to a more "business" side of the matter than an endemic problem. The total cost for the initial research and the development of a product is VERY high. For example, my company (Infocus at the time) spent over 6 million US dollars inventing the very first wireless projection technology. We did breakthrough stuff (at the time) and I personally earned 2 of my patents on that project. We had to re-coup those costs and as such the technology had to be at the upper most price range that the market would bare for these things. Even at that it took years for us to break even. Several years since our release of this technology other companies have been able to leverage key parts of it and since those companies did not have to put up the extreme costs of research, prototype, etc, they were able to manufacture the same feature set for cheaper and so on... Until it gets cheap enough for every one. It isn't about classes but dollars. That is how "capatilism" works at a basic sense and it makes sense in a capitalist society.

I hear time and again this argument of the "wealthiest" not needing money they are spending and always it comes from people who have either never paid taxes or are receiving benefits from the govt ergo living minimally and as such are disgruntled. I just paid my annual taxes to my state and govt to the tune of several times the gross national average annual salary. My company likewise supports this community and this country to the tune of countless of millions of dollars. I honestly do not feel that I am doing anything wrong in distributing the rest of my money how I see fit despite people who believe I make too much. Who is to decide how much money I need or my company needs if not the tax system to which we pay in?

I already said it before and I will state it again since this is a song you sing over and again. Raising taxes of the "rich" unduly is not the "silver bullet" you think it is. Companies like mine will leave this country and go to places where it is cheaper to do business. We have already seen this with the outsourcing epedemic earlier this decade. Likewise individual people like me will either leave or have no incentive to work. I bust my ass every single day and make many sacrifices to have the things that I have. If you take that from me or reduce my income enough, I too will just join the ranks of SSI collectors (and YES I could do it) so I can make my own schedule and do my own obsession things all day long. In many ways it is much easier to live that way afterall...

Last edited by kfisherx on 01 Apr 2011, 12:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You can call it stupid but it can't be dismissed. The REALITY is that people don't make fully rational decisions.




You still don't understand what I'm getting at. If the dynamics of public policy formulation are not fully rational (they most assuredly are not) then it is not inconceivable that forced cures become policy. While you specifically cleanly differentiate between "cure" and "choice" you aren't allowing for the fact that MOST people, autistic or not, will not draw distinct boundaries between the two. The Arizona legislation is an example of how institutions insert themselves into private lives. These institutions have a long track record of creating policies that cherry pick science for the promotion of less than rational ideologies. It doesn't matter how rational policy making could or should be, but rather how rational is actually is in practice. Another great policy issue is the riders being attached to legislation by House Republicans to defund Title 10 family planning (subsidized birth control). The rationale for doing this is rooted in anti-abortion ideology, but the perverse effect is that by defunding such family planning, unintended pregnancies will increase. Half of all unintended pregnancies are terminated. So this "anti-abortion" rider will actually INCREASE abortion rates. Makes sense, no?

Given the ridiculous propensity for ideologically based policy decisions, it is not an entirely unfounded fear that cures might be forced upon individuals.

Could you cut the ad hominem out? I have much more substantial reasons for my politics than "I am living on benefits." I have stated some of them previously.

I could just as easily argue that since you make enough money to be comfortable that you are personally invested in keeping your taxes as low as possible - but I have not, because I think that style of debate is not real debate at all. But if you want to keep insisting that my economic class ruins my objectivity, I have to point out that yours most likely does the same.

The point is, however, there is enough money in the US for the US to economically recover, it is simply that it is being hoarded or traded at levels that have no impact on the majority of the population, and there is no reason for that. The threat that corporations and wealthy people will take their money elsewhere has already happened and is currently happening, and this is one of the reasons the economy is so f****d.

My point was exactly that our objectiveness is tainted by our experiences. I have never met anyone or any company earning large sums of money who felt as you do. Different viewpoints are needed in your arguments and I am not seeing them.

The economy is so F*** for a LOT of reasons and is the topic of many books. Let's agree to drop this tangent and stick to the argument that a "CURE for autism will likely be FORCED upon adults with autism" as a "rational" thought.... I call, "Bullsheet"

It may not be rational. That doesn't mean that it has no weight.

What is Rational anyway.....?


http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rational

—Synonyms
2. intelligent, wise, judicious, sagacious, enlightened. 6. See reasonable.


—Antonyms
2. stupid. 3. insane.


Stupid and insane arguments are NOT for me.

You guys carry on....

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02 ... hart-graph

I am perhaps a bit lazy in fully elucidating my sources, but it is not strictly my perspective.

Also, I am not "embittered." I am actually pretty happy with how things have been going for me personally, recently. Have I mentioned how much my depression completely vanished four months ago? I've been in the best mood I've had in years, but my moods don't drive my political opinions.

I'm willing to drop this. I am not trying to get the last word, but I feel that my arguments have been mischaracterized.



That's not likely to happen.

Kfisherx, while philosophically arguments like "we might be forced into taking a cure" and "we don't want further abortions" do not make sense because a cure does not entail those things, on a political level, we know from experience that that is what tends to happen when people have the scientific capability to screen genetically or give people psychiatric drugs. 97% of Down's Syndrome babies are aborted. Many people are forced to take psychiatric medication under various mental health acts, or are indirectly forced to take it so they can keep their jobs/SSI so these are valid arguments politically. One way of stopping undesirable uses of scientific knowledge is to not have the knowledge, and when you are a minority group with a limited voice, sometimes it's the best way of stopping some really horrendous things from happening.

Just to be clear, my points to you are NOT about you personally at all.

Of course if your main source is Liberal magazine and writings, you will come out with liberal stands. The idea is to take arguments from BOTH SIDES and then to weigh the two trying to leave out your personal bias.. The article you link to for example simply shows the disparity between people who earn more and people who earn less. That is what Capatilsm is about. CEOs of major corporations generate (many times) billions of dollars versus the normal American dude who goes to his 9-5 workday and plays on the computer all day. Big decisions/high-risk make big payoffs. If we were a socialistic society there would not be this sort of thing NOR would we be a "super power" country. Good and bads to both sides.... I am merely pointing out that you never rep the other side...

We agree that the FORCED CURE thing is not gonna happen. I simply take it one step further and declare it a stupid thing for us to discuss.

Yeah, there's not much point to discussing it - I tried to argue that to some extent in the other thread, and pointed out why it was a bad plan to even suggest it.

I don't just read liberal magazines and writings, I just grabbed an article I had open to point out that, yes, I do draw my opinions from more than one source. I actually prefer anarchist-socialist writings, but it's harder to find that perspective represented in the news.

Since this isn't a capitalism thread, I'll leave it there, though.

You can't make the world rational. Decisions will be made irrationally - important, expensive decisions. It is irrational to not include this fact in a rational analysis.