Autistic campaigners protest together in Cambridge, UK

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Autistic campaigners protested for hours outside the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, at the centre of a £3 million study that they believe could be used for the purposes of eugenics:
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/a ... e-tactics/

They were forced to protest outside the entrance, beside a main road, after managers locked the main gate:

I don't see an issue with the study they're protesting against.

What is eugenics? What is it that it is seen as wrong? I am trying to understand what is happening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

Personally I think they're barking up a very dangerous tree given some of the pure evil regimes that used forms of it.

It's preventing people with undesirable traits from reproducing. The protesters appear angry because they're worried the research they're protesting about could be used to preempt the births of autistic kids and possibly abort them.

How this is a bad thing I don't really know.

Ah. I see what you mean now.

What exact research are they doing?

Being forced to protest outside? Uh that is where protests are supposed to take place.

Of course they would lock the gates and stuff. I know for a fact here whenever protests happen here in Portland, they usually take place downtown and there are always the SWAT and the police involved and businesses boarding up their windows to ensure the protest won't get violent.

Here is a video of the protest. It may help you to understand why the autistic campaigners are protesting:

The protestors seem like fools. They object to research being done into how autism develops? What else do they object against? Research into the causes of hereditary cancers? Research into the causes of PTSD? Research into the causes of MS? Research into the causes of sickle cell anaemia? Extrapolate their logic to other disorders and they start to look a bit sinister.

They seem extremely anti-science and easily butt hurt. Hopefully their protests will amount to nothing and it'll be a valuable lesson for a crowd of people who have clearly been mollycoddled their entire life. I'm not surprised they locked the gates. I have a tendency to keep confused people out of my house and property too.......most of the times.

This is what happens when autistics allow autism to become their entire identity and who they are instead of letting something more constructive and beneficial become a focal point of their lives. An autistic with a skewed sense of self worth feels mundane research like this is a threat to them because they let autism become them. An autistic with a proper cause in their life wouldn't give a monkey poop about research like this.

It depends on the circumstances. For example, when this same group of autistic protesters held a protest against the film "Vaxxed" last year, they were initially allowed to enter the cinema where it was being screened:


And here is the protest that took place later, outside the cinema:

Maybe this is hyperbole and paranoia but considering the history of how eugenics has been used in the UK and the US in the past and how because of genetically identified abortion of Down's Syndrome fetuses the fears are not wholly unjustified.

I don't think SBC is trying to do a Nazi-like eugenic elimination of autistic people. This is a type of project that is prone to the "slippery slope" effect, that they know they are being monitored is being probably is not a big thing.

Speaking as an Autistic cancer survivor the two are not comparable.

Is this research mundane? Having autistic participation in or at least transparent oversiteof the research would ease the fears of reasonable people.

Well, what I don't like about this sort of eugenics movement is that it's like "playing God". Or, more insidiously, "picking up where Darwin failed".

Many people see autism as a paradox, that it goes against rules of "natural selection" yet it is more prevalent.

I too tried to reconcile this struggle from the micro level to the macro level - meaning back in my 20s which was in the 90s and early 2000s, I would have been what they call an "incel" today - I had very few sexual experiences and a few short-term girlfriends, until things got better in my 30s (and luckily I always looked young for my age).

So I couldn't understand why after being diagnosed in 2001 at the age of 27, that back then I was already told that ASD was on the rise yet we still managed to exist. Yet here were all these young women that were giving me the indirect message, "whoa, something's wrong with you bucko - I'm getting some 'weird' vibes so I ain't gonna let you anywhere NEAR my reproductive organs, condom or no condom".

Based on that and other like anecdotal experiences of male Aspies, I pondered that autistic traits may simply die out due to severely curtailed opportunities for "mating" due to the stigma.
Never mind any institutional intervention campaigns...

Its a slippery slope indeed but does that slope end in a bad place? Advances in genetics are inevitable and if this research isn't done now, it'll only be done a year later and so on and so forth.

Autism is a disorder I wouldn't inflict on my worst enemy. I've noticed that many people who seem to enjoy having autism have a whimsical and child like view of the world. They're often on the lower capability end of the spectrum and are shielded from the realities of adulthood by parents or carers (who too, seem fanatical at times about ASD advocacy)

They just don't understand the struggles of aspies who need to deal with work, independent living, learning to drive, interacting with others on their own and paying the bills. They also don't understand autism at the absolute bottom end of the spectrum and the misery it causes parents who have to care for them.

They sit in a strange bubble. Smart enough to read, learn and obsess over feeling offended while knowing full well they'll be picked up if they fall (assuming they're not being looked after already)

For someone like me who has zero chance of being picked up if I take a stumble, autism is just a significant stumbling block into having the life I want.

For them...it's a free meal ticket whether they know it or not.

Without speaking ill of the protesters, you can see they're not really capable people with anything to lose from having ASD.

So wouldn't it be better to take money away from genetic research and put it into research that would help autistic people deal with work, independent living, driving, interacting with others and paying the bills?

Not really no. It's like buying a load of mops instead of understanding where a leak is coming from. Autism in any form is better to eradicate. It is afterall a developmental disorder that severely alienates those who have it, prevents people from coping in the modern world and often keeps them in poverty. Look no further than the Haven for example to see the problems it causes even high functioning autistics. It literally has no benefits whatsoever to the sufferers and everyone else around them.

Why spend money on dealing with coping strategies when the disorder can be understood and hopefully erased entirely in the future?

I would love medicine to become so advanced one day that I could take a pill and remove every single gene that might cause my autism. Good riddance to it.

Zero Sum game rhetoric going on here. Understanding genetic causation need not necessarily mean using that knowledge to eliminate autism and autistics from the face of the earth. It can be used to make the autistic lives better.

Coping strategies are autistics adjusting to the NT world, NT's need not do anything. We do not demand that of most minorities, or people with diseases.

I am not naive here, as a small minority, we are always going to have to do a lot of adjusting. There are always going to be NT's that will be uncomfortable around us, probably most, it is a natural thing to be uncomfortable around differences, so why not get rid of the problem by eliminating autism? Let's take this line of thinking further, black and darkness make a lot of people uncomfortable. Would it not be easier if we could through genetics get rid of blackness? That might be easier than getting rid of autism since autism involves so many genes. But we will never know because research with that goal in mind will probably never will happen. Pretty much the same with most minorities. But is is the right thing to do for autistics