There is only one person mentioning shame in this thread. Most people hear genetic disorders and instantly think cancer or diabetes, that is what I am trying to say. The research into removing diabetes alone from the gene pool is worth billions of dollars, so normies won't have far to go in thinking "why are we not researching how to rid ourselves of Aspies? It's genetic..."
It also does not take having a diagnostic definition to observe when none of your relatives behave like Aspies. If the formula that one woman gave me is correct and my IQ can be estimated at 167, then mine would be equal to the combined IQs of my mother's brothers. They are about as Aspie as I am a monkey, but they are all drunks, idiots, or both. If I have a singular Aspie relative, I will eat my boots. And that goes for the other two Aspies I know personally.
Genetic disorders also propagate by being passed on. One genetic marker from one parent, another from the other parent, and so forth. Law & Order also had an episode once in which a child was murdered as a mercy-killing because they had some kind of motor-neurone disease that is prevalent in Jewish families, and genetic testing is done in order to ensure that if one parent has the gene, the other does not. And I hasten to add that just because the condition does not manifest in one generation does not mean they do not carry the genetic marker. Sadly.
This has gotten so far away from what I was trying to say in the beginning that I have little hope for it. But here goes, anyway...
Folks, we are engaged in a war. Not a war of bullets, swords, or even stones, but one of PR. Every time there is a current affairs show featuring mothers whining that their Aspie children cannot be segregated into special schools because there are not enough places, they are firing shots at us. And so far, we are losing. We should not be.
While a good offence is important in any battle, a good defence is even more so. A suit of heavy Dwarf armour will protect you more than segmented light armour, thus giving you more opportunities to hit your opponent back. Now, whether Asperger's Syndrome is genetic or not is not part of my original point, in spite of the fact that I have yet to hear of an Aspie who behaves anything like one of their relatives in spite of trying to interface with literally hundreds of Aspies just this year. If I ever hear one of my relatives is an Aspie, I will shoot them for selling us out. I am serious.
My point is that every word spoken by a group purporting to represent us is either an asset or a liability. "We do not need a cure because it is genetic" is a massive liability. When public exposure increases, if this kind of statement gets in the hands of diabetes associations, just as one example, it will cost us dearly. They will come back with "I have a genetic disorder that has doctors telling me I will have amputations and blindness if I don't walk in the middle of the road all my life, and you don't want me to have a cure?". And they will have a point. Hell, I would say that. Diabetes, the childhood kind, has a rate of one in a hundred or thereabouts. It is like a plague, and furious calls to lift the ban on cloning research so that these poor children can have their islet cells back are in force. Speaking purely as an Aspie, I do not want to find myself opposing such a large and well-known group. Do any of you?
There are far better arguments against curebies out there. My personal favourite is "for twenty-five years, you have abused me, lied about me in front of my face, proposed my extermination, and had the audacity to claim I provoked it simply by being me... if offered a cure, I would refuse it because I do not wish to become you". See how easy that was?
Nobody here has made a threat. The only thing more serious than I am when I express disgust at my so-called relatives is cancer.
I am also not confusing the issue at all. I am telling you quite simply what the normie media will do if we go more mainstream with this kind of information on the front of our car, so to speak. Parents of children with diabetes can be quite vicious when you merely suggest that something that might yield a cure is in any way immoral.
As I said earlier, would you want to find yourself butting heads with such a group? I know I would not. And public image has everything to do with our struggle at the moment. Go to someone who has only heard of
"arse-burger" syndrome from
Law & Order: Trial By Jury, and tell them you are an Aspie. See what kind of response you get if you don't believe me.
At Aspies for Freedom we are aiming for certain rights and opportunities. We are fighting against the idea of a cure for autism. We believe autism and aspergers syndrome are genetic. Therefore not a disease and certainly not something that could be cured.
This is how the argument is presented (ie poorly) on the site. It's not a disease because it is genetic? Let's see you walk into a meeting of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (and this is an organisation I hate, mind you), and say that. They would chase you up a tree and set it on fire. I could think of several ways to word this better, but what the hell.
That's what on Earth that has got to do with it.
Oh, and there too is your answer, Gareth. I thought it was exclusively normie behaviour to say something at one moment and then say "I didn't say that" as if addressing a five year old moments later.
Given that this is my family I am talking about, I fail to see how anyone could see me determining that them declaring themselves to be Aspies would get reprisals as sell-outs from me could be seen as a threat. I do not make threats, I tell facts.
It is an even worse way to make an argument to say one thing with your public face and then claim something totally different in private. I have since sent that statement to four friends who are also aware of my diabetes, one of whom is an Aspie. Not one of them agrees the statement should remain like that. The Aspie even said they are scared if that is what people purporting to advocate for them want the public to think.
I am far from a patient man, after all that is what being held down and abused for twenty years does to you, and I have no wish to wait for this to blow up in my face. If you are going to present something to the public, at least have the nerve not to cower in renunciation when someone you purport to argue for is horrified with it.
*sigh*... This is getting nowhere...
If you are afraid of being forced to take prenatal tests for autism, then I have this much to tell you: you are going the right way about making it happen. Were I writing the thing, and I write professionally at times,
"we do not need a cure because its genetic" is the last thing I would write in there. I would write
"a world without Aspies would be a world without thinking outside of the box, without world-changing discoveries... without men like Albert Einstein for starters". An example of this kind of
"world without" writing is available at
http://www.xenu.net/archive/world_without/. A much better one simply because it is non-confronting and tells the bland facts (which in the case of this particular subject matter, are ugly).
Hmmm... okay, take my example of how horrified diabetics would be to be told their condition needs no cure because it is genetic and blow it up to look like the sum of my entire statement. I think I made a big mistake believing I could get help coping with what is still an extremely abusive environment here.
At the moment, it seriously feels like trying to swim against the tide into a sewage pipe. I also question the wisdom of highlighting the fact that Bill Gates is an Aspie. Those of us who have been computer literate since before Microshaft gained their de facto monopoly hate the man with a passion. His claim that the DOJ was trying to force him to include another competitor's product with his (false) and it is like Coca-Cola being forced to include cans of Pepsi in their six packs (false again) is the sort of babyish whining I expect from normies.
When you get a gift horse from Bill Gates or anyone involved with Microsoft, my belief is that you should hold its jaws wide open and take a long, hard look inside.
I have read the Wikipedia articles, and they also fill me with the same dread. I think a big part of the problem is that people are trying to bring the normies from a position of total ignorance to complete understanding in one big leap. It does not work like that. History is laden with examples of people trying to go from one extreme to another in one big step, and having all sorts of trouble as a result.
*butts head into wall* Maybe I should go real slow... I am using the example of diabetes to try and tell you that "no cure is needed because it's genetic!" (oh, wow), as written on that page, is shaking a hornet's nest.
Oddly enough, normies also have this habit of throwing statements back at me. I was yelling at my father about his deliberate efforts to disable me from living independently when he interrupted me by saying "I'd love for you to be able to live independently", as if just saying it makes it fact. I am going to tell him I do not believe him. It will get much worse from there for him.
Okay, but my statement still stands. Gates is hated by a lot of people, with good reason.
What I’ve said here doesn’t address peoples’ concerns about prenatal testing or eugenics against autistics--both of which could be possible if genetic causes were to be adequately defined.
Well, my concern was about neither, but rather the public face Aspies present to the world. I like to think of it as a war, myself. But one of those parts hits the nail on the head in so many ways it is impossible to count.
"For example, if the phenotype causes pain and suffering to people, and the cultural value is that pain and suffering is to be avoided or ameliorated if possible, then the desire will be to treat or cure the syndrome."
This is exactly what I am talking about. So far, treatment by others of my autism has caused me nothing but pain and suffering in my life. Hence my desire to form a society of my own. But there are people with genetic disorders that directly cause them real pain, real fear, and real suffering (and in some cases are used in a similar manner to my autism to keep them down).[/i]
Or, might attitudes toward autism and societal support for autistics be sufficiently positive by the time the identification of such genes occurred that most parents would welcome an autistic child?
For the 50,000th time, this is not going to happen if we commit the same distortions that come out of a normie's mouth. If I were having a child through IVF and someone told me "these embyros have a 75% chance of developing diabetes, but these only have a 10% chance", guess which I am going to argue for the use of? Every parent is going to think of it in terms like that, and the specific phrasing of this page, that autism is genetic and therefore does not need to be cured, is going to help organisations like NAAR no end.
Given that I have already vowed that if I had an Aspie son and a principal proposed that he be sent home from school every time he "misbehaves", I would kick said principal's butt until his ears bled, I find it distressing to say the least that people cannot get how concerned I am at the presentation of (mis)information.
If the two issues are independent of one another, then there is no good reason to connect them in our writings, in my view. And of course some will argue for. Hell, there have been people arguing in favour of cures for being Jewish. I guess that is just the way Humans are.
My idea is not so much to present autistics as healthy valuable individuals, but simply as individuals. I have said to a few people now who made the mistake of calling me an "Aussie" that to be an Aspie is to be a nation entirely unto yourself. That means presenting as a society, warts and all, so to speak.
I think it was in the television series Saiyűki, where an introductive narrator stated that the phoenix can only fly when its feathers are grown. If anyone wants me to stop being upset that those who indirectly made a promise to help and protect me as a boy instead cut off my wings and laughed at my inability to get off the ground, they have to give me a reason.
Well, I for one am not glad. The research has been going on since the 1940s, and for someone born in the 1970s to only learn they are an Aspie when they are in their latter twenties should be grounds for a lawsuit as far as I am concerned. Especially after being dragged to so many doctors who played musical diagnosis. I have had two bouts of priapism because of poor diagnostic skills. My family is just plain malicious as far as I am concerned. They cannot live without someone to dominate over and make miserable.
Having all Aspies live to the best of their potential, unfortunately, means a need for separatism. At least for the time being. If Einstein had been more like me, he would have invented something that only hurts or kills normies, and we would be in a far better position to ask for terms. A kind of eerie reversal of what the normies seem to want, in other words. I do not know how I could achieve that, but I am working on it.
So it would have made a lot of difference...
At last... someone with the potential to understand what I am so perpetually sodded off about. :lol:
The normie rule about rules is simple: if it benefits normies, observe it. Otherwise...
Imagine the carnage that would ensue if a few thousand Aspies became lawyers and began challenging laws. The first thing I would do in such a situation is make doctors or hospitals or health ministers liable for telling a patient for twenty years they have everything but what they actually have.
I hope Iron Man is still looking in here, because he has got the "genetic" argument all wrong.
I think a post I saw from a doctor on the Hating Autism blog (in order to correct the blog owner - an exercise in futility by anyway) gave a pretty good look at a feasible theory;
THE ORIGINS OF AUTISM
Birth - The Autistic Child has a defective gene that is yet to be discovered.
First few months of life - The gene is dormant, and the baby grows normally.
A-Day - The child suffers a sensory overload, activating the dormant gene and starting the regression.
(The only way to avoid Autism is to avoid the sensory overload. Once the overload occurs, the damage is done and can not be reversed)
Causation - Sensory overload can come from almost anywhere. Food, domestic environment, an overwhelming attack on one of the five senses, and other factors. Yes even mercury poisoning.
Treatment - This largely depends on the disorder's level, and it's side effects and consequent sensory overloads. But above all, sensory overloads must be avoided at all costs. Bullying in the school yard can cause this, and can do additional damage to an Autistic child. Applied Behavioural Analysis is a useful tool but it does not work on low functioning Autistics. It also has limited success on other Autistics whose initial sensory overload was caused by other people's behaviour.
Discovering what caused the initial sensory overload can assist as well as any consequent overloads. The prevention of such overloads is then easier to achieve and the damage done by the first overload can be minimised.
However it must be made clear that once the dormant gene is activated, it can not be switched off. It is for this reason that Autism can not be cured. It is possible - by reducing overloads - to make a low functioning Autistic high functioning. Parents with low functioning Autistic children can hope for nothing better.
In this blog, much is made of mercury. It may be a cause of an overload, it may not. Chelation may help reduce the overload if indeed this is true. But again, the most that can be hoped for is a young adult with high functioning Autism. Better that than low functioning - but never neuro typical. This is impossible once the gene that carries the disorder is activated.
The only way to prevent Autism as I said is to prevent the first sensory overload. And as there are so many different things that could cause it - of which mercury in vaccines could be simply one - do we really believe we can eliminate Autism?
I think not.
This is an interesting theory. The only problem I have with it is the open door for those curebies who support the mercury poisoning story.
The point, Iron Man, is that we HAVE to pay attention to the genetic factor. It exists. We need to concentrate on that. The curebies are trying to take out the genetic argument completely and diverting attention away from the real research that needs to be done. That's why our argument that "Autism is genetic" is valid, and essentially correct.