Aspies For Freedom

Yeah that columnist is a piece of work all right.

Get rid of all the non-NT markers and you'll eliminate the brainpower behind god-like humanity in the first place.

Why is it that idiotic mediocre are generally the staunchest proponents of eugenics?

Sounds alot like the holocaust to me..

Guess thats what happens when people play God.

I've a hypothesis that we are, as a species, overclocked.  That is, merely being a "run-of-the-mill" human is such a drain upon the basic primate nervous system that having or exerting any significant cognitive ability means always living past the red-line.

It's like being a cognitive test pilot.

I was going to make a post on this, but see it's already here.

There are plans to weed us out. It's Nazism. There are people out there that plan to abort my future children without my consent. They hope that by that time, say in a little less than ten years, technology will be that advanced and humanity that narrow minded.

Unfortunately, we're considered just as damaged as any other embryo

I remember way back when then Pope John Paul spoke out about IVF, because he saw it not only as unnatural, but as the start of a slippery slope.  At the time I thought he was going too far.  But, time has proved him right on this; society has headed down a very, very slippery slope and tough ethical issues are around every corner.  Just because we can do certain things, doesn't mean we should.  Not that I want government making these decisions for us; but we, as individuals, need to think carefully about everything that may lie behind a door before we open it.

I don't think people will use a prenatal genetic test for positive purposes.  Any scientist who believes otherwise hasn't fully considered everything that lies behind the door he strives to open.

Oppenheimer's greatest sin was his innocence.

You said that we cannot make ourselves less genetically diverse, then you said that we would have to voluntarily "bank" alleles that were eliminated from the population.

So, which is the true statement and which is the false one:

There is no possible risk of us seriously damaging our genetic diversity.

There is so much of a risk of us seriously damaging our genetic diversity that we will have to resort to "banking" certain alleles "just in case"?

The two statements are mutually exclusive.

Well, we could say that stockpiling nuclear weapons is just as potentially dangerous...

Don't you mean sexual life every time you say asexual? because asexual means not sexual.

Also, it's not as much about having organisms that "fall to the wayside", it's more about having mixes of mutations that may prove to be more advantageous than the mutation was by itself. Also, genetic diversity makes organisms less vulnerable to disease, because while one organism is better to defend against B at the cost of poor defense against A, there's another that's better at defending against A but poor at defending against B. This stops disease from wiping out whole populations at once. An interesting expansion of this issue deals with the Banana industry, but that's a bit far from the topic at hand.

perfection is subjective.

how the hell can ppl living year 2006 be this stupid?

perfection is relative.

Culling disabled people has nothing to do with any of that.  It's all group identity.  Aspergers is only a disability because society now perseverates on being able to conform and make small-talk.  Normal people have impairments as well, including (relative to autistics) poor memory, difficulty with logic, lack of perseveration, difficulty with percieving details.  In an autistic society these would be horribly debilitating, the fact that they are not only proves that disability is relative.  

Disabled people are called "disabled" because our abilities and impairments are "other."  Something about our physiology or neurology excludes us from The Group.  It has nothing to do with darwinism, conscious or not, nothing to do with pity, not even cost to society everybody whiones about is the real reason--the "ethical theories" for dealing with people with disabilities are nothing more than rationalization after the fact.  

Disability is like any other sort of difference: something to be feared.  Like the Autistic *** from hell said "what we are dealing with here is raw caveman emotions: if it's not part of the tribe, you better grab your club and kill it."

Not in any useful way.  The generally-accepted quantification of "fitness" is the number of offspring's offspring ("grandchildren" in the case of humans) a given organism has.  However, the "fitness" of grandpa can only be reliably used to predict the fitness of the current generation if (and only if) the environment has not changed since grandpa's reproductive period. Thus, quantified "fitness" is, in the real world, always post hoc and very weakly predictive, if predictive at all.

one has to suspect the aim is to breed perfect workers who work to support the system rather than be a 'burden'. the problem is the system only works for the priveleged (sp?) few, for the majority work for an empty or meaningless promise, the majority (in the western world) can work as hard as they like and will never gain more than perhaps a house and a 'comfortable' retirement, if they're lucky.

Even though it is not likely to be very soon that there would be such a test and in widespread use, think about it: What voice do autistics have in policy decisions regarding autism today? Next to none, as we see with the autism cure "charities" and with the US Combating Autism Act of 2006.

So if today we have so little visibility, and what little visibility we have is strongly perceived as "those HFAs who don't care about the difficulties of LFAs and want us to do nothing while our kid bangs his/her head", then how long do you think it would take for our opinions to begin to matter to the population at large?

The fact is, it's going to TAKE years and possibly decades to inform people that yes, our lives are worth living. In order to build this kind of widespread awareness in the general population, who mostly hasn't heard of autism or has the image of Rainman or Autism Everyday to think about and mostly doesn't think a second thought about autism - it will take a lot of effort, and much persistence.

It is by no means impossible. It means that, just because such a test will probably not come until awhile from now, we can't wait until it is too late for people to finally get it.

It is just too important an issue of human rights to brush it off as something we won't be affected by, because when such a violation of rights occurs, it affects everyone, and everyone with any foresight should take whatever action is possible to prevent such injustice.

Even just writing on a blog, or posting on YouTube -- these things can have an ENORMOUS impact, and should not be underestimated. After all, many of us found out about autism/autistic advocacy through the Internet. Prior to finding this site, I thought I had no choice but to let others define why I do the things I do. Now I feel the courage to write/speak of the REAL reason I experience these difficulties.