• Heikki@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    When I hear something along the lines of “there is no way someone can be that stupid.” I think about 2 things.

    1. How dumb the average person is and realize half the population is dumber than that.

    2. The interview of a Yosemite Park Ranger discussing the difficulty of designing the perfect bear proof trash can. The ranger is quoted as saything,“there is a considerable intelligence overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human.”

  • Etterra@discuss.online
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    1 day ago

    Of course he can be that stupid. If you don’t think you can be that stupid, you are as out of touch as he is. There is no known bottom to human stupidity.

    • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Congress too, we need them to step down. The rich are afraid of taxes, congress needs to be more afraid of us than they are of taxing the rich. they still need to get food. They still have family that live in our communities. They should feel as safe as an illegal immigrant smuggling thought crimes across the border.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Touted ‘Unfit’

    By senators prior to his appointment?

    No, by some anonymous posts on social media last week

    So will this result in any actual consequences?

    Absolutely not

    Great

  • Jaysyn@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Hey, that 65 year old neighbor with the $200k model trainset? Yeah, probably autistic.

  • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    ‘He Cannot Be This Stupid’

    He’s even more stupid than they are acknowledging.

  • perestroika@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Short answer: if they got it bad, they’re dead or in a nursing home. That’s why they aren’t walking in a mall. They ran out of health.

    Long answer: in recent times, there seems to be lower threshold of diagnosis.

    But if he truly thinks he can pinpoint exposures that increase autism - things like the exposure to tetraethyl lead which probably increased criminality and decreased mental health - good luck for combing scientific studies. There may be some. But if he’s gonna rewind the age old “vaccines cause” record and replay it, nah, I won’t be listening.

    • thiseggowaffles@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      It’s not that there’s a lower threshold. It’s that the definitions and our understanding of Autism changed. People who formerly would have been labeled with Asperger’s are now labeled (correctly) with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Plus we’ve learned how Autism can present differently in other communities that aren’t white male children. Acknowledging that girls can even be Autistic is a relatively recent development (the 90s).

      The truth is that there are likely a ton of people out there with undiagnosed Autism, because they wouldn’t have met the criteria to be diagnosed as kids based on our understanding at the time. It’s why there are so many adults now getting late life diagnoses.

      • AoxoMoxoA@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Acknowledging that girls can even be Autistic is a relatively recent development (the 90s).

        That is in-fucking-sane

      • Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I was a scientist and have tested on the spectrum myself. And I think a whole lot of my colleagues would have too. Except if you’re high functioning and productive, there is little reason to test you. The misery of being on the spectrum and not being able to easily socialize with other people or to detect their emotional states is unimportant to society as long as one meets the performance standards society sets for you. Not that I’m complaining but I might have felt better about myself if I had known why I wasn’t able to do those things until I was an adult. I suffered depression largely because I was “weird” growing up and was bullied until I became an accomplished wrestler and it became dangerous for others to bully me. I truly think sport saved me. And taught me how to act more normally. Not everyone on the spectrum is so fortunate.

        • thiseggowaffles@lemmy.zip
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          1 day ago

          This, exactly. I didn’t get diagnosed until my mid-30s with either Autism or ADHD. My life would have been so different if I had known earlier. I would have been so much kinder to myself. I’m sorry to hear you experienced the same. 😔

        • thiseggowaffles@lemmy.zip
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          2 days ago

          Yeah, my uncle who passed definitely had Autism, and so does my dad. They’re half-brothers, which means it’s highly likely my grandmother was as well (which my dad also agrees with).

          It’s definitely hereditary in my family. I also clearly get my ADHD from my mom.

  • TomMasz@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    He’s dumber than most people can imagine. Jack, Ted, and Bobby might have been morally bankrupt but they weren’t stupid. Something went seriously wrong with this one.

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    “No one in my generation had autism”

    Sure thing. Uncle Barry, who collects every issue of Mechanics Monthly, and has spent over $10,000 on his model train set that is a perfect scale recreation of King’s Cross Station, is completely neurotypical.

    • flicker@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      This response vexes me because while Uncle Barry here is certainly an example, what these people are forgetting (and what this thing about Uncle Barry glosses over) is that until the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the fights from the 70s onward, if a family in the US had a child with an IQ of under 70, they were often shipped off to an institution.

      Deinstitutionialization didn’t really begin to gain steam until relatively recently in our collective history- here in Tennessee we still had one of these facilities open until the nineties. These people didn’t believe there were people with severe mental disabilities, because our society hid them away!

      Look up Clover Bottom. But don’t, because it’s horrifying. I’ve met people who lived there their entire lives. What was done to them was disgusting.

      It is awful what was done to them. But it’s awful that people with a greater severity of condition, a greater need for care, are often glossed over in these comment sections. It feels like they’re made invisible in these conversations just like they were in those institutions! And I’m terrified that assholes like RFK Jr will disappear them for real!

    • Wytch@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      I have a staunchly leftist but older co-worker who thinks no one she knew growing up had autism.

      “I still think something is causing it” despite being pro-vaxx.

      The propaganda is extremely effective unfortunately

      • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        What’s causing the rise in cases is actual diagnosis. For many generations. Theirs and mine included. Either you were institutionalized. Or you were undiagnosed. People would just refer to you as Quirky or eccentric. There was no Spectrum to be on. It was treated as largely binary. Only in the last 40 years at the earliest did they start to fully understand the condition. And even now they still have a long way to go. But they’ve at least started recognizing the larger condition.

        Thinking that the rise in diagnoses at this point is some sort of crisis/pandemic or Healthcare emergency that needs to be addressed. Is like blaming the Exterminator coming out and finding your house is filled with termites. It wasn’t filled with termites before they came just a few odd little ones that you saw skittering about on the surface. All these other ones must have been brought by them or someone else right? It’s not like they could have been there all along and we just didn’t notice?

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Considering how provaxx they where back then, it’s insane seeing people who grew up with polio repeating antivax shit.

        Like back in the day. No one got cancer…cause they didn’t know wtf it was, doesn’t mean the shit wasn’t around. Science didn’t stop in 1904.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          Just on cancer as an example, there’s a solid argument to be made that it was historically diagnosed as a consumptive disease. My great great aunt died of cancer awhile back and she was practically wasting away.

          • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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            3 days ago

            consumptions usually refers to TB, its has been called wasting sickness forever, because one of the symptoms of cancer(terminal) was cachexia which is your body wasting away. i found it interesting inuyasha mentioned its old term"wasting sickness" which immediately knew it was cancer.

              • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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                i remember consumption being the old name for Tuberculosis, its also known as the white death, due to people looking sickly and pallor when having the final stages of tb.

                wasting was always associated with cancer, and then HIV/AIDS. if you hear films using old terms like wasting sickness, you can bet its cancer.

          • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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            3 days ago

            Even bronze agers knew what cancer was, they just called it weird things.

            I’ll never forget looking at a virally trending obituary from the 15th century and seeing “Cancer, and Wolf” as a cause of death.

            If you look it up you’ll see other things like “King’s Evil” aka scrofula or jawfaln (lock jaw from tetanus)

          • Forester@pawb.social
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            3 days ago

            I’m pretty sure the over 1,000 atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons over the last hundred years had zero effect on background radiation levels and on levels of human contamination from eating radioactive fallout…

            I’m not saying we didn’t have cancer before but I would be very surprised if the rates are not elevated. Even counting misdiagnosises as consumptive illness.

            On a similar note, I do suspect that our current petrochemical heavy environment has changed the human microchoism enough to possibly make it more likely for some of the classical autism traits to be passed on generation to generation influencing their heritability in society at large. Sincerely, an artist with two autistic parents in denial. And at least three autistic grandparents.

        • blazeknave@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          So I’ve talked to my elderly union dem mom about this recently. Maybe it’s just her, and she did vax me completely, but she said something along the lines of how even in the 70s and 80s it was a personal decision that people thought about before executing, while most went ahead with it. But I was never exposed to a single skeptical thought at home, at school, in my community, or anywhere

      • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        looks like she bought into the partly anti-vax prop, probably heard jenny mcarthny once about vaccines and she was hooked.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
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        I really do think autism and cancer have gotten much more common. And it’s very likely something is causing it.

        Not vaccines. Vaccines are fine.

        Could be plastic. Could be pfas (forever chemicals). Could be lots of things, or a combination. But there’s most likely an environmental cause rather than genetic or just an increase in diagnosis. (Though the increase in diagnosis and recognition is also real.)

        • cynar@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Modern society is making both mild autism and ADHD more obvious. It both brings out traits associated with them, and makes it more acceptable to have them and not mask completely.

          As for cancer, that’s mostly an age and treatment thing. People with cancer live longer, due to treatment, so you hear far more about it. Also, if you live longer, you get cancer. Therefore an older population has more cancer cases.

          My personal concern is neurological and plastics. People with degenerative neurological conditions tend to have more micro plastics in their brains. We’ve no idea of the long term implications of this. It could possibly be the modern equivalent of leaded petrol.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          There’s also the fact that we have WAY better technology and techniques for discovering and understanding both autism and cancer nowadays compared to even 20 years ago.

        • Jaysyn@lemmy.world
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          If it is environmental pollution, the current administration would never admit it anyhow.

        • Serinus@lemmy.world
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          I’m disappointed that Lemmy feels the need to downvote such a mild differing opinion that doesn’t even conflict with your own.

          All these things can be true. Diagnosis, treatment, and recognition are all much better; we agree there.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      and shoots steroids regurlarly, and is obssesed with playing with animal carcasses.

  • Jax@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    I’m sorry but if you can listen to RFK speak for longer than 10 seconds without becoming enraged then you really are just fucking dumb.