RFK Jr. Touted as 'Unfit' After Rant About Lack of Autism in 'Older People': 'He Cannot Be This Stupid'
https://www.latintimes.com/rfk-jr-touted-unfit-after-rant-about-lack-autism-older-people-he-cannot-this-stupid-580963Open linkView original on lemmy.world1000
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"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Sorry I got my Ye Olde disease mixed up.
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.
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)
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.
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
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?
looks like she bought into the partly anti-vax prop, probably heard jenny mcarthny once about vaccines and she was hooked.
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.)
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.
Cancer is rising rapidly in younger people unfortunately
https://www.mskcc.org/news/why-is-cancer-rising-among-young-adults
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.
That’s not mutually exclusive with “we have better diagnostic tools now”. I would know, since I work at an oncology biotech. I help make some of the tools I’m talking about.
If it is environmental pollution, the current administration would never admit it anyhow.
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.
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!
State institutions are still hellholes.
There needs to be a federal investigation in to Oklahoma’s congregate care homes. Kids still get shipped off to institutions, which are unsafe and unregulated.
The one good thing Reagan did was deinstitutionalization, even if he did it the dumbest way possible.
Thatcher did the same over here. Called it 'Care in the Community' which translates as 'Vastly increasing the at risk and vulnerable unhoused population'.
and shoots steroids regurlarly, and is obssesed with playing with animal carcasses.
It's so funny because you look at the guy and think he's fit. But I saw a video of him doing pushups and it's honestly so unimpressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOGNznbJPY0 like all that gear to not be able to do 10 full straight pushups? Ok dude
Lol that last one looked real difficult, and he looked a little wobbly getting up
He has no qualifications and an exactly equivalent amount of judgement.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
He may have 0 qualifications, but I wouldn't say his judgement is exactly equivalent. His judgment goes much more into the negatives, since everything he says and every decision he makes is actively causing harm. We would be better off simply having the role vacant, or giving the job to someone in a coma.
Ironically, even the most profoundly autistic people, the ones that resemble his characterization of the condition, would still be better at the job than he is.
He is a cis white male. Pretty sure thats all the qualifications he needs unless you are one of those "woke" people who think we should have experts running things.
his worms are doing all the talking./
Narrator: Indeed, he can
Methinks the "doctors" fucked up his so-called brain worm incident...
Evidently, they removed what there was of the brain and left the decaying dead worm in its place.
🤷♂️
Twist: The worm is still alive, and operating RFK Jr. like a fleshy mech.
Except not as charming, nor intelligent.
Cheeeeeeeeeeese???
No can't be. I'd have a lot more faith in a worm.
It's not doctor's. Dude spent his life eating trash at the dump and no I don't mean that figuratively.
or the parasites are still alive, parts of his brain "died" and the worms have replaced those parts.
I read that in the voice of Ron Howard
"cannot be this stupid?" This is a kakistocracy, it's only stupid.
It's an administration of "well, I haven't seen it, so obviously it isn't real."
It's an administration made up of people who aren't smart enough to get better jobs, which assures their loyalty. There's definitely other people who love trump who are actually qualified for these positions, but they would have said no to some of this at some point.
Not even. Older people got the mercury-stabilized vaccines he's ranting about, they should be more autistic according to him.
He's just fucking stupid.
The lady doth protest too much...... I'm calling it now, some psychiatrist tried to diagnose Rfk Jr with autism and he lost his fucking shit about it. I mean the dudes been obsessed with dead animals since he was a child always been known as "eccentric".
Plenty of older people have ASD. I know a couple personally. They have childhood stories of being beaten, yelled at, difficulty with teachers and peers. They claim to be fine today, but telling horror stories of your trauma as a kid really says otherwise. If ASD was bad enough to be “retarded”, they were kept from society and/or put in State Homes. RFK is ADHD, and the only thing that kept him out of jails due to the untreated effects when he was younger is hs family name and wealth.
That and having a penis. Rosemary wasn't so lucky.
Exactly. His frickin aunt was institutionalized and lobotomized for her intellectual disability.
Worse, his father thought that she would make JFK look bad
A friend of mine learned she had adhd at 65, and autism very recently at ~78. She said that her behavior and interests finally make sense.
I still... maybe it's my years working construction, but when I look at RFK Jr. - his mannerisms and gestures and speech patterns and connection (or lack thereof) to reality - I see a tweaker, clear as a bell.
He has done (and sold) a lot of drugs. So, no surprise there.
Maybe… if we make vaccines illegal, he’ll tell people to start taking them. /s
He did heroin for over a decade so you’re not far off
alcohol too, he was such a menace he drove his former wife to suicide.
One of Donald's cabinet? Unfit?!?
Again?
He's even more stupid than they are acknowledging.
Yes, I was going to post "hearing CAN be that stupid".
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.
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.
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. 😔
Acknowledging that girls can even be Autistic is a relatively recent development (the 90s).
That is in-fucking-sane
It is still in textbooks that girls are not likely to get it. Clinicians are still being taught this.
Yeah. And then they wonder why the number of diagnosed people has increased. 🙃🤡
I suspect my grandmother has undiagnosed autism
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.
They're going to blame flouride for sure
Way too many rural (i.e. well water) cases for that to even make a good scapegoat.
I keep seeing the Forest Gump quote overlayed over him whenever I see one of his posts, "I am not a bright man."
Also, there very much are older people like this. My mother worked with severe people my entire life. The elder autistic exist.
When I was very, very little, I remember my mom saying that they're shutting down all of the institutions and she was worried about where they would all go. I didn't really get what she meant at the time, now I get it.
Nowadays it wouldn't be as much of a problem as they could all just get senior leadership positions in the Trump administration
Nah, overqualified.
You would think he’d know from his aunt Rosie’s tragic example about how our society puts inconvenient people out of sight.
She’s was a woman though, they don’t get autism. Autism only looks like a nonverbal little (white) boy in an Autism Speaks commercial who can only eat chicken nuggets.
Are people just realizing now that he's unfit for his job?
Yeah. That's how stupid America really is. Worse than Carlin ever thought possible.
Hey, that 65 year old neighbor with the $200k model trainset? Yeah, probably autistic.
But in his defense, trains are cool.
Absolutely.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
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.
By senators prior to his appointment?
So will this result in any actual consequences?
Great
He was touted as unfit before that, too
the former husk is just a meatsuit for the worms.
All the people who made the boomer neurodivergents disappear either have dementia or are long gone. Easy scapegoat.
Not to mention that there are heavy correlations between queer identities and Autism. A lot of neurodivergent Boomers likely died during the AIDS epidemic, unfortunately.
"He was in fact, exactly that stupid..." - Ron Howard
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.
Look, he's killing people. He should be arrested and go to trial for criminal negligence and manslaughter. Like the rest of the bunch.
But they can't even say it lol. "oh, some people touted!"
There was a thread on reddit that had someone speculate that he is an indirect serial killer. Meaning he tries to influence people into doing 'healthy' things that are anything but and keep bullying them into them until he results in their health declining to the point that they die. He had a relative that he did this to. The justice system isn't built for that kind of stuff and proving it there would be damn near impossible unless he somehow confesses to it.
Something like Munchausen by proxy?
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.
When I hear something along the lines of "there is no way someone can be that stupid." I think about 2 things.
How dumb the average person is and realize half the population is dumber than that.
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."
Everyone in Donald’s Admin is fucking stupid. Donald blaming dei… as everyone else is saying merit.
It must be A1. It’s all computer!
The steak sauce? Mmmmm yummy.
yes, he absolutely CAN be this stupid
'sharks don't get cancer' - same train of thought.
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.
Somehow JFK is still beating him in the brains department
heroin and worms was downfall.
Coming from Silicon Valley, I can assure RFK, my friends with autism are absolutely crushing it out here.
I look at their homes and families and think “fuck, carve me off a slice of that spectrum.”
All someone on the spectrum needs to be successful is to get a special interest in a lucrative field.
Respectfully, this is a vast oversimplification. There are many successful people on the spectrum in tech, but that doesn't always translate to success or money. Communication is a huge part of a development job and communication with others is usually fraught for autistic people.
That being said, a bunch of folks on the milder end of the spectrum have certainly had great success in the field, myself among them.
I see now thay my wording wasn't very good. You're correct.
You should read about the double empathy problem. It has empirical proofs and explain well the issue.
That's great. Thank you very much. Glanced over it and expect I'll go down a rabbit hole there making sure I understand all the related concepts.
No problem. If you deep dive the rabbit hole, you may be interested in this (Intersubjective, systemic, and sensory roots of autistic social difficulties: a critical evaluation of enactivist and phenomenological approaches)
So, how old is the ol' muskrat?
THIS MAN HAS A WORM IN HIS BRAIN.
How we allowed him to lead the HHS is beyond me.
Honey, he's a worm in a meatsuit. I'm not quite sure how much of the man was left.
The inside of RFK Jrs head be like…..
Yeah, I don't think The Brain is in there.
Could be just pinky
the worm made sure of that
Don't insult Brain like that! He is legitimately smart and does what he can given his circumstances (he is a literal lab rat in a lab that he has to escape from every night... and his only companion is barely functional).
Sure but when they used pinkies plan pinky took over the world. Then brain had to get involved and ruin it.
Tell me that episode. I agvent watched that show since the 90s (at least beyond clips on YouTube) i think a binge is in order.
The worm ate deeply _ although I doubt there was much to eat.
What there was was junk food.
He is a crank.
The brainworm he has in his skull died as a result of his stupidity so yeah… he’s that stupid.
Lack of nourishment it seems... And it shows...
or still alive, parasites are pretty hard to kill because they have ways of shielding themselves from the immune systems. thats why its a bad idea if a parasite dies suddenly(your immune system goes into overdrive)
Unfortunately lots of old folks think this way, actually today in the morning this same topic was brought up at breakfast by my mom, she was not being disrespectful necessarily but still is incredible how she cannot see that herself might be autistic and just never got a diagnosis
He’s been unfit since he got in.
No shit. Next they're gonna drop a bombshell report that sometimes dogs are brown.
RFK: “Oh yes I can! In fact, I can be even more stupid! JUST WATCH ME!”
He looks like that old stress squeeze toy
https://toywiz.com/panic-pete-5-inch-squeeze-toy/?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAD_vcoXD0oAXnDM5trPikhdlWnChn
That thing looks the killer in a horror movie franchise.
Don't give Hollywood any new ideas.
None of the twits in the current regime are fit for running a roadside fruit stand. Dumb, mean, divisive... these are some of the worst asinine people the world unfortunately has...
oh yes he can be, just look at that face
oh so now he's unfit?
Maybe he has Autism
There's this thing called the internet:
I would be pretty proud to be the number 1 on this search result.
Back in the 60s I was just "slow".
People started having kids at later age. My parents were 36 and 37 when I was born, so here I am, mildly autistic.
On top of that, I'd never have known if I didn't go to a psychologist and ask my doctor.
My dad likely is autistic too. Just never went to a psychologist in his life. (He's the last child of 6 kids, so his parents were likely old at that stage too)
If it's not causing serious impairment, people won't seek information about it. There's a ton of people with neurodivergency that live perfectly fine lives.
It's the overactive amygdala that caused me the most impairment anyways, not autism. Luckily, that can be helped with a simple medicine.
I don't understand the downvotes here. Parental age has in fact been identified as a risk factor for more than a decade.
But also, just being on the spectrum is not problematic. And, as you point out, a lot of people are probably somewhere on the spectrum but are undiagnosed because (in the US, at least) we generally don't seek medical attention unless we're experiencing some sort of crisis.
He can be that stupid, if you've noticed :p
Y-u know guys at some point you just have to roll with this shit because it’s too absurd. I mean I remember I used to be outraged far far in the past when I still treated these seriously
Now it’s just hilarious. Outrage to entertainment pipeline
What you can do is laugh and be entertained because such stupid people at the top will probably never happen again for decades. It’s your chance to soak up all the entertainment potential
That's a very privileged viewpoint.
Exactly. My family is like "why does this bother you so much? You have a good job, a house a family, great holidays! All of this doesn't affect you at all!"
"Well yeah, I guess I could just ignore that the world is going to shit and that people less lucky than me are suffering through all of it..."
Also it is bold to assume this won't ultimately effect everyone. Mismanagement of covid certainly did
Problem is, all it does is push them in the wrong direction. My father went from "I don't care about any of this shit" to "what the fuck do you mean I can't go on my quarterly golf trip??" and on to "Bill Gates murders Indian children with vaccines and also have you heard about RFK Jr?"
Fuck Facebook man...
I'm still friends with a lot of my college classmates. Most are pretty reasonable to progressive. But one has a harridan of a wife who is full bore Trumpster and bullies him politically. I don't know if she still is but she was last year. Anyway, when we were discussing our concerns with the shit the Trumpistas are pulling, he said to our group (who are all upper middle class professionals with money) "Don't worry, what ever happens, we'll be OK." And I replied, "That's the problem. Others most assuredly will not be ok.".
If you find entertainment when people are dying, then something in you is defective.
But what if it's evil people or people who willingly and purposefully do evil who are dying? Can't I be entertained by that?
Who is dying where? Why would that be entertaining?
Yep. Defective !