First Things First
My sister is engaged! Sean, welcome to the family.
Don’t Mess With The Spectrum
A couple weeks ago, our idiot director of HHS - secretary of HHS? - whatever the moron’s title, his name is RFK Jr. - that guy held a press conference about autism. He says we will have the cause for autism by August or some nonsense like that. But what people have really gotten in a tizzy about is this section of his speech.
Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two years old, and these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted, and we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it…
RFK Jr. is an idiot and conspiracy theorist and spoke poorly about autism generally. Many autistic people live fulfilling lives. I know and love many of these people. I have worked with and studied with many of these people. I have, at various times of my life, considered these people friends.
However, many autistic people truly are nonverbal and need round the clock care for their entire lives. As such, I found the outrage at his comments to be… expected I guess, but nonsensical. It totally parallels the left’s insane reactions to trans women playing in women’s sports. (I can’t believe I’m going here, but you made me!) To pretend like a person who has undergone male puberty doesn’t have physical advantages over women is simply nonsensical. By the same token, to pretend that autism, especially severe autism - as he is clearly discussing here - doesn’t make lives harder for everyone involved is just as nonsensical. I mean divorce rates are higher among parents of children with autism than those without. So let’s not pretend like what he’s saying is without cause.
That being said, is autism on the rise as he also claimed in this presser? I think the answer is we don’t actually know. There is certainly more awareness and better diagnostic tools which are leading to more diagnoses. But even severe cases of autism, which likely would have been diagnosed years ago, are on the rise1. Do I trust RFK Jr. to handle this study he wants to do appropriately, hire responsible scientists, and do said study like that in 6 months? Absolutely not. However, maybe him doing a bad study will lead the next administration or some responsible scientists to do a better study and we can eventually get some answers. And if we find an answer and can prevent or cure autism, should we? I don’t know.
Sweden, and many other countries, probably including the US, currently are preventing Down’s syndrome by way of abortion. I think that’s bad, both morally and societally. But I’m pretty biased because of my uncle. That being said, if, after my uncle was born, the doctors had said, “we have a cure for Down’s syndrome,” he’d probably be alive today and probably would have lived a much more fulfilling life. I doubt it would have been a happier life, dude was pretty happy and brought joy to many, myself included.
I actually kind of think disability, while bad for the individual, is good for society. It forces us to learn to love people who are different than us, to be patient, to sacrifice. Down’s syndrome shows us what pure love looks like. Autism forces us to look at the world differently. And what about Autism that we used to refer to as Asperger’s? I mean that’s basically just people who, generalizing greatly, don’t get social cues. What’s so bad about that?
So I don’t necessarily know that we should cure Autism, if that’s even possible, but I also don’t think we should pretend that it doesn’t make life harder. It does. However, I also kind of believe hardship is a good thing2, which again is why I’m not sure we should even try to cure autism or any other disability for that matter. I guess what I’m saying is let’s not commit the error of going so far in our criticism of this insane administration that we stop making sense ourselves. That’s how we got here in the first place. I guess the other thing I’m saying is don’t abort a Down’s fetus.
Speaking of Autism…
If you haven’t seen The Accountant, and you’re open to watching movies starring the lesser Affleck as he’s known around my house, I could not recommend it more. Not only is it a great action flick with well executed set pieces, the main character is autistic and that features heavily into the story; which is very compelling, if you ask me. I don’t quite know how to classify it, maybe action thriller with a light romantic dramedy? But it’s definitely not just a shoot em up with the barest bones story possible.
The Accountant 2 is fine. Story isn’t nearly as compelling and the guy isn’t even an accountant in it. But like the whole point of the first one is that he’s an accountant. That’s why it’s called The Accountant. Also, he has like a child army who are his “guy in the chair” in the second one, which is also less compelling. It’s good, not great. Recommend it, but don’t expect it to be anything more than a fun shooter action movie.
Shall We?
Three of you voted. Thank you. And unanimously said you’d like to do a book club. Cool. Me too. I’ll give you a month to prepare, but in June we will read a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while: Red Rising. I will create a calendar of books for the rest of the year so you can decide what months you’d like to read with me.
Catholicism
I just want to say how cool Catholicism is. They get a bad rap because of the perverts and the crusades, but man they’ve done a lot of good. And they are the reason Christianity stuck around as long as it did. I mean they used Christianity as a tool of empire, which isn’t ideal, but that was a long time ago. Gaah, sorry Catholics, I promise I’m trying to compliment you! Basically, what I’m trying to say is that Catholicism is pretty dope, and thanks be to Catholics for preserving belief in Christ for 2000 years. I mourn with you at the death of your Pope - who seemed to be a truly great man - and look forward to watching the chimney with you next week. Also, as has been said all over the internet this week: look at this drip.
(Less) Scary(er)
I watched the below clip. You may have seen it.
I’m not sure if I feel better or worse after watching it. On the one hand, I think I feel good that an actual insane person isn’t in the Whitehouse. On the other, is it better that there’s someone in the Whitehouse who is so intensely focused on getting and maintaining power that they are willing to credibly play an insane person? I’m genuinely not sure. Like the tariffs thing: The tariff rollout would not have gone any differently if there were an actual insane person in the Whitehouse. So does this clip give me hope? Not really. Is it interesting? Very.
Dad Quote of the Week
“The best part of having a baby is being able to use the express lane.” I’m dead serious. You can just zoom past everyone with just three people in a car. Best thing ever.
He Said It Better
As another piece of follow-up from last week’s newsletter, Brett Stephens wrote this which gives some better reasons than I did for not calling people Nazis. TBH, it was possibly brought on by this, which was a critique of the Bill Maher segment. Everything is connected. I actually think Larry David makes the point basically as well as Brett Stephens because of the absurdity of pretending Trump has done anything approaching Hitler’s levels of evil. Don’t call people Nazis.
Plants Are Cool
Real quick, to close things out, can we talk about how cool plants are? They’re so cool. Every other living on earth, maybe excluding some bacteria or something, have a defined way of being. A human has two arms and two legs, proportions are relatively fixed barring genetic mutations, two eyes, one mouth, yada, yada, yada. Quick, how many limbs does a tree have? It could be any number! How many leaves on a Rose Bush? Nobody knows. Oh no, there’s a fence beside the tree, how ever will it grow?! The tree will engulf the fence!!! So cool.
If you look at this and go, hey that’s just ChatGPT. Look at the references. I clicked on a few. They seem to be legit. But I don’t have time to do research y’all. I’m doing the best I can.
But is that a good argument for keeping that thing around? Disease makes us learn to care for others and we try to cure that. Well, most of us. RFK is pretty pro disease.