Future crimes against cure/treatment developers?

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I agree Pithlet. I don't think that the cure would be like death, but that it would be a change. I don't think the cure'd be any scarier than puberty, y'know. I completely agree with you on those who want a cure and those who don't want a cure. If they don't want a cure, they deserve to say no, and if they do want a cure, they deserve to say yes.

Ana54, I don't think they'll force us to take a cure. No one would want to see that happen.

Anyways, onto the topic at hand that Elan started...

I think there's a chance that it could happen. I've seen harsh critics of pro-cure activists and supporters get really riled up, though the leap from angry writings to attempts to take people's lives seems a little difficult. If a cure being created was imminent, I could logically see that someone might decide to kill the ones involved if they were paranoid, or scared, or felt sufficiently threatened. Should pre-natal testing become an issue, I could see autistics killing off medical practitioners who perform abortions. An eye for an eye seems a prevalent philosophy...

Elan, I don't think you realise just how much angst you are causing with a lot of your posts here. You make certain claims about what you are trying to promote - which of course you are entitled to do. But at the same time you appear to be ignoring the alternative interpretations which many (including myself) are drawing.

For example, the title of this thread appears to insinuate that ASD people like us will kill those try to develop a cure. Forgetting for the moment there isn't one - that is a rather offensive claim. Now you'll say "that's not what I meant". Now it's one thing to say that, but it's something else not to learn from it. So far I have to say I'm not seeing you learning anything from your mistakes.

Please be more careful when you post - unless of course it is your intention to cause angst. That would be different.

Do the curebies feel like they are on a dangerous mission?

Is this to justify a premptive first strike?

There are a lot of us, and many are in research. The results are in, genetics cannot predict, unless you want to ban half the humans from having children. It would still not work due to the expression of recessives, which show up every few generations. Autism is in the human Genome, and cannot be removed.

As for a cure that involves the social, turning on the frontal lobes, that would make us deep thinkers, and cunning sociopaths. The cure would create a much worse problem.

As long term change seems impossible, we use drugs to alter mental processes. A drug to improve social skills would have a waiting black market. Love starved people who have nothing to do but cause agravation on the Internet would be the first customers. This pill will make you a Babe Magnet!

Autism is the cure for Neurotypical babbling. It is a much worse problem. There is no point, no survival goal, when they talk just to hear themselves talk, try to raise contraversy where there is no foundation of Science supporting the idea that humans mental process, could be changed, or should be.

The best Medical Science has done is in the treatment of depression, which has no organic root, affects Neurotypicals mostly, and is still only a patch, to reverse the effects, while working on the cause. Curing depression can only be done by dealing with the cause. It is strictly mental.

Another field that has had great study is a drug to increase IQ. Coke and Speed may give users the feeling, but on tests they perform poorly, and long term usage produces dangerous Tweakers.

Our whole history of stimulating an area of the brain has had bad results. Social skills can, as here, be used for social manipulation, a type called a Sociopath, who without feeling, tries to manipulate, just to show he can.

It is a desperate try for feeling superior to something, which most likely comes from a long history of rejection. Failing with peers, it is turned on an out group, not being able to hold their own in their world, they seek advantage elsewhere. It is the general psychology of bullies, trying to find someone smaller to pick on.

You have chosen to bully at a Martial Arts School, of the mind. You keep posting mindless imaginary threats, seeking some response, and get called a dumb troll.

I would apply Occam's Razor to you, a weak failure who would not dare to speak to me in public, who will alone and lonely try to disrupt other peoples enjoyment of life, while hiding behind a keyboard.

Trolling is for those who have failed at everything else.

There are treatments for depression that work, for a while, and with the help of a therapist you could address your deep and basic problems. You are so attention starved, and so weak, that you attack people who are different, on the Internet.

On the other hand, suppresion of neural processes is very easy, a fraction of a chemical, which can be gene spliced into E Coli, and will cure useless and excessive thinking and communication. It is a living drug manufacturing and delivery system, and will cure chit chat, endless running around, cell phone use, and Internet trolling. It will calm the wild monkeys, and give them focus, persistance, so perhaps we can get some useful work out of them.

This I can do at home in my kitchen, and as we do not use that part of our brain, we are immune to the results. In your honor I will call it Elan-icide.

Thanks for all the fish!

How do you propose that a "cure" would unweave the structure of a mind, and reweave it into a form called "typical"? Because that is what a cure entails. A brain is a grown thing, and when, over days, months and years, its exposed to unusual enzymes, chemicals, poisons or.. heaven forbid, a blow to the head, it develops and heals in an atypical way.

The structure of the tissues takes an unusual path, lays itself out in unusual ways, 3 dimensionally. Neural pathways may be twisted, warped, lengthened or shortened. They may not connect at all. They may not be present. Though they are soft and squishy, what the past wrought might as well be engraved in stone. You cannot undo tissue.

I will use a simpler and more common example. A person is gravely injured in an accident, and has their arm badly mangled. No sort of pill can take those torn muscles and straighten them to a "typical" formation. No amount of scalpel work will do it either. That person will be disabled in that limb for the rest of their life. That is what is called MAIMED. There is no pill for maiming, and nobody seriously looks for one.

The best thing that science can do is physical therapy for a person like that. To restore a modicum of functionality. Thus is the autism spectrum. Believe whatever you wish as far as cause; the fact is that the expression of autism is caused by the atypicality of the tissue. You might strip out heavy metals, or suppress certain chemical reactions, but the organization of the tissue, the density, proportion of white/gray matter and the length and shape of the neuron connections is different and not subject to much change.

Once that kid is autistic, There is no going back. No cure for the born. Not in our lifetimes.

If you want a simpler example, fine. You cut yourself by accident. In time, perhaps with medical treatment, perhaps not, the wound heals. The skin that grows there is not typical skin, it is scar tissue. Science cannot even eliminate that. Even the finest plastic surgery, the pinnacle of scar free medical procedure leaves some scar tissue.

Now you cut into a brain to straight things out, things that nature did, and you make a mess going in, and then you leave a mess coming out. You cannot erase your presence, so any good you do is marred by further complications. You may do more harm than good. Autism is not life threatening in any way, but brain surgery certainly is. That is why doctors will leave a tumour in a brain unless it absolutely presents risk to the patient.

Yes listen to TLPG, Elan. He is very sensible, rational and full of good advice and likes to slander 14 yr olds on his blogs.

Not to mention the cure for the "bandwagon" mentality...



Indeed... Magneto is the only "villain" that I have ever felt sympathy for... I wouldn't take it as far as he did in X3, but I do fear that a genocide is coming. Sure, the "cure" would be "voluntary", but social and economic factors will coerce every last one of us to be "cured".

NT's always fear what they do not understand... that's the only reason they want to "cure" us (or mutants in the case of X-men)...

Aspies too, fear what they don't understand. A cure, people who advocate for a cure, parents of autistic children...

They want to cure us because we aren't as able as we could be.

TLPG, if we're not impaired, what do you call delays in socialization and communication, advantages?

Delays in small talk and banter? More like casting off unneeded elements of socialization (aspies are still very well able to communicate about real material)

*sigh* There's a reason why people socialize, why they make small talk and banter. There is a delay, and a delay is not a good thing when it comes to being able to communicate or socialize.

Popular cure: denial, grandiosity, retaliation

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postx55926-0-0.html

Excerpt:

Last edited by elan_i on 06 Feb 2008, 9:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I know a good many scientists who have made their opinions clear in the autism world, and the death threats directed towards them and their families are already happening. They're not theory or conjecture.

These death threats are not because they are looking for a cure. They are because they say there is no cure, or that there is no autism epidemic. The threats come not from autistic people, but from the same clique of mostly-parents that has threatened to kill me and several other autistic people and parents I know in the past -- merely for being against a cure, or for providing evidence against specific false 'cures'.

If I were you (well, if I were some version of you that wasn't trying to spread hate and alarmism, and were genuinely concerned for people's safety), I would look for who is making and who is receiving the majority of actual threats at the moment.

Hint: It's not no-cure autistic people threatening researchers who want to cure us. It is relatively common among a certain specific (fortunately rather small) crowd of parents, towards a large number of people who don't agree with them for a large number of disparate reasons -- whether those who don't agree with them are scientists, politicians, parents, or autistic. This has gotten to the point where scientists are afraid to look into or comment on certain aspects of autism for fear of being targeted next. And the threats have made both the news and scholarly journals.

I think, however, that you are trying to spread dislike and fear of people who don't believe in a cure, rather than (for all your protestations of complete logic) behaving logically. Most people don't leap to the sorts of conclusions you're leaping to through logic, especially when there are real threats being directed at autism scientists and none that I know of are threats being sent by actual autistic people or for the reasons you cite. Nor do most people behaving logically insist they know the motivations of other people as thoroughly as you claim to know the motivations of those who disagree with you.

But in the end, no matter who's on the receiving end of these threats or assassintions, it's still wrong.

Oh it absolutely is, and I didn't mean to convey otherwise. (Even if I didn't oppose it as a person, which I do, that sort of thing is also against such a major part of my religion that people have gotten thrown out of said religion for doing or advocating things like that, even against very evil people.)

I just find it strange to hear "fear" of hypothetical assassination attempts by a particular group of people, in an area of the world where there are death threats taking place all the time to an alarming enough degree to be constantly publicized, but both from and towards totally different people within that part of the world than the "fear" is described as being about. (This part of the world, I mean the "autism world" for lack of any better shorthand.)

small talks and banters are pointless and stupid. people who do those are the one who are disabled (from my point of view)

I'm autistic and I banter. It's not pointless, it's something some people do with their friends. (Those of us who do might or might not be autistic, and those who don't also might or might not be autistic. It's often a personality thing.)

Small talk does have a purpose. It's not always in the words said, but in the conveying that someone cares about another without actually saying it. I used to think it was pointless until I asked some non-autistic people what the point was and they told me that.

Calling their social behavior pointless is just as inaccurate as to claim that autistic routines and rituals or special interests are pointless (things I hear a lot and that are rarely if ever true). As I've pointed out elsewhere, calling non-autistic people's behavior pointless is blowing hot air (because it'll never be taken that seriously) whereas calling autistic people's behavior pointless can ruin autistic people's lives. So they don't as things currently are set up cause the same level of damage in an overall sense. But they are both equally incorrect in a plain factual sense.

It's possible to value your own abilities without putting down those of others. I'm not a good guitar player but it doesn't make me say that guitar-playing is pointless just because someone else is good at it. I'm not too interested in the weather but I don't tell my autistic friend with a special interest in weather that weather is pointless. I'm good at things other than guitars are weather and other people's abilities in those things don't threaten mine in any way.

And really if you just talk about how defective non-autistic people are, you're doing the same thing non-autistic people do to autistic people. You'll have less impact, because you have less power, but it shows that if you did have the same amount of power as non-autistic people do, you would be just as likely to abuse it against non-autistic people as the non-autistic professionals who define autistic behavior as pointless abuse their power over us. Parody is all well and good but acting like it's real is something else altogether, and smacks of elitism.

I believe that fear of a "cure" is legitimate. Here's a big secret for all of you: Anyone who "society" sees as different is going to have problems. My mother saw me as having problems because my real IQ was somewhere in the stratosphere and it was painfully obvious. This is why she limited my opportunities to educate myself. Simply knowing that I had a high IQ led her to all sorts of deluded and destructive behavior.

What exactly do they cure if they cure us? I've often been the only person in the room who had a clue about something. Unfortunately, I still often suffer under the influence of someone who thinks that my opinion about something is wrong and they are right even though they have no clue about the subject and I do. There is a way that deliberate obtuseness is used to get over on someone who does have some intelligence. I think that explains a lot of the "cure that so and so" behavior. It also explains justifiable alarm at attempts to "cure" people.