Reddnet Scribbles

For Autism Awareness Day this year I decided to celebrate by remaining very pissed off at the stupidity and gullibility of the average concerned American citizen.

Over the last couple of decades, a new pop-cultural trend has arisen. Autism Awareness is just the latest in this line of fads. This one will play out the same as the breast cancer crusade before it.

It’s a fraud that will steal large amounts of time, money, and attention from other problems and in the end it'll leave us with no real progress towards the treatment, cure, or even understanding of Autism than we had before.

These frauds all follow the same general pattern.

Some obscure medical condition gets elevated to "epidemic" status by a combination of popular media marketing and advertising. Usually the trigger is that one or a few high-profile celebrities either develop the condition or just develop an obsession with it. Sometimes a movie gets made.

The condition will be just obscure enough where everyone has heard of it, but don't know that much about it. It will be just common enough a problem where most people know someone who knows someone with the condition, but few of them are directly affected by it themselves.

Then begins the small charity drives. These start like most any other charity drive. They have an arsenal of stupid gimmicks to use... the ones where your kids have to sell candy bars, or you have to sponsor someone to walk around, or your co-worker stalks around with a can begging for money (which you have to donate to or you'll be seen as the office scrooge).

Once those smaller charity events show some reasonable success, you'll then start seeing the commercial end of the campaign. By this point the campaign has chosen colors, developed a logo (corporate brand), and you'll start seeing the ribbons and stickers show up at the local drug store and gas-stations.

Not long after that large manufacturers of food will take up the cause and you'll see the campaign logos plastered all over cereal boxes, soda cans, or whatever.

Next thing you know, the condition is has its own holiday and gets all-day coverage on CNN.

It's such total bullshit!

What's really going on is that very large and powerful non-profits have discovered a free-money tree.

These organizations are run by people with the same business skills as in any large corporation. They are trained in running large organizations and know how to market intangible products. They also get paid the same kinds of salaries as their business counterparts.

This is BIG money here! There are millions to be made in the world of non-profit fund-raising and it doesn't suffer from most of the potential drawbacks of an actual business.

Few taxes, lax accounting requirements, no labor standards, and immunity against most of the common law-suits that plague regular business. Who wants to sue the nice-guys that are trying to raise money to help poor unfortunate victims of this horrible condition? They avoid political oversight and criticism the same way. Who wants to go on record as opposing efforts to help sick people?

These organizations don't have to pay most of their labor force. Instead they rely on legions of volunteer workers with nothing better to do. They get the benefit of these people's labor without having to compensate them. And thanks to our public school system they'll even pimp out the non-autistic kids and use them as a free labor force to help raise their money.

Any "profit" these organizations manage to earn beyond their massive operational costs gets donated on to other organizations and companies that supposedly are in the business of researching the problem or helping victims affected by it.

But there is little incentive to donated this money wisely, nor that the recipient actually use the money for the particular purpose it was raised for. Often you'll find that the executives at the fund-raising organizations own significant stock in the companies receiving those donations.

They don't have to worry about making a competitive product or offering a competitive service either.

They can use techniques against their customers... er... I mean donors, that would be illegal for any regular businesses. They can, and do, make blatant use of guilt, manipulation, misinformation, and often outright lies... whatever it takes to drive sales, and all without having keep paying customers happy or loyal to the brand.

The condition is expected to be incurable, so it is impossible for them to "fail" in the marketplace.

The only drawback is the limited interest in the cause... but that's easy enough.

They jump in raising funds for whatever the popular cause happens to be, squeeze the willing consumers out of as much as they are willing to donate, then switch to raising funds for the next new fad. During the transition, they can keep milking the remaining interest in the old fad while the they build up an inflated interest in the new fad.

Fucking brilliant!

And disgusting!

As for Autism specifically... sure, it is a real condition and it really sucks to be the parent of an Autistic child. But is it really a growing epidemic? It might be, but I am positively sure that it isn't growing at anywhere near the rate being pushed by the marketing.

Autism isn't new. It's been around a long time. What is new is the number of people that are now considered autistic and the number of sub-autistic conditions that have been defined.

When I was a kid you had to be like Rain-man or you weren't autistic. Now days everyone who is slightly smart, but not so good at fitting in is Autistic.

They used to just be Nerds you know...

Also, there used to be a lot of retards around... Where did all the retards go? Did we cure retardation when I wasn't paying attention?

No parent wants to admit that their kid is stupid, and thanks to modern medical and political science they don't have to! Instead, their kids are just "different".

Autism is appealing to many parents simply because they get to talk about how little Jonny is actually just "super-smart" and misunderstood... so they shop around until they find a doctor that diagnoses them with some variation of autism, grab the tax breaks, sign-up for the government hand-outs, and keep telling everyone else that their kid is wonderful and gifted... not the pitiful waste of flesh that they appear to be.

Understandable I suppose.

The doctors can justify an Autism diagnosis simply because the definition of autism and related conditions has grown so much over the recent years that it pretty much can mean anything you want it to mean.

It doesn't matter, if you can't get an autism diagnosis, you'll likely get some other diagnosis (ADHD is a popular one too) that will alleviate you of the burden of having to admit that you suck as a parent and that your kid is just in need of a little parental guidance.

Another side-effect of the expanded definition of Autism is that an entire army of people can now declare themselves "border-line autistic" or some related condition. I've actually met at least a dozen people that have made this claim of Autism as part of their introduction or the introduction of their kid the first time I met them. 

I can identify with them. I was, and remain, a social misfit myself. In my childhood it was understood that the smarter kids were less likely to fit in socially. Duh! The social norms are dictated by the majority of average people. The smarter or dumber you are the less likely you are to fit in with the expectations of the mass-averages... how is that hard to understand?

But I grew up without a convenient medical condition to blame it on, and so I worked hard over the years to learn and adapt as best as I could to better fit in. I had an incentive to do so, and no excuse not to. I was always less able to fit in, and I'm still less able, but at least I try!

These poor bastards growing up today don't bother to try though. Instead they excuse their lack of social skill as a medical condition. Worse, they then expect everyone else to just give them the special consideration that they deserve as poor victims of an unfortunate disease. Many of them seem to relish the freedom this condition gives them to selectively ignore any inconvenient social expectations others might have. They come off as a total ass then just blame it on their "autism" and try to make you feel guilty about it to boot!

Fuck them!

Since the number of people who can be classified as Autistic has increased, the effect is that we no longer have retarded people, or even just plain old nerds anymore.

So are there more Autistic people than there used to be? Who could possibly know since there are no longer any meaningful measurements that you can use to accurately compare the autism cases in the past with autism cases reported today?

And another brilliant side-effect of Autism awareness is the misinformation. All these fad causes have their lies, but this one takes the cake with the whole vaccination thing. Quite a lot of Autism doesn't become apparent in a child until it is between 1 and 3 years old... coincidentally, near the time they get their vaccinations. So naturally there was some concern that there was a link, and there was specific concern about the preservative in some of the vaccines.

But once the science was done, it never even came close to proving a link. In fact, it could be said to have come very close to proving there wasn't a link. But just in case, the preservative was removed years ago anyway... you know, just in case (which means to hold off the law-suites). Despite the removal of the suspected preservative, the number of autism cases has risen anyway.

But even now, the Autism campaigns keep bringing up the vaccine thing... and many parents are just dumb enough to fall for it... the end result likely being that the rate of Autism continues on unaffected while the number of fatalities from preventable childhood illnesses will go through the roof.

Good job ass-holes!

Perhaps the saddest thing about the whole mess is just the colossal waste of effort and energy... time, effort, and money that could be put into solving bigger problems.

In the short term I'm sure all this Autism awareness will really help a few legitimately Autistic people and their families. But science doesn't get much better or faster just by throwing money at it, so I doubt it'll make much difference to how quickly the science progresses. But it will ensure that there is less money and fewer scientists investigating other areas of research.

As for the families and kids with Autism? What happens to them once the popularity of Autism wears out?