While I recognize your experience and honor your message, I’d like to say that a lot of people within the spectrum on these boards don’t seem to feel the same as you do. They are aware of their limits as you are, but are adamant about their willingness to participate and add what the neurotypicals view as quirky points. But everyone’s POV is in some way valuable, and when it comes from an honest place in someone willing to examine themselves that’s the really valuable stuff. I absolutely agree that aspergers and autism make one’s life difficult beyond what I’ve ever experienced as someone with ADD, but I can see so much value in the added perspective of the non-neurotypicals among us.
Nobody here wishes upon anyone, including you @Nonhuman_Hominid the difficulties of living with what western society would call a disability. We don’t wish you to suffer, but we value to a high degree the input of people like you and the ideas you have. For neurotypicals a lot of analysis is too mundane to carry out, but to the people on the spectrum like you, there are many instances where your data processing power/laser like focus is invaluable, and we’re very happy to include your synopses and interpretations because you think about things deeply in a different way than most of us.
Please don’t feel that we’re trying to sock you away, or wish further suffering upon you. What we want is to hear about what’s important to you because it’s valuable to everyone.
This is all about campaign fundraising. He’s the squeaky wheel right now. Big pharma hasn’t greased his wheel enough, so here we are. He’ll settle down when the money starts to flow.
The underlying issue with all of this is that Americans don’t trust our own medical establishment. So much of our healthcare experience is actually a sales experience. When the CDC says vaccines are super important, many Americans have a hard time parsing that from the doctor saying annual mammograms are important. Couple that with the fact that many (most?) of us do our healthcare research on the internet, where bad information is given the same weight as good information. Ugh.
ETA: L_Mariachi has pointed out that Dan Burton isn’t running for anything, and is in fact retired. This is technically correct. However, I feel this should not detract from my previous assertion, though it may seem (to the untrained eye of a casual observer) to prove me entirely wrong.
Tell that to @Nonhuman_Hominid. As far as I can tell they’re depressed and are always in a state of readiness to be excluded. Speak to (him? AFAICT) and let them know they’re welcome here. Nonhuman_Hominid seems to always have something interesting to say whether or not it’s replied to. We should be encouraging diversity here right?
The CDC actually changed the requirements after doing statistical analysis. But your point is well taken. The CDC doesn’t have partisan squabbling, and concerns itself with what the science is. I should know as I have many friends working with the CDC, and the CDC doesn’t take shit from nobody. It’s concerned with what’s good for the public, and fuck whatever political grandstanding the anti-vaxxers and such have to say. If the anti-vaxxers have a point, it’ll be investigated, but the removal of mercury was forced via political pressure onto the higher ups who actually aren’t a part of the CDC. Now vaccines are more expensive and fragile because of people’s uninformed opinions. Thanks a lot, Jenny McCarthy, you stupid bitch.
You’re one of us my brother/sister. And we are you.
You’re not alone in your experience. I believe there are many of us here on the spectrum. I suspect I may be myself, though not having seen any form of medical personnel since I was a child I cannot be sure.
As @LDoBe says, it’s the diversity we appreciate, and as your posts are intelligent, thoughtful and ‘non-trollian’, your views are important.
It is, or was, a fairly non partisan stupidity. But let’s not let a legitimate complaint about this guy’s stupidity get in the way of your claims of liberal bias.
Vaccines are indeed an issue where the far left and the far right meet around the back of the building, where it smells of trash and urine and bilge water.
Dan Burton has always been a deep-conspiracy type. He’s the fellow who simply would never stop talking about the Vince Foster suicide, just as a small example.
I’ve got a friend who’s actually allergic to thiomersal. He’s in the military, so he’s had to get a lot of unusual vaccines, and he says there’s only a few that he can’t get, most of them being for diseases that are uncommon.
Maybe normal humans just like to assume that they are more connected to others than they really are? It could be that people such as you and I have a more accurate understanding.
For years, contact-lens solution was preserved with thimerosal, which is mercury-based, and you didn’t hear about a sudden uptick in autism in the children of pregnant women who didn’t wanna wear their glasses… and this was stuff they were sticking in their eyes every single day, not just once or twice in a lifetime.
