I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is.Savage subsequently "clarified" these statements with Glenn Beck (pre-demigod version) on 'Larry King Live':
Autism -- everybody has an illness... Stop with the sensitivity training. You're turning your son into a girl, and you're turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men.
Preceding this was a discussion of American Academy of Pediatrics which has had the nerve to say that children as young as two years of age should be given anti-cholesterol drugs...This was in the broader context of the over-medicalization, the over-diagnosis of disease, using our children as profit centers...I have to defend myself from men who specialize in hating families and children.In his trademark effusive style, Savage denigrates the pernicious "war on childhood", a phenomenon I've covered extensively at this blog. Generally, this type of gross imposition manifests in academic contexts whereby government officials and overzealous parents believe persistent intervention triumphs over natural predilection. In this case, Savage discusses the childhood disease industry, a charade buttressed by impatient suburban parents who have wholly digested the blank slate doctrine. Instead of providing children with freedom to grow, to explore, to mature as nature intended, these parents believe the constructs of man are a more efficacious alternative. Only in this deluded sphere could one countenance providing two year olds with anti-cholesterol medication. Or turning recess into structured activity, forcing children into yoga classes, and screening every child for a multitude of obscure ailments.
These types of initiatives rely on the premise that each developmental milestone should be motivated instead of occurring autonomously. Thus, slow developing children or simply the obtuse ones are diagnosed as abnormal simply due to their innate constitution. In the blank slatist framework, everyone is equal if provided with the proper environment and thus any deviation from normalcy (which by NCLB standards is excellency) demands intervention.
Of course, Savage went over the top, as he is wont to do. But his main message is still a valid and important one.
22 comments:
The autistic kids I've met won't be cured by telling them to "cut it out." They are what would have been called retarded in an earlier era. It may be a trendy diagnosis, but it represents a legitimate malfunctioning of the brain.
KM
One,
In light of the current topic, I'm very curious what you think of the following article:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201003/if-liberals-are-more-intelligent-conservatives-why-are-lib
Holla back
O.
@ KM:
Of course. But autism rates have almost quadrupled in the past 20 years and they can't figure out what it's being caused by (not genetic, etc...).
What it is is overzealous doctors and parents considering slow development or awkwardness as autism (because no definitive definition exists).
Savage's 99% number is just classic over the top Savage.
This is pure amateur speculation on my part but I wonder if a contributing factor to causes of autism is career-moms putting thier children in daycare as early as two weeks after birth.
Maybe some infants react to this by "withdrawing" or otherwise retarding their cognitive and social development.
Savage's manic depressive style is very entertaining. Even when I don't agree with what he is saying I find him to be compelling to listen to. Unfortunately his TV show proved that he has a great face for radio.
I recall reading several years ago that areas like Silicon Valley had a much higher rate of Autism, and they speculated that the sorting process in that area bringing two engineering type parents together might be the cause. I'm not sure if there is any basis to this or not.
@Obsidian
Great link! I think the point is valid. Liberals believe in all sorts of concepts which not only defy common sense, but also either can't be backed up empirically or even are disproved by the data. HBD, no innate gender differences, gun control, the effectiveness of prison sentences, etc. Our great grandparents who never completed junior high knew better than the average college educated liberal on all of these issues, as does your average blue collar worker.
One actual physiological explanation I have seen is clamping the umbilical cord immediately after birth before the blood from the placenta is forced into the baby, in some cases depriving the child of almost half of his blood supply. In a natural mammalian birth the cord is not severed until after the placenta is expelled so the neonate actually has virtually all of the blood from the placenta forced through the umbilical cord into his body. Studies of children whose cord was not cut promptly show they have significantly higher iron levels for the first six months of life.
One very interesting case of a severely developmentally delayed one year old IIRC was given his placental blood which had been stored made a full recovery within about a week of receiving his own placental blood.
So the war on childhood starts really early. Poor babes deprived of their own blood. Obviously the actual amount of blood an individual neonate has from the placenta varies considerably based on how promptly the cord is cut and other natural variations in the birth process.
Didn't autism and Asperger's recently get lumped into one disorder called Spectrum Disorder?
checking...
Yes, here's the Wiki on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum
It's called spectrum because there are so many traits associated with what appeares to be a disorder that ranges from mild to acute, but the mechanism (genes, environment, virus) that causes it is unknown.
Here's the mission statement of a forum for Aspies:
http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/
Aspies for Freedom began in June 2004. We have the view that aspergers and autism are not negative, and are not always a disability...We know that autism is not a disease, and we oppose any attempts to "cure" someone of an autism spectrum condition, or any attempts to make them 'normal' against their will.
-Killer Bee
I think ADHD is overdiagnosed, but autism might have some kind of bio-environmental cause. Cell phone waves, something in food processing, something in the water- who knows.
I don't think your war on childhood is a sensible "HBD" topic because our modern concept of childhood diverges from the concept of childhood found throughout most of history. Children were once almost seen as small people. It was only until the 19th century that westerners started seeing the child as the focus of the family and childhood as a special time in a person's life. It used to be that children were fed the least desirable food even because adults did not want to waste tasty food on children (which makes sense because children have terrible taste in food anyway). In paintings from centuries we often see 3 yr olds dressed as adults, or 11 yr olds becoming heads of states, or wives with adult responsibilities.
The level of sentimentality we now see about childhood is a very modern state of mind. Now we have whole theme parks and museums dedicated to children. It's a result of our instinct to protect our children looking for an outlet in our affluent society.
As for parents trying to force their children to develop according to milestones, that's the parental instinct. They have an instinct to want to make their child conform to adult patterns of behavior. Every day I see some idiot teenage ghetto mother smacking her kids and telling them to sit still in the subway. I doubt she read a book about parenting and the importance of getting children to sit still like adults. It's simply her instinct to smack her kids when they move in public. Whether or not trying to alter children gets them to change probably depends on the parent, the child and the trait in the child that parent is trying to change.
As an undiagnosed adult Aspie, I can state with absolute confidence that there is such a thing as Autism Spectrum Disorder. The question is, where do you draw the line at who is normal and who has ASD? Even a disease like diabetes has an arbitrary line drawn somewhere on the blood sugar or glucose-tolerance test results that says , and "if the value is to the left of this line the person does not have diabetes". It gets much harder to do this when you are dealing with subtle differences in cognitive processing. I have no doubt that many kids are being erroneously diagnosed with ASD (and ADHD, and childhood depression). I also have no doubt that ASD is a real condition, and that some percentage of the population has it.
When I was growing up, back when we lived in caves and wrote on clay tablets, there was no such thing as an Asperger's diagnosis. It just was not out there in the minds of pediatricians and child psychologists. Today I would be diagnosed in a heartbeat. I think that is where the "increase" in ASD incidence comes from.
I agree about the incidence of diagnosis vs. incidence of disease. However, in the past there was a very high childhood mortality. Lots of kids didn't make it to reproduce. Now they do and those genes that were handicapping (even to the point of fatality) are being passed on. Also, the current absence of a genetic explanation doesn't rule out a genetic cause.
I don't really understand how Savage's autism quotes fit in with the war on childhood. I'm still not quite sure how you agree/disagree with him on autism. Please elaborate.
His autism comments are part of the war on childhood because of the equating of any deviation from normality with serious illness and thus a demand for intervention.
The war on childhood is continuous intervention into a child's development, whether that be physical, emotional, social, or academic.
Overzealous parents overreact and think their kid has some horrible problem (like autism) when maybe he's just slow or slightly awkward. So they give the kids all kinds of treatments and medicine and drugs (ADHD: ritalin and adderral) even though they don't need it.
The war on childhood is basically unnecessary intervention from blank slatist parents who think any natural predilection (such as slow development) can be overcome with treatment.
@ FemX:
Have you ever heard of progress? They were wrong: children aren't small adults and luckily our modern society has come to understand that. Are you honestly arguing that because they did something back then we should just continue doing it even if it's harmful? I guess you're going to put leeches on your skin too.
And I missed your recent snark in that comment. Too bad.
I think he confused autism with ADHD.
If Savage did confuse ADHD and autism, then his comments make much more sense (and are far more defensible).
But there is alot of questions about why the autism rate has increased SO MUCH. I imagine "helicopter parents" is one of a few different reasons. Here's an article about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/national/26AUTI.html?pagewanted=1
Why do people have to exagerate to the point that it offends people to get listened to by mainstream media. Savage has to make these alarming statements to get attention and it only makes his arguments sound ignorant and absurd when behind it, there are real questions that need to be answered - real issues with the way the problems are diagnosed, funded and treated.
As for the comparison between ADHD and autism, I don't think they're as pronounced as you'd like to make out. ADHD is over prescribed and medicated, driven by pharmaceutical interests. Autism isn't well treated by drugs and is becoming more understood - thus the name change to Autism Spectrum.
If autism is over-diagnosed, I believe it has more to do with severely mentally handicapped who are also withdrawn socially being grouped in with a completely different disease that doesn't retard thinking but affects how the patient relates to other people.
Savage doesn't know what he is talking about as regards autism. Just telling a child with autism to "cut it out" will solve most of their problem? What a load of nonsense.
The "oversealous" argument is also dubious. It is ahrdly "over-zealous" for a parent to be worried when at 36 months their child is not speaking normally, and exhibits deficit in motor functions, and does not respond to parental stimulation like other children. The smart parent would definitely check out such things. failure to do so delays treatment or therapy than can create a huge head start on living a normal life. It is the STUPID parent who refuses to do anything out of fear of appearing "overzealous."
One of the things that has driven autism rates up is better diagnosis. It may be that total numbers overall have not risen significantly but we now are able to diagnose those with the condition earlier. This is not at all a bad thing. I agree that the process can be abused particularly since government spending creates an incentive to claim or exaggerate things.
My younger brother probably would have been diagnosed with autism had my mother allowed it. He started regressing in language ability at around at 4, and kept up his "baby talk" until he was about 8. He refused to look at anyone's face, and was absurdly obssessed with routine. But my mom kept working with him until he started developing again. He never did quite catch up with the rest of the clan, only getting a 1270 SAT score and joining the military. But he's totally funtional now, and even has a girlfriend. I wonder how many "autistic" kids never make it out of their shells because the parents accept the doctor's word and just sort of give up, putting their faith in medicines and professional therapy.
Savage was a dick for going over the top against autism, but he's an entertainer and that's what people want to hear. The rise in autism is probably related to a rise in assortative mating. I think many really smart people are on the mild end of the autistic spectrum, and these days are more likely to get hitched to each other than in earlier generations.
What I find interesting, given your position here, is that old-school conservatives used to think that the whole notion of "childhood" was a liberal construct, and they romanticized the days when kids started working at 5 years old and got married at 12. But I agree with you, going to school in the summer, having class instead of recess, is not going to make kids any smarter, it will just impede social development. I mean, just look at the weirdness in those workaholic asian countries anyway. Do we really want our kids to be like theirs?
While Autism exists, there is another angle that inflates diagnosis of autism and other issues that may be classified as "learning disabilities".
If you have an dim or even unexceptionally average kid who doesn't meet their parents' high expectations, it behooves the parents to get a "learning disabled" diagnosis.
With intense pressure on the educrats, this will entitle their darling to a plethoria of unfair advantages limited only by parental resources and motivation to extort the school systems: special tutors, extra time on tests or special take home allowances, etc.
There was a case in the news recently of a woman who graduated with a law degree but only with the exceptional assistance to compensate/cover for her reading disabilities. Obviously, this needs to be formalized as a protected class so she can sue her way into a high-paying job she cannot perform.
"Have you ever heard of progress? They were wrong: children aren't small adults and luckily our modern society has come to understand that. Are you honestly arguing that because they did something back then we should just continue doing it even if it's harmful? I guess you're going to put leeches on your skin too."
I don't advocate that the old ways were the best ways, but they were the old ways and they were around for thousands of years. We needed child labor laws because remarkably, so many parents had no gut instinct against sending their children to work in dangerous factories for 12 hours a day.
Children had to handle working in fields and raising several children of their own while they were still teenagers. We must be built to handle this kind of work load and stress. Thus, I am not sure that children today can't psychologically handle helicopter parents and pressure. My great grandmother was married when she was 8 years old. My father's brother had scarlet fever as a child and was left partially retarded. But he grew up, did the simple jobs he could do and raised two children who eventually became well educated and successful. What is a helicopter parent compared to a severely debilitating disease?
I think our concept of childhood is mostly for us adults. We like to do arts and crafts, so we get our kids to do them. Surely they enjoy this more than factory labor, but it's not clear to me that scheduling a bunch of activities for a kid overtaxes them or harms them in the long term. Given that some forms of expertise require learning at a very early age, it probably does help some people get ahead.
" We needed child labor laws because remarkably, so many parents had no gut instinct against sending their children to work in dangerous factories for 12 hours a day."
I thought child labor laws were to limit an oversupply of workers and thereby support wages. Kids work cheaper than men. If there are no kids available, then there are fewer workers and workers can command higher wages. That is how it was explained to me. I think it is also why child labor laws don't apply to farm work.
My son exhibited strange behaviors that at first I didn't pick up on. My wife did, but I didn't. The more time I spent with my son, though, the more I realized something wasn't quite right. He would "site" objects real close to his face and follow them with his eyes. He would walk with his head to the side, eyes turned and zone out, not paying any attention to us. He would freak out at loud noises, and purposefully hurt himself. He had obsessive pattern behaviors, and we noticed he would go nuts over certain foods, too.
We gradually researched autism as we thought this may be what our son had. I didn't care what they called it. They can call it "WhatTheFu#k-ism" for all I cared. I just wanted to find someone else who had kids that were acting like mine. We found there were many parents in our same situation, and my wife and I are big on the power of food, so without an official diagnosis, we started trying a glutin free, casein free diet that parents of "autistic" kids tried with success. Within the first few days we noticed several weird behaviors stop. When we introduced those foods back, back came the behaviors.
We will not medicate our child as we believe with constant attention, select food choices, and socialization our son will get better.
We're also very skeptical with organizations that make their living from the diagnosis of kids. After all, no diagnosis, no career right?
But, something was off with our son so now we are getting help from people that have years of experience with training methods that work. My wife and I are former computer instructors, so developing lesson plans is not a problem, but these professionals have the best game plans and some of the "tricks" they taught us I may never have thought of on my own, so I've found value in this service they offer.
As for the official diagnosis, though, if we choose to send our son to public school, I think we will keep that to ourselves as we don't want to "labelize" him.
Regardless of all this, it's been one hell of a tough year for us.
On a side note, none of this weird shit happened until we got a vaccination that has now been modified to make it "safer". We don't know for sure if this had anything to do with it, and we believe in getting vaccinations to a certain extent, but we do not agree with all the sh!t fillers they put into the vaccinations for the ride. These are the suspect chemicals that people suspect may cause brain problems. This is just our personal experience. We can't prove anything. All we can go on is our gut.
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