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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

Clearly, RFK is either confidently stupid, or confident he can eventually produce and put something vaguely resembling a key in the kitchen in the alloted timeframe.

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I would be surprised if they don't already have the document drafted up and are just... engineering the results they want to justify the conclusion.

I'm reminded of the comment by a republican adviser, during the second bush presidency, critiquing an interviewer by saying ~ "you're too reality based, we're making reality". The odd thing about this claim that autism is rising, diagnoses sure, but don't any of the adults old enough to remember, remember all the people who we just labelled as strange. I've got a feeling we've got rising numbers of people diagnosed with autism and a corresponding reduction in people labelled and ostracised as non-specific 'strange'

If the increase is due to better diagnostics, then we should see a plateau after a period of time.

A few years ago, I remember hearing reactionary podcasters panicking about trans identity propagating by "social contagion" {their phrase}. The word "contagion" sets up an awful frame around this. I think instead you could come at this from an angle that recognises that there is a kind of social and internalised Overton window, a set of ideas that people are willing to express, or even allow themselves to think. As we increasingly see people living good full lives expressing and owning aspects of themselves that had once been heavily stigmatised - there may be a dynamic beyond just better diagnosis - there may be an uptick of people willing to be more honest about an aspect of themselves that they may otherwise have sought to hide or suppress, others might have been able to avoid even self-awareness. If that is the case - just as there will never be a person who matches the reference human genome - there may be no upper limit to the fraction of people who find some aspect of themselves that extends outside the venn diagram circle of neurotypical.

Quite - it's not as though sexual identity has always been a strict binary between male and female. Other cultures have explicitly recognised different gender identities for ages which makes me think that it's part of the Western Christian cultural identity to only recognise two genders. e.g. Thai culture has a number of different recognised sexual identities and of course, India has the Hijra.

To my mind, people who are anti-trans identities are simply trying to exert control over others rather than having a generous nature and accepting that different people are different.

Trump claimed he could stop the Ukraine war in a day. He wasn't either of those things. Ok, possibly the first, but he knew he could get away with it. In politics you don't have to do what you promise. It's true now more than ever.

He's going to blame vaccines.

Because he’s a dumbass lol.

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