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Trump and RFK blame acetaminophen for childhood autism. I couldn’t find a transcript yet, but the meandering press conference is recorded here. Was this on anyone’s bingo cards?
I’m confused. I vaguely knew that the Trump campaign had decided to fight autism at some point, but I always figured it was appeasement for the antivaxxers. Is there an untapped pool of Tylenol haters out there? Is this a stalking horse for a broader wave of FDA guidelines targeting the usual suspects?
Maybe there’s some sort of political smokescreen going on. We don’t appear to have started any new wars, and domestic hate for Trump looks more or less like it did since last week. If it’s a distraction, it’s not a very efficient one; I had a hard time finding reporting on it, and all the sites that bothered were also eagerly blasting his abuses of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. That leaves the old-fashioned political motive of throwing meat to the base. Maybe Trump is just checking off campaign promises. But again, it’s so niche.
I suppose there could be some sort of personal beef. If Trump is trying to tank someone’s stock, uh, this is still a pretty weird way to do it.
That’s not even touching the medical case. The administration doesn’t appear to have provided much substance behind their claim. This will dissuade approximately no one. Enjoy your fresh CW battleground.
Why is the American right so obsessed with autism and discovering some unknown or suppressed cause for it?
Politicising medicine in general is baffling to me, like how Ivermectin is right-wing while vaccines are left-wing (and I remember 20 years ago most antivax people were leftwing). At some point it feels like American politics is about picking any conceivable topic and flipping a coin to declare one side Republican and the other Democrat.
It's simple, over the last decades, the left has succesfully taken over multiple fields through academia, including medicine, and there is a fear from conservatives that this political capture is tainting the quality of the science that comes out of it. In some fields of medicine, particularly those at the intersection of hard sciences and social sciences, for instance study of the transgender phenomena, it's hard to argue that the conservatives don't have a massive point. In more hard science aligned ones, such as which drugs are effective/dangerous, it's less legible, but the conservatives do have (IMO) a smaller point that the left relishes the power to force public policy and is not wielding it objectively. The gleefulness with which they they resorted to coercive methods to force people to vaccinate during COVID is a great example.
I’m not American so I’m not too familiar with what you’re describing. Where I live the vaccination enforcement and lockdown measures were significantly harsher than anywhere in the US, and there was broad social support from all political parties. Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
And the right in the US, especially in its current MAGA incarnation, is just as gleeful in its authoritarian tendencies. It doesn’t even feel economically right wing anymore; tariffs, protectionism, anti-immigration, the government having ownership of major companies… that was all leftist policy 50-60 years ago.
If they knew for sure that they did, they might. But when they see the medical establishment visibly torturing the science to fit the progressive agenda in subfields that are legible to laypeople (see again, transgenderism, or the immediate endorsement of BLM protests from the american medical establishment despite the pandemic), the result is distrust of the pronouncements in the subfields that are not as legible. If you're lying to my face about something that I can independantly observe, why would I just shut up and believe you when it comes to something I'm not able to observe?
I’m actually in agreement that there is political distortion from the left in the social sciences (less so in medicine), but the American right has not presented any credible alternative and instead doubled down on even worse distortions of their own, and burning down the whole thing. The American medical establishment supporting protests (perhaps due to internal political pressures?) does not mean you should distrust the whole institution when it comes to non politically influenced matters.
I’m transgender myself, and I would love for the left to stay out of my medical condition, and for there to be actual studying of the phenomenon and treatment options without political bias influencing it. Unfortunately the right does not offer any solutions and seems interested in stopping research and putting laws that restrict treatment.
I was a fan of the anti-woke movement early on - the intellectual dark web so to speak - but it really feels like Americans just traded one flavour of woke for another.
The right totally offers solutions -- see that clip that was circulating of Charlie Kirk talking to somebody considering hormones; you just don't like the solution. (ie. talk therapy, find a way to be comfortable in your own body that doesn't involve intense, largely unstudied, lifelong pharmaceutical intake + extremely invasive surgeries, carry on with life)
The politicization is the reason that this hasn't been studied -- while there's no intrinsic reason such a study couldn't be done in an ethical way, you would struggle to get it by and IRB (due to politics), and even taking such a thing on would be a death sentence both career-wise and socially in the current campus/PMC political milieu.
Why are you blaming the right when the left has blocked all the paths (ed. other than the one that they chose, apparently for political reasons) to a scientific solution? "Burn it down and start over" seems like the only thing to be done in the current situation, and it's not the right that has brought us here.
And what if those other solutions just don't work? I did try talk therapy for years, I did everything I could to convince myself I didn't need to transition. I went to the gym and became very physically fit, I dated men and women both, I talked to TERFs and tried to read what they said with an open mind. And yet, the pharmaceutical route - just a estradiol gel you apply daily to your skin - is so far what has made me the most comfortable in my body and reduced my body dysmorphia by a huuge amount.
The history of trans medicine goes back over a hundred years and is not just a fringe modern leftist medical movement. If you read say, Harry Benjamin's famous book from the 1960s, he describes how psychotherapy has been completely unable to cure transsexuals and transvestites from their mental affliction and provides numerous psychiatrist reports to that effect. This is from a time when gender non-confirming behavior risked severe social disapproval, and was often outright illegal, and all pressure would have been on patients to not be a transsexual as opposed to today where there is acceptance and even encouragement. Psychotherapy has advanced since the 1960s sure, but why do you think talk therapy would be more effective at reducing gender dysphoria now than it did back when transitioning meant losing your job, your family, your friends?
There's plenty wrong with the modern trans movement, I won't deny that. But the right wing proposal - "find a way to be comfortable with your own body", "carry on with life", I'm sorry, that's not an actionable solution I can put in practice, that just sounds like "cope harder". Why would I subject myself to lifelong psychological pain, have it be this constant weight on my shoulder, have difficulty being intimate with a partner when I can just... accept that I'm trans, follow an established treatment plan, and have all that inner suffering massively reduced? I didn't pick that option out of some ideological belief, it's just the best option I tried so far, and I'm lucky enough that it hasn't had any negative social or professional consequences.
I do think talk therapy, etc, have a place as a first-line intervention and everyone is too quick to jump to puberty blockers/HRT, but ultimately I agree with you: estradiol worked, the other things didn't.
I even had reason recently to stop it for a while which seemed like a good chance to test if it was still necessary or whether the other changes were enough. Sure enough, things were terrible again (long after the period where the hormone changes had largely settled down).
My position is that it's kind of like chemo: it may not solve things and dear God don't do it if you don't have the relevant issue, but if it works it's invaluable.
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Give it a couple decades and the cycle will start again.
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Of course the right doesn't have any replacement, outside of "rogue" doctors and scientists who by being outside of the medical establishment will cluster around non-central views.
But you can hardly blame them; just telling the right to shut up and inject whatever people that have already clearly revealed themselves to be their ideological enemies tell them to is not going to go smoothly. Even if they cannot really tell whether what they're asked is harmful or not, the people telling them to do it are not trustworthy anymore.
It's the same with libraries; having a place funded by the community where kids can discover reading material for free is great, perhaps even important, and I think everyone in that community would agree with in general. But if the librarians insist they must host drag queen story hour, and that this is not a negociable part of its functions, despite it being considered unacceptable by a very large part of the community, then they shouldn't be surprised if the answer is to cut funding to the library, even if it affects the non-objectionable part of its functions.
Basically, the left is learning, a bit late, that they cannot hold important impartial societal functions hostage to get their way in politics. The right is willing (and increasingly able) to shoot the hostages to remove the threat.
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Rather in the same way that a cop killing an innocent person is more outrageous than rando killing someone; the cop is supposed to protect people, and is empowered by the state to do so. I have high standards for the medical and scientific establishment and find it particularly perverse and outrageous when they cave to/follow political pressure. I have very low standards for a populist movement of anti-vaxxers and fox news youtube clip viewers led by Orange Man.
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