I’d say all 3.
For diseases du jour, don’t forget hypoglycemia (big in the 70s), “anorexia”, fibromyalgia, and SADD.
I am so glad I am not familiar with the esteemed Mr Savage–I have limited energy for outrage these days and he seems more like an obstreperous and recalcitrant preschooler than anything else.
My dad takes everything he says as gospel, but he never, ever believes one word of what the rest of the family thinks, cause we’re book learned. My mom has been teaching in elementary schools for 20 years and she deals with autism diagnosis everyday. To be officially labeled as autistic requires a rather lengthy and involved process of all sorts of gizmos and scanners and such with, but my dad firmly believes that my mom and everyone else is just making it up.
He also believes that since he’s 1/8th Cherokee, he deserves a million dollars “like all the other indians get”
And that global warming is a lie by democrats in order to… well… he doesn’t really know, but he knows it’s bad
Etc, etc, etc
The problem with this pit thread is that both sides are talking about absolutes. Savage is spot on a lot, maybe even a majority of the time, as other posters have noted in their observations of the the diagnosis du jour. That doesn’t meant that there aren’t real kids with real autism, a real medical condition that needs real medical treatment. However, is Savage is wrong for making the blanket statement that autism is a fraud, SVF is equally wrong (and startlingly naive) to deny that much of what is diagnosed as autism today isn’t.
Some statements inspire debate. Others, one hopes only to back away slowly from the room before one is noticed.
I meant the majority of the time in this article, on autism, that was posted by the OP. If the entire article is longer and contains other elements, I can’t speak to them, and I haven’t really read anything else he’s written, although I did read his book on the seven deadly sins years ago, I thought it was amusing.
Why on God’s green earth would anyone SEEK a dx of an autism spectrum disorder for their child? Do they WANT their lives to be run by therapy appointments, insurance claims, and IEP meetings with idiot school district people? Do they WANT to spend $5000 - 10,000 per month on good private services when they can get no reasonable or appropriate services from their SD? Do they WANT days, weeks and years of frustration, fear, anger and hopelessness?
Fuck that guy and his opinions. He has no idea what he is talking about.
A legitimate dx is usually the result of a warning by a pediatrician, followed by extensive testing by speech therapists, OTs & PTs, autism specialists (PhD please, not a school district employee with a BA and a seminar) and at least one neurologist. It isn’t quick, easy, cheap OR desirable.
:rolleyes:
Some people just want answers.
Some people see in it the hope of a solution.
Or a suitable excuse for their powerlessness.
Then there’s the Hypochondria / Munchausen By Proxy crowd, which is larger than people would believe.
Yeah, I found the article about how he was fired for it.
To be fair, the guy later turned out to be a prank caller, but Savage was unaware of that at the time.
Dude’s a homophobic, racist, nutbag who should rot in hell.
This is to Chimera-
Oh, I don’t mean that people don’t want answers. What I am saying is that I cannot imagine someone WANTING an autism dx. Believe me, what I WANTED to hear was “It’s nothing, he’ll grow out of it, kids develop at different rates.”
And a parent looking for “the hope of a solution” in autism may be disappointed, in most cases.
A dx is not an end, it’s a beginning. A beginning I wouldn’t wish on anyone. 
He should have been fired in the same way Leela told Fry he would be fired in the first episode of Futurama:
Fry: What if I don’t want to do it?
Leela: Then you’ll be fired…
**Fry: **Fine!
Leela: …out of a cannon…into the Sun.
EJ:
But what you’re not understanding (because you are sane and love your child) is that there are people on this planet who do not love their child and would be content to have a label affixed to their kid, so that they do not have to do any of the real work of parenting. This is fairly common in mental illness–parents take kid to a psychologist who diagnoses X and urges the family to ALL get help. This is unacceptable to mom and dad (who are oblivious to the fact that they are walking pathologies) and they doctor shop until Junior is placed in whatever box (ie label) that satisfies them. Of course, at the same time, the parent’s pathologies may indeed exacerbate whatever issues the kid had in the first place…
There used to a doctor on staff (he is now dead) who used to talk about his no good son and how he had tried everything to get him “right” and set him straight etc to no avail. Given the inappropriateness of the venue (he was supposed to be making rounds), my sympathies usually lay with the son.
And of course, there are those parents who genuinely have tried everything to no avail–such stories are heartbreaking. Mr Savage should be grateful he didn’t have to live that type of family life, but I’m sure that’s never occurred to him.
Deaf kids aren’t really deaf. They’re just being disrespectful and ignoring you. Next time you talk to your “deaf” kid and they don’t respond, give 'em a good whack upside the head. That’ll set 'em straight.
I am pretty sure you have Michael Savage confused with Dan Savage, who did write an amusing book about the seven deadly sins. Google them both, compare and contrast, and I bet you’ll get a chuckle out of it.
I can’t stand to listen to him. I’m ashamed he calls himself a conservative.
I have a step-nephew with Asberger’s. I can tell you, there is something definitely wrong with him. It’s not something that can be corrected by snapping “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.”
He’s a sweet kid, but he is never going to be able to live without a strong support system from his family. Jeez, you might as well tell some kid with Down’s Syndrome to wipe that look off his face. :rolleyes:
Do you have any valid stats showing the truth of the autistic claims? Are there actually false claims of autistic behavior? I will say that it seems that there is more press about autism, so that an older person with no empathy (M.Savage) would think it a bit suspicious.
:dubious:
The two aren’t mutually exlusive. At all.
(Sure, Michael Savage is probably an asshole. But that kind of seems like a disingenious rebuttal)
I can’t imagine where to even look for something like that.
Why not start another thread about it?
Zzzzzzing.
First of all, Savage was born “Michael Weiner.” He never talks about it, but his silence about his Jewish origins strike me as shame and self-loathing. As a young man, he was a leftist and hung out with beatnicks like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Learey. Supposedly there are even photos of him swimming naked with Ginsberg, who was homosexual. Sometimes I suspect that Savage himself is in the closet, and that his extreme anti-gay rhetoric is some kind of compensation for this. Before his career as a political pundit, he wrote many books about plants and herbs and natural medicine, and was very successful in this field.
When he reinvented himself as a man of the people, and turned into a savage, his image was drastically altered. I have seen his videos on Youtube - he drives onto the stage in a gigantic red convertible, looking exactly like Hunter Thompson on the cover of “Better Than Sex,” complete with the Stetson hat and leather jacket over a flannel shirt. He fancies himself a cowboy and a tough-guy. He was never in the military, yet ceaselessly advocates warfare, which bothers me, nevertheless he seems very popular with servicemen. He speaks with an unbelievably powerful delivery, which frequently turns into very loud bellowing and cursing. In this regard, I have to say he is definitely more entertaining than O’Reilly or any of those other mainstream guys on Fox. He’s not afraid to say fuck, shit, son of a bitch and other cuss words, which I like. He also has a hell of a stage presence, almost like a stand up comedian. So there are things about him I like even though I disagree with most of his politics.
The thing I dislike most about Savage is his pompous re-invention of his persona. I wonder, if his fans knew of the Jewish hippie beatnik new-age herbalist Mikey Weiner, who used to swim nude with other men and gaze upon their weinerschnitzels with great glee, if they would still like him as much, or if they’d suspect him a charlatan.