Friday, March 7, 2008

Dumb McCain Shit



Last night I couldn't remember what I'd read about McCain lately that had disappointed me. Turns out he's banging the drum for the crazies who think that vaccination causes autism.

5 comments:

Qhorin said...

He does sound embarrassingly uninformed.

I almost posted a week ago on the improving visibility of autistics as so many of them are active bloggers/networkers. Lesson being the Internet is for porn, and auties.

Unknown said...

There's a great activist for autism who uses YouTube and A Second Life to help change ingrained ideas about people with autism. This video is a good starting place. Anyway, RE: McCain, those statements he made are a pretty lame attempt at making him seem like the candidate for the underdog.

Qhorin said...

That's the one. Wired magazine had an excellent article on autism which highlighted the video's creator/actor.

Unknown said...

I caught an upload of a UK tech news show talking about her. The clips of her Second Life avatar are priceless, because rather than create some kind of idealized character she took the time to make her avatar look just of odd shaped as she is, then programmed all the funny tics and stuff into it.

avk said...

To be fair, when researchers were bandying about the autism/vaccine correlation it got a lot of press. I know. I read it all because I happened to be getting my infant son vaccinated in southeast Asia at the time. Its debunking? Not so much.

So we're getting down on McCain for what? Rattling off some out-of-date information (that experts in the field were spouting not that long ago)on what we have to admit is a fringe topic? I have to think that, if the intent is to kick McCain in the shin, we can do better than this.

At the same time (based on the comments to the Crooks and Liars article), there's still a lot of horrible misinformation out there- including one comment that was clearly confusing autism with the slew of behavioral disorders that we're giving our children Ritalin for these days.

So did we net a positive here? I'm pretty sure I can't be bothered to do the math.

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