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Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Yeah, they could just as easily pivot to “Well, sure, autism was around before that, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.” Kind of like cancer and modern carcinogens. It’s just a foolish line of argument that makes us look stupid.

And it’s completely unnecessary. The evidence that autism is genetic is overwhelming. Anyone who is going to listen to facts already has the facts right there, and anyone else isn’t worth trying to convince.

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squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Yeah, they could just as easily pivot to “Well, sure, autism was around before that, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.”

In fact, that was their actual argument. This is what Trump said:

First, effective immediately, the FDA will be notifying physicians that the use of, well, let’s see how we say that. Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen. Is that okay? Which is basically, commonly known as Tylenol. Can be associated with a very increased risk of autism. So taking Tylenol is not good. I’ll say it, it’s not good.

Within the rest of the rest of the speech you can clearly see where Trump goes off script and does his regular monkey-in-a-suit act, and he says stupid shit as always, but that up there is the core claim: “Can be associated with a very increased level of autism.”

That’s a claim that’s totally not affected by the “but autism existed before Tylenol” argument.

The whole argument is a strawman, nothing else. And that’s really infuriating because there are ample real arguments for this point. It’s not hard to argue that Tylenol has no link to Autism. But making up a strawman argument and butchering to even tear that strawman down is ridiculous.

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