The reason it doesn’t seem like I was arguing against your comment is that indeed, I wasn’t trying to refute your comment. Reconsider your defensiveness. And bear in mind that not all critiques aim to establish a kind of propositional negation of what they address.

Cures for otherwise blinding conditions do exist (e.g., cataract removal, some gene therapies for retinal diseases) and they’re good. I have a condition that will eventually render me blind and I would seek to be cured if a cure existed for it.

But pursuing/promoting cures for disabilities, including blindness, is not without problems. See, in the US for example, the politics of the National Federation of the Blind vs. the Foundation for Fighting Blindness. Cures also raise class issues and threaten to further marginalize people who won’t or can’t be cured, for whatever reason. In particular, imagining a world in which ‘everyone’ is cured is dangerous and even inherently harmful ideology.

Also, while I have some reservations about the rhetoric and what I think it likely really means, there are blind people out there who will tell you they don’t want to be cured because it’s part of who they are and they’re getting along just fine. Such people do exist. A similar sentiment exists for some within the deaf community as well.

Gene therapies for other genetic conditions often do, but then those aren’t neurodevelopmental.

I’m kinda fascinated by the question of how something like this would affect me. Like the way a psychedelic experience can teach us lessons we still retain (and want to hold onto), like the way formative experiences leave deep traces in us even when when we grow and change, what features of autism would always ‘stay with me’ on some level? If things changed perceptually for me, what old habits of mind would I retain? What would I miss most? What would I not miss?

In a lot of ways I think temporary windows into different neurotypes would be much more interesting than purported ‘cures’. People don’t usually want to undo their own personalities, including mental dimensions like neurotypes. But who wouldn’t want to play with that a bit, if they knew it were safe?

This kind of thing is really interesting for what it might teach us about autism and the human brain more generally, but when it comes to the practical applications I just don’t see a future where it doesn’t present a ton of problems. Even when you make it ‘voluntary’, eugenics is dangerous and closely allied with exterminationist sentiment, thinking, and practice.

And it seriously risks, at a minimum, deeply undermining struggles to accommodate rather than erase disabilities. Admittedly this is a step beyond the technical capability, but if a society develops an expectation that some major human variation (be that autism, deafness, blindness, or whatever) be cured rather than accommodated wherever it is a ‘problem’, where does that leave people (or parents) who refuse the cure for themselves (or for their children)? I can easily imagine arguments like ‘if you don’t want problems, just administer the cure! you’re being selfish’, ‘this creates an unnecessary burden’, etc.

Also, to be clear, there’s no accepted notion of ‘autism for mice’ (or any other non-human animal), even if describing animals as autistic can sometimes be arguably useful. So ‘works in mice’ is a phrase that does a lot of work here.

It might do something in humans, but the idea that autism is reducible to genes— and a single gene, at that— strikes me as laughable on its face.

arm the moderate gays

tl;dr: this appears to be an inauthentic Che quote, and the meme seems more or less designed to paint anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic, decolonization as annihilationist/genocidal, etc. I’ve reported this post.

The language of extermination is obviously fraught in this context and plays directly into the hands of those who would equate Zionism with Judaism and Jews. It’s also repulsive in its brutality and childish in its simplicity, even in contexts where it is understood that force is necessary to resist oppression.

Beyond that, the idea that there’s an analogy here isn’t credible. Who is in a position, in Palestine, to oppose and crush a fascist movement in the way successful domestic opposition to fascism has ever been carried out?

Searching for more context, I found a transcript of what appears to be the text of the speech named. It doesn’t mention fascism at all. It does (naturally) address colonialism, which obviously does have a great deal of relevance to Palestine. Maybe we should post some real quotes from that speech instead. He does mention Palestine once:

When we send our greetings from here, and from all the conferences and the places where they may be held, to the heroic peoples of Vietnam, Laos, so-called Portuguese Guinea, South Africa, or Palestine — to all exploited countries fighting for their emancipation — we must simultaneously extend our voice of friendship, our hand and our encouragement, to our fraternal peoples in Venezuela, Guatemala and Colombia, who today, arms in hand, are resolutely saying “No!” to the imperialist enemy.

All of the results I can find for the phrase “exterminate them with bullets” from a quick web search are this very meme, posted simultaneously here, in Hexbear, and various leftie subreddits. I’ve reported this post to the mods.

I’m not on Reddit. If anyone lurking here is also on Reddit, would you please do a web search on the post title and/or some phrases from it and report those posts for our comrades on Reddit? (A couple posts come up when I search on DuckDuckGo, and at least one does on Google)

deleted by creator

you probably already know this, but if your password manager is also what you use to generate your passwords, you may be able to recover it from the generation history, which some password managers store locally

(this has saved me in the past)