Quote from daily mail

I was reading an article in the daily mail today about an autistic adult and came across this piece of information.

Any comments???

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people with autism have trouble with social, emotional and communication skills that usually develop before the age of three and last throughout a person’s life. 

Specific signs of autism include: 

  • Reactions to smell, taste, look, feel or sound are unusual
  • Difficulty adapting to changes in routine
  • Unable to repeat or echo what is said to them
  • Difficulty expressing desires using words or motions
  • Unable to discuss their own feelings or other people’s
  • Difficulty with acts of affection like hugging
  • Prefer to be alone and avoid eye contact
  • Difficulty relating to other people
  • Unable to point at objects or look at objects when others point to them

'Autistic people aren't scary or vicious or aggressive, they can be vulnerable people and are totally entitled to have their part in society and be represented,' she said.

  • we now have an ignorant, child-like population that is easy to rile-up and point towards a target - just like it was in 1930s Germany.

    People are conditioned to react rather than analyse and prioritise. There's also the fact that people cannot deviate a decision outside of the ideologies that they subscribe to. People will prefer to appear moral by voicing an "opinion", which most of the time is a cookie cutter mantra, rather than actually acting upon something. It's more about appearances than actual action.

    Include the Guardian as well as the more establishment broadsheets. You get pretty good coverage then. 

    The Guardian is as establishment as the Daily Mail. It's all reactionary spin. Another Pavlovian bell for the people who subscribe to the massive amount of cultural doctrine that it's demographic is aimed at.

    If you use social media, make sure you follow a few people you fundamentally disagree with.

    This is very true. In general it's good to have people around who disagree with you over things. It keeps you out of an echo chamber, and it stops you being over-sensitive to other people's opinions. I don't need to totally disengage with someone because we have a difference of view over a few things.

    Reuters is one of the best places to get news. First for most stories. Very little bias. Most of the rags buy their stories from either them or AP. The real stories anyway. If I'm really concerned or interested about something I read there I will look more into it.

    Another publication that is interesting is FT. If you read between the lines, and know who owns what, and who's trading certain things, you begin to see where the trends are headed.

  • I stopped getting papers several years ago.  I get The Week now, which gives a really good digest of the week's news - and it's balanced by giving reports from across the spectrum of news media - left-wing, right-wing, broadsheets, red tops, TV and foreign media.

  • I dip into multiple newspaper publications each morning. Independent, Guardian, Daily Mail (for their positive approach to women (sic)) and The Times 

  • The dispute between the Mail & the guardian!

    I must be one of the few that reads both.

  • Read a range of newspapers. Include the Guardian as well as the more establishment broadsheets. You get pretty good coverage then. 

    If you use social media, make sure you follow a few people you fundamentally disagree with. It keeps you honest and keeps you from sitting in a bubble of like-minded people. Don't use facebook as a news source. 

  • Unfortunately, with so many deliberate lies being told by governments and people looking for personal gain and the press not doing any real reporting, just cutting-n-pasting what turns up in their inbox, it's very difficult to sort the truth from the lies.

    To not read a newspaper makes you uninformed.

    To read a newspaper makes you misinformed

  • And that wave of populism is sweeping the world - though I think there's some plausibility in the oft-heard complaint about the complacency of the elite liberal establishment.

    Whatever anyone's views on the EU and Brexit are, I like to think that a lot of 'leave' voters were driven by more than populist rhetoric and scare stories.  But a recent YouGov poll doesn't help me to be confident in that belief: 47% of Leave voters in the EU referendum (from a sample, I assume) believe the government is deliberately hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living in the UK.  31% of Leave voters believe immigration to the UK is 'part of a bigger plan to make Muslims a majority of the country's population' (presumably they mean only Muslims from Pakistan and similar countries, not white ones).  12% of Leave voters think global warming is a hoax. 

    A guy I used to work with - very definitely not anti-immigration - said he voted 'Leave' solely on the basis of the NHS money, as advertised on Boris's Battle Bus.... even though that had already been rubbished by the time of the referendum!

  • Unfortunately, the DM demonstrates that the dumbing down of the population and the training to make decisions without logic or facts has been very successful - we now have an ignorant, child-like population that is easy to rile-up and point towards a target - just like it was in 1930s Germany.

  • And the sad thing is - people believe it.  I waded into a furore on a mental health group on FB once where a bunch of women in the US were ripping into some UK woman who was the victim of a Mail Online fabrication.  She was claiming ESA because of MH issues... but they had a story about her using the money to pay for beauty treatment.   It took some doing on my part to convince them that the story might as well have been in Fortean Times.  They initially gave me a lot of abuse for 'defending the feckless and welfare cheats.'

  • I remember a few years ago - as part of the Mail's ongoing demonisation of (amongst others) benefit claimaints - they ran a 'story' about a young unemployed guy who claimed he was refusing to look for work because it would interfere with his fitness training regime.  They had photos of him working out in a gym, etc.

    Finally, following an investigation, they admitted the story was fabricated - and they'd used an actor in the photos. 

    It's a shameful, spiteful little rag.

  • Read some of Autism Speaks stuff. They are literally full of this kind of bollocks.

  • The DM is classed as unreliable news - their website content is a mix of paid advertorial, political press releases, celeb's promotional puplicity releases and blatant click-bait - there is no actual news. I'm not even sure the 'journalists' work in any office - it seems to be a hap-hazard bunch of illiterates cutting-n-pasting content from the internet and posting it on the site. there's no coherence except for spinning every 'story' into 'outrage' for clicks.

    My ad-blocker reports over 90 trackers on any page. Beware.

  • You are probably right! 

  • Would have taken longer. The Mail does not lovingly craft their stories. They crank them out as quickly as possible. Often regurgitating other sources. We have probably spent longer talking about this story than they spent writing it. 

  • They did not. The Mail Online is a digital sweatshop. Low paid grunts turning out as much click bait as possible. They would not take the time to contact the CDC. The CDC ranks high in Google and is quick to cut and paste. 

    Besides the Mail Online target audience is mid-Atlantic. 

  • Sorry just saw your explanation of why they used cdc. Surely NHS or nas would have had plenty of info available though . 

  • Yes but we are in the UK and this happened in London why did they contact an American agency? 

  • No, the CDC perform some of the role that NICE perform in the UK. They have handy reference materials that the Mail hacks can cut and paste to bulk out their word count.