I see that stellar and nearly omnipotent funding body, autism speaks has awarded a $25,000 grant to help with job training and placement. I suppose Gadfly can now eat his words about autism speaks putting on their dog and pony autism in the workplace show that I wrote about previously. I had bemoaned the fact that when autism speaks its words are louder than it's actions. With this new unprecedented grant I guess this is no longer true.
Of course Gadfly still wonders why Laurent Mottron's grant to study "enhanced perceptual functioning" in autistics was twenty times larger than the grant given to Woodrow Wilson rehabilitation center. Apparently autism speaks feels it is 20 times more important to study how well certain high functioning autistic people can find embedded figures, do well on the block design subtest of the Wechsler and how they have perfect pitch and other superior talents on given tests than it is to help unemployed autistics find jobs. It seems to me that autism speaks has some rather strange priorities.
$25,000 dollar smokescreen. Cheap at the price. Minuscule to the point of irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteI think $25,000 per autistic for work support would be more useful.
But then AS was founded as a research and eradication program, not a social welfare organisation.
Have you seen the remarkable resemblance between John Best in his new video and Larry Arnold? Astonishing.
You are correct, autism speaks was originally founded as an organization to fund scientific research for the purposes of mitigating autistic symptoms and ultimately curing autism (whether you want to call that eradication is a matter of semantics and interpretation). However, they have branched out into other things, such as a lobbying organization to pass certain legislation in the U.S., an organization to publicize certain causes, and education and even a social welfare program for the rich given they have handed John Robison free money.
ReplyDeleteSo, now that they have branched into other things, they might as well do it right and yes, 25 grand is petty cash for such a noble cause, considering they fund Mottron and Michelle Dawson who has stated the people who help pay for her research "make her sick". and they would pay for the films of someone who says that autism is a good thing. It was in that spirit that my post was written.