It's certainly not a Get Out of Nuremburg Free card.

One time my family was at a trampoline park, and a kid who was 7 or 8 years old started zinging dodgeballs at my 2 year old, continuing to pummel my small child after several calm pleas to stop. The kid's mom was no where to be seen, and I had just read an article suggesting that it would damage my boy to let other people run over him in my presence. So, I did what any red-blooded American man would do and Tom Brady'ed that kid into next Tuesday. Wife goes to find Attacker-mom, who was having a mommy-meeting about rich people stuff around the corner with half-a-dozen other moms. Attacker-mommy hears Wife's pleas and immediately beings shouting "You can't do that, he has autism!" IDK what we're supposed to do in these situations. ^^^^/humor PS: Add 15 years to the ages of the children and you get today's just-graduated-from-college cult members and the nerdy-kids-still-in-high-school potential recruits, resulting in this foolishness right here.

No, I’m saying that the rationalist blogosphere, where many of the participants are openly on the autism spectrum, has problems of a classically autistic flavor. For instance, eugenics *can* make sense *on paper*, which was why it was popular among progressives before the Nazis demonstrated how deeply dark the bottom of the slippery slope can be. Dismissing eugenics out of hand, as an argument from social consensus, is like an anti-autistic safeguard of decency. Steelmanning eugenics, then, is a slippery slope, leaving society vulnerable to racist, bad-faith arguments that can lead to, idk, the Holocaust. How wrong am I in characterizing an inability to *feel* this truth as what this sub is effectively sneering at, as opposed to “rationalizing” that “prevention of common genetic disorders (what the entire profession of genetic counseling does) justifies a eugenic perspective”?

This! I mean really.