Your uncle sounds awesome.

I have a childhood friend who was very recently diagnosed with autism. We talked a little while ago and he brought it up. My first thought was "ah, yep, that explains a lot".

He's still a great friend. It didn't change anything about him, rather it helped make sense of his behaviors that we all just saw as "that's just how [friend] is".

There is an incorrect belief that autism is on the rise and that it must be caused by something, but in reality we are just getting better at identifying it and diagnosing people correctly. So it's not that there is an autism epidemic, we're just discovering that it's less rare of a condition than previously assumed.

Autism

Have we tried slapping them out of existence? Or just telling them to think harder and maybe that'll make them stop existing?

I heard there's also a galaxy outbreak happening as we speak

It's probably a reading error that will go away if we ignore it.

Hell, I'd even go so far as to say it might not be worth a specific categorization, that everyone is a bit different and we don't need to pigeonhole every state of reasonably normal into little categories. Ever since Asperger's was popularized, we had a big chunk of people that are not especially far from normal latching onto this.

If it doesn't need particularly special treatment/accommodation, then it's not really worth a category. If someone feels like not dealing with people, needing a bit of a break from it, then that shouldn't need to be correlated to a condition. By the same token, it can't be an excuse for being unreasonable to others when you are perfectly capable of being reasonable, you just don't like doing so. If you misread someone's non-verbal cues, whether or not you have a "condition", people should understand that's just a possibility of everyday life.

Absolutely! In fact, I'd argue that this is true for many conditions that we treat as disabilities, like dyslexia (which is rarely disabling) and the aforementioned autism. Both of these conditions have disadvantages and advantages. The situation is not black and white; simply because society was designed one way, does not mean that everyone who does not perfectly fit in is disabled or has a illness.

Wholeheartedly agree with this! IMO our societies have a big problem with people being different.

That's my opinion, but I attribute this liberalism: when the society's philosophy is to attribute 5he responsibility of anyone's success on each self person, it means the responsability to fit in is on the person itself and not on the society. This removes the burden of inclusion from the society, the group, and make it a burden of adaptation on the person. It is a toxic societal environment.

As an argument to this point of view: making it an illness provide a justification for the person to be different, and a responsability for the society to accommodate disabled people. But the need to go to this extreme instead of simply being tolerant and accommodating any difference is both stupid (because it is a burden for both the victims and the society to hold discussions about basic needs) and a inhuman way of treating people.

Another argument to my thesis is that the "epidemic" is coincidental with societal individualism (pushed by liberalism and that rose since the end of ww2) and the decline of social structures like church and government help (because liberalism was about fighting government involvement in people's lives).

The tldr for this is Neurodiversity

Almost all disabilities exist only within the context of a culture. They are a human applied label.

I recon most disabled people can do more advanced complex tasks than any animal/pet. Yet we do don't think of our pets as disabled.

We are all born with a useless appendix, which can potentially burst and kill us. If someone was born without. Would we all have a disability compared to them.

Someone with only one arm is considered disabled, extra fingers? If its not the default it’s considered disabled.

Now imagine a humanoid alien race with only 1 arm and a hand with 6 fingers. And imagine what their keyboards may look like. A normal human in their society would be considered disabled. Not because you cant use the keyboard but because you would struggle using a tool not designed for you.

Now the reason why you still want a diagnosis even when you agree with the above is simple. Society has not evolved this perspective. We can accommodate almost all disabilities but they key to getting that help is by first bureaucratically “registering” yourself as disabled by a medical professional.