{"id":26486,"date":"2020-01-06T14:27:34","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T20:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=26486"},"modified":"2020-01-06T14:30:49","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T20:30:49","slug":"26486","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=26486","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The Martyrdom of Saint Greta of Sweden<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So Meat Loaf caused a little kerfuffle this weekend by saying\u00a0he thought Greta Thunberg had been “brainwashed.”<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t know that should be a surprise, but it got me thinking about her\u00a0again<\/a>. I have a lot of sympathy for the kid.<\/p>\n

For me, it started with seeing her picture. She’s small, slight, even scrawny; her head looks out of proportion to her body. She’s now 17 (as of 3 January) but she still looks childlike, prepubertal, younger than her 14-year-old sister. Frankly, she looks like she’s been in a concentration camp: malnourished over the long term<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sure enough, reading a little about her, we find that she’s an Asperger’s child (I guess this month that’s now called “high-functioning autism”), she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, she stopped eating for months and still refuses to eat anything but certain specific things, in particular, a dish of pancakes filled with rice \u2014 but her OCD keeps her from eating if there’s a sticker or label on the package. She suffers from “selective mutism”, which means basically that there are situations in which she’s unable to speak……..<\/p>\n

Her public career started when she took Fridays off from school to hold up a sign outside the Swedish Parliament; this grew into a movement that spread throughout Europe.<\/p>\n

Through it all, things keep striking me as odd. I don’t know what it’s like in Sweden, but cutting classes one day a week isn’t normally feted as heroic in the US. And she hasn’t been attending school for months as she traveled. In the US, that’s called “dropping out”.<\/p>\n

So, this is what we’re being asked to believe: that an autistic kid with OCD who often can’t speak on her own has<\/p>\n