Retarded hasn’t been a slur against the mentally disabled in the common vernacular for a while now. Well, until people decided that it’s the new term to get offended for others about.
Language is always changing, and its meaning is now synonymous with moron (which also used to be a medical term for the intellectually disabled).
Context and intent is key, and it’s clear that they weren’t disparaging the mentally disabled.
Really? Did you not read the original comment? Because that’s how I used it on the playground when I was a child. I asserted another person was less due to an intellectual disability, normalizing that it’s OK to insult people using a term that once upon a time neutrally described the intellectually disabled. And then I learned that it isn’t OK to punch down, that the people used as an insult were as human and deserving of respect as myself.
Fuck off with your bad faith nonsense. The original comment is exactly why it became a slur in the first place.
Because that’s how I used it on the playground when I was a child.
I feel like there is a concession here?
I asserted another person was less due to an intellectual disability, normalizing that it’s OK to insult people using a term that once upon a time neutrally described the intellectually disabled.
This is explicitly what they’re saying it doesn’t mean. They’re not referring to literal mentally handicapped people. They’re using a casual if aggressive put-down towards people who demonstrate profound anti-intellectualism in a way those people would understand as a means to viscerally and painfully insult them.
And they’re doing so in a way that doesn’t mentally police their own language. Self policing perpetually requires cognitive effort and second guessing. It puts you culturally on the backfoot. If you want to fight rightwing demons, you have to go for the jugular on a pure red boiling instinctual level, or you lose. You have to fight so hard that there is collateral damage, otherwise the average person will simply see you as inauthentic and overly clean and calculated.
Further, ableism and other particular ‘isms’ like racism and sexism are not directly comparable. Talk about bad faith. Ableism based insults directly reference material capabilities in the person you are insulting, definitionally. Racism and Sexism are bad because they prescriptively assign people to irrational and prejudiced stereotypes about their weakness or unworthiness. Ableism just directly references perceived weakness. This is still rude and mean spirited, and thus can easily be bad. But it is simply not the same.
I am autistic. When people insult rightwinger’s social behavior by calling them a cringey autist (and yes, I’ve seen this) it does sting. It does bring about some bitterness because I did not choose to be this way. But I get it… I understand. If it hurts the rightwinger, its probably worth it. And I’ve even engaged in the same seeming self loathing indulgence to get at people who need to be brought down a peg.
There is no moral difference between calling someone “stupid” and using the R word, except in the impact of the term. And the modern rightwinger gives absolutely no shits if you call them an “asshole”. In fact, many of them like that, they’ll even embrace their lack of morals with pride.
And then I learned that it isn’t OK to punch down, that the people used as an insult were as human and deserving of respect as myself.
Correction: Its harmful to punch down. Its more harmful to refuse to punch down as some kind of holy rule if it weakens a righteous cause to more broadly protect the weak. By destroying a rightwinger’s pride through such humiliation of their material ability you are helping the weak, even if through “splash damage” you also hurt their feelings.
That said: I don’t even think any of my politically tactical justifications here are wholly needed. Sometimes you want to hurt who you rightfully hate and are willing to damage yourself and others to do it. Rational ethics do not always come into the picture when you are facing the end of the world. Its just eye rolling to expect clean language as we sink into the fires of hell.
Sometimes you want to emotionally unburden yourself and metaphorically just rip a pigs head off in the mud because the world has shit on you when you did not deserve it. My visceral hatred of the average dipshit rightwinger is so intense as to nearly be the reason I’ve not off’d myself. I’m almost surviving off spite right now.
More that I did unacceptable things as a child and grew out of them. An appeal that I’m not some righteous figure, just someone who wants to do better and would like to see that elsewhere.
This is explicitly what they’re saying it doesn’t mean. They’re not referring to literal mentally handicapped people.
There is nowhere in there that implies this. It explicitly compares republicans to the intellectually disabled in an equality for the purposes of insult. The republicans were the expressly intended person to be insulted, the intellectually disabled (kinda get using the damned slur, it’s a lot faster) being the undesirable comparison.
And they’re doing so in a way that doesn’t mentally police their own language. Self policing perpetually requires cognitive effort and second guessing.
Everyone self polices to some extent. We stand in lines, we don’t steal, etc, etc. We refrain from using terminology that would hurt others. This is not a high bar. It’s the base line. Feels like the only reason it’s seen as acceptable is because you can shout that word and not have an angry mob delete you. Use the n-slur on the other hand and no power in the universe will save you depending on where you’re standing. But I digress.
I am autistic. When people insult rightwinger’s social behavior by calling them a cringey autist (and yes, I’ve seen this) it does sting.
That’s the point. I’m autistic too and instead of tolerating shit, backsliding behavior that was picked up from the people we are all agreeing are terrible, I said something. We can rage against them without hurting others. We can have some community standards. Hell, they’re defending pedophiles. Why are we using their slurs when they hand us such terrible ones to use? (Argument goes here for using the language they understand, which I don’t have an argument against).
Sometimes you want to hurt who you rightfully hate and are willing to damage yourself and others to do it. Rational ethics do not always come into the picture when you are facing the end of the world.
Respect for the honesty. And I don’t totally disagree. The kid that recently became the ‘ok’ meme comes to mind. And his way seems more moral. Though it’s hard to punch Nazis through the screen.
Ultimately, this ‘purity test’ isn’t a hard one. This is ‘write your name on the paper’ level. Debating things like Al Green getting ousted from congress for shit he did decades before is debatable, and a good debate to have. Using slurs that were resurrected by awful people should not be that difficult, nor elicit such discussion. It should be the baseline.
Yes, and apparently my reading comprehension is better than yours. They’re saying Republican Trump supporters are so dumb their intelligence is on the level of someone with an intellectual disability.
They’re not disparaging the mentally disabled or saying that mentally disabled people are lesser. They’re making a comparison.
But I bet you’d be perfectly fine if they had called Trump supporters morons, which is exactly the same type of insult as retarded.
They are making a distinctly unfavorable comparison (or was the monster in the picture that started this a compliment?) by comparing repugnant, morally vacant people to the mentally disabled in an equality. They are saying that republicans are lesser and that they are the same as the intellectually disabled, which would make the intellectually disabled lesser by logic we learned in elementary school.
It’s not hard to not use a slur. There are a great many insults out there. Have some standards.
And yeah, moron probably would have missed me. It was a slur before my time. And now, I’ll update my internal no-no list. Thanks, that’s correct. That’s a common way people improve, but being called out on shitty behavior.
There is a correct and good community building way to address this issue, and there is a “Gotcha, fucker! you made a mistake in your words, I’m gonna yell at you on the internet!” way of dealing with this issue.
The correct way would be to privately message the person and say, “Hey, please don’t use that kind of language, it is offensive”
They might have gone back and edited it.
I feel like people have forgotten the concept of face, since the internet is anonymous, and a lot of flame wars happen because people do not consider each other’s faces when they are talking to each other.
So if you really consider the impact of derailing a conversation about how Republicans and Trump supporters and fascist pedophiles are destroying the entire world and making everyone on the planet miserable to say, “Hey, you used a word that is offensive to people with mental difficulties”, then I would say that you were in the wrong for addressing your concern in the way that you did, not that your concern itself was wrong.
Or you call them out in public because discretion just lets things fester. Shame me when I do shameful things, I beg you. Shit like this is how the Overton Window moves. Having basic standards in ones community, however it manifests, is not a bad thing. It signals to others that this behavior is not acceptable instead of quietly letting it slide and implying that it is OK by silence.
And it isn’t a hard standard. It’s not asking a lot. Don’t use slurs. We generally understand that with race. We mostly understand that with sex and gender. So disability gets a pass? Fuck that. Tear me down if I’m so casually cruel. If you can’t have the creativity to have a decent insult that doesn’t involve shaming the disabled, then call them (the republicans not the disabled) assholes and move on. Don’t use the slurs of the morally repugnant.
If you want to have that debate, then you have to address the concept of insults themselves.
It is the soul of irony to suggest there is a specific line that you’re not allowed to cross when you’re being offensive, when insults themselves are meant to be offensive.
You can find a bone to pick with any insult. You can’t call someone an asshole because there is a significant portion of the population who have either been congenitally born without assholes or who have lost theirs and are using a colostomy bag. And every time the word asshole pops up in their radar, they’re reminded of their plight and it is trauma-reinducing.
Calling someone a fucker is potentially trauma-inducing to people who have lost their genitals or been surgically mutilated and are unable to enjoy any pleasure from sex or possibly unable to have sex itself.
And I get that people who have experienced difficulties are different from people who are born with difficulties, but both of those groups are forced to live with things that they simply cannot do anything about. When they encounter aggressive language all they can do is take it.
I still think you are correct that we shouldn’t use the r-slur, but we also shouldn’t really tone police one another in public when the only method available to do so is to detract from a much more important conversation.
After all, the only way we’re ever going to get to a world where the largest concern we have is the Emotional Impact of what words we use when we are angry and frustrated is to deal with the actual world in front of us, where people are murdering and killing people for being born different.
First and most important: we’re in a shitposting community. This is not some stage where the conversation needs a focus. This is THE place to call people out casually. It’s a damned free for all for better and worse. I’d honestly be more OK with your argument if this happened elsewhere. I’d still disagree, being polite and ignoring people being shitty in public should be called out more, to hell with face. Holding people to basic standards should be the norm and doing so where others can see shows those that might be hurt that people don’t agree. But elsewhere, I’d consider removing my post or some such.
You’re right. Most insults have someone who may be hurt who doesn’t deserve it. I’ve honestly had that thought bouncing around my head for the past hour or so. And I don’t have a good answer other than calling them things are/should be universally reviled. Work in progress. Immoral shitstain has a decent ring and I suspect there isn’t anyone that identifies with profound uncleanliness. The ideal would be to specifically insult based on bad behavior, but damn that’s tough on the fly and very context dependent.
It should be noted, and you did somewhat, that calling someone and asshole or fucker doesn’t have a storied history of being a slur. I’m no philosopher or even terribly good debater to specifically define the line, but ‘old slurs that came back because awful people started using them again’ feels like an easy win. We gave that word up a long ass time ago, let it stay dead instead of emulating these people we claim to loathe.
Retarded hasn’t been a slur against the mentally disabled in the common vernacular for a while now. Well, until people decided that it’s the new term to get offended for others about.
Language is always changing, and its meaning is now synonymous with moron (which also used to be a medical term for the intellectually disabled).
Context and intent is key, and it’s clear that they weren’t disparaging the mentally disabled.
Really? Did you not read the original comment? Because that’s how I used it on the playground when I was a child. I asserted another person was less due to an intellectual disability, normalizing that it’s OK to insult people using a term that once upon a time neutrally described the intellectually disabled. And then I learned that it isn’t OK to punch down, that the people used as an insult were as human and deserving of respect as myself.
Fuck off with your bad faith nonsense. The original comment is exactly why it became a slur in the first place.
I feel like there is a concession here?
This is explicitly what they’re saying it doesn’t mean. They’re not referring to literal mentally handicapped people. They’re using a casual if aggressive put-down towards people who demonstrate profound anti-intellectualism in a way those people would understand as a means to viscerally and painfully insult them.
And they’re doing so in a way that doesn’t mentally police their own language. Self policing perpetually requires cognitive effort and second guessing. It puts you culturally on the backfoot. If you want to fight rightwing demons, you have to go for the jugular on a pure red boiling instinctual level, or you lose. You have to fight so hard that there is collateral damage, otherwise the average person will simply see you as inauthentic and overly clean and calculated.
Further, ableism and other particular ‘isms’ like racism and sexism are not directly comparable. Talk about bad faith. Ableism based insults directly reference material capabilities in the person you are insulting, definitionally. Racism and Sexism are bad because they prescriptively assign people to irrational and prejudiced stereotypes about their weakness or unworthiness. Ableism just directly references perceived weakness. This is still rude and mean spirited, and thus can easily be bad. But it is simply not the same.
I am autistic. When people insult rightwinger’s social behavior by calling them a cringey autist (and yes, I’ve seen this) it does sting. It does bring about some bitterness because I did not choose to be this way. But I get it… I understand. If it hurts the rightwinger, its probably worth it. And I’ve even engaged in the same seeming self loathing indulgence to get at people who need to be brought down a peg.
There is no moral difference between calling someone “stupid” and using the R word, except in the impact of the term. And the modern rightwinger gives absolutely no shits if you call them an “asshole”. In fact, many of them like that, they’ll even embrace their lack of morals with pride.
Correction: Its harmful to punch down. Its more harmful to refuse to punch down as some kind of holy rule if it weakens a righteous cause to more broadly protect the weak. By destroying a rightwinger’s pride through such humiliation of their material ability you are helping the weak, even if through “splash damage” you also hurt their feelings.
That said: I don’t even think any of my politically tactical justifications here are wholly needed. Sometimes you want to hurt who you rightfully hate and are willing to damage yourself and others to do it. Rational ethics do not always come into the picture when you are facing the end of the world. Its just eye rolling to expect clean language as we sink into the fires of hell.
Sometimes you want to emotionally unburden yourself and metaphorically just rip a pigs head off in the mud because the world has shit on you when you did not deserve it. My visceral hatred of the average dipshit rightwinger is so intense as to nearly be the reason I’ve not off’d myself. I’m almost surviving off spite right now.
More that I did unacceptable things as a child and grew out of them. An appeal that I’m not some righteous figure, just someone who wants to do better and would like to see that elsewhere.
There is nowhere in there that implies this. It explicitly compares republicans to the intellectually disabled in an equality for the purposes of insult. The republicans were the expressly intended person to be insulted, the intellectually disabled (kinda get using the damned slur, it’s a lot faster) being the undesirable comparison.
Everyone self polices to some extent. We stand in lines, we don’t steal, etc, etc. We refrain from using terminology that would hurt others. This is not a high bar. It’s the base line. Feels like the only reason it’s seen as acceptable is because you can shout that word and not have an angry mob delete you. Use the n-slur on the other hand and no power in the universe will save you depending on where you’re standing. But I digress.
That’s the point. I’m autistic too and instead of tolerating shit, backsliding behavior that was picked up from the people we are all agreeing are terrible, I said something. We can rage against them without hurting others. We can have some community standards. Hell, they’re defending pedophiles. Why are we using their slurs when they hand us such terrible ones to use? (Argument goes here for using the language they understand, which I don’t have an argument against).
Respect for the honesty. And I don’t totally disagree. The kid that recently became the ‘ok’ meme comes to mind. And his way seems more moral. Though it’s hard to punch Nazis through the screen.
Ultimately, this ‘purity test’ isn’t a hard one. This is ‘write your name on the paper’ level. Debating things like Al Green getting ousted from congress for shit he did decades before is debatable, and a good debate to have. Using slurs that were resurrected by awful people should not be that difficult, nor elicit such discussion. It should be the baseline.
Yes, and apparently my reading comprehension is better than yours. They’re saying Republican Trump supporters are so dumb their intelligence is on the level of someone with an intellectual disability.
They’re not disparaging the mentally disabled or saying that mentally disabled people are lesser. They’re making a comparison.
But I bet you’d be perfectly fine if they had called Trump supporters morons, which is exactly the same type of insult as retarded.
They are making a distinctly unfavorable comparison (or was the monster in the picture that started this a compliment?) by comparing repugnant, morally vacant people to the mentally disabled in an equality. They are saying that republicans are lesser and that they are the same as the intellectually disabled, which would make the intellectually disabled lesser by logic we learned in elementary school.
It’s not hard to not use a slur. There are a great many insults out there. Have some standards.
And yeah, moron probably would have missed me. It was a slur before my time. And now, I’ll update my internal no-no list. Thanks, that’s correct. That’s a common way people improve, but being called out on shitty behavior.
There is a correct and good community building way to address this issue, and there is a “Gotcha, fucker! you made a mistake in your words, I’m gonna yell at you on the internet!” way of dealing with this issue.
The correct way would be to privately message the person and say, “Hey, please don’t use that kind of language, it is offensive”
They might have gone back and edited it.
I feel like people have forgotten the concept of face, since the internet is anonymous, and a lot of flame wars happen because people do not consider each other’s faces when they are talking to each other.
So if you really consider the impact of derailing a conversation about how Republicans and Trump supporters and fascist pedophiles are destroying the entire world and making everyone on the planet miserable to say, “Hey, you used a word that is offensive to people with mental difficulties”, then I would say that you were in the wrong for addressing your concern in the way that you did, not that your concern itself was wrong.
Or you call them out in public because discretion just lets things fester. Shame me when I do shameful things, I beg you. Shit like this is how the Overton Window moves. Having basic standards in ones community, however it manifests, is not a bad thing. It signals to others that this behavior is not acceptable instead of quietly letting it slide and implying that it is OK by silence.
And it isn’t a hard standard. It’s not asking a lot. Don’t use slurs. We generally understand that with race. We mostly understand that with sex and gender. So disability gets a pass? Fuck that. Tear me down if I’m so casually cruel. If you can’t have the creativity to have a decent insult that doesn’t involve shaming the disabled, then call them (the republicans not the disabled) assholes and move on. Don’t use the slurs of the morally repugnant.
If you want to have that debate, then you have to address the concept of insults themselves.
It is the soul of irony to suggest there is a specific line that you’re not allowed to cross when you’re being offensive, when insults themselves are meant to be offensive.
You can find a bone to pick with any insult. You can’t call someone an asshole because there is a significant portion of the population who have either been congenitally born without assholes or who have lost theirs and are using a colostomy bag. And every time the word asshole pops up in their radar, they’re reminded of their plight and it is trauma-reinducing.
Calling someone a fucker is potentially trauma-inducing to people who have lost their genitals or been surgically mutilated and are unable to enjoy any pleasure from sex or possibly unable to have sex itself.
And I get that people who have experienced difficulties are different from people who are born with difficulties, but both of those groups are forced to live with things that they simply cannot do anything about. When they encounter aggressive language all they can do is take it.
I still think you are correct that we shouldn’t use the r-slur, but we also shouldn’t really tone police one another in public when the only method available to do so is to detract from a much more important conversation.
After all, the only way we’re ever going to get to a world where the largest concern we have is the Emotional Impact of what words we use when we are angry and frustrated is to deal with the actual world in front of us, where people are murdering and killing people for being born different.
First and most important: we’re in a shitposting community. This is not some stage where the conversation needs a focus. This is THE place to call people out casually. It’s a damned free for all for better and worse. I’d honestly be more OK with your argument if this happened elsewhere. I’d still disagree, being polite and ignoring people being shitty in public should be called out more, to hell with face. Holding people to basic standards should be the norm and doing so where others can see shows those that might be hurt that people don’t agree. But elsewhere, I’d consider removing my post or some such.
You’re right. Most insults have someone who may be hurt who doesn’t deserve it. I’ve honestly had that thought bouncing around my head for the past hour or so. And I don’t have a good answer other than calling them things are/should be universally reviled. Work in progress. Immoral shitstain has a decent ring and I suspect there isn’t anyone that identifies with profound uncleanliness. The ideal would be to specifically insult based on bad behavior, but damn that’s tough on the fly and very context dependent.
It should be noted, and you did somewhat, that calling someone and asshole or fucker doesn’t have a storied history of being a slur. I’m no philosopher or even terribly good debater to specifically define the line, but ‘old slurs that came back because awful people started using them again’ feels like an easy win. We gave that word up a long ass time ago, let it stay dead instead of emulating these people we claim to loathe.
Nah, I wouldn’t have. It’s pearl clutching.
It’s educated park clutching and purity tests. You said it better than I care to.