this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Tbf, now that I've jumped over here and gotten comfortable, its nice that lemmee itself isnt abusive, but good god are the communists here fucking retarded. And I say this as someone who liked the ideals of communism. Its like how I liked the Idea of Telsas until I met Tesla owners
Edit: Lmao the most controversial part of this statement is merely one of the words I used. One of the things I appreciate about Lemmy is that it shows both the up and downvotes
Edit 2: Look at me! IM the controversy now!
To be fair, your use of the R word as a pejorative reduces your credibility as a moral compass. I do agree with your overall point though.
Since I have been a child the word retard has NOT been used for people with developmental disabilities, it has only ever been used to describe people who've done something incredibly stupid that they had the capacity not to do. In fact, I have worked with low and high functioning people with developmental disabilities, and one of the high function people actually told me to use the word when he's being stupid, as I was using the word goof before, and that had unfortunate prison meanings that the resident didnt like.
Your experience is not absolute. It's still abelist and offensive.
Nah man, I'm just not down for constantly keeping up to date with the treadmill of what words are and arent appropriate... especially for insults, which have never been meant to be appropriate. I dont fucking care if your feelings are so fragile that relatively tame words can hurt you
Then be prepared for people to rightly call you a bigot. Sorry you're done learning, grandpa but the world keeps turning.
And the fact that you now know better and still choose to hurt ableist language just means you're embracing your bigotry.
Calling someone a bigot based entirely on the words they use instead of the intent behind them is a great way to be wrong 80% of the time
Someone knowing using hurtful, bigoted language and claiming they didn't "mean it like that" is asinine and disingenuous. Using deliberately incorrect terminology nearly everyone will misinterpret and then complaining when they do is placing yourself upon a cross. It's a pathetic level of discourse usually outgrown by middle school.
You're assuming barely anyone keeps up with what the minority of people decide isn't okay to say anymore. Twitter isn't the world. Lemmy isn't the world. Reddit isn't the world. There may be millions of users, but the average person doesn't give a shit about any of these platforms.
If you think ableist pejoratives targeting neurodivergences and metal impairments are only present on social media, you need to touch some fucking grass. That shit hasn't been OK in decades. South Park even did an apologetic episode on it more than a decade ago which means the discussion was mainstream. And you should 100% not be taking social cues from that show.
Then that's a more honest response than your earlier one. It's not that you don't understand that others may be hurt by your language even though it's not a word you personally ever used to describe developmental disabilities, it's just that you don't give a shit.
Good on you for owning it (on the second try), I guess.
You mean like developmentally disabled people you work with who may have good reasons to be sensitive about certain words? I guess since one of those people said he was cool with it he speaks for all of them. I'm sure none of them have ever been hurt by hateful people using the R word about them.
50+ years old and in my entire life this isn't something I've found to be mentally taxing to keep up with. This is truly the flimsiest excuse I've ever seen for using shitty language. Just stick with "I don't fucking care."
Do you really not know that people can have multiple different reasons and motivations for their behaviours and actions? I've been honest this entire time, there are slurs I absolutely wont use because of their history and the immediate harm they cause, but retard isnt one of them, so my earlier explaination still stands. Its also true that people that get offended on others behalf annoy me and I dont care when I offend them. If I PERSONALLY offend someone for something that they PERSONALLY struggle with? I care in that scenario and I mark it down mentally to adapt to their needs and not hurt them again. You are a stranger on the internet, I dont care about you, I dont have the emotional space to. I didnt casually use the spicy word, I used it specifically as an insult towards people who I've been dealing with dogshit takes from. To be clear, I NEVER called any of my clients Retard, and this client I only did for them, after they requested it, and even then it made me uncomfortable because using that word to refer to someone with developmental disabilities IS gross. Nuance exists. And yes, I'm tired of the treadmill. I have Aspergers syndrome and now the treadmill is trying to tell me that not only did the DSM take that diagnosis away, I'm now not allowed to refer to my high functioning autism as Aspergers since the guy whom it was named after was a nazi, even though my autism has NEVER BEEN about that guy, and IM THE PERSON WHO HAS the diagnosis.
I don't fucking care.
xD Ok. Have a nice day!