this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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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.