this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Fuck. See, that was easy, no censoring necessarily at all.
As in: Fuck off for using the r-word.
Could you please not lump folks with learning and or intellectual disabilities with a bunch of spineless fascist traitors?
The war on all words that describe a negative trait continues.
I promise whatever the goalposts are set to will be the next inappropriate term.
I don't know about that. What I do is try to listen to why a group thinks a word is offensive.
The thing with "retard" is that it has been used to refer to people with mental disabilities for a very long time. By saying "republicans are retards" you say "rebilocsns are as stupid as people that were born with a mental disability".
Thing is, people with mental disabilities are still people. There are goofy, snarky, nice, some are even quite big assholes. Many can be a lot of fun to interact with. They are just people, even if they are not as intelligent as you or me.
Referring to people as retarded, to me, means setting mentaly disabled people as the baseline for beeing idiots. And I just don't think it's fair to reduce them to something, they had no saying in what so ever. They didn't choose to be born that way and they shouldn't be reduced to just that.
/rant I guess
You know idiot, moron and imbecile were replaced by "retarded" as a less offensive way of expressing those terms? Kind of funny that things have flipped and the original offensive terms can be used with abandon but the less offensive replacement is now the thing that can't be said.
I completely understand. In ITIL terms they're addressing the incident - the thing that is causing someone immediate harm. To continue the ITIL analogy, the problem is not being addressed and will never be addressed. I am confident humanity will never stop using the concept of mental disabilities as a slur regardless of the verbiage used.
Any 'nice' term you can think up is immediately ammo for someone to use once it starts getting traction as the new way to talk about it. "Trump has a mental disability", "republicans are mentally disabled" are two examples of what people could say until that term is no longer acceptable, and the cycle repeats.
Really what should change is that mental disabilities should be normalized so that descriptors cannot be used to degrade people based on a reality that cannot be changed.
Anyway, regardless of our best intentions, empathy, patience and understanding for others, the cycle will just keep continuing. Idiot is a great example of a word for the same thing and is used frequently and often because people simply have forgotten over the generations how it was once used. It's original term was innocuous, simply describing common individuals, not necessarily implying any truly negative thing. Eventually it was used to describe the mentally disabled, and then used as a slur, and then it fell out of favor for a long, long time. Ultimately the meaning and the application is the same. The problem remains.
I feel highly offended by your use of the word "goalpost"
runs to ~~mom~~ mods
Euphemism treadmill go brrr
Or people could just stop using slurs?
It's not like there's a short list of things to dislike about fascists without punching down on social minorities...
Is calling someone stupid a slur? Not saying that’s what the previous poster said, legitimate question
I don't think so since stupidity is a trait not a slur afaik.
Okay. Would you say the same applies to the word idiot? Imbecile? Moron? Are any of those slurs?
idk for idiot or imbecile.
Moron is a slur imho.
But these are only my opinions and English isn't even my first language so I might miss some things ^^`
The reason I bring these words up is every one of them was originally a medical diagnosis, that eventually became offensive so they changed it to retarded, which has now itself become offensive, which then became special ed/sped, or special needs, which are now going the way of retard and becoming offensive.
The line of which of those words is a slur is entirely arbitrary.
Euphemism treadmill go brrr
Yup but imho it doesn't stop there.
Once the word stops being used as a medical diagnosis it will slowly stop being associated with learning / mental disabilities.
Nowadays not a lot of people associate saying someone is an idiot with any social minority so it kinda is just a disparaging qualifier.
Retard just happens to currently be in that sour spot.
Someday saying "intellectually disabled" will draw horrified gasps from people who will berate you for not using "cerebrally unenfranchised"
I mean there’s already a school of thought that “disabled” has a negative connotation to it, that’s where the term “differently-abled” comes in.
It’s all kind of a dance to not hurt anyone’s feelings.
Wow dude, that cuts me deep.
/s
Honestly "differently-abled" seems more like a media term than anything linked to either handicapped communities or scientific research. Imho it's kinda stupid.
And people speaking on behalf of marginalized communities is a real issue that does a lot of harm. e.g. Autism Speaks
An expression I encountered helping my roommate work on their education master was "handicapping situations". It's a bit unwieldy but I like that it conveys that someone is handicapped by a combination of an ailment, an activity, and a lack of accessibility.
In other words, someone who's paraplegic isn't in a "handicapping situation" when gaming in a chair.
Or someone who's dysorthographic isn't handicapped as long as their not trying to write anything.
I use handicapped as a shorthand for myself but it's still a neat concept imho.
I might be mistranslating some stuff since said roommate is French.
PS: about the dance, blame it on people insisting on using our disabilities as insults.
PS2: You're always gonna hurt someone at one point or another. But it's not hard to try not to and apologize when it happens imho.