But my community is full of people who demonstrated on November 5th 2024 that they are favor of or ambivalent to fascism.

This is just a regular political meme. A good one but still wrong by category.

Your post is not unhinged enough to belong here.

Wrong community.

Also they like it when they do it because it means they’ll prevent minorities from becoming armed.

This popped up elsewhere in this dumpster fire. I eliminated moron (which was specifically called out) from my dictionary because I’ll put my money where my mouth is.

Idiot has a similar history. Most clinical terms and words describing someone with an intellectual disability ends up turned into an insult.

Further, the idea of shaming people for lacking knowledge is by itself problematic. Intelligence in general is not a single factor but context specific. I don’t know a lot about a lot of things and that doesn’t make me a worse person, those just aren’t my fields. XKCD’s lucky 10000 is a great example of why shaming people into pretending they know things makes the world worse. Bear in mind, pride in not knowing things is foolish and worth derision.

Its not even pride necessarily, sometimes its an active mental shield and I find both revolting. Refusing to see the truth of something for mental comfort is pathetic and extremely selfish. I’m not a virtue ethicist, but emotionally I am one towards people like this. In order to make the most ethical decisions, you need to face the truth. By purposefully avoiding the truth: rational ethical decisions become impossible, meaning anyone who does this is just a straight up bad person.

Not even close. I lived through that word dying off in middle school. Early to mid aughts. In my small town it became taboo to say fairly rapidly.

I guess I’m mostly referring to internet usage as well as its taboo nature being equivalent to swearing or using expletives which are merely not acceptable around authority’s, stuffy people, at school, or at work. I remember playing online games among even progressive people who would call people the r-slur a lot as late as 2014 or interacting on Forums, Reddit, Twitter, etc and seeing the word thrown around. Among my friends (who were democrats, while I was a republican because my dad said we were lol) they would call people retards when teachers were not around.

Outside of the main topic:

If I remember right (not looking up studies right now so I’ll eat my words if I’m wrong), the mentally disabled are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators thereof. Might be crossing my wires with mental illness

Also without looking it up, pretty sure both are correct. Though with the asterisk that mental illness includes a broad variety and that many of the “violent” mental illnesses are more rare than the non-violent ones. Untreated schizophrenia, bipolar, NPD, ASPD, most substance abuse disorders, and even ADHD all have associations with higher rates of committing violence compared to the average. Its just that for every 1 person with one of those there are like 5-10 people with PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, eating disorder, chronic depression, autism, etc who are significantly less likely to be violent, so they drag down the average. And almost all of them are more likely to be victims than perpetrators.

Aside: I appreciate the candid debate. Many thanks.

I unironically love good faith and intellectually honest debate. It gives me energy.

He would be better than Newsom, but worse than Khanna or AOC. I don’t like his lib-brained gun control perspective though.

Fuck, I don’t have the money to replace my phone. I probably wont by September either. Too many expenses.

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.

Not what I meant, to be fair I should have been more explicit. I was pointing out that you are referencing your childhood, implying this was a while ago and that this goes along with the idea that language changes over time, which the person you responded to had pointed out.

Do you think “idiot” and “moron” are offensive to the mentally handicapped? Are they unacceptably ableist?

Everyone self polices to some extent.

Yes, but its intrinsically unpleasant. Its essentially a mutually agreed upon facade for business and formality that many people prefer to willingly destroy with alcohol to socialize with each other more authentically.

As a fellow autistic person, you should know well the resentment stemming from constant and heavy masking.

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.

Maybe for some people this is the case but not mine. I use the r-slur because I feel a distinct and strong disgust for anti-intellectuals and dumb shit rightwingers that softer insults do not even make qualification for let alone rank for casual usage where I’m not necessarily trying to get creative.

Other words that authentically would get me “deleted” as you say I feel zero desire to say out loud. Ultimately though, the reason I don’t is the people saying them are precisely the sort to want to propagate violence towards the racial or gender group they’re using a slur for. They’re stochastically calling for violence against innocent people. Using the r-slur doesn’t do that.

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.

I don’t consider this taking cultural ideas from the right. Though we definitely do that and I think its normal for the two political factions of left and right to take cultural ideas from each other. Regardless, the r-slur was considered acceptable by virtually everyone pre-2010. Left or right. And the ramp up in disdain for the usage of word happened leading up to Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016.

Using slurs that were resurrected by awful people should not be that difficult, nor elicit such discussion. It should be the baseline.

Its not baseline. Its obviously still a debate, a stubborn one as well.

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.

While I naturally want to contribute to society, I do not have a duty to it. I did not choose to be here. Much like the kids in question.

I don’t give a shit about what the parents think or want as parents. Having a kid doesn’t make your desires elevated over child-free people. In fact tbh you are under a minor moral debt in my eyes.

I think its more that those hobbies are thrust upon you by the child. Your willingness to engage with them smooths it all out. Not everyone has patience for kid friendly activities and some find them incredibly boring.

For instance… I work in childcare. Almost all of my personal favorite activities are very non-child friendly… (then again I also engaged with many of my favorite non-child-friendly pass times way younger than most people would be comfortable with…) I find most sanitized “kid friendly” activities pretty unbearably boring.

The kids themselves are fine though. And if anything I think they’d agree with me. If I busted out a super violent video game or something they’d probably cool with it. It’d be my fellow counselors and parents who’d take issue.

If anything my experience with kids almost softened my desire to get sterilized and cement my child free life. Kids seem fine to me. Its just all the social restrictions and expectations around them and obviously the energy, money, and time commitment. (Also I’m a soft-anti-natalist.)