There’s a clear campaign against the mentally ill with the global rise of fascism. Lots of it shows up in anti homeless rhetoric, but you can see it in the MAHA and anti vaccination movements.
There’s no reason to use the word “r-tarded” to describe someone. As someone who’s worked with the intellectually challenged, it’s an insult to them to compare them with people who are willfully ignorant.
Yeah. We’ve been down this road before. Believe it or not but all those african american navy seals with gay brothers who also were active duty military? Yeah, they were just shitty white kids who wanted to say nr and ft a lot. Who’da thunk it?
No. It is about showing the absolute bare minimum of human decency to change your vocabulary and avoid using slurs that people have to constantly hear from people who AREN’T actually african american navy seals with gay brothers and all that.
And a huge chunk of that is to stop saying fucking slurs.
Homie… are you ACTUALLY playing the “You could be property so shut the fuck up if I want to say a slur” card?
Also, I strongly suggest anyone who thinks “history” was a no woman’s land or was all about racial purity to actually do some research. Shockingly, things were actually a LOT more “progressive” than they would expect with most bigotry and hatred being more oriented towards killing those Others across the channel. Most of the “We used to be a whole lot more racist and sexist” is, shockingly, from racist and sexist people who want to “make <insert country> great again”.
Thank you for this, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading some of these comments. I’m shocked how hard this is to grasp for people.
I mean… just look at elon musk.
conservatives (and, if your stance is that “I can’t change my language just because people decided it is suddenly offensive” then you are fundamentally conservative), think the pinnacle of humanity is 20-30 years ago. Generally when they were teenagers or whatever the fuck musk is doing with cultivating his entire life to be the kind of person who posts on 4chan about how LUE over on gamefaqs banned them.
And… 20 or 30 years ago the various funny people on TV were casually dropping slurs like r****d.
And then you just have the normal response to any pushback or criticism on The Internet. People spend 28 hours a day watching Content at 1.5x speed where they are constantly reinforced to their world view (or, more often, the world view of their favorite influencer…) because of The Algorithm. ANYTHING that is not telling them exactly what to do or think is met with scorn.
And when someone says something that goes against that worldview? It is “disingenuous” or “gaslighting” because it is not just a question on if they need to improve as a human being… it is actively opposed to their very existence. It is like they had been wearing red tinted glasses for years and someone said “Actually the sky is blue, not purple”.
Nope, I am not saying you could be property so shut up. I’m saying the progress we made was not based on language.
Abraham Lincoln famously said “Free those fucking n****rs”, right? Okay, actually a LOT of the politicians and white people of that era were ridiculously racist but that is why things continued to boil over until the 60s… and then continue on since then.
But yes. A huge part of things IS behavioral. And the language people use is a huge part of that. Because when someone says “Hey, that word is a slur and is hurtful” and the response is “Fuck off, I am not treating you like property so be happy with what you’ve got”… the behavior is pretty abhorrent as well.