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.
I don’t like the euphemism treadmill. Normalize all slurs. Get more creative with your language & learn how to reappropriate & reclaim.
The worst take I’ve seen on slurs is the online activism to make the noun female a slur. When I explain that their advocacy accepts a sexist premise that something is wrong with the name of an entire gender & thereby consents to the stigmatization of that gender, they erupt into an irrational rage.
The reason people have a problem with the noun female isn’t because “there’s something wrong with the name of an entire gender” it’s because it’s extremely often used in such a way that people (typically men) will refer to men as men and refer to women as females. It’s why you may see the phrase “men and females” thrown around as a response.
(For the record, I think referring to women as well as men as females or males is pointlessly degrading. The noun version of those is acceptable for non-human animals, e.g. the males in a flock of birds.)
people (typically men) will refer to men as men and refer to women as females
Where
Enough that people made a whole subreddit about it.
These stupid wars on words IMHO is the reason why “liberals” were regarded as a joke prior to trump election
Like banning “master” in github as well as dumb, regex based words filters in chats. Oh you want to mention the “beta version”? Too bad, a social justice warrior decided that “beta” is now offensive, you have to change your language so that you wont affect the hypothetic easily offendable persons
Like banning “master” in github as well as dumb
Master wasn’t banned. The default name was changed from master to main. Literally nothing is stopping you from choosing to use master.
“Morally banning”. But you got my point
slurs are useful.
they are an escalation step that are words instead of physical violence.
making slurs illegals removes that step and leads the escalation straight to violence.
That is an unpopular opinion.
What the fuck kind of logic is this? We can’t magically make insulting language go away. If someone wants to use a slur, they will. People also don’t think “damn, if I didn’t have a word to insult this person that was insulting enough I’d punch them!” If people want to be violent they’re going to be violent.
It is so weird to me that this opinion is unpopular, but judging by some of the comments here, I see your point.
There’s a historical cycle where the helping professions rotate the terminology out, as the wider culture overloads the old terms with insulting usage. Eventually the new vernacular leaks out into general parlance and the cycle cycles. “Retarded” was once acceptable clinical terminology because "idiot, “moron”, and “imbecile” had accumulated cultural baggage. The latter terms were, themselves, once politically correct alternatives to even older terms.
I think it’s naive to think that THIS time is special, and today’s politically correct terminology won’t ever leak out into common usage as a slur too.
