It’s unfortunate. Other than you loving hate speech apparently, your comment history indicates we agree on quite a bit, if perhaps not to the same level of passion.

I see. Care to share with the class? Or are you just gonna show up outside my house with a knife, cause that’s the vibe you’re now giving off.

An appeal to your… whatever you’ve got going on: it’ll help other people not be deceived if you say whatever the fuck you’re talking about.

It’s just very suddenly aggressive. I’m very confused where the turn happened and where the poorly founded accusations of lying enter. What statement did I intentionally misrepresent?

I mean, I dumped a lot of effort into defending against the use of a slur. Fascists have a tendency to be pro-slur in general. Your stance is… shaky.

This has taken such a strange turn. At the risk of encouraging the pigeon, you do realize that deception, by definition, requires an intent to deceive? At worst I’m just wrong.

I don’t understand your affinity for hate speech nor why you defend it to the point of apparent delusion, but you might want to ask a therapist about that.

It’s rather hard to see eye to eye while you cover yours. Enjoy your hate speech.

Glad we could agree even if you are coming from a point of bad faith now.

Ah pigeon chess. Delightful.

You say calling it a slur was not lie, but it was.

I’m still confused. What did I misrepresent? Calling it a slur was a lie? That’s my entire thesis that I have backed at every step.

The way it was used was simply not a slur.

I contend otherwise. Extensively. With logic and rationale that you refuse to engage with.

I apologize if you feel I have not conceded to any of your points.

You don’t have to concede. I expect you won’t. I’d like you to engage with me rather than put words in my mouth and ignore what you find inconvenient, though even that is out of what I have control over. I’ve specifically marked why I have dismissed some of your arguments (mostly red herring) while you’ve relied on the tried and true ‘nuh uh’ strategy.

I listed three things that, if refuted directly, I would gladly yield. You have ignored this condition that is the basis of having any sort of debate and instead decided that you have won by some metric that you have come up with. Or would you like to babble about context while ignoring it more?

So you admit that slurs are not always slurs and context matter. This context was missing for you to call it a slur to begin with. There was no mentally delayed person being called a retard. Glad we can agree your original comment was half-baked.

That’s quite a few words you shoved in my mouth. I, at no point, said slurs are not always slurs. I acknowledged context matters as a general statement and then posed the context that I believe matters. I, in fact, positively asserted that history, usage, and present recognition by relevant advocacy groups as being relevant context to define it as a slur. You have yet to acknowledge any of those points. I’ll happily yield if you can name why those three things are irrelevant.

What are you left with again? Oh yes a lie about a slur and a false usage of punching down.

Lie? You’ve lost me on that one. I hold that the usage was offensive even if it does not necessarily meet the definition of ‘punching down’ specifically. The bat is still harmed when it strikes the baseball.

Stop bloviating, this is the beginning and end of it.

Is it? You have ignored my points multiple times while I have endeavored to engage with yours. I should know better than to engage with bad faith. Alas.

Black people don’t view as a slur

Black people are not a monolith and I’d be dead in the street if I said that in the wrong neighborhood. This is also irrelevant as that is more about reclamation than the status as a slur (which it is). It would matter if the original usage was performed by one who was disabled, for which we have no evidence nor reason to assume.

We collectively as a society stopped using retardation as a medical diagnosis. The rest of what you say is nonsense.

So history, the appeals of advocacy groups, the direct rejection of what you say by someone who would have been called such not long enough ago is irrelevant? Context only matters when it helps you I guess?

Glad you can admit the punching down was nonsense.

Linguistic imprecision is hardly the most salient point. My inability to name a better term for the wrong done does not remove the wrong.

Speaking of spirals, I just said it was a dumb take because you forgot context and added in some bullshit about punching down. This is objectively true so I am not sure why you need to keep going on and on.

I’ve listed off context multiple times. You have failed to refute any of it.

You’re rather arrogant to aspire to objective truth. Even I’m not doing that and I’m having trouble breathing from my high horse. Sociology and linguistics are not the land of objective truth. It speaks ill of your reasoning abilities that you believe that is what you’re doing.

Edit: I continue because you haven’t convinced me. Do so and I’ll yield.

So calling someone a removed is always a slur? Ignoring context is stupid because it is willfully ignorance. Clearly context matters.

So dropping the n-slur when no black people are around strips it of its history and the connotations used by the speaker? History is part of the context. Tone is part of the context. Both were present.

Furthermore who defines it as as a slur.

Society as a whole generally does that. We collectively decided 20 or so years ago that it was a bad thing to do. And the world was better for it. But that is a bad argument. Advocacy groups publishing articles reasoning far better than I regarding its status as hate speech is probably the better angle.

I know someone who is mentally developed that throws around the retard word all the time. Are you offended for them?

I’ll assume you meant developmentally delayed. I don’t care for it, but that’s getting into ‘reclaiming the word’ territory, which is not what this conversation is about.

Also retardation has fallen out of favor for medical diagnosis. It has not fallen out of favor for a general insult, no matter how badly you want it to. Once again, ignoring context.

The existence of this conversation and my general net upvote (with a nod that lemmy is not a complete demographic, nor do a few comments do an informed study make) rather disproves that. It was out of favor for a long ass time. It was scumbags like Joe Rogan who brought it back. Words evolve past their history. A point I have at no point refuted, merely rejected the argument that this is relevant. One must show that the evolution has changed it sufficiently to no longer be a slur. It still bears its history and current status of being a slur despite falling out of medical favor.

Lastly punching down refers to social ridicule from a high standing group to a low standing group.

The individual, presumably not disabled, used the intellectually disabled as an insult against others. While perhaps not directly social ridicule it’s not exactly promoting social standing. I’ll grant that they were not attacked directly and thus punching down is not the most appropriate term. What was done was definitely a sibling and still a shitty thing to do.

So yeah you are acting stupid and you continue to double down on the stupidity like it is a badge of honor.

You fundamentally misunderstand. I see an offensive thing. I make a single comment that spiraled in a big way. I defend my position and await a compelling argument to convince me otherwise, which has not arisen. I’ve even had some good faith debate and conceded a few things in this mess. Your arguments just aren’t landing for the reason’s I’m spending too much time and effort on.

I’ll admit that my taunts were in poor taste. It doesn’t induce good faith debate to insult.

That’s a poorly reasoned take. Slurs are only slurs if someone’s around to hear it? That’s definitely not how that works. Additionally, groups that are not necessarily mentally delayed (waves in autistic) get painted with that brush too. So even by your poor reasoning, it was a slur because I was there to see it.

It was also definitely punching down. It was the classic usage “Group X is like group Y and they’re bad because of the features they share”, specifically difficulty understanding new information in this context. Explain how it wasn’t that? How it didn’t draw an equality between them based upon the expressed undesirable feature of learning difficulties, thus implying that the intellectually disabled are less because of it?

So, yeah. You’re taunting me. Really badly.

Well with such a compelling, well reasoned argument, I’ll have to concede. Well done.

Now you’re just taunting me. Badly.

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

This whole thing has me soured on using lack of intelligence as in insult, because it shouldn’t be. We’re more than what we know or the ease in which we learn things. It feels old-timey to use it, but foolish feels a better term for what should be an undesirable trait. Along the lines of reveling in ones ignorance is a thing that shouldn’t be encouraged. Could just be my internal dictionary on that one.

meaning anyone who does this is just a straight up bad person.

Complete and utter agreement. No caveats. Capital T Truth is one of the very few things I’d call ‘sacred’ (gross religious connotations aside).

I guess I’m mostly referring to internet usage as well

That’s fair. I’m the weird millennial that really didn’t do forums or vaguely social internet things back in the day. And I think I forget how edgy the internet back then was. This kids, is why anecdote is an incomplete source of knowledge.

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

It’s too bad they’re so few and far between. It’s that good faith bit that’s so hard to get. Engaging in a way that leaves me open to being wrong and understanding more is delightful, even if the topic is not necessarily so.

If you’re gonna jump in so late with so little to add, at least have the courage to drop the slur. It was right there.

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

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. 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.

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.

I understand that one. I agree with the sentiment even if I disagree with the execution. I’d offer alternatives if I had them, but I’m burned on the whole thing for the moment. End of the day I really don’t want to insult people really.

Using the r-slur doesn’t do that.

That’s kinda my point. The group that the r-slur maligns is not one prone to violence or aggregated enough that people feel the need to check themselves. 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, but you get my point. It’s not the best that the only reason certain groups aren’t given respect is because they aren’t prone to harming those that disrespect them, often to their detriment.

I don’t consider this taking cultural ideas from the right.

According to the New York Times, that’s exactly where it came from. Posts from Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Justice* Department’s Civil Rights Division posted it in some knitting. Joe Rogan said “The word ‘retarded’ is back”.

And the ramp up in disdain for the usage of word happened leading up to Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016.

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.

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

It isn’t and that’s my problem. I am prone to naivete and acting how I think the world should work. It’s a thing I struggle with. In my (paltry) defense, the debate died like 20 years ago and assholes brought it back.

Aside: I appreciate the candid debate. Many thanks.

Tren is known to make a person red as well.

I appreciate the answer. I even agree to a large extent with your last point. I still think it an easy thing to not do and will call it out when I see it. I think the people that are letting annoyance with the general rule ‘don’t be a dick even if you can get away with it’ lead them to fascism were probably most of the way there anyway, but that’s whatever.

I’m not going to entreat further change from you, I’ve got too many paragraphs into this thread as is. I hope to see the immoral sacks of shit get everything they have coming too.

There was no ambiguous intent to how they used the slur. It was the classic “they’re bad because they’re like X” usage. It’s a word with a long history of harming a marginalized group. It was resurrected by awful people for its original awful purpose.

So, less good faith this time: why do you defend it? What worth does it have that cannot be claimed elsewhere?

Asked by someone part of a group that was painted with the r-slur for a long ass time (autism).

So. Coming down from my high horse and taking a breath. A good faith question for you? I can understand the first paragraph and disagree with the second, but I would like to let that go for just a second.

Why are you attached to this word? They defend pedophiles, the steal from the poor, they commit atrocities, and they do really bizarre shit like wearing diapers because their leader is incontinent. I get the ‘hit them with what hurts’ angle and can’t say whether or not it’s effective. Is casually hurting others, because two different people in these comments have positively asserted that they were offended, worth not choosing a different word?

I feel like there is a concession here?

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.

This is explicitly what they’re saying it doesn’t mean. They’re not referring to literal mentally handicapped people.

There is nowhere in there that implies this. It explicitly compares republicans to the intellectually disabled in an equality for the purposes of insult. The republicans were the expressly intended person to be insulted, the intellectually disabled (kinda get using the damned slur, it’s a lot faster) being the undesirable comparison.

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.

Everyone self polices to some extent. We stand in lines, we don’t steal, etc, etc. We refrain from using terminology that would hurt others. This is not a high bar. It’s the base line. 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. Use the n-slur on the other hand and no power in the universe will save you depending on where you’re standing. But I digress.

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.

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. We can rage against them without hurting others. We can have some community standards. Hell, they’re defending pedophiles. Why are we using their slurs when they hand us such terrible ones to use? (Argument goes here for using the language they understand, which I don’t have an argument against).

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.

Respect for the honesty. And I don’t totally disagree. The kid that recently became the ‘ok’ meme comes to mind. And his way seems more moral. Though it’s hard to punch Nazis through the screen.

Ultimately, this ‘purity test’ isn’t a hard one. This is ‘write your name on the paper’ level. Debating things like Al Green getting ousted from congress for shit he did decades before is debatable, and a good debate to have. Using slurs that were resurrected by awful people should not be that difficult, nor elicit such discussion. It should be the baseline.