this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Ask Lemmy

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Like, you choose to be drunk or high. No one chooses to be disabled and it's horrible that a whole demographic is treated as a joke.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

I mean, my crippled ass is perfectly willing to crack my cane upside someone's head, while calling them all sorts of names.

I know, you probably meant retard, right?

Well, retarded is no longer the medical term for people with learning disabilities. Just like moron, idiot, and other categorizations of the past.

At this point, retard has nothing at all to do with people that have a learning disability. It definitely no longer refers to them in any accurate sense, and has been fully co-opted into slang.

Calling someone a retard at this point is no more about a disability than calling them dumb. Seriously. Dumb used to mean the same thing as mute.

Truth is, it doesn't matter what terms get used for people with learning disabilities officially. That term will be taken and used as an insult. That sucks, but it's a long standing part of language, at least in english. If you're gong to disparage someone's intelligence, you do so using terminology related to categorization of intelligence.

Now, would it be better if we stopped that, and used similar terms that aren't related? Sure. But the typical brain dead, addlepated, shit-for-brains, thoughtless and air-headed twerp is going to ignore that and use learning disabled instead.

It's already a thing where people will say "what the fuck are you, learning disabled?"

We ain't getting rid of that. Those of us that would suggest avoiding such terms that used to be about disability aren't the ones that would need to be asked this question, and the ones that would need it asked aren't the ones that would agree to it.

But, yeah, we're all fucktards on the internet, and that term has joined things like moron and idiot in being genericized rather than about an actual form of inborn disability at all.

All of this applies to things related to mental illness too. Even mental illness as a term is being slangified into not being about actual mental illness, it's just the new way of saying crazy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

I like to use "muppet", since it's less attached to disabilities. (Some able-minded people act irrationally and they do need to be called out on that, sometimes with insults, otherwise they'll keep doing it and keep being a dead weight and a burden to the others.)

I'm not a big fan of "drunk" or "high". It doesn't deliver the point well, I think.

[–] Grimy 2 points 9 hours ago

Do you mean instead of the word "retarded"? I hope you aren't calling people paraplegic or something.

It's never okay to mock someone's disability or use that disability as an insult, yes drunk or high as substitutes are fine since its a state people put themselves in willingly. I think saying crazy, nuts and wacked out of your mind is fine even though it might be a disability for some.

[–] MrQuallzin 2 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

How about not insulting people?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Some people deserve to be insulted.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

And disabled people shouldn't be used as an insult or a joke.

I think "drunk" flows better than the r word anyway. "You think Elon Musk is a transgender ally? Are you drunk?"

[–] toomanypancakes 4 points 10 hours ago

To be fair, some people are conservative

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 hours ago

That's fine, so long as health extortion CEOs aren't considered "people". There's no way in hell I'm going to stop insulting them.