Elon Musk has the ear of one of the most powerful people in the world – President Donald Trump – making him one of the most powerful people in the world, too. He’s been given unfettered access to adjust the federal government’s budget and headcount.
So what’s he doing posting a slur multiple times targeting the disabled community on social media?
It’s not generational. Bigotry went out of fashion, which is good, and then a completely different and unrelated thing happened at the same time which was terrible and stupid and bad, which is the phony bouts of public fainting whenever somebody uses The Wrong Words. People act, for some weird reason, like these two extremely different things have anything to do with each other.
A word like “retard” can be the ableist slur, or it can be exactly the same as “moron”. The strange notion that it can only ever be the shittiest version of itself is simply a mistake. It’s an error.
And now it’s an error that nobody is willing to publicly acknowledge because it’s developed the force of a public fear campaign. It’s time for the fear campaign to stop, and for people to understand that words that have multiple senses still have multiple senses even when one of them is really shitty. Don’t use the shitty version, use the non-shitty version freely, stop pretending that every use is the shitty version. We do it with “bitch” instinctively. That’s what the correct answer to this looks and feels like.
Because people keep using medical terms as insults necessitating the need for new medical terms with the connotation of insults…
So instead of just constantly making new medical terms so people can try a new insult, why not just fucking stop?
How is that difficult to understand?
It’s not “fear” it’s not “censorship” it’s not any of the things you’re whining about
It’s about stopping the process of turning medical terms into insults.
You have enough insults already, if you feel like you need more how about you make one up I stead of just using actual medical terms?
Why is thnkng so difficult for the people who insist on disparaging that population?
The funny thing about this whole conversation is I genuinely don’t know which population it’s supposed to be disparaging. (Also I’ll note I never saw the message you responded to, given it was mod removed on Lemmy it could be super toxic or it could be “I don’t like Linux that much”, but I assume the former)
Don’t get me wrong I know I could look it up, but it’s easier to just not care and go with the flow when I’m around folks in their 20s…and also not care and go with the flow when I’m around folks in their 50s.
They basically said because “moron” was once a scientific term (and people opposed it’s use as an insult back in the day too) it was fine to keep doing it indefinitely…
That just leads to an endless cycle where no one is happy, or they could just get creative with their insults.
Like, the whole “debate” is driven by people who aren’t smart enough to come up with original insults on their own, so they have to resort to offensive language to “shock” people with their lack of empathy.
There’s a certain kind of irony to that, but the people advocating for using recent medical terms as insults will never noticed it