Part of the reason I have autism in my name is so comrades I expect to be able to do so will not try to dunk on me for normal autistic behavior like caring about accuracy in rhetoric.
Please don’t take a defensive stance and attack me like I’m some federated user (not that you all aren’t obnoxiously agressive with federated users who havent actually earned it anyway sometimes, ive called it out a few times recently) spouting liberal rhetoric.
This is an obvious subtweet so fuck it i’m just going to screenshot what im talking about
In this thread I was arguing with the federated lib elsewhere, which was easy to see. But these two users here @Kieselguhr@hexbear.net and @ElHexo@hexbear.net decided to compare me to liberal fact checkers (liberal fact checkers use differences that dont actually matter to try to spin things as false, this is not what was happening here, as I wasnt trying to spin Kieselguhr as false, merely give them advice, AND the difference actually is material). Which frankly is an insulting comparison to make towards an autistic comrade. Then ElHexo decided to tell me information I already knew but wasnt relevant to the correction I made.
Fact checking isnt inherently wrong and playing fast and loose with information in your rhetoric isnt lib shit. Don’t give people holes to gotcha you with lmao. Caring about truth is supposed to be one of our values. We are materialists. The fact that they got upbeared over me for this dunk bothers me too, wish I could see upbears so I could correct everyone involved in that too. Please, as leftists, care about truth and dont give liberals opening to gotcha you with. The fact that you’ve let the bad faith actions of liberal fact checkers start to make you post-truth is not a good sign. Readjust your thinking.
Finally, you really shouldnt approach any fellow Hexbear doing this by assuming bad faith like this, but especially not one with autism in the username. I was trying to improve rhetoric, not prove you wrong. Coming at me aggressively was not an appropriate response. We really should have an official rule of assuming good faith from fellow Hexbears. Especially long standing ones like myself, and ones who are open about being neurodiverse on top of that.
I think it’s fair to ask that comrades not make fun of you (or anyone) or get on your case for wanting accuracy and pointing it out when something is less than accurate - I’m not sure that’s what’s going on in your screenshot - but it is a fair request in general. However, I would also like to ask that you please try to avoid using pejoratives like “moron.” I know it’s not a hard rule or anything here, and I know it is not intended to be used in an ableist way (most of the time) but there still is a lot of ableism embedded in the insult “moron.” I think it’s just better if we can do our best to replace those sort of words in our vocabulary with ones that are just as much biting towards those that deserve it without doing splash damage on those who don’t.
In that very thread (which I think is sad that the whole post got removed, because it was shaping up to be quite a thorough and lively lib-smashing!) the lib that everyone was attempting to educate (with a surprising lack of PPB given their bad faith garbage), was using the term moron, and a comrade pointed out that it was an ableist term that they were using. I think that’s a legitimate ask. It also would have been more effective if other hexbears weren’t making the same mistake.
I don’t mean to hijack your thread to make a different request or to turn your own request back on you, but I feel like it’s actually a very similar thing having to do with respecting neurodivergent people.
I really don’t want to start this Discourse again, but calling someone “moron” is not ableist beyond the metric of “insulting someone’s lack of intelligence is ableist”. It genuinely does not matter that it has a long-dead association with phrenological bullshit, it does not even remotely read that way to a modern audience and is as ridiculous as calling “lowbrow comedy” and ableist way to describe Jackass. That association is not part of the language anymore, it is linguistically dead.
You are right that the lack of PPB was good, though
As someone who is neurodivergent and has worked with people that are more severely effected with developmental issues who frequently get called “morons” specifically because of their disabilities, I think you are way off base. Just because the ***ard slur was recent in common and casual use and still is to a large extent, that doesn’t make the use of it ok, or that it would be ok if we gave it a few more decades to become more fully ingrained in society.
Then don’t.
Edit: And to be clear to anyone reading this, it’s not like I’m calling for the word to be banned on hexbear or even telling people not to use it. I was asking that comrades be more mindful of their use of it and recognize that when they do use it, it does do harm to many neurodivergent people who might be reading, the same way other slurs for them do. All I’m saying is that the respectful, thoughtful, and comradely thing to do would simply be to make an effort to replace it with less splash-damaging terms in your vocabulary when you are able to do so. Because again, there are people with disabilities who feel hurt by its casual use.
It’s not okay because of the association, which does indeed mean
Though that is certainly not what I would recommend compared to the much more reasonable solution of “stop calling people that for any reason”.
This all having been said, my caveat is in the earlier comment was very important, because this sounds like it has gotten very much into “mocking someone’s intelligence is ableist”, which is probably true but is worth clarifying because I have to assume that those people you work with have been called every other slang word for “unintelligent” that was within their bullies’ productive vocabularies. That seems to be very much about how the term is used and disconnecting from any sort of etymological trivia. Surely they were also called “idiot”, and to explain the real meaning of how that it ableist, we would really be getting distracted if we started talking about “idiot savants” and such, despite that being a much more living term than literally any phrenological jargon.
Doesn’t it seem kind of tailist to not ban these terms?
Did you not finish the sentence there? Both the ***ard term and “moron” mean essentially the same thing.
The fuck? Are you trying to quote me out of context or did you really not understand me? I was saying it still would not be ok even if the ***ard slur were given a few more decades to become more ingrained, which it was well on its way to becoming when efforts were made to point out the harmfulness of its use.
The rest of your comment is mostly just
pedantry. “Idiot” absolutely was and is used in an intentionally derogatory way, but most people, even those with developmental disabilities like those I mentioned, do not feel like the use of that word is a slur against them. (If they did, then I would make the same recommendations for it as I did “moron.”) Yes, they also, some of them, had been called, let’s use as an example “shit-for-brains.” But if someone casually used “shit-for-brains” directed elsewhere but in conversation around them, they didn’t have the same gut-punch reaction because they intuitively knew the phrase didn’t have the same kind of history in specifically ridiculing and demeaning people like them.
Take “bitch” as a similar example. We (here) have made an effort not to use that term because of its misogynist connotations. But what about the countless instances it was and is used in situations completely devoid of those connotations? “Man, life is a bitch and then you die.” “They’re just bitching about the TV being too loud.” And on and on. “Bitch” being used ubiquitously in circumstances where it is not at all being directed at women or as a way to emasculate someone is still looked down upon here for reasons I hope are obvious, reasons that I would have hoped regular posters here would recognize as being the same reasons why it would be good to advocate for replacing “moron” in our collective vocabulary. I don’t go around policing people every time the say something like “oh wow, bitchin’!” but at the same time, especially in spaces that are ostensibly sensitive to culturally ingrained sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, etc., I have an expectation that people recognize the history and the fact that it low-key does make many women uncomfortable and they would be doing a net good to make an attempt not to say that.
Basically, it comes down to the feelings and opinions of the group who has been oppressed and is still stigmatized. How do people of color feel about each of the many terms historically used to describe them? Are some of those terms better than others, on a spectrum of acceptability and also dependent on who uses them? Is there a significant portion of women who feel that the word “bitch” is too deeply entwined with misogyny to be salvaged despite it’s ubiquitous innocently-intended use and does its use make them uncomfortable? Are people who suffer from developmental disabilities made uncomfortable by the casual use of “idiot”? The ones I’ve known were not, but all of them, every single one I talked to about it, got upset by people calling others morons, specifically because of the way the word had been used against them. Even the ones who would not have been able to articulate an understanding of the history of how the word was used still had an intuitive sense of how it had been. Personally, I am with them and would always stand in solidarity next to them against the people who simply can’t make the slightest effort to try to use another word when they notice themselves calling someone a “moron.”
Also, I thought you didn’t want to get into this discourse.
edit: autismdragon, I didn’t mean for your post’s thread to get derailed like this, I apologize that it did.
c’mon, lol
They do though.
I should have used a colon or something to mark it, but both of the main things you are baffled by, which you will notice are consecutive, come from an understandable misreading. The quoted part completes the earlier sentence and is not meant to represent your view but refer back to it as a [modified] version of a thesis that you raised to refute. Moving on:
Do you want to take bets on whether the person whose thread we’re hijacking thinks that statement and especially the caricature used is ableist? I thought the point of the thread is that some of us do get hung up on what others trivialize as insignificant details and we shouldn’t just mock that?
Why? I suppose in a way I should thank you for the honesty since that’s a mark against using etymology given, again, “idiot savant” being a demonstration in common reference of “idiot” being used very much as a slur to cast people of a certain group as subhuman, but I’m curious about what leads the average bigot to pick “moron” with such consistency over the many other words we have with the same denotations.
I do think you’re undercutting the way that “bitch” to mean “complain” has emasculating connotations and is therefore still very sexist.
Otherwise, I think that there’s a norm-establishing problem here, because a lot of these matters are incidents of language use and not broadly-established slurs, so they are going to be localized to some extent, so it doesn’t make sense to go in swinging, as we saw in that one thread, saying “that’s ableist language” to someone from some other instance speaking offhand, because you don’t know what their frame of reference or their intention is. You can and should still enforce norms on everyone, but it should probably be couched in the language you used to explain the root of the matter to me just now, that some people feel a certain way about X word. Anyway, that’s all I have to say.
No youre very right, I’ll try to watch that thank you.