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.
Policing the hell out of language, while well intentioned, creates a backlash effect that I think actually hurts us more these days. Look at how they originally attacked “political correctness” in the 90s - because we were trying to code some improvements into language. Now people openly laugh at us for not having a solution to homelessness besides renaming them “unhoused.”
Be far easier to just let the R word become the word it has become, which doesn’t describe mental illness or disability anymore, much like “idiot” and “moron” and “imbecile” were once used as medical terms, and now they have none of that meaning.
You aren’t being “policed.” The point is the problem is the dehumanization of people with intellectual delays, who are a group currently being target by the fascist government of the US, and probably other fascist governments at the moment. Disability rights are fucking invisible, and language like that goes with that problem.
It’s not about being “offended,” it’s pointing out that words mean things. Some people are hurt by your language. Why isn’t that enough to consider what you are saying and why.
they mean things to you.
they don’t mean those same things to other people.
just like if I say the word sabaka, it doesn’t mean anything to you, but since i speak russian, it has meaning to be.
you find the word retard upsetting. Cool. I don’t. I find the word heteronormativity upsetting, also emotional intelligence. maybe you don’t.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. Attempting to change “homeless” to “un-housed” is different from just not using a slur — you’re assuming that non-derogatory terms don’t exist for neurodiverse people; there are no “improvements” to be made, just exercising some discretion. You shouldn’t be using slurs just because it’ll turn acceptable soon or because everyone else is using it; if there are people that feel hurt by it and have a history of being marginalized by such usage, you don’t have the right to use it; that is if you are a morally sound person that doesn’t care about BS buzzwords like “political correctness”.
I get what you are saying but if idiotic and imbecile are still available as insults and are further from medical definition than retard then why not just use them instead? The point being is that retard still has the bite of comparing the person to the mentally disabled and the others don’t.
No dude, the PC mob in the 90s were pricks trying to police language. The result came in the 2010s when the UK enacted Section 5 of public order act. Which say a kid arrested and actually in fucking court for calling a horse “gay”. And other for saying “woof” to a fucking dog!
The problem is that all those people who wanted that shit, were just thin skinned little bitches. And now that virtue signalling is all the rage, everything is offensive now. “Sticks and stones and may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”. Yet here we are, and everyone is clutching their pearls over anything that will get them a worthless up arrow.
Part of free speech is about being allowed to offend people. You are totally free to criticise the person, and whatever he or she might be saying and who they are saying it too. But the fundamental right to offend is something that should be protected by all of us. Or one day, you might just find yourself in trouble with the law, because someone claims to be offended at using the word “fascist” because what you called fascist, didnt rise to horrors of history attributed to that.
And now we have the online safety act in the UK, which is spreading to other countries where you have to show ID to use social media among other things, when it was only ever supposed to be used for porn sites.
But dont take my word for it. Mr Bean said it much better than I ever could:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU
Languages evolve. It’s a very common thing for descriptors of negative things to become slang for insults. Not to say we should be encouraging this behavior, but rather that policing it is ineffective at best.
Effective solutions address the underlying issues
(Destigmatization of ailments is a good thing, but doing so by stigmatizing the words themselves often has a Streisand effect)
Ah yes, let all those white kids say “the rapper word” (as it was known in my time), slavery is over, segregation is over, those who still discriminate are just jerks, and being black is a nice filter to know who your real friends are. /s
As long as one ignores all the solutions that capitalists dont like, sure. We also cant figure out why people starve while we’re at it.
If you’re serious about helping the homeless, don’t spent scant attention antagonizing potential supporters over vocabulary.