Stuff like “stupid, idiot, moron, dumb,” you know the ones. If you’re insulting someone for their shitty garbage beliefs and all you can manage to come up with is ways to insult their intelligence, appearance, or other aspect about them that has nothing to do with their cruelty and shittyness, you should maybe reevaluate.

Just saw a thread on here where a user was stubbornly refusing to adjust their language when another user politely pointed out that it was harmful to our comrades as well, and the person refusing was massively upvoted and the comrade trying to explain why it was harmful was downvoted. Thought we were better than that

I’m not calling anyone out, just wanted to make a post explaining my feelings on it and that when stuff like that happens (not the intelligence based insults, I know its hard to switch, but getting insulted for asking people to avoid them) it hurts and makes me feel less welcome here </3

Using words like “You’re being ignorant” or “That’s a cruel belief” is actually more effective than just going “lmao idiot”.

If those are the words you actually mean to convey I’d say use them instead :)

Edit: if the reception this post got isn’t a good proof that this is something this community needs to grapple with, I don’t know what is.

  • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    4 years ago

    I get where you’re coming from Quill, and I think full blown slurs like re[dacted] are should unambiguously be denounced. But I’m not sure if extending this to any language that could be considered ableist is productive. There’s an enormous range of possible disabilities and a lot of language that can be considered ableist in one way or another.

    • QuillQuote [they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      1·
      4 years ago

      I absolutely understand where you’re coming from :)

      But what I’d ask is this: Is using intelligence based insults (and other ableist language as you mentioned) productive? Does it allow for uniquely powerful rhetorical uses? Does it do a job better than any other insult or criticism could?

      In my view, insults like these are not only less effective than criticizing people for their actual monstrous beliefs and actions, but when they’re used instead it means the person isn’t getting criticized for those (fundamentally bad) things.

      Gonna drop a quote here from @hogposting because I think they said it better than I can

      Big difference between wokescolding and: “Hey you know how we all figured out that using the r-word is pretty fucked? Maybe we should think a little about how we’re using other, less severe insults designed to communicate the exact same thing.”

      Even if you’re not bought in on that, there are so many more creative, precise ways to insult someone that aren’t “ur a dum dum.”