Comment on Based Red Dead

• Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  You’re absolutely right. You didn’t say that “autistic” is synonymous with stupid, I wasn’t accusing you of doing so. Neither of us believe it is synonymous, people don’t think it’s synonymous, and it’s no surprise that people will instead use it colloquially to mean “excessively detail-oriented”.

  Is that so terrible? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t use it that way, but I also don’t say things like “I’m so OCD” for that same purpose - and I don’t think it’s a terrible thing to do that either! I wouldn’t use those terms like that, for the record, nor do I think others should. But I don’t think it’s anywhere on the same level, and I don’t think it ever will be.

  I think it’s insensitive to use “autistic” and “OCD” in this way because it runs the risk of blinding us to other people’s struggles when we normalize their symptoms as “standard neurotypical problem but worse”.

  But do you see how specific that concern is? Do you see how far we’ve come? To even care about the idea of not being able to see someone’s symptoms? To discuss how it might be insensitive to not even know someone else has a mental condition?

  Being “detail-oriented” is not by itself a bad thing. It doesn’t bear any terrible inplications of your value or worth to society. It doesn’t suggest that you can’t be trusted to make decisions, or hold a job. If anything some people are starting to think the opposite.

  Which is also problematic, because we sometimes romanticize symptoms as super powers - but do you see? Do you see how far we’ve progressed, when we have to start worrying that people will assume neurodivergent people are too capable?

  So calling someone “autistic” when you want to call them “detail-oriented” is insensitive, sure. It might even be labelled as ignorant - but look how high that bar of ignorance is! “Detail-oriented” is simply the most recognizable symptom of a particular flavor of neurodivergence - and using it colloquially like that suggests that you already know how the disorder works!

  In the past, children and adults with autism weren’t called autistic. Even after the diagnosis was added to the DSM, it went criminally underdiagnosed for a long time.

  Some of them, the ones that didn’t strongly present symptoms that disrupted their lives, the ones that could mask their behaviors - they were just called “detail-oriented”. They were just “weird”.

  But most of them? The ones that had trouble speaking? The ones that had trouble looking you in the eye? They weren’t called “detail-oriented.” They were called retarded.

  Do you see how it might be different to call someone “retarded” when you want to call them “stupid”? How much deeper the implications run? How much worse the associations are?

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  • yeahiknow3@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I agree with everything you’ve written, but we are sort of going in a big circle. Earlier I wrote that

    using the r-word to insult someone autistic is cruel and unacceptable.

    For that reason, I can endorse everything you’re written here. However, I thought our disagreement was over whether there should be a concerted effort to banish a particular pejorative term from our vocabularies (namely the r-word). I had argued no, since it seemed like an overreaction, whereas you made it clear that groups of people were being offended/hurt by the casual use of that term.

    So then the question becomes:

    1. To what extent are we responsible for moderating our private speech in order to appease random people we’ve never met?

    • My intuition is that the answer is never. I think words should be struck from our vocabulary for a very different reason. Namely, when they represent an evil ideology. That is to say, I think that removing words from our vocabulary is a drastic thing to do and should be reserved for truly heinous verbiage (the sort of language that, if you used it, the only possible outcome between us would be violence). Some of these words are so evil, I can’t even euphemize them without feeling angry and sick.
    • My understanding is that you have looser parameters for unacceptable language, which must meet a certain thresholds of causing offense to be a candidate for censorship.

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    • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      That’s fair, we can step back from the intricacies of this particular word and return to first principles - and I agree, this is an important first principle to discuss. After all this time disagreeing, we may have come back around that big circle to find that we really agreed all along.

      I don’t really think I advocate for a concerted effort to change the english language the way you imagine. I want people to change the way they think, not the way they talk. I think if they change the way they think, this will certainly change the way they talk. Not the other way around.

      I try to invite people to take a look at the words we use as a vehicle for taking a look at the way we use them - the intentions and the context. Why do we use these words this way? What do they mean? Who can be hurt? Why would they be hurt?

      I think that there are a lot of good reasons not to use the word “retard”. And there aren’t many good reasons to use it. I know of plenty of alternatives. So I don’t use the word. And I do have the arrogance to think I’m right, and the gall to suggest that others should stop using the word too.

      But for the record I have never advocated for censorship of the word “retard” in this conversation, or anywhere. I don’t think a fediverse instance or any media platform should just ban the word, or ban people for using it. I don’t think people should be silenced for it.

      Even below the level of “control”, of authority figures or systems imposing changes from the top-down…

      Even down to a personal level - I don’t think I advocate for people to censor themselves or each other. Please forgive me if I have done so here - that wasn’t my intention.

      I just want people to be mindful of what they say. To understand what they’re saying, and why, and what impact it can have and what implications it carries. I don’t think the decisions I make about vocabulary are so severe as your question suggests.

      I don’t think I’ll ever again find someone to go the distance with me on this topic as you have, and I thank you for that. But if I did? And they listened, and thought, and considered… and they walked away, still saying the word? I wouldn’t want them to lose their voice. I don’t think they should be censored. I might think they’re wrong to continue saying it, but I think a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things.

      But I do have to say that I think a large part of this conversation unfortunately has boiled down to “who gets to decide?”.

      You have a list of words in your mind that deserve to be abandoned. I’m fairly confident we could agree on all of them. But I’m not certain, because I don’t know your list. I only know my list. Most people only know their list. So I do need to argue against the implication that I have looser parameters from you because my list might be different. I may have added words to my list for different reasons than you added words to yours, but that’s not the same thing as having a lower threshold for what offends me. There are people who will add words to their lists that I won’t add to mine, and for reasons I won’t understand, and I don’t think they’re wrong for doing so.

      That being said, you and I appear to be approaching some of the core concepts of linguistics here, and from different angles. You’ve joined me this far for this productive discussion, so I feel comfortable asking you to please follow me on one more twist of thought before we step away from ableism entirely -

      How often do you call someone a cretin? The interesting thing about the euphemism treadmill is that we kept replacing the “official” words for the same definitions. We actively changed our clinical language each time. But until the treadmill stopped on “retard”… we didn’t actively stop using those words colloquially.

      We struck them from the medical journals, but we didn’t strike them from the social vocabulary. The internet didn’t exist. People weren’t nearly so up in arms about ableism. You couldn’t censor the town square the way you can an online forum. We still use the word moron, and idiot. We even still use the word imbecile sometimes. It’s a fun word to say.

      But how often do people use the word cretin? You might hear it in a particularly poetic roast, but you’ll never hear someone say “oh, jennifer? Yeah, she’s a total cretin.”

      Medical journals stopped using it because it became a derogatory term… but did we stop using it for that reason? Then why didn’t we stop using moron?

      I take a descriptivist approach to language. I believe it is what it does. The only rules for how we talk to each other are the ones humans made up, and because of that language constantly evolves as we keep making shit up. And I don’t set the rules. Nobody does, because we all do. I decide what the language of the future will be as much as you do, which is to say probably not at all.

      I don’t think we stopped using cretin for good reasons… I think we just stopped using it. I think we’ll just stop using a lot of words for no good reason, and so it’s not a very big leap from there for me to believe we can stop using a word for genuinely good reasons.

      I think that we should try our best not to hurt people. And I think that we will hurt people anyway, no matter how hard we try. No matter our intentions. No matter the context. That’s one of the many curses of being the rising ape, and I agree with you - there is absolutely no way to break that curse. Something we do will offend someone somewhere, and that doesn’t mean we did a bad thing. But that also doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

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      • yeahiknow3@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        I think that there are a lot of good reasons not to use the word “retard”. And there aren’t many good reasons to use it. I know of plenty of alternatives.

        Agreed. That’s my feeling as well.

        But how often do people use the word cretin?

        Most people have no clue what that word means or how it originated. I certainly don’t use “cretin,” since I have no use for disparaging someone for being mentally and physically crippled. Maybe that’s your point, that properly understanding the genesis of some term can undermine your desire to use it? And you’re right. Cretinism, the disease, makes me really sad, as does the fact that assholes chose to turn it into a pejorative. So maybe that’s has something to do with my unwillingness to ever use the word.

        In my mind, “retard” was more of a vague diagnosis mental slowness, so it makes me less sad. Still, I’m far less willing to use it than an alternative word like “idiot” whose meaning is totally divorced in my imagination from any origin story. After all, once you use a word (a bunch of sounds) to mean something long enough, it eventually makes no difference what the word used to mean. That said, I can see your point. The cretin example is a good one. Very persuasive.

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