Comment on Teehee
lyralycan@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks agoBreaking character, I’m glad there are pockets of the internet where offensive humour is still freely used. Not 4chan offensive, fuck them. But comedy containing degrading jokes are an important portion of life imo. South Park, US roasts, Cards Against Humanity, even (cringing when I say this) Ricky Gervais has a valid place in the world of comedy. I don’t like them all, but I recognise that suppressing any form of creative expression is more abhorrent than doing something the majority of the tribe dislikes.
Abyssian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ricky Gervais? I know his old stuff used to be great, not so sure about his new stuff just because I haven’t really seen any of it. But Anthony jeselnik had me laughing my ass off when you first since a few more came out. I like dark humor.
(Hmm… this got long. I do that. My bad)
The social word policing is biggest annoyance. I understand the attempted thinking behind it, but I’m in my late 40s and grew up calling people retarded. So did my father. Neither of us would mock someone with a genuine developmental deficiency, because that’s horrible. We’ve both worked with them. Me only a little, but he’s spent the last 30+ years working as a care nurse for people who actually need to wear bicycle helmets to keep from injuring their own heads and need 24/7 care.
I can’t describe how backwards it is to have some kid overhear him use the word retarded and decide that they should lecture him on ableism and let him know that he’s a terrible person. They’ve never changed the diapers of adults who can’t not shit themselves, let alone do it over and over day after day for years.
The worse a disability like this is the lower a person’s life expectancy becomes, and there have been several times where he’s worked one on one with the same client for many years and I’ve had to watch him break down because he considered them family and they suddenly died from what would be something small but they couldn’t communicate what was wrong and no one knew.
It’s ironic because the same people who will jump on someone for using the word retarded are generally completely fine using words like stupid, imbecile, moron, and dumb themselves. All of those words have the exact same history. They all started as medical terms for the same sort of horrible conditions, then people use them to insult others that didn’t have those conditions and eventually some people in society decided it was the words themselves that were the problem so new clinical terms were created and those were relegated as bad words. They have the exact same history as the word retarded, but they were just part of an older cycle so now most people consider them just to be insults while they consider retarded to be something especially awful and ableist and discriminatory and mean.
But… all of them are just people using words for a condition anyone would be horrified to have as an insult. It’s not whatever word someone is using that is the thing that is emotionally hurtful to people with genuine developmental deficiencies. It’s the fact that a lot of them understand to some degree that something is missing and wrong. It’s knowing that anything being used to insult another person’s intelligence could be applied to them as a definition. That hurts. It sucks. And the words we use aren’t going to make that any better for them. Because the condition is something we would all consider a complete nightmare to live with.
One of his clients was a woman in her 50s. She had a master’s degree, and used to have a brilliant career and huge house and a lot of money. She loved riding horses and was doing that one day when she got thrown off of one and her head hit a rock. Mentally she ended up something like 10 years old. And she remembered the life she had before and how smart she used to be and being able to read long books and do everything herself.
That’s hell. Humanity trying to feel they’re doing a good thing by not using the word retarded doesn’t make it any better. They’re not making these people or their behaviors any more socially accepted. They’re not making the condition any easier to live with. They’re not doing anything to improve the condition, because there’s nothing we can do to improve the condition.
They’re just doing the least effort thing they can to tell themselves they’re helping and being better people. But it doesn’t make any difference at all, because no matter what word we use as a medical term for the condition and no matter what words people use to insult other people without those conditions, it’s the fact of having the condition itself and understanding to some degree what it means that’s the thing that actually causes the hurt.
Words aren’t bad. Humans are always going to insult one another, sometimes playfully and sometimes cruelly. Having an actual severe mental developmental deficiency is horrible, and painful. There’s a massive difference between using a word to insult a person who doesn’t have an actual developmental deficiency and using any word to mock a person who has any condition that’s outside of their own control. One is normal human behavior, the second one is being a complete piece of shit… sadly still normal human behavior, but an aspect of it we can all try to get better at. Because it’s something the majority of us still do to some degree, we just don’t do it with the conditions that have become socially frowned upon to do it with.
Virtue signaling online isn’t actually being a better person, so keep enjoying offensive humor.
Besides, there are so many things that it’s now becoming more socially acceptable for a genuinely retarded person to do. For the first time in history the United States of America has a Secretary of Health who is completely retarded. And not just him, the Speaker of the House and dozens of Senators and Representatives. Even the President of the United States is openly retarded. And he’s so retarded that people with developmental deficiencies would be insulted at being compared to him, because no one else is nearly as retarded as he is and it’s understandable for them to feel insulted at being compared to him mentally.