Comment on Here I go hate criming again
krashmo@lemmy.world 6 months agoI can’t speak for others but the reason I’ve used boomer as a slur, if you can even call it that, in the past is because they don’t see the fight you mentioned as necessary. You can’t be allies with someone who doesn’t think there’s a problem to be fixed. It would be one thing if we were fighting the same battle in different ways but that’s not what’s happening. They’re actively helping the other side win.
FMT99@lemmy.world 6 months ago
And this is why it’s, in my opinion, correct to call it a slur. When you refer to a certain part of the population, in the context of calling them the enemy, not based on their beliefs or actions but their age, that sounds questionable. Just as it would be if you said the same thing about a racial group, a sexual preference, a religious group, etc.
krashmo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I would take issue with you saying the word only refers to a specific age group. In my experience it is describing people with a specific set of beliefs about the world. It just so happens the most common factor in whether or not you have those beliefs is how old you are. Not all boomers are “boomers” just as not all Gen Z are progressive or whatever else the stereotype is, but in order to talk about large groups of people you have to make generalized statements. We’re talking about trends not absolute definitions.
FMT99@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This feels a lot like saying “when I say the n-word I don’t mean all black people, just the bad ones” (and yes that word is of course a different level of bad but the principle is the same)
You can make those arguments without the blatant generalization and denigrating language.
krashmo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Language is like that. You can read into it what you want to in many cases. If you don’t want to accept what I’m telling you I mean when I say something then that’s fine. Just know at that point you’re giving more weight to your own assumptions than you are to what the speaker intended to convey and that’s the opposite of how listening is supposed to work.