As a disabled person, I face ableism and ableist language every day. Some people use ableist language without even knowing that it is ableist. I thought it would be good for folks to take a look at the attached BBC article and expand their perspectives a bit.
Speaking of facts
Now, as for actual discussion to be had, unfortunately our language is entirely coded in slights towards different groups of people. In calling someone “a sinister villain who’s a part of a cabal”, I’ve called them a left (handed) farmer who is Jewish.
At some point we do need to accept that these negative words, which are at their fundamentals, slights to certain groups of people, have taken on a new meaning, and that their misuse as slights against those people only really applies contextually. I do think that terms like “stupid” and “idiot” have achieved that level of shift.
Feel free to disagree with me of course, I’m not here to tell you you or your experience is wrong, and I’m more than happy to have an actual discussion on this. ❤️
I agree with you. In fact I had no idea dumb used to mean “a deaf person”. This word has a new meaning. This is obviously besides the fact that the word dumb is demeaning in today’s definition, so there’s that.
Agreed, but for words like that to make such a shift, there was a period where the words were still super offensive and used anyways. And if we are more enlightened now, we should have less of these words going forward. Like I think we’ve largely stopped such a transformation of the word “retard(ed)”.
I personally have completely nixed the R word from my vocabulary. I agree that there was a time when some terms were super offensive, or the history of a term is one leaded in negative use towards marginalized peoples. I’m just not convinced that these terms in particular are ones I need to care about.
If you’ve stopped using the r word because it’s offensive, that’s great! Really. Hopefully this discussion (like the linked article) will convince you that there are other terms commonly used that are just as offensive. If you can find alternatives to the r word, then you can also probably find alternatives to “deaf” and “stupid”, for example. Regardless, I appreciate that you’re trying!
This isn’t a new discussion I’ve seen, and it’s something I’ve dealt with internally myself. It’s also not as though this is a final answer. I do try to evade these words where I can, but generally I don’t think they’re harmful enough for me to “swear off” so to speak, if that makes sense? I’m not so dull as to say it’s “a personal choice” - that stuff’s just a cop-out for choosing the worst options, but I think that simply suggesting that some people may be offended by certain terms is enough to lend people to change their biases in terminology; or at least it is for me haha
Thanks for the good natured response. I appreciate that in this thread, given how intense some people seem to be.
I’m autistic, and so I come off pretty blunt sometimes. I am really passionate about disability justice, but blasting people just hardens their position and makes them unwilling to listen. I’m glad that you weren’t offended! :)
if left handed people were still marginalised your comparison might be valid, but they aren’t so it isn’t.
No we don’t, especially since no, they haven’t
you would be wrong
https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/stupid-is-an-ableist-slur-breaking-down-defenses-around-ableist-language-liberating-our-words/
yet that’s exactly what you are doing.
You should be able to remove a few words from your vocabulary to reduce harm to already marginalised people, without arguing about it or trying to “logic” your way out of it. It isn’t a big ask, but rather the very bare minimum.
Uh, I’d rather good faith discussion instead, actually.
Ad hominem != Good faith IMO
@ram
Not the person you were talking to but wait… why… I thought kbin was one of the more chill instances? Have we got a bad reputation in your neck of the woods?
It’s a personal observation I’ve noticed, I go into more detail here if you’re curious.
Thanks, perspective’s a strange thing, to me it always feels like the bad faithers are from the biggest instances but that’s just because of the size of them.
I think some of us who joined kbin before we federated are kind of in a bit of a diy small magazines vibe and don’t really mix it up as much.
I joined because I found the interface so much easier to use than lemmy, and also it has a lot of features like the ability to block domains or instances by myself, and the cool interfacing with mastodon. We also turned out to have transparent finances which is nice.
Although we can see the names of people who upvote and downvote us, Kbin doesn’t seem to federate all downvotes, so I guess we can be kind of oblivious to disapproval from outsiders.
wrt not federating all downvotes, you sure that’s not because the commenter or poster is from an instance that disables downvotes? If they disable downvotes, then all downvotes will only be localized to your instance (i.e. every downvote you’ll see on that comment/post is from kbin.social users, and me, lemmy.ca users)
No, there’s definitely more to it than that. I don’t fully understand, but to give you an example, @ram, here are screenshots of how your comment about kbin above looks to me:
From visiting your instance, not signed in
From kbin
From my test account at lemmy.world
(All sorted by old). As you can see, the voting is very different viewed from kbin.
Huh that’s really interesting. I wonder why that is then.