Blahaj.zone admin here. Let me make this simple and clear. I don’t care what specific word you use, if you are using intellectual disability or neurodivergence as an insult, you’re going to get moderated.
Just… don’t use anything one can’t control as an insult.
Yup. Goes for bodyshaming too.
Genuinely curious if this applies to moron and idiot, since they have basically the same origin story.
Sounds like a yes
Sounds like a silence to me.
lemmy users will hear “i don’t care what word you use, don’t insult based on disability or neurodivergence” and say “sounds like silence to me, too bad the mods won’t answer my questions of if certain words are allowed”
🙄
Tell that to anyone in the aviation industry and you’ll get a chuckle and a couple of "bless your heart"s.
entirely different word and we both know it
Try telling that to a text filter or a moderator on a power trip. They won’t give a rat’s ass about “to retard” meaning “to reduce or hold back.” Even the linked article fails to make the semantic distinction when it calls for the elimination of the word.
If this comment disappears, it will have proven my point.
it’s giving 6th grade locker room 😂😂😂
“dude look i found a way to say it and dude it’s allowed because it’s about airplanes”
And a bitch is a female dog, I know. There’s a factor of intention, a.k.a mens rea, a.k.a guilty mind that separates right from wrong based on why a person does something. It’s this sort of inconvenient nuance that dealing with absolutes doesn’t allow.
and there’s a matter of intention to me blocking you, too. literally no one disagrees with you, not even me. i am not calling for an “absolute” anything
your sophomorisms are literally just being posted to give you an excuse to type le edgy words. and worst crime of all you’re not doing it even in a funny or thoughtful way, you are just being mean about it. take care and i hope to me is the most unkind you will be to anyone all day.
I put my sourdough batard into the fridge to retard. Retarded dough tastes better!
It’s quite obvious that it’s very different to use it as a verb and as a noun to refer to someone.
How am I supposed to just stop using this word?? How else is the plane supposed to tell me to put thrust at idle during landing? This is ridiculous.
Just don’t use it to refer to people and you’re golden. There are many slurs that are also legitimate scientific terms, like how fag(g)ot is a bundle of sticks, or how in physics you have the Advanced and the Retarded Green’s functions.
this is the way
To be fair to Airbus,
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They probably chose the language for that call-out way before 2009. Airplanes can live for thirty years, and type designs can keep going several decades longer
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The designers were also likely to be French, but they selected English call-outs. This seems to me like a case where they picked a word that’s technically in the OED l, but is actually much more common in French.
I mean, if it’s a valid word for what they want to say, then I don’t really see a problem. It’s pronounced the same, but it’s a completely different word.
Same with a pork meatball or cigarette in the UK.
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no hate to you but i do hate that this is one of the default responses the internet has chosen when discussing this language (twice now in this thread)
i guess it’s like a growing pains thing, but it strikes me as very middle schooler, kind of like bringing up that one word that means unwilling to share with others.
one is a noun/adjective, the other is a verb. entirely different words that simply have the same Latin root. one is used in a professional context in an industry nearly none of us are familiar with, the other i come across as a derogatory on this site pretty much hourly. please let’s grow up a bit about this.
(again no hate to you specifically commenter, it was a funny joke and i just want to call out the broader trend)
It probably gets annoying as a bystander, but I don’t have a lot of opportunities to bring aviation into the rest of my life. Especially in a way that’s mildly funny.
honestly happy for you lol i think both of our emotional investments are valid
Tell airbus to use the proper term “intellectually disabled” instead
Airbus is Ableist!
It was offensive even way before that. I remember us not serving a customer at the fast food place where I worked because he used it around my co-worker whose brother had Downs Syndrome.
I’ve never really associated with people who use that word.
Lemmy seems to be pretty good about not using it, though. Reddit, on the other hand…
it absolutely was offensive way before that. from my understanding 2009 was the year there was a unified push to change things across the language though :)
also wow reddit was worse? i won’t lie i never saw it there in the past decade but perhaps i was browsing more wholesome subs than some
but yeah on lemmy it’s not an exaggeration to say i come across it (used as a slur, not in an aviation sense, children 🙄) almost hourly. in another thread i am getting dogpiled with downvotes for asking politely not to use it in a derogatory way.
Every time I’ve reported it on lemmy, I’ve seen it removed by mods, but I guess there are a lot of communities here I just don’t visit.
Reddit had a very popular sub with the r-slur in its name, and I saw it a lot on CTH (don’t ask me why I ever visited that sub – I ask myself, and I have no answer lol).
And yeah, Rosa’s Law was 2010, but even dating back to the 70s people were abandoning its use. I recall my brother having to write an essay about people with disabilities when he used it in school in the 90s (not that I approve of using writing as a punishment).
it does get left up by certain mods here 😭 part of the reason for posting this
in my individual non authoritative opinion OKBR gets grandfathered the pass but only because it’s used in a purely non offensive context. the mods there did a good job of that.
hereabouts though i’ll see like, a thread argument about cross stitching and boom, r-slur used as a derogatory. like come on kids this isn’t kindergarten lmao.
I know so many people who adamantly stand by their use of it. I used to say it, too, but all it took was one person to point out to me that it was hurtful and I apologised and stopped no questions asked. I don’t get why it’s so hard to just have a little empathy.
based and i adore people who are like you
it does tend to be a good litmus test for disempathy, sadly. obviously there are outliers, but if one can’t take a tiny correction to like 0.01% of their vocabulary, color me not surprised when that same person starts talking about the immigrant problem or women’s place in the home or something :(
My guy still thinks bigotry is caused by lack of empathy. It’s actually selective empathy that helps encourage bigots.
i used to think it was okay for me to say as i’m disabled. what i noticed, though, is that my doing so 1) communicated to my abled peers that it’s okay for them to say as well & 2) made me appear as a pick-me; i was perceived as “one of the good ones.”
the r-slur has been causing a very visceral reaction in me for years & i will continue to report each & every instance of it.
That’s the problem I have when people of that slur use it. And worse, they act like it’s not a big deal. There’s offensive words I can use because of my skin tone that would absolutely get any non-colored person choked out.
But you nailed it. If I brush it off like it doesnt offend/isn’t a disgusting word, then I am giving permission to others that it’s okay to say.
I understand not calling disabled people the word, because mocking people for something about themselves they didn’t choose (like a disability) is cruel, I am totally on board with never using words in this way to target disabled people.
I don’t understand why I can’t use the word to mock someone who is not intellectually disabled for choosing not to use their perfectly well-functioning brain, it seems like a very apt analogy. It communicates “you aren’t disabled, you have no excuse for acting like it, start choosing to use the fully functional brain you have”.
Additionally, only the “r-word” seems to be the bad one, despite there being many other words in our language that originally began as a medical descriptor for intellectually disabled folks. If I call someone a moron for running a red light because they’re playing with their phone nobody bats an eye, but if I call them the “r-word” I’m a terrible person?
It communicates “you aren’t disabled, you have no excuse for acting like it, start choosing to use the fully functional brain you have”.
look, if this doesn’t make you see how it’s a shitty thing to say, i don’t think anyone else can help you understand.
nobody is going to arrest you for using the word, and many people will celebrate you using it. The problem is those people are mostly assholes. The word you should be thinking about is “audience”.
what annoys me is that no one cared about this until Sarah Palin made a big deal out of someone calling her that and she pretended to get offended for her baby with down syndrome as if it was targeted on them.
but I’m also ok with never saying it again. not a big loss who cares. at least we got a legendary Linus clip out of it.
Fun fact: Abbott sells methylphenidate chlorohydrate with a retardant effect so that it lasts for approximately 16 hours instead of 4, and they called it Aradix Retard lmao. I know why they called it that but I can’t help but laugh every time I see it.
Yes words can mean different things.
Airbus pilots hear the removed call-out all the time.
Aradix Retard
Sounds like a Harry Potter spell
Fans: Because it slows things down? Rowling:
I think it’s fine in its original contexts (i.e. “retardant”, or to “retard” something), but could maybe be avoided in 80% of cases.
It is inexcusable to apply it to people though.
It’s just lazy. If you want to hurt someone’s feelings you need to do the work.
i miss old school r/murderedbywords
I asked a question about this after seeing it quite a bit here!
This is the argument I see to defend use of the word and I’ve never understood it. Where I am (west coast-ish of the US), the word is used very specifically to mean autistic. If you ask someone not to say retard, they say autistic instead. If you ask them not to say autistic, they say special education. If not that, slow. If not that, someone who takes the short bus. Unambiguously the people here use the r slur as a slur against autistic people. They use it as an insult towards allistic people to degrade them as lesser. Same as calling a straight person the f slur. Maybe it’s different in other parts of the country, but the r slur is absolutely used as a slur against autistic people where I am.
the constant reality is that hateful losers just want to be verbally disdainful and othering to the disabled, and they will do whatever they can to keep doing it even if it means changing their language
the model of the “euphemism treadmill,” while accurate, is just another tool spiteful people use to justify saying spiteful derogatives
I’m sorry this happens where you live, that’s super messed up. Autism is particularly frustrating to see denigrated because it all too often comes down to social ineptitude (so far as the people who ostracize others go). Everyone’s brains work differently - this idea that anyone who breaks the mold should be cut down is incredibly frustrating and sad.
I guess I’m getting too old. Is everyone these days offended by crumbs? And don’t come in with your vocabulary evolves, works both ways. Were I live everyone uses a multitude of slurs and nobody is hurt in the process, but if they do. Then they open their mouth and we have a civilized discussion about it. We’re nearing a point of a privacy invaded society by the people and not the governments at this rate, everyone is opinionated about everything and hurt in the feelings if someone doesn’t adhere to their vision on reality.
this post is literally the definition of me opening my mouth and having a civilized discussion about it. pls respect that. :)
If I call you “stupid,” “moronic,” or “intellectually bankrupt” you know what I’m saying. Getting offended by the specific wording of an ad hominem, while giving synonymous terms a pass, is truly some of the finest hair-splitting I have ever had the displeasure of seeing.
Imagine calling the difference between people who do stupid things and people who are born with diagnosed mental illnesses “splitting hairs”.
It’s very, very simple. In one case, you are attacking someone who is completely in control of their mental facilities. In the other, you are attacking people who are literally incapable of defending themselves, from birth. They are not synonymous. If you think that level of punching down is okay, then be as indignant and self-righteous about it as you want, but you deserve to be told.
Intellectually-disabled people were originally defined with words such as “morons” or “imbeciles”, which then became commonly used insults.
I don’t see anyone getting a ban anywhere for calling someone a “moron,” for any other reason than making an ad hominem. The thought is almost laughable.
So, we’re just going to pretend that language doesn’t evolve because it justifies your bias?
People didn’t put their foot down when the meaning of those words began to shift, and now they mean something entirely different. In our more socially and culturally aware culture, we as a people understand nuance and are generally educated enough to see what’s happening. We have by and large decided that it’s a bad thing to continue normalizing attacking the mentally disabled.
Fuck off with your pseudo-intellectual defense of toxic, dehumanizing culture. Words mean things. The things they mean can change. Those ones, in a less educated and accepting time, did. The ones we have now have not. Your attempt to dismiss that is genuinely hateful.
Ootl. Did someone use the word that rhymes with lard?
You can say fart on here
hello rhyme police? yeah this one right here
