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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4249 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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What are the steelman arguments for/against using the word "retarded" to describe idiocy?

The main argument I've heard is that actually mentally retarded people are well aware of their condition being used as a punching bag to put down other humans, and this naturally produces feelings of Feels Bad Man. Why would you knowingly inflict such collateral damage on innocents when there are perfectly valid alternative insults to be used?

And yet I can't help but feel that this is what the left would call "tone policing." I wanna express myself how I feel like expressing myself, damn it, and that shit right there is some fucking retarded shit.

Imaginary mental anguish is a common manipulation tactic.

Who is out there informing all the retards that someone said the word? Do they have a daily call-in show?

Hilarious quote from a Supreme Court decision:

The distribution of photographs and films depicting sexual activity by juveniles is intrinsically related to the sexual abuse of children in at least two ways. First, the materials produced are a permanent record of the children's participation and the harm to the child is exacerbated by their circulation.10 Second, the distribution network for child pornography must be closed if the production of material which requires the sexual exploitation of children is to be effectively controlled.

10As one authority has explained:

[P]ornography poses an even greater threat to the child victim than does sexual abuse or prostitution. Because the child's actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place. A child who has posed for a camera must go through life knowing that the recording is circulating within the mass distribution system for child pornography.

Shouvlin, Preventing the Sexual Exploitation of Children: A Model Act, 17 Wake Forest L.Rev. 535, 545 (1981). See also Child Exploitation 292 ("[I]t is the fear of exposure and the tension of keeping the act secret that seem to have the most profound emotional repercussions"); Note, Protection of Children from Use in Pornography: Toward Constitutional and Enforceable Legislation, 12 U. Mich.J.Law Reform 295, 301 (1979) (hereafter cited as Use in Pornography) (interview with child psychiatrist) ("The victim's knowledge of publication of the visual material increases the emotional and psychic harm suffered by the child").

I am not too sure what you find objectionable or funny about this? (Unless you assume the bolded sentence is about children viewing pornography rather than being in it?).

Five of the Supreme Court's nine justices approvingly quoted a claim that distribution of child pornography is worse than child rape and child prostitution. (The other four justices merely concurred in the judgment, so they did not endorse this particular footnote.) I would expect most people to find such a claim laugh-inducing.

distribution of child pornography is worse than child rape and child prostitution.

Because the former cannot happen without the latter, thus all victims of the former are also victims of the latter.

Even if one considers a child to suffer 100,000 units of harm from being abused, and only 0.0001 units of harm from recordings of that abuse being circulated for the gratification of other predators, 100,000.0001 is still a bigger number than 100,000.0000.

Yes, it's additive. Any sexual abuse that is filmed and shared is graver, even if only slightly, than the same sexual abuse that's not filmed. I really doubt the judges were saying that the distribution component alone is worse than the rape component?

I genuinely believe that the suppression of the derogatory terms "gay" and "retarded" is part of what allowed Wokism to flourish so much. Those two terms were easy ways to shut down a lot of the arguments and psychological impulses behind the movement. They play a similar role to how the derogatory term "simp" shuts down decent but of feminist arguments and actions at a social level. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is up to your preferences.

(I dislike both movements, so I am in favor of these terms being used.)

I think attempts to broaden "gay" as a slur beyond male homosexuality don't work, because whatever broader meaning you adopt is impossible to protect and the word ends up being used to describe anything bad, in much the same way as "lame" (or possibly even anything at all, like "fag" on 4chan). In the UK in the early noughties I was part of a group that trolled the humourless scolds of then (then temporarily out of power) PC left by handing out buttons saying "Homophobia is Gay" and "Ablism is Lame". Everyone who wasn't a PC humourless scold got the joke instantly. I also remember a US-based online campaign around the same time trying to oppose the generic negative use of "gay" by saying "Gay is Lame" or something similar.

What would you say are the "psychological impulses" behind Wokism that "gay" and "retarded" are such effective counters to?

"Gay" captures the destructive aspects of femininity (woke is a license to exhibit those qualities): that being effeminacy/learned helplessness, weakness, vanity, and superficiality. (It's not a surprise that men don't like sharing their space with this any more than they do a woman who isn't controlling those failure modes. Tomboys are partially exempt from this in male spaces just as gay men are partially exempt from judgment on those attributes in female spaces.)

"Retarded" is merely a signal that objective results matter.

Tomboys are partially exempt from this in male spaces just as gay men are partially exempt from judgment on those attributes in female spaces

Now that's interesting, I never made the connection. What's the flip side of tolerated failure modes for men? Performative toughness, stubborn self-reliance, unrestrained competitiveness?

It doesn't seem like there's a single slur to capture that.

In British English, "cunt" has become the preferred slur for toxic masculinity taken to the extremes where a harsh slur is needed. "Douchebag" in AmE and "wanker" in BrE capture similar but subtly different aspects of toxic masculinity at a milder level.

Wokists use "bro" or "dudebro" as a slur for this kind of thing, but that usage hasn't caught on among normies. My impression was that "chud" is used this way by the very online yoof.

But the normal way to attach someone engaging in unnecessary performative masculinity is to accuse them of compensating for a small dick. I'm not sure why no dialect of English has developed a one-word term for "small dick energy"

That's just classic "toxic masculinity", with "macho" and "chauvinist" being the closest linked slurs.

They don't land as hard, maybe because of the tacit acknowledgment that many women find some degree of macho/machismo attractive, and "chauvinist" is just to... intellectual, I guess.

That's because there no tolerated failure modes for men, the disposable gender.

In this sense, I think it would be characteristically masculine behaviour that's considered unpleasant, bad, or socially maladaptive?

I feel like the obvious examples are things like heavy drinking, brawling, gambling, and the like? All the 'male' vices.

Presumably 'gay' is a useful shorthand that connotes effeminacy, weakness, vanity, and superficiality? Something along those lines?

Ah, that's exactly what ThisIsSin said as well -- and the connection to Woke being that woke allows for the expression of these.

I've thought about trying to articulate "gay" as a pejorative with "behavior that's gone so far up it's own ass it's forgotten the original point of doing the behavior." Which is nothing to do with men who have sex with men.

Under this metric, a peackock's tail, and being part of a magic superhero team who only chases after one guy, are both completely gay.

To some degree, it's the euphemism treadmill. But it originated with the well-intentioned desire to treat mentally retarded people more humanely. Telling children not say "retard" did not, of course, cause children to become kinder, especially to retarded people, but since you asked for a steelman, it is now much more widely accepted in society that insulting and abusing the disabled is a shitty thing to do and the status of the mentally retarded is better now than it used to be.

That obviously didn't happen because we made "retard" a no-no word, but it can be argued that the mindset that tabooed the word contributed to greater awareness and sympathy.

I still think tabooing words is retarded, lame, and stupid (no shit, I've been lectured by SJs that "stupid" and "dumb" are offensive and ableist) but you asked for a steelman.

We had a small discussion last week about "Negro" and "Chinaman." Both of those words used to be perfectly acceptable. Now they are considered rude at best. Why? Mostly arbitrary shifts in usage, but those shifts came with improved racial conditions. The one didn't cause the other, but they are associated. Now "Retarded," "Negro," and "Chinaman" to describe a person all sound reductive and dehumanizing.

The advantage, of course, is now you have a power word to use when you really want to be offensive.

it is now much more widely accepted in society that insulting and abusing the disabled is a shitty thing to do

Is it? Concern for the less fortunate was not invented in the sixties.

There is huge irony in all this and as usual, this language is self-defeating. In the old days every dumbass was retarded - except of course mentally retarded people. It was low class and retarded behavior to tell your local 70IQ Timmy that he is a retard - unless you were funny and creative with it of course. Banning this word actually brought the spotlight onto literal retards as the only ones who subconsciously own that moniker, they are now the only retards around.

In a strange way telling your neighbor that he is a retard humanized mentally retarded, it blurred the lines. It is by the way a common evolution of "power words". Take an example of how the world literally evolved due to its usage for heavy emphasis to such an extent, that it became synonym with figuratively. Example: "he is literally retarded" means that he did something really, really dumb such as microwaving his cell phone to test if it was a hoax or dumb shit like that. It does not mean that he suffers from "intellectual disability" which is the correct current word of the day as replacement for mental retardation.

it is now much more widely accepted in society that insulting and abusing the disabled is a shitty thing to do and the status of the mentally retarded is better now than it used to be

Is this actually true? I don't think believe that insulting or abusing the mentally disabled was ever considered non-shitty. Like calling a gay guy a "faggot," or an obese person a "fatass" or "Michelin man" or something, it was probably seen as rude, unnecessary, and low-class in 20the century America before the language taboos were introduced. Also, I think most people have a visceral horror or revulsion towards signficant mentally and physically deformity. None of that has really changed IMO. The only difference is now is that somebody can pull out a phone a record you saying the no-no words and post it on Twitter or report it to HR, so people have learned to self-censor.

Good luck explaining why 'Aborigine' is now frowned upon, while 'Aboriginal' is fine.

I have heard people explain something about how 'Aborigine' is a noun and 'Aboriginal' is an adjective, and a clipping of 'Aboriginal person' is better because it acknowledges their humanity in a way that 'Aborigine' supposedly does not. Or sometimes you just get vague waffle about how somehow 'Aborigine' has racist connotations from the colonial past that 'Aboriginal' does not. Now as Amnesty's own link some want to move the treadmill again to 'First Nations', a term borrowed from Canada (and not, contra the article, actually supported or used by a large number of Aboriginals).

It's all just... extraordinarily tiresome, petty language policing as if the letter E does some sort of psychic harm that AL does not, all as a substitute for any policy that might actually improve anybody's lives.

That is similar to the debates regarding “colored person” vs. “person of color” and “Jew” vs. “Jewish person,” where the first is often considered offensive, while the second is preferred. There was also an amusing debate in the autism world, now largely settled, on whether “autist” and “autistic person” are offensive. Advocates declared the terms demeaning, scolding anyone who didn’t say “person with autism.” The autists themselves found that view retarded and continued to use the older and simpler terms.

I would have slighly more tuck for "Chinaman" being an ethnic slur, if the Chinese themselves weren't so intent on making "Chinese" a perfect synonym for "ethnically Han".

I’d also have more patience if “Englishman,” “Irishman,” and “Frenchman” were also considered offensive—especially “Irishman.” Given that the argument against “Chinaman” is that the term dates from a time when the Chinese were considered inferior, the fact that “Irishman” is still okay just highlights the hypocrisy.

I also find it odd. They call themselves 中国人 and 黄种人, literally "China-person" and "yellow-race people." Whitey didn't make it up.

I still think tabooing words is retarded...

I see what you did there. All derogatory words function as an outlet for strong emotions. I very rarely use them except when among very close friends and family when we're getting a little belligerent and too humorous.

The funniest and most insulting uses I've ever witnessed has been using the terms in unconventional ways you very rarely see. Calling someone a "retard," yeah; alright. But I remember observing an interaction between two people having an argument where one of guys said something stupid (perhaps intending to be sarcastic) and the other man replied with a counter-argument, saying "you 'actual' fucking retard..." The rejoinder to that was to say "you clearly missed the irony," followed by the comeback to his retort. It made me laugh.

I did ask for a steelman. Thank you for providing it!

One argument for using it: is that the argument for not using it is essentially a kind of cultural relativism. The euphemism treadmill is real.

Another argument for using it: your main argument is an isolated demand for rigor - caring about the feelings of retarded people, but not about the feelings of losers, for example (whose condition is also routinely used as a punching bag).

Jeff Maurer's case for it is that the word at this point is clearly detached from any reference to people with developmental disabilities, in much the same way that 'idiot' once referred to a person with a disability, but has now come to just mean 'stupid person'.

In a sense the euphemism treadmill functions to exculpate words over time. The treadmill means that today nobody uses 'retard' to mean 'person with a mental disability'. The non-pejorative use of it has been crowded out by the pejorative use, so to it all intents and purposes it now has only pejorative meaning. When I say "you're a retard", nobody pictures a person with mental illness. Indeed, if I want to refer to a person with a developmental disability in a polite way today, I would not use the word 'retard' because it has come to be seen as always offensive.

I suppose another comparison might be 'lunatic'. If I say "you're a lunatic" or "you're a loony", nobody sensible believes that I am specifically criticising people with mental illnesses. (I have, admittedly, once been lectured by someone for saying 'lunatic', as it is 'ableist language', but I think that was transparently ridiculous.) The word 'lunatic' now means 'person who is dangerously unhinged' or 'person who behaves in aggressive, unpredictable, and self-destructive ways'.

The case for 'retard' is that there is, in 2026, no risk of confusing it with abuse of actually disabled people, and that it fills a useful lexical gap - it is stronger than 'idiot', 'moron', 'imbecile', or similar, and is immediately understood as a pejorative.

My final thought is that I think the other way the euphemism treadmill fails is that if a quality is genuinely perceived as undesirable, accusations of having that quality are always going to be offensive regardless of language. If I say to someone "you're intellectually disabled!", that still read as an insult, and it's always going to read as an insult no matter what language you use, because it's the actual condition of intellectual disability, not the word, that makes the insult work. You cannot change the actual perception of a minority group just by policing words. To take a different example, you can ban kids from calling each other 'fag', but then they'll just switch to 'homo' or something and it will continue to have exactly the same effect. If you want to eliminate the insulting-accusation-of-homosexuality, you have to eliminate the perception that homosexuality is something shameful. Shifts in genuine perceptions of homosexuality have done far more to eliminate those insults than policing vocabulary.

In a sense the euphemism treadmill functions to exculpate words over time. The treadmill means that today nobody uses 'retard' to mean 'person with a mental disability'.

I still see "retarded" (though not "retard") used in the wild to describe actual retards, mostly from older people who don't know what the new PC circumlocution is. I think we are at least ten years away from the point where "retard" is as harmless as "idiot", "imbecile" or "moron" (all of which went from scientific term for learning disabilities to slur and now to mostly-harmless-but-not-PC term for generally stupid behaviour)

The primary criterion for mental retardation was an IQ below 70. The secondary criteria were difficulty in two areas of cognitive function impacting everyday live, such as problem solving or academic achievement; I understand that there were rare individuals who avoid diagnosis on this basis, but by and large they were coextensive. The DSM V changed the name to 'intellectual disability' and discarded the IQ requirement, which changed little because the areas of impairment largely capture the same signal.

Intellectual disability isn't actually some special, separate category from regular low intelligence, it's simply the (somewhat arbitrary) cutoff below which low intelligence is considered a disability. When someone uses 'retarded' in this context to mean 'stupid,' that's... just what the word means. No one's confused here. When a psychologist or a teen boy calls someone 'retarded,' they are making very nearly exactly the same claim of fact; the latter is saying 'you're very dumb,' and the former is saying 'you're very dumb (and that's not a bad thing!).' But even then, that's just professional courtesy; the psychologist does call people stupid in a pejorative manner outside of work because they, like everyone else, place value on intelligence.

My final thought is that I think the other way the euphemism treadmill fails is that if a quality is genuinely perceived as undesirable, accusations of having that quality are always going to be offensive regardless of language. If I say to someone "you're intellectually disabled!", that still read as an insult, and it's always going to read as an insult no matter what language you use, because it's the actual condition of intellectual disability, not the word, that makes the insult work.

Yes, exactly this. If you believe it's an insult to call someone stupid, then the treadmill will only ever generate new insults. If you want to de-stigmatize stupidity, then... good luck with that, I guess. Maybe it'll actually be possible once we all know ourselves to be 'intellectually disabled' in comparison to the AI god?

If you want to de-stigmatize stupidity, then... good luck with that, I guess.

Wasn't that the argument of The Cult of Smart?

Come to think of it, that's also an argument Lewis satirises in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, isn't it? Norwood's idea of 'parity of esteem' is a kind of move to de-stigmatise stupidity, or at least, de-stigmatise low academic achievement. Lewis' response is, "Intelligence is good, and academic success is good, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. They are not the only goods, and dumb people may be virtuous in other ways, which should be encouraged and praised, but they are nonetheless good in themselves."

Personally I just find it irritating to not be able to use the word literally.

Actually, in the vein of master and slave in hardware, I'm amazed we're still allowed to call things e.g. 'flame-retardant'.

To this very day I can never say that without smiling.

Because of its euphemistic use on censored social media spaces, hearing someone described earnestly as "highly regarded" never fails to make me smile.

In the past I've got away with "r-tard," and "Yuri Tarded" a few times after the censorship went into effect. Credit to South Park for that one.

While I myself will use insults like that, at the end of the day they're pretty much entirely just "I don't like this person's ideas and disagree with them and want to be mean about that" in actual usage. So really in a polite mature conversation we shouldn't use retarded cause we shouldn't be insulting to begin with.

As for when we do want to be mean, which insult you pick is contextual. Dummy is silly and gives a joking vibe. Idiot and stupid are the classic and basic "I disagree with you and want to be mean about it". Retarded is the "I'm really upset about how much we disagree and will violate social norms to express this" one. IRL I would not be dishing out the extreme one too often or else it diminishes the value there. The guy who calls everything retarded has less meaning when they say it vs the guy who barely ever calls anything retarded.

... we shouldn't be insulting to begin with.

You have to admit though. Some of the best arguments you'll ever see have made heavy use of insults. Once they start getting hurled, mentally I always ring the bell and tell myself, "... Ok then! Diplomacy has gone out the window!," and then start hurling them back.

Exactly. Sometimes these insults are very good at grounding the discussion, making it real. Imagine somebody says shit like this (a literal Richard Dawkins quote)

The biological organism is a temporary triumph over the chaotic whims of entropy, a sophisticated vessel that maintains its own structural integrity until the moment it ceases to do so. We must observe that a creature remains alive for exactly the duration of its lifespan, neither a second more nor a second less, as dictated by the cold mathematics of cellular survival. To be alive is, in a rather literal sense, to continue the process of not being dead, until such time as the chemistry of life concludes its tenure.

You can just retort "You just said you live until you die you retard" and it maybe angers the other side enough to hack their script and hopefully resulting in normal discussion.

That's actually a real quote? Because it's morning, I just woke up right now, I'm in a hospital, and I just laughed. Very hard.

I'm not able to find any sources on Dawkins saying that, so sadly no. He has plenty of other "I'm 14 and this is deep" kinds of quotes, but sadly this doesn't appear to be one of them. I'd be glad to be proven wrong if you know a source, @georgioz

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