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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.
I once debated with a friend who never used "real" profanity/vulgarity. My position at the time was: if you just use "fudge" every time a vulgar person would have used "fuck", you're essentially cursing just as much as they are, you're just using a different but isomorphic language to curse in.
Years later, she was speaking about something upsetting enough to say "fuck", for the first and only time ever in my presence. Her language was not isomorphic to mine after all. Mine has an f-word corresponding to her "fudge", but it does not have any single word that can instantly both convey and provide evidence for "this is the worst thing I've ever spoken about in my life". That's actually kind of a powerful thing to have in your vocabulary.
It's weird that our "violate social norms" words are often so bad at that etymologically, though. I'm old enough that it sounds silly to me that "retarded", a word chosen out of kindness for its clinical sound and gentle literal meaning of "slowed down a little", is now on society's Top Ten No-No Words list. I wonder if "fuck you" sounded even more confusing to old fogies at some point centuries ago. "Yes, I will have sex soon; thank ye for the well-wishes?" I hope to live long enough to someday accidentally tell my grandkids that something "challenged" me and then get dragged into a 10 minute long Get Off My Lawn digression about how I'm not being insensitive toward the physically and mentally challenged ("Ohhh! You said it again, grandpa!") and how back in my day that wasn't even "the C word" yet.
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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. Or as my father once said, “Shit talking is just foreplay to violence.”
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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