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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.
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.
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.
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