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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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A close friend of mine was telling me just the other day how she was raising her (very young) kids to understand that bad words weren't the classic religious/scatological/sexual terms, those were fine, it was slurs against someone's identity that were offensive. Fuck is fine, faggot is bad. A cunt is just a part of a woman's body, but chink is bad even if you are talking about armor. I told her she was doing this exactly wrong, because true inborn profanity processes through a different part of your brain than the rest of your language, if you teach him that all words are fine except slurs, then the only thing he can yell when someone cuts him off in traffic and get that kind of satisfaction is a slur.

Like, remember when you were, idk, 11 or 12 or 13, and you started cursing for the first time? It felt so good, it scratched such an itch. The only way her kid can scratch that itch is going to be by yelling ethnic and homophobic slurs, because those are the only "bad" words he knows. Indeed, if he fully imbibes what his mother wants to teach him, they are the only bad words that exist. He's going to have that itch, everyone does, you have to give him something to scratch it with.