I ran into this personally a few months back, when I on Discord referred to Elon Musk as a "social retard." I did this explicitly because I didn't want to imply that he acted the way he did due to Asperger's/autism, but boy, people came down hard on me and I had to delete my post entirely.
The thing about the discourse around retarded is that the term "mentally retarded" was originally developed because the earlier terms (idiot, imbecile, and moron) became so associated with pejoratives describing low intelligence more broadly they ceased to be useful in formal situations. Hell, dumb used to refer to mute people, so it can also be considered a case where a disability word transmogrified into a general insult (much as was the case with the word lame, which formerly described crippled folks, not something generically bad).
I have to say, 20 years ago I would have predicted that "developmental delay" or something similar would also have become a pejorative describing low intelligence. It hasn't happened yet, which may be because the terminology is too clunky - though the right wing turning DEI into a slur which apparently now just means a woman/person of color shows some variant of MHDD could yet become a generic insult.
I'd say that ultimately we can't stop language drift, but I think we were pretty successful at stopping the early 2000s use of the word "gay" to mean lame from being permanently established. Still, the word retard is no longer used clinically, and it's not even used as a pejorative towards the original class any longer. Another few generations, and it will be as divorced as idiot from its original meaning.
"I have to say, 20 years ago I would have predicted that "developmental delay" or something similar would also have become a pejorative describing low intelligence."
"Which is another dynamic that’s dominated progressive politics for the last fifteenish years: trading long-term political sustainability for short-term individual gain in the arena of performative righteousness. This is how we got so much of the bizarre, alienating vocabulary of social justice inserted into mainstream political debate. Many people, most certainly including many Black people, find using the term “Black bodies” instead of “Black people” deeply strange and off-putting. I suspect most people in the progressive intelligentsia were always aware of that fact. But constantly saying “Black bodies” advanced them within their own social and professional circles, even though it damaged the progressive cause more broadly. Like saying “misogynoir” or “othering” or “microaggression,” exaggerating the radicalism and offensiveness of using off-color language privileges the inner circle over the outer."
Once again, none of this dreary performance changes who has the whip hand, nor does it affect how the pie gets sliced.
In fact, the PMC assumption goes something like this: because we are a natural aristocracy, smarter, better educated, Holier Than Thou and with better taste to boot, it is but natural and fitting that we help ourselves to the lion's share of the goodies.
Besides, the Great Unwashed would prbably use those goodies not to acquire artisanal kitchen gadgets, but to buy reissues of Billy The Bigmouth Bass or something."
The country-boy-will-survive guys I know like to build a pizza oven out in the yard, though I don’t think they get around to making much pizza. The building’s the thing. I knew one guy who built one out of one of those domed dog kennel things. Then he rocked over it. I can’t remember how he got the dog kennel out of the finished product though. It looked pretty cool.
ETA: I guess he used the kennel just as the mold, filled it with something, then chipped that filler out.
It's like that any time you get an Inner Circle. The language becomes a tool to separate people. Ironically, for PMCs who claim they're trying to be "inclusive," the newspeak just confuses anyone outside a college campus.
"Ironically, for PMCs who claim they're trying to be "inclusive," the newspeak just confuses anyone outside a college campus."
This is, like any other insider-speak, entirely intentional. The point is to separate the cognoscenti, who have the time and who gain status by keeping up with these things, from the hoi polloi.
I'd say that in the majority of cases those trying to ascribe to the new language standards about something like "retard" or "gay" or even as obviously stupid as "black bodies" are just trying to do what they feel is the right thing, just trying to be a good person.
Of course, they might get a small feeling of superiority from that usage--I mean that's in play with so much of what we do in life. And, of course, the worst offenders are those who dogmatically and sanctimoniously police language in these way. Please, have at them all you want. They're most definitely the problem. But I just think they're a relatively small minority of people avoiding those kinds of terms.
You said it best a while back: perhaps the most powerful force in politics is people's resentment at being talked down to.
People really really hate moral scolds. They hated it when the Moral Majority did it, and they hated it when the Social Justice Left did it. It's just that simple.
Power corrupts. The SJs got a taste of being the ones who could MAKE those superstitious hinterlanders act the Right Way, and set about bringing the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, where no one need suffer harsh words.
I just wish for once, someone on the left would stop saying the right wants to 'cut medicare' or 'cut social security'
The idea is to cut FRAUD in those things...which is a good thing for everyone.
I'm hardly rich. I'm a veterinarian who owns a small, intentionally low cost clinic.
Trump's first round of tax cuts helped ME. I'm not one of his rich billionaire friends. I never donated to his campaigns. I never went to a rally. I did vote for him.
He cut taxes for ME. He got rid of the onerous Affordable Care Act penalty for not getting it's shitty coverage....I was a healthy 50 something yr old in when that penalty was enacted. I did not have insurance and at 60, I still don't. I'm healthy. The premiums are through the roof for me because of actuarial tables. It makes no economic sense for me to get health insurance that doesn't pay for much anyway. Trump helped get rid of that. I was being PUNISHED for being a healthy older person....he isn't just helping 'rich people' whatever that even means.
I would go so far as to say that argument the left always throws out is RETARDED.
I think the claim is more that they are trying to cut mediCAID, which they certainly are intent on at least trying to do, though it remains to be seen whether they can muster the votes of the moderates to pass anything significant. The right seems to have settled on not cutting Medicare or Social Security, but they still want cuts, and Medicaid is the only sizeable program left outside the defense budget in which to do that.
Say there is 800 Billion of a thing in a pile and I've signed a law saying I have to get rid of 200 Billion of the thing.
400 Billion of it is the thing you promised not to touch, and 300 Billion of it is in a pile labeled "Medicaid." It's not some defense to say "but the law doesn't say I'm cutting Medicaid!" You don't need a math degree to recognize it has to happen.
This just plain isn't true. There's not $800 billion of fraud in Medicaid they're looking to cut.
They want to do the following, and they have stated this pretty directly:
1. Impose work requirements on able bodied adults (the least problematic change, imo. It's not going to save much money, 92% of people on Medicaid are either children, elderly, or working already.)
2. Pay a fixed rate to states instead of one that is dependent on the number of people in their program. Right now the amount fluctuates automatically with the number of enrollees. Ultimately this will result in a lower budget.
3. Create a 'Per person limit' on Medicaid funding. This would force states to either cut funding, or make up the difference on their end.
4. Lower the reimbursement percentage by the federal government on all Medicaid expansions from the ACA from their current 90% down to a more typical 50% or 60%. This would likely result in massive cuts on the state end, because they don't have the funds to make up the difference.
This is not about fraud. You're being sold something that just isn't true. I hope they do work on fraud, but that is not what this bill is going to be about.
The cuts are going to be fine in the prosperous large blue cities where most people are covered by their employment health plans. It's going to devastate the poor rural areas where there aren't large employers with health care plans and 40% of the population is on some form of Medicaid.
It won't just be the lack of health insurance, the new health care jobs that have sprung up replacing the old obsolete jobs will be gone.
Yes, and many rural hospitals will close. People who have to drive 30 minutes to an hour are now going to have to drive 2 hours to get to a hospital, and a lot of healthcare jobs will disappear in their communities. It will not be pretty in many rural areas.
Fraud is baked into the system. Medicaid and Medicare pay inflated rates for everything....where does that extra 'profit' go? My friend's mother just had a wheelchair purchased for her by Medicare....for $4,500. My friend found the identical chair, same brand, same features, etc....for $399 on Amazon. Now, that's fraud....it doesn't smell like fraud, but it is. Overcharging is fraud. As I clearly stated, but you didn't read, I am concerned about fraud from both the consumer and provider side. Oh, and I'll bet you ANYTHING you want that there is easily $800 billion in fraud when you combine the two. The fraudster at the local level is small potatoes. Do you know what an EBT store is? It's a store(an employee's aunt ran one) where all the items can be purchased with an EBT card. At the time, milk was about $1.99/gal retail. At the EBT store, it was $10.00/gallon. The government allowed for prices many times higher than regular retail. THAT is fraud. This person's aunt, with not even a high school education was making absolute bank(much more than I did as a veterinarian) by buying staples at Sam's Club then taking them to the EBT store and selling them for multiples there. That's capitalism for sure, but with other people's money. And these types of things are baked into the system. Any time someone tries to fix it and clean up the fraud, well meaning, but stupid liberals cry about babies going without milk and seniors not getting their meds. Well, here's a clue....babies are ALREADY going without milk--cuz mamma sells her EBT dollars on the black market and seniors are ignored by their doctors anyway and STILL have to pay for Meds at a higher rate often than if they self paid. If you even tell the pharmacist that you have insurance, you can't opt to self pay at a lower rate....they won't let you. Tell me that's no fraud. I know how much medicine actually costs because I order my own inventory and we use a lot of human side generic meds. What is being charged to Medicare and Medicaid is FRAUD....provider side fraud.
Pahlease with your 'there's no way there is 800 billion in fraud.' Dude, there is way MORE than 800 billion....now do the Pentagon.....which is also in the cross hairs.
And it's not the GOVERNMENT that's being ripped off...it's ME....and other working people like ME. You all always act like the government has resources....they don't. Every bit of $$$ they use came from some working person like ME. Well, if I have to pay for it, I want a say in how it's spent.
Oh....and GOD FORBID some fat ass go out and get a job......you likely have no idea how rampant the fraud is in SSDI is as well....
Well there's a lot here, but I'll just say right away, Medicaid reimburses hospitals at lower rates than private insurance or Medicare. Medicaid, specifically, has some of the lowest reimbursement rates for healthcare in the country. If there's fraud, it's more in Medicare than in Medicaid. But I'll leave it there.
This is where you get into some seriously dishonest bullshit over whether or not it's inefficiency, waste, or fraud. When taxpayers are being charged anywhere from five to a hundred times the actual cost, is it inefficiency, waste, or fraud? Are those labels really important when the problem is actually known?
This is where the American political left's stupid fetish for controlling language is a serious obstacle. Acknowledge the obvious perverse incentives, acknowledge it's a bad thing, and help be part of the solution. You'd think they'd support this on merit, but apparently, no.
Historically the Right has wanted to cut a LOT of government spending in general, and use fraud/waste as a low-hanging fruit to start with - I mean, who doesn't like eliminating waste? While the Left tends to overlook a ton of this stuff because, well, their voting base really likes federal spending when it comes to social entitlements (like Medicaid/care, SS, food stamps, w/e).
I see the problem in the way the Right is trying to do so in two ways:
1) They are using a broadsword when they should be using a scalpel. In their earnestness to root out fraud/waste they don't seem to care very much about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's easy to axe right through the center of something and claim you're doing god's work, but it's much harder, and much less sexy, to take the time and effort to weed out the good from the bad. I also personally think they really overblow certain things, like voter fraud, and don't really care to find out the facts on it because it bolsters their message not to do so.
2) They often completely ignore other areas of fraud/waste for the same reason the Left doesn't - it runs counter to their base voters and donors. The military in general, and gov/private contracts in particular, are notoriously rife with fraud and waste. Yet Republicans almost unilaterally refuse to touch these because for some reason not throwing huge barrels of cash at the military is seen as weak...or something.
Also, Trump's 2017 tax cuts were verifiably skewed towards the wealthy. Of course it also helped out those not making above 6 figures (or 7), but they couldn't have sold it to the public without SOME benefit to average Americans. It was a case of giving the peasants an extra hog, giving the nobility an extra dozen cattle, and claiming they were 'doing their part' to help out regular Joe Americans.
I think you underestimate how poor some people are in this country. Something like 1 out of 6 kids in the US lives in poverty - go ahead and look up those numbers. You are not middle class. You are probably a 5%er.
So......I am one of Trump's RICH buddies, right? No, I'm what used to be called the middle class before it was destroyed by taxes and inflation.
The 'poor' people here, just outside of Atlanta that are using EBT cards are somehow, amazingly.....incredulously...somehow driving brand new SUVs....please tell me how the hell that works?
I DON'T drive a new car. Everything I have is used. I haven't taken a vacay in 15 years because I have to bust my ass to pay my goddamn employees. But this is the system...work hard, produce, employ others....get called 'rich' and get screwed over by taxes.
OR.....sit around on your fat fuckin ass, pump out a few children you don't really even try to take care of...collect EBT, get a HUD home, get SS disability because you can't back your fat ass away from the table....am I warm? Yeah, I am because I see it every damn day.
You likely are ACTUALLY a rich person whose only contact with the great unwashed is what you see online or read about in your liberal rags.
I grew up poor and made something of myself without help from the gov. Not so much as an SBA loan(cause they are too damned complicated to get without help), paid off my student loans and work every single week and ALSO provide a living for my employees and also provide low cost veterinary care for my clients.
I cannot stand assholes like you that don't know ANYTHING about actual poverty.
No, I don't. I pay a shit ton of taxes and have since I was 15 yrs old. There are people in this country....those 'poor' people who have never paid a cent. NOT ONE CENT. I don't think it should be incumbent on me and people like me to make sure the lazy asses of this world get everything they want. ESPECIALLY since everyone is hiring and has been for some time.
Also, nobody wants to deprive people of necessities....we want to stop the FUCKING FRAUD that is rampant in everything.
During COVID, I took out a PPP loan because we were shut down for 10 days due to stupidity. I didn't let a single employee go. I borrowed $67,000......for a full time business with 10 employees....meanwhile, rappers and other shitheads borrowed MILLIONS...bought themselves cars, boats, vacations, etc. It's the FRAUD.....and the FRAUD amounts to BILLIONS.
Oh....and that is just the consumer end fraud....now let's talk about the hospital and doctor fraud....also in the billions....then let's talk about the pharma fraud....it's just never ending.
And it all falls on the few who actually pay taxes....and we are just expected to pay more and more and more....I guess(because it's socialism) we are gonna be required to pay more until the lazy asses have everything we have, but didn't work for any of it.
I mean, how can y'all be so STUPID that you think FRAUD doesn't exist in any meaningful way?
And it's 'my case' DAWG......it's the feeling of the majority of the country. The people who WORK are sick of getting screwed all the time.
I don't think anyone is denying that fraud exists. It just isn't going to fix the federal budget by itself, and this republican congress is absolutely targeting more than fraud. They want to make cuts to Medicaid, among other things, and are very clear about that. You're not listening to what they're saying if you think all of this is about fraud. They aren't even claiming that. You just made it up in your own head.
And most people receiving Medicaid are children or the elderly or else working people. Children can't be expected to contribute, because well, they're children. The elderly on Medicaid could maybe work, I guess, but most of them are well past retirement age. Most of the others are already working.
The PPP program was Donald Trump, so if you are annoyed that a bunch of already rich scammers got more rich off your taxes I have bad news for who is currently president of the United States.
Also anyone who has ever worked a job pays taxes, you might pay more if you are making more money, and its true that a lot of poor people get more money out than they put in, but again, the way the tax code is set up, that's only possible if you were a working adult at least part of the year, and usually its only a lot more than you put in if you also have children.
So this idea that you are in some special class of people who pays taxes is false. I pay taxes too, and I'm happy for my taxes to be used to fund government programs that help disadvantaged people, and also just to stimulate the economy through stable employment for federal workers, grants to farmers, and all the other ways we are seeing the federal government was helping working people who are currently suffering under the Trump administration.
You can type in as many capital letters as you want, it doesn't make it true, it just makes you look like you are throwing a tantrum.
If there is waste in the medicare and medicaid system, its because hospitals are overbilling patients for care and the goverment is picking up the check. That should probably stop, but nothing Trump is doing is addressing that, and its not going to go away it just means people are going to die. People are already dying because they can't afford insulin or other basic medical necessities, it just doesn't make the news anymore because its so common no one gives a shit, but its going to get worse. If you can live with that, fine I guess, but don't pretend that you are just making things fair. Fair would fighting for a system where billionaires who have benefited from the prosperousness and infrastructure in the United States pay enough in taxes to pass that prosperousness onto middle and working class people. But that's not what's going to happen, and its not what you are currently fighting for. You are fighting so that even more poor people get screwed while the rich walk away scot free.
oh, so you make big bank. The fact is, that proportionately speaking, the middle class actually pays the most impactful amount of taxes. The higher brackets may pay more, but they don't miss it. You are CLEARLY one of those(I do love me some CAPS). In my world, I pay enough in tax to significantly change what I can do....because I'm 'rich' or something....but not rich enough.....As for those poor poor people who are destitute...if you are destitute in this country, almost for sure you did it to yourself. Not always. Private charities used to do a much better job of helping people than government....they had people called VOLUNTEERS who worked for free. Now, all the NGOs and of course gov 'help' all get paid really well.....so that takes money that is supposed to help people away. No government worker EVER volunteers anything.
As far as PPP, it was the administration of it....you know, the shitty bureaucrats, that allowed the fraud...not Donald Trump. He wanted to get rid of those people....but couldn't because he was too busy being stabbed in the back. Now that he's trying to clean it up...he's a bad man...
Bottom line is government is corrupt and FRAUD is rampant. And trying to pretend there is not appreciable fraud is idiotic. It's stupid. It's moronic. If you think there isn't a good deal of fraud going on, you are either: a diehard Democrat or socialist, and idiot, a government employee, a government contractor, a fraudster....did I say idiot?
Funny how ANYONE can be upset about cleaning up fraud. Y'all so damn brainwashed, you don't realize it will benefit EVERYONE......even those who are getting things from gov.....
Also funny.....that most of the 'billionaires' today are all lefties.....they could, at ANY TIME of their own volition, pay more taxes....but they don't, do they? They cry for OTHER billionaires to do so.....who ARE these other billionaires? Why doesn't Oprah divest herself of everything down to about 500 Mill? She could afford it....but no, she goes on TV and begs for OTHER people to donate for Maui......when she has enough $$, with her buddies, to rebuild the whole town of Lahina....but she doesn't now, does she.
The 'billionaire' class used to be mainly Republicans, but I believe that it's way more Dems now....so, talk about hypocritical.
So just to be clear, anything good that the government does is because Donald Trump personally ordered it, all the evil billionaires are Democrats except for Elon Musk, who is good because he works for Donald Trump, and anyone who is actually happy to pay their taxes is some sort of elite, as opposed to a hard-working American like yourself?
Oh, and the tax cuts the Republicans are proposing that are mostly going to benefit millionaires and billionaires are good, even though you admit that middle class people feel the impact of taxes the most, because it was Donald Trump's idea in the first place.
Great. Enjoy this clear, unbiased worldview you have constructed for yourself.
I'm confused. Do you think people who collect EBT and SS disability are doing great or something? Most of them are desperately poor even while collecting those benefits. The average disability benefit is less than $2,000 a month, about $21,000 a year. That's truly almost nothing. Only 2.7% of the country lives in subsidized housing, and their average annual income is $18,000 a year.
These people are very poor. They are not living high on the hog on your dime. They're barely surviving on your dime.
Have you been to the grocery store and stood in line behind people using their EBT cards? 9 times out of 10, they are buying junk....and a LOT of it. Then they go get in a new car. Oh and they 600 dollar hair extensions and 250 dollar gel nails and a coach purse....but maybe that's just my neck of the woods. It's called FRAUD. The people who NEED EBT, I have no problem with.....but I'll make a bet that only about 10% of the people receiving it, actually need it.
See the famous, now, TikTok of some influencer with no teeth in from Michigan bitching because her EBT bennies got cut. She has a 2024 BMW and was getting $4,500 in EBT bennies AND making a lot of money online....which she didn't report.....Wish that was uncommon, but it's NOT.
POOR people live in Appalachia...you know the ones that got fucked over by FEMA so they could house illegals? I grew up poor. My mom was a grade school teacher and she raised 3 kids on her salary. My dad gave us nothing. She got paid once a month.....by the last week, we were down to pennies. We NEVER qualified for any government assistance, we couldn't even get the government cheese, but somehow, we never had money either. She drove a shit car and we lived in an OK house that was way past it's prime. Our vacations were State Park camping trips. All the food in our cupboards came in plain black and white boxes(IYKYK). We lived in a trailer park for a couple years right after her divorce...in a single wide with two bedrooms---3 kids and one mother.
And she never got gov bennies....because she WORKED. You get punished for working in this country. As soon as you get a job, you become a money stream for the government.
What the American left wing cannot understand, despite decades of telling them straight to their faces, is that in our country, "poverty" is a definition set by bureaucrats. The average American household under the poverty limit has two cars, cable television, high speed internet and three point something smartphones.
That's the definition of being rich in many parts of the world. Poverty is a wage definition. Misery and want are different things entirely. I wish people would understand this point.
What's worse, we perverted the social safety net in such a way that people who do work get lower quality of services, despite working themselves to the bone. The left also doesn't understand that working people don't want handouts - they want to WORK - and they simply want to that work to be worth something in the way of a comfortable life.
I truly believe that the failure of the left to have a transparent conversation about what happened in the 2010s, and how carried away people got by treating recently made up social rules as the norm, is that the internet rewired a lot of people - and in ways that we still don't fully understand. The instant someone even tries to initiate the conversation, the "rewiring" causes others to see them as a bad-faith actor and shut them down. I can understand it to a point, because the highest profile dissidents at the time were people like Milo Yiannopoulous - criticizing liberals with occasionally fair points, and then acting like a middle schooler with immature shit-stirring, before getting caught collaborating with literal white supremacists. All of that broke people's brains and ability to separate between the benign and malicious, and it's hard to break out of that mindset.
And the same goes for the media, which is a real disservice to everyone. On the left MSM, there's no distinguishing between garden-variety conservatism, MAGA/know-nothing madness, and everything in between.
Admittedly, Trump's firehose makes that hard when he's in office.
Look back at what MSNBC was saying about Mitt freaking Romney in 2012 - it has a similar breathless doomerism as to what the news said about Trump last fall. The left MSM is the boy who cried wolf, and now our country is being eaten by that wolf.
Exacerbating the difficulty for the media is that Trump introduces a whole new scale of items to cry wolf about.
And that's Trump's trump card - his firehose of stuff makes it almost impossible not to cry wolf repeatedly. And that of course erodes the credibility of those crying wolf.
It's almost like the media needed to develop an alarm scale. Romney would have produced some 1 and 2s in comparisons to Trumps 5s through 11s on a scale of 10.
It's way too easy to cut people out. And as "ghosting" becomes more normalized, that's going to get worse. Why suffer through the struggles of compromise when moral purity is one banning away? Wait, why is no one joining our group?
95% of airline pilots are male and 95% of elementary school teachers are female. As far as I know airlines and elementary schools are happy to hire anyone who applies with the right credentials. It’s just that men and women do in fact have different career preferences.
Gender equality is whatever we're halfway to. And we were halfway to in the 70s, and halfway to in the 20s... We will never see an "equal" society that meets enough people' definition of equal. The goal will always elude us...or the goalposts keep moving. We've done away with the hard obstacles to equality (ignoring class), but cultural change is measured in generations.
To go further, I think the n-word split between who and who can’t use the ‘a’ version will have to eventually collapse, either being put off limits completely or, more likely, removing a way for Kendrick Lamar to humiliate naive white girl stans of his.
Or at least soften to the point where that girl who posted after getting her driver’s license wouldn’t lose her college acceptance.
I think it’s too important a cudgel to be yielded, though the irony is that giving it this totemic power is essentially observing the norm of the Southern upper class, which frowned on the word. And I’m pretty sure the latter group is not one the left is trying to be in solidarity with.
Not to get hit with the ban hammer but it’s also the case that the right and left can get caught in their own online echo chamber. The very online come to believe certain things are broadly popular when, in many cases, they are basically unknown outside their own online milieu.
This can lead to electoral defeat when Very Online politicians and staffers start interacting with potential voters convinced that their Very Online beliefs are widely held.
I was trying to come up with a term for rule by the very online - edgelordism, clicktocracy?
I remember growing up in the early 2000s, “retard” had by then been replaced in school with the term “special education,” or “sped” for short. And we used that term all the same to make fun of each other.
There is no word for the cognitively disabled that 5th graders won’t find funny and use to offend. So the treadmill continues.
It would be a pretty sort of garden-of-children, really Edenic, if kids could go back to saying “stupid”. But we don’t say stupid in kindergarten, a chorus of kindergarteners once told me, though I was referring to an object or to the lesson itself, or some aspect of it. Not a child :-).
In fact in the ten or so adult years I spent a lot of time in primary schools, I found that kids - at least kids in that area/demographic, I shouldn’t claim universal experience - actually tended toward tenderness to the severely disabled who were a big part of the education budget by then, and very visible as constantly shuffled around from place to place (that seemed the definition of mainstreaming, there). Kids overflowing with goodwill make “pets” of other kids; whether that’s its own crime I will leave to others - but they are kids after all, and subject to their own limitations. There were emotionally disturbed kids, or those with a bundle of diagnoses, ill-suited to the classroom setting, that made everyone’s life more difficult - and those were not made “pets” of, but neither were they tormented. It was more a “just ignore them, maybe they will settle down” thing.
I used to be very uncomfortable with the word in the 2000s and 2010s! But now? The very efforts to make "the r-slur" taboo have given it power. If you call something Elon Musk or Donald Trump are doing "retarded", you express an intensity of contempt in a way other words, even "stupid" or "moronic", can't. And as a bonus, you instantly separate yourself from the kinds of people who think "maybe laws need to be enforced if we are to cooperate as a society" is literal fascism.
> "I have a special needs child. If anyone used that term specifically on my son I'd want to punch them in the face. But I use it myself all the time these days, because quite frankly our national politics has become completely retarded and we need that word back to say so."
In many animal species, in order to find a mate, the male must go through an elaborate mating dance to attract the females attention and then acquiescence. That is essentially what we are seeing with the need to use the "right" words. It's nothing more than a type of mating dance. The problem is that the dance attracts only birds of that species. Birds of other species, which are the majority of birds, just ignore the dance. In the same way, those who do the song and dance get attention only from their own small tribe. They are ignored by the majority. The left needs to stop acting like birds perfecting a song and dance and get active on issues that matter.
I'm not sure this is such a ridiculous claim. Of course not all people who use the word 'retarded' are part of the alt-right or whatever, but that doesn't mean the smaller claim is false, that the term has outsized importance within those circles and is seen as a signal that you're 'in the club'. I think that's probably true to an extent. I used to browse the incels.is forum on occasion a few years back when incels were taking up a bit more of the national conversation, and they use that word a LOT. I find it perfectly defensible to say that using the word is a signal to them that you're part of the incel community.
I resubscribed as a paid member just so I could say, I love this post, thanks Freddie! I feel like this is such an important point that's very hard to make without sounding like an asshole. Forwarding to various friends and family.
Words mean different things in different contexts. As Michael Scott said: "You don't call retarded people retards. It's bad taste. You call your friends retards when they're acting retarded."
This is a bit of an aside, but it reminds me of the whole discussion around "the c word" in the U.S. Consensus has become that it's a very misogynistic slur against women, similar to "the n word" for African-Americans, which is why Americans are often shocked at the wide usage (and inoffensiveness) elsewhere in the anglosphere.
The thing is, I spent lots of time around very politically incorrect dudes when I was younger, and the only way I ever heard the word used was a porny way to describe genitals. I literally cannot think of a case where it was used to call a woman an asshole or whatever. And this is despite use of the word bitch still being pretty prevalent in the 1990s/early 2000s.
In Gen Z slang, saying someone is "c*nty," or "serving c*nt" is generally speaking a compliment that women/queer folks give to other women/queer folks, related to a certain sense of style.
Lesbian zoomer here. I've mostly run into it from gay men/MTF trans women, not cis women. Generally using it that way still feels misogynistic to me in the same way they use "fish" on Drag Race.
I'm not really that offended by it, but the way I've seen it used makes me think of men who view womanhood as a costume they put on and take off, and I've never heard a fellow cis lesbian use it that way.
I ran into this personally a few months back, when I on Discord referred to Elon Musk as a "social retard." I did this explicitly because I didn't want to imply that he acted the way he did due to Asperger's/autism, but boy, people came down hard on me and I had to delete my post entirely.
The thing about the discourse around retarded is that the term "mentally retarded" was originally developed because the earlier terms (idiot, imbecile, and moron) became so associated with pejoratives describing low intelligence more broadly they ceased to be useful in formal situations. Hell, dumb used to refer to mute people, so it can also be considered a case where a disability word transmogrified into a general insult (much as was the case with the word lame, which formerly described crippled folks, not something generically bad).
I have to say, 20 years ago I would have predicted that "developmental delay" or something similar would also have become a pejorative describing low intelligence. It hasn't happened yet, which may be because the terminology is too clunky - though the right wing turning DEI into a slur which apparently now just means a woman/person of color shows some variant of MHDD could yet become a generic insult.
I'd say that ultimately we can't stop language drift, but I think we were pretty successful at stopping the early 2000s use of the word "gay" to mean lame from being permanently established. Still, the word retard is no longer used clinically, and it's not even used as a pejorative towards the original class any longer. Another few generations, and it will be as divorced as idiot from its original meaning.
"I have to say, 20 years ago I would have predicted that "developmental delay" or something similar would also have become a pejorative describing low intelligence."
It has. It's been shortened to "delayed".
When I was in middle school in 2010, the real insult was to call people "special" or "special needs."
On my middle school campus, the new term on the pipeline is “SPED”
"Which is another dynamic that’s dominated progressive politics for the last fifteenish years: trading long-term political sustainability for short-term individual gain in the arena of performative righteousness. This is how we got so much of the bizarre, alienating vocabulary of social justice inserted into mainstream political debate. Many people, most certainly including many Black people, find using the term “Black bodies” instead of “Black people” deeply strange and off-putting. I suspect most people in the progressive intelligentsia were always aware of that fact. But constantly saying “Black bodies” advanced them within their own social and professional circles, even though it damaged the progressive cause more broadly. Like saying “misogynoir” or “othering” or “microaggression,” exaggerating the radicalism and offensiveness of using off-color language privileges the inner circle over the outer."
Once again, none of this dreary performance changes who has the whip hand, nor does it affect how the pie gets sliced.
In fact, the PMC assumption goes something like this: because we are a natural aristocracy, smarter, better educated, Holier Than Thou and with better taste to boot, it is but natural and fitting that we help ourselves to the lion's share of the goodies.
Besides, the Great Unwashed would prbably use those goodies not to acquire artisanal kitchen gadgets, but to buy reissues of Billy The Bigmouth Bass or something."
Great post Finster. Here, have a fish on me.
Taking inventory around the house, it appears I'm part of the Great Unwashed.
Any time I get rid of a Billy, my relatives gift me another variant of that damn fish*. And I just haven't pulled the trigger on getting a pizza oven.
*The last Billy I received sings Song of the South, for extra sin.
The country-boy-will-survive guys I know like to build a pizza oven out in the yard, though I don’t think they get around to making much pizza. The building’s the thing. I knew one guy who built one out of one of those domed dog kennel things. Then he rocked over it. I can’t remember how he got the dog kennel out of the finished product though. It looked pretty cool.
ETA: I guess he used the kennel just as the mold, filled it with something, then chipped that filler out.
(Duh.)
It's like that any time you get an Inner Circle. The language becomes a tool to separate people. Ironically, for PMCs who claim they're trying to be "inclusive," the newspeak just confuses anyone outside a college campus.
"Ironically, for PMCs who claim they're trying to be "inclusive," the newspeak just confuses anyone outside a college campus."
This is, like any other insider-speak, entirely intentional. The point is to separate the cognoscenti, who have the time and who gain status by keeping up with these things, from the hoi polloi.
I'd say that in the majority of cases those trying to ascribe to the new language standards about something like "retard" or "gay" or even as obviously stupid as "black bodies" are just trying to do what they feel is the right thing, just trying to be a good person.
Of course, they might get a small feeling of superiority from that usage--I mean that's in play with so much of what we do in life. And, of course, the worst offenders are those who dogmatically and sanctimoniously police language in these way. Please, have at them all you want. They're most definitely the problem. But I just think they're a relatively small minority of people avoiding those kinds of terms.
But let's not forget that incorporating the term 'intentionality ' makes all of thus super serious....
You said it best a while back: perhaps the most powerful force in politics is people's resentment at being talked down to.
People really really hate moral scolds. They hated it when the Moral Majority did it, and they hated it when the Social Justice Left did it. It's just that simple.
Power corrupts. The SJs got a taste of being the ones who could MAKE those superstitious hinterlanders act the Right Way, and set about bringing the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, where no one need suffer harsh words.
Agreed. Democrats would be so much more successful if they could embrace a modicum of social skill.
But there's no fun in that.
I just wish for once, someone on the left would stop saying the right wants to 'cut medicare' or 'cut social security'
The idea is to cut FRAUD in those things...which is a good thing for everyone.
I'm hardly rich. I'm a veterinarian who owns a small, intentionally low cost clinic.
Trump's first round of tax cuts helped ME. I'm not one of his rich billionaire friends. I never donated to his campaigns. I never went to a rally. I did vote for him.
He cut taxes for ME. He got rid of the onerous Affordable Care Act penalty for not getting it's shitty coverage....I was a healthy 50 something yr old in when that penalty was enacted. I did not have insurance and at 60, I still don't. I'm healthy. The premiums are through the roof for me because of actuarial tables. It makes no economic sense for me to get health insurance that doesn't pay for much anyway. Trump helped get rid of that. I was being PUNISHED for being a healthy older person....he isn't just helping 'rich people' whatever that even means.
I would go so far as to say that argument the left always throws out is RETARDED.
I think the claim is more that they are trying to cut mediCAID, which they certainly are intent on at least trying to do, though it remains to be seen whether they can muster the votes of the moderates to pass anything significant. The right seems to have settled on not cutting Medicare or Social Security, but they still want cuts, and Medicaid is the only sizeable program left outside the defense budget in which to do that.
Right.
Say there is 800 Billion of a thing in a pile and I've signed a law saying I have to get rid of 200 Billion of the thing.
400 Billion of it is the thing you promised not to touch, and 300 Billion of it is in a pile labeled "Medicaid." It's not some defense to say "but the law doesn't say I'm cutting Medicaid!" You don't need a math degree to recognize it has to happen.
They want to cut FRAUD.....FRAUD....FRAUD.
This just plain isn't true. There's not $800 billion of fraud in Medicaid they're looking to cut.
They want to do the following, and they have stated this pretty directly:
1. Impose work requirements on able bodied adults (the least problematic change, imo. It's not going to save much money, 92% of people on Medicaid are either children, elderly, or working already.)
2. Pay a fixed rate to states instead of one that is dependent on the number of people in their program. Right now the amount fluctuates automatically with the number of enrollees. Ultimately this will result in a lower budget.
3. Create a 'Per person limit' on Medicaid funding. This would force states to either cut funding, or make up the difference on their end.
4. Lower the reimbursement percentage by the federal government on all Medicaid expansions from the ACA from their current 90% down to a more typical 50% or 60%. This would likely result in massive cuts on the state end, because they don't have the funds to make up the difference.
This is not about fraud. You're being sold something that just isn't true. I hope they do work on fraud, but that is not what this bill is going to be about.
The cuts are going to be fine in the prosperous large blue cities where most people are covered by their employment health plans. It's going to devastate the poor rural areas where there aren't large employers with health care plans and 40% of the population is on some form of Medicaid.
It won't just be the lack of health insurance, the new health care jobs that have sprung up replacing the old obsolete jobs will be gone.
Yes, and many rural hospitals will close. People who have to drive 30 minutes to an hour are now going to have to drive 2 hours to get to a hospital, and a lot of healthcare jobs will disappear in their communities. It will not be pretty in many rural areas.
Health insurance is a scam. SCAM.
I pay less out of pocket than any person I know on insurance.
I broke 6 ribs and spent two days in the hospital.
My self pay bill was a tiny fraction of what they would have charged through insurance.....and it was less than a deductible.
It's a scam.
We have been brainwashed to believe we will die without health insurance.
Just ask an illegal if you need health insurance........
Well, let's hope you never get cancer.
Fraud is baked into the system. Medicaid and Medicare pay inflated rates for everything....where does that extra 'profit' go? My friend's mother just had a wheelchair purchased for her by Medicare....for $4,500. My friend found the identical chair, same brand, same features, etc....for $399 on Amazon. Now, that's fraud....it doesn't smell like fraud, but it is. Overcharging is fraud. As I clearly stated, but you didn't read, I am concerned about fraud from both the consumer and provider side. Oh, and I'll bet you ANYTHING you want that there is easily $800 billion in fraud when you combine the two. The fraudster at the local level is small potatoes. Do you know what an EBT store is? It's a store(an employee's aunt ran one) where all the items can be purchased with an EBT card. At the time, milk was about $1.99/gal retail. At the EBT store, it was $10.00/gallon. The government allowed for prices many times higher than regular retail. THAT is fraud. This person's aunt, with not even a high school education was making absolute bank(much more than I did as a veterinarian) by buying staples at Sam's Club then taking them to the EBT store and selling them for multiples there. That's capitalism for sure, but with other people's money. And these types of things are baked into the system. Any time someone tries to fix it and clean up the fraud, well meaning, but stupid liberals cry about babies going without milk and seniors not getting their meds. Well, here's a clue....babies are ALREADY going without milk--cuz mamma sells her EBT dollars on the black market and seniors are ignored by their doctors anyway and STILL have to pay for Meds at a higher rate often than if they self paid. If you even tell the pharmacist that you have insurance, you can't opt to self pay at a lower rate....they won't let you. Tell me that's no fraud. I know how much medicine actually costs because I order my own inventory and we use a lot of human side generic meds. What is being charged to Medicare and Medicaid is FRAUD....provider side fraud.
Pahlease with your 'there's no way there is 800 billion in fraud.' Dude, there is way MORE than 800 billion....now do the Pentagon.....which is also in the cross hairs.
And it's not the GOVERNMENT that's being ripped off...it's ME....and other working people like ME. You all always act like the government has resources....they don't. Every bit of $$$ they use came from some working person like ME. Well, if I have to pay for it, I want a say in how it's spent.
Oh....and GOD FORBID some fat ass go out and get a job......you likely have no idea how rampant the fraud is in SSDI is as well....
The whole gov is crooked as hell.
Well there's a lot here, but I'll just say right away, Medicaid reimburses hospitals at lower rates than private insurance or Medicare. Medicaid, specifically, has some of the lowest reimbursement rates for healthcare in the country. If there's fraud, it's more in Medicare than in Medicaid. But I'll leave it there.
This is where you get into some seriously dishonest bullshit over whether or not it's inefficiency, waste, or fraud. When taxpayers are being charged anywhere from five to a hundred times the actual cost, is it inefficiency, waste, or fraud? Are those labels really important when the problem is actually known?
This is where the American political left's stupid fetish for controlling language is a serious obstacle. Acknowledge the obvious perverse incentives, acknowledge it's a bad thing, and help be part of the solution. You'd think they'd support this on merit, but apparently, no.
Just so hard to believe that obvious, nakedly perverse incentives could ever lead to obvious, nakedly perverse, results.
I've made this observation on Twitter too and got back a lot of "AcKSHUaLLy, I think that's waste, not fraud - check and mate, MAGA chud!"
It's all so ridiculous.
Historically the Right has wanted to cut a LOT of government spending in general, and use fraud/waste as a low-hanging fruit to start with - I mean, who doesn't like eliminating waste? While the Left tends to overlook a ton of this stuff because, well, their voting base really likes federal spending when it comes to social entitlements (like Medicaid/care, SS, food stamps, w/e).
I see the problem in the way the Right is trying to do so in two ways:
1) They are using a broadsword when they should be using a scalpel. In their earnestness to root out fraud/waste they don't seem to care very much about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's easy to axe right through the center of something and claim you're doing god's work, but it's much harder, and much less sexy, to take the time and effort to weed out the good from the bad. I also personally think they really overblow certain things, like voter fraud, and don't really care to find out the facts on it because it bolsters their message not to do so.
2) They often completely ignore other areas of fraud/waste for the same reason the Left doesn't - it runs counter to their base voters and donors. The military in general, and gov/private contracts in particular, are notoriously rife with fraud and waste. Yet Republicans almost unilaterally refuse to touch these because for some reason not throwing huge barrels of cash at the military is seen as weak...or something.
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Also, Trump's 2017 tax cuts were verifiably skewed towards the wealthy. Of course it also helped out those not making above 6 figures (or 7), but they couldn't have sold it to the public without SOME benefit to average Americans. It was a case of giving the peasants an extra hog, giving the nobility an extra dozen cattle, and claiming they were 'doing their part' to help out regular Joe Americans.
I think you underestimate how poor some people are in this country. Something like 1 out of 6 kids in the US lives in poverty - go ahead and look up those numbers. You are not middle class. You are probably a 5%er.
So......I am one of Trump's RICH buddies, right? No, I'm what used to be called the middle class before it was destroyed by taxes and inflation.
The 'poor' people here, just outside of Atlanta that are using EBT cards are somehow, amazingly.....incredulously...somehow driving brand new SUVs....please tell me how the hell that works?
I DON'T drive a new car. Everything I have is used. I haven't taken a vacay in 15 years because I have to bust my ass to pay my goddamn employees. But this is the system...work hard, produce, employ others....get called 'rich' and get screwed over by taxes.
OR.....sit around on your fat fuckin ass, pump out a few children you don't really even try to take care of...collect EBT, get a HUD home, get SS disability because you can't back your fat ass away from the table....am I warm? Yeah, I am because I see it every damn day.
You likely are ACTUALLY a rich person whose only contact with the great unwashed is what you see online or read about in your liberal rags.
I grew up poor and made something of myself without help from the gov. Not so much as an SBA loan(cause they are too damned complicated to get without help), paid off my student loans and work every single week and ALSO provide a living for my employees and also provide low cost veterinary care for my clients.
I cannot stand assholes like you that don't know ANYTHING about actual poverty.
Dawg, you might want to chill. I don’t think you’re helping your own case.
No, I don't. I pay a shit ton of taxes and have since I was 15 yrs old. There are people in this country....those 'poor' people who have never paid a cent. NOT ONE CENT. I don't think it should be incumbent on me and people like me to make sure the lazy asses of this world get everything they want. ESPECIALLY since everyone is hiring and has been for some time.
Also, nobody wants to deprive people of necessities....we want to stop the FUCKING FRAUD that is rampant in everything.
During COVID, I took out a PPP loan because we were shut down for 10 days due to stupidity. I didn't let a single employee go. I borrowed $67,000......for a full time business with 10 employees....meanwhile, rappers and other shitheads borrowed MILLIONS...bought themselves cars, boats, vacations, etc. It's the FRAUD.....and the FRAUD amounts to BILLIONS.
Oh....and that is just the consumer end fraud....now let's talk about the hospital and doctor fraud....also in the billions....then let's talk about the pharma fraud....it's just never ending.
And it all falls on the few who actually pay taxes....and we are just expected to pay more and more and more....I guess(because it's socialism) we are gonna be required to pay more until the lazy asses have everything we have, but didn't work for any of it.
I mean, how can y'all be so STUPID that you think FRAUD doesn't exist in any meaningful way?
And it's 'my case' DAWG......it's the feeling of the majority of the country. The people who WORK are sick of getting screwed all the time.
I don't think anyone is denying that fraud exists. It just isn't going to fix the federal budget by itself, and this republican congress is absolutely targeting more than fraud. They want to make cuts to Medicaid, among other things, and are very clear about that. You're not listening to what they're saying if you think all of this is about fraud. They aren't even claiming that. You just made it up in your own head.
And most people receiving Medicaid are children or the elderly or else working people. Children can't be expected to contribute, because well, they're children. The elderly on Medicaid could maybe work, I guess, but most of them are well past retirement age. Most of the others are already working.
Agreed, cutting Medicaid isn't good. People need health care.
The PPP program was Donald Trump, so if you are annoyed that a bunch of already rich scammers got more rich off your taxes I have bad news for who is currently president of the United States.
Also anyone who has ever worked a job pays taxes, you might pay more if you are making more money, and its true that a lot of poor people get more money out than they put in, but again, the way the tax code is set up, that's only possible if you were a working adult at least part of the year, and usually its only a lot more than you put in if you also have children.
So this idea that you are in some special class of people who pays taxes is false. I pay taxes too, and I'm happy for my taxes to be used to fund government programs that help disadvantaged people, and also just to stimulate the economy through stable employment for federal workers, grants to farmers, and all the other ways we are seeing the federal government was helping working people who are currently suffering under the Trump administration.
You can type in as many capital letters as you want, it doesn't make it true, it just makes you look like you are throwing a tantrum.
If there is waste in the medicare and medicaid system, its because hospitals are overbilling patients for care and the goverment is picking up the check. That should probably stop, but nothing Trump is doing is addressing that, and its not going to go away it just means people are going to die. People are already dying because they can't afford insulin or other basic medical necessities, it just doesn't make the news anymore because its so common no one gives a shit, but its going to get worse. If you can live with that, fine I guess, but don't pretend that you are just making things fair. Fair would fighting for a system where billionaires who have benefited from the prosperousness and infrastructure in the United States pay enough in taxes to pass that prosperousness onto middle and working class people. But that's not what's going to happen, and its not what you are currently fighting for. You are fighting so that even more poor people get screwed while the rich walk away scot free.
oh, so you make big bank. The fact is, that proportionately speaking, the middle class actually pays the most impactful amount of taxes. The higher brackets may pay more, but they don't miss it. You are CLEARLY one of those(I do love me some CAPS). In my world, I pay enough in tax to significantly change what I can do....because I'm 'rich' or something....but not rich enough.....As for those poor poor people who are destitute...if you are destitute in this country, almost for sure you did it to yourself. Not always. Private charities used to do a much better job of helping people than government....they had people called VOLUNTEERS who worked for free. Now, all the NGOs and of course gov 'help' all get paid really well.....so that takes money that is supposed to help people away. No government worker EVER volunteers anything.
As far as PPP, it was the administration of it....you know, the shitty bureaucrats, that allowed the fraud...not Donald Trump. He wanted to get rid of those people....but couldn't because he was too busy being stabbed in the back. Now that he's trying to clean it up...he's a bad man...
Bottom line is government is corrupt and FRAUD is rampant. And trying to pretend there is not appreciable fraud is idiotic. It's stupid. It's moronic. If you think there isn't a good deal of fraud going on, you are either: a diehard Democrat or socialist, and idiot, a government employee, a government contractor, a fraudster....did I say idiot?
Funny how ANYONE can be upset about cleaning up fraud. Y'all so damn brainwashed, you don't realize it will benefit EVERYONE......even those who are getting things from gov.....
Also funny.....that most of the 'billionaires' today are all lefties.....they could, at ANY TIME of their own volition, pay more taxes....but they don't, do they? They cry for OTHER billionaires to do so.....who ARE these other billionaires? Why doesn't Oprah divest herself of everything down to about 500 Mill? She could afford it....but no, she goes on TV and begs for OTHER people to donate for Maui......when she has enough $$, with her buddies, to rebuild the whole town of Lahina....but she doesn't now, does she.
The 'billionaire' class used to be mainly Republicans, but I believe that it's way more Dems now....so, talk about hypocritical.
So just to be clear, anything good that the government does is because Donald Trump personally ordered it, all the evil billionaires are Democrats except for Elon Musk, who is good because he works for Donald Trump, and anyone who is actually happy to pay their taxes is some sort of elite, as opposed to a hard-working American like yourself?
Oh, and the tax cuts the Republicans are proposing that are mostly going to benefit millionaires and billionaires are good, even though you admit that middle class people feel the impact of taxes the most, because it was Donald Trump's idea in the first place.
Great. Enjoy this clear, unbiased worldview you have constructed for yourself.
Your rant doesn't bother me, plenty of truth there.
I'm confused. Do you think people who collect EBT and SS disability are doing great or something? Most of them are desperately poor even while collecting those benefits. The average disability benefit is less than $2,000 a month, about $21,000 a year. That's truly almost nothing. Only 2.7% of the country lives in subsidized housing, and their average annual income is $18,000 a year.
These people are very poor. They are not living high on the hog on your dime. They're barely surviving on your dime.
Have you been to the grocery store and stood in line behind people using their EBT cards? 9 times out of 10, they are buying junk....and a LOT of it. Then they go get in a new car. Oh and they 600 dollar hair extensions and 250 dollar gel nails and a coach purse....but maybe that's just my neck of the woods. It's called FRAUD. The people who NEED EBT, I have no problem with.....but I'll make a bet that only about 10% of the people receiving it, actually need it.
See the famous, now, TikTok of some influencer with no teeth in from Michigan bitching because her EBT bennies got cut. She has a 2024 BMW and was getting $4,500 in EBT bennies AND making a lot of money online....which she didn't report.....Wish that was uncommon, but it's NOT.
POOR people live in Appalachia...you know the ones that got fucked over by FEMA so they could house illegals? I grew up poor. My mom was a grade school teacher and she raised 3 kids on her salary. My dad gave us nothing. She got paid once a month.....by the last week, we were down to pennies. We NEVER qualified for any government assistance, we couldn't even get the government cheese, but somehow, we never had money either. She drove a shit car and we lived in an OK house that was way past it's prime. Our vacations were State Park camping trips. All the food in our cupboards came in plain black and white boxes(IYKYK). We lived in a trailer park for a couple years right after her divorce...in a single wide with two bedrooms---3 kids and one mother.
And she never got gov bennies....because she WORKED. You get punished for working in this country. As soon as you get a job, you become a money stream for the government.
What the American left wing cannot understand, despite decades of telling them straight to their faces, is that in our country, "poverty" is a definition set by bureaucrats. The average American household under the poverty limit has two cars, cable television, high speed internet and three point something smartphones.
That's the definition of being rich in many parts of the world. Poverty is a wage definition. Misery and want are different things entirely. I wish people would understand this point.
What's worse, we perverted the social safety net in such a way that people who do work get lower quality of services, despite working themselves to the bone. The left also doesn't understand that working people don't want handouts - they want to WORK - and they simply want to that work to be worth something in the way of a comfortable life.
I truly believe that the failure of the left to have a transparent conversation about what happened in the 2010s, and how carried away people got by treating recently made up social rules as the norm, is that the internet rewired a lot of people - and in ways that we still don't fully understand. The instant someone even tries to initiate the conversation, the "rewiring" causes others to see them as a bad-faith actor and shut them down. I can understand it to a point, because the highest profile dissidents at the time were people like Milo Yiannopoulous - criticizing liberals with occasionally fair points, and then acting like a middle schooler with immature shit-stirring, before getting caught collaborating with literal white supremacists. All of that broke people's brains and ability to separate between the benign and malicious, and it's hard to break out of that mindset.
"separate between the benign and the malicious"
And the same goes for the media, which is a real disservice to everyone. On the left MSM, there's no distinguishing between garden-variety conservatism, MAGA/know-nothing madness, and everything in between.
Admittedly, Trump's firehose makes that hard when he's in office.
Also, most people IRL are a blend of different stances. Even with superior message discipline, Red Tribe is made out of people.
Look back at what MSNBC was saying about Mitt freaking Romney in 2012 - it has a similar breathless doomerism as to what the news said about Trump last fall. The left MSM is the boy who cried wolf, and now our country is being eaten by that wolf.
Exacerbating the difficulty for the media is that Trump introduces a whole new scale of items to cry wolf about.
And that's Trump's trump card - his firehose of stuff makes it almost impossible not to cry wolf repeatedly. And that of course erodes the credibility of those crying wolf.
It's almost like the media needed to develop an alarm scale. Romney would have produced some 1 and 2s in comparisons to Trumps 5s through 11s on a scale of 10.
It's way too easy to cut people out. And as "ghosting" becomes more normalized, that's going to get worse. Why suffer through the struggles of compromise when moral purity is one banning away? Wait, why is no one joining our group?
Gender equality meaning what?
95% of airline pilots are male and 95% of elementary school teachers are female. As far as I know airlines and elementary schools are happy to hire anyone who applies with the right credentials. It’s just that men and women do in fact have different career preferences.
Gender equality is whatever we're halfway to. And we were halfway to in the 70s, and halfway to in the 20s... We will never see an "equal" society that meets enough people' definition of equal. The goal will always elude us...or the goalposts keep moving. We've done away with the hard obstacles to equality (ignoring class), but cultural change is measured in generations.
My thought exactly: "equality" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence.
To go further, I think the n-word split between who and who can’t use the ‘a’ version will have to eventually collapse, either being put off limits completely or, more likely, removing a way for Kendrick Lamar to humiliate naive white girl stans of his.
Or at least soften to the point where that girl who posted after getting her driver’s license wouldn’t lose her college acceptance.
I think it’s too important a cudgel to be yielded, though the irony is that giving it this totemic power is essentially observing the norm of the Southern upper class, which frowned on the word. And I’m pretty sure the latter group is not one the left is trying to be in solidarity with.
Not to get hit with the ban hammer but it’s also the case that the right and left can get caught in their own online echo chamber. The very online come to believe certain things are broadly popular when, in many cases, they are basically unknown outside their own online milieu.
This can lead to electoral defeat when Very Online politicians and staffers start interacting with potential voters convinced that their Very Online beliefs are widely held.
I was trying to come up with a term for rule by the very online - edgelordism, clicktocracy?
I remember growing up in the early 2000s, “retard” had by then been replaced in school with the term “special education,” or “sped” for short. And we used that term all the same to make fun of each other.
There is no word for the cognitively disabled that 5th graders won’t find funny and use to offend. So the treadmill continues.
Shit, "he's... *special*" can hit hard with the right intonation.
I went to go find Darla called Beavis & Butthead "emotionally special" but the lead-up to it is a little unsettling with current events. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekm9dJ1b-IE&t=495s
It would be a pretty sort of garden-of-children, really Edenic, if kids could go back to saying “stupid”. But we don’t say stupid in kindergarten, a chorus of kindergarteners once told me, though I was referring to an object or to the lesson itself, or some aspect of it. Not a child :-).
In fact in the ten or so adult years I spent a lot of time in primary schools, I found that kids - at least kids in that area/demographic, I shouldn’t claim universal experience - actually tended toward tenderness to the severely disabled who were a big part of the education budget by then, and very visible as constantly shuffled around from place to place (that seemed the definition of mainstreaming, there). Kids overflowing with goodwill make “pets” of other kids; whether that’s its own crime I will leave to others - but they are kids after all, and subject to their own limitations. There were emotionally disturbed kids, or those with a bundle of diagnoses, ill-suited to the classroom setting, that made everyone’s life more difficult - and those were not made “pets” of, but neither were they tormented. It was more a “just ignore them, maybe they will settle down” thing.
Listening to the Gen Z children of a friend of mine over the holidays, apparently the replacement term is “delayed”.
Used in the exact same way with the same connotations.
I used to be very uncomfortable with the word in the 2000s and 2010s! But now? The very efforts to make "the r-slur" taboo have given it power. If you call something Elon Musk or Donald Trump are doing "retarded", you express an intensity of contempt in a way other words, even "stupid" or "moronic", can't. And as a bonus, you instantly separate yourself from the kinds of people who think "maybe laws need to be enforced if we are to cooperate as a society" is literal fascism.
From https://x.com/EsotericCD/status/1844893027396972742:
> "I have a special needs child. If anyone used that term specifically on my son I'd want to punch them in the face. But I use it myself all the time these days, because quite frankly our national politics has become completely retarded and we need that word back to say so."
In many animal species, in order to find a mate, the male must go through an elaborate mating dance to attract the females attention and then acquiescence. That is essentially what we are seeing with the need to use the "right" words. It's nothing more than a type of mating dance. The problem is that the dance attracts only birds of that species. Birds of other species, which are the majority of birds, just ignore the dance. In the same way, those who do the song and dance get attention only from their own small tribe. They are ignored by the majority. The left needs to stop acting like birds perfecting a song and dance and get active on issues that matter.
I'm not sure this is such a ridiculous claim. Of course not all people who use the word 'retarded' are part of the alt-right or whatever, but that doesn't mean the smaller claim is false, that the term has outsized importance within those circles and is seen as a signal that you're 'in the club'. I think that's probably true to an extent. I used to browse the incels.is forum on occasion a few years back when incels were taking up a bit more of the national conversation, and they use that word a LOT. I find it perfectly defensible to say that using the word is a signal to them that you're part of the incel community.
I think the much stronger signal is that someone saying 'retard' is rejecting leftism.
I resubscribed as a paid member just so I could say, I love this post, thanks Freddie! I feel like this is such an important point that's very hard to make without sounding like an asshole. Forwarding to various friends and family.
Words mean different things in different contexts. As Michael Scott said: "You don't call retarded people retards. It's bad taste. You call your friends retards when they're acting retarded."
This is a bit of an aside, but it reminds me of the whole discussion around "the c word" in the U.S. Consensus has become that it's a very misogynistic slur against women, similar to "the n word" for African-Americans, which is why Americans are often shocked at the wide usage (and inoffensiveness) elsewhere in the anglosphere.
The thing is, I spent lots of time around very politically incorrect dudes when I was younger, and the only way I ever heard the word used was a porny way to describe genitals. I literally cannot think of a case where it was used to call a woman an asshole or whatever. And this is despite use of the word bitch still being pretty prevalent in the 1990s/early 2000s.
My wife, and more than a few other women, use it as a slur against other women.
Rarely the T-word though.
In Gen Z slang, saying someone is "c*nty," or "serving c*nt" is generally speaking a compliment that women/queer folks give to other women/queer folks, related to a certain sense of style.
Lesbian zoomer here. I've mostly run into it from gay men/MTF trans women, not cis women. Generally using it that way still feels misogynistic to me in the same way they use "fish" on Drag Race.
I'm not really that offended by it, but the way I've seen it used makes me think of men who view womanhood as a costume they put on and take off, and I've never heard a fellow cis lesbian use it that way.
Is MAGA the new retard?
Only among the libtards.