I’m trans and I really don’t want to federated with these people if their mods are defending the -tard suffix and they aren’t getting de-modded and banned. I also don’t want to be federated with them if they ban critiquing western chauvinism.
Someone who is an admin and with more of a level head than me RN please talk to their admins about it.
That’s a
from me.Also, I have a family member with an intellectual disability, so it sticks in my craw when someone tries to defend it as innocent. It’s fine if someone throws it out and then gets corrected (think of the Chapos, they quit using it after all), since for a long time it was “acceptable.” But to try and defend yourself after correction…
Not just people with intellectual disabilities either, plenty of nuerospicy people and people with mental illnesses are also called the R slur.
Given how many trans people are autistic(as am I) they really should know better.
Is there any argument to using **tard and *spie in a reclamatory sense? I have a few autistic friends and I have absolutely heard them calling each other such terms.
My question here is:
How are these terms being reclaimed?
If we looked at the reclamation of the word “queer”, we have a perfect example. Queer used to mean bad, perverted, unacceptable, and too feminine/too masculine for the hegemonic gender norms etc. It still gets used as a slur in this sort of way, although much less frequently.
Nowadays, queer has been reclaimed as a term that is used as a positive description and it’s used with pride to define individuals by their sexual and/or gender identities and to foster solidarity.
With that in context, how are these so-called “reclaimers” of the R-slur reclaiming this term?
When someone like Keffals (🤢🤮) uses the word or a portmanteau of -tard, is she using this term to create solidarity and as a term of pride?
Or is she using it to regurgitate the current discourse which uses the term to perpetuate stereotypes, as a way to use the term to denigrate and dehumanize, in just the way that the R-slur became a slur in the first place when it was originally taken from medical discourse and brought into mainstream slang usage?
If it the latter case, and it is in Keffals’ case, then there is no reclamation of the term taking place and the person doing it is misusing the term “reclamation” as a rhetorical shield to hide behind, like the intellectual coward they are, by draping their bigotry in some self-aggrandizing notion of activism while they are simply perpetuating the prevailing hateful discourse of the term’s usage.
Your friends may be using it differently however and I can’t say because I’m not privy to the context in which they are using those terms, although I’m extremely skeptical about people who do not have intellectual disability using the R-slur and claiming that it’s used in a reclamatory fashion. That’s a bit like myself, being a white person, and having had people use the N-word against me (rarely, but still…) and then deciding that it’s my prerogative to reclaim the term since I’ve been on the receiving end of it being used as a slur against me; it’s not my term to reclaim.
So I’d need a pretty damn good justification for why a person without intellectual disability is reclaiming the R-slur and tbh I haven’t come across it yet.
Yeah it’s really fucked up. I love the mod, after they drop it, is like “(I am a vocal socialist and very far left).” WHERES YOUR SENSE OF HUMANITY TOWARDS THOSE WHO ARE DISABLED/NEUROATYPICAL MFER. Really enrages me. Like, the idea that you shouldn’t apologize and do better about this, that’s fascist thinking rather than leftist.
"(I am a vocal socialist and very far left).
If you say you’re a socialist you don’t need to add “far left” lol. This is, at best, a baby leftist and more likely just a confused reactionary.
“I am very far left - I even frowned while I was voting for Joe Biden in the last election.”
“Hexbear is like the Donald” - an instance blocking comments that are critical of their bigoted content
Liberals and their political analysis not extending past the point of crafting similes, name a more iconic duo. I’ll wait.
Honestly, so much lib bullshit is just “Donald Trump is like Voldemort and Hillary Clinton is like Hermione…” and then they list what they like/dislike about those characters in a comparative fashion and that’s all the analysis they can muster.
Or they say shit like Putin is like Hitler because Hitler Lebensraum and Putin also expanded Russia via imperialism. Plus here’s a picture of Putin with a Hitler moustache to make my argument more compelling.
As if there aren’t countless examples of countries engaging in imperialism and expansionism and as if that isn’t low-key Nazi apologism to reduce the primary characteristic of Nazi Germany to just “expansionism” at the expense of ignoring all the other, far more egregious, things that characterised Nazi Germany.
Another interesting snippet of the modlog. They’re an “anarchist”.
Anti-oppression policy/anti-oppressive speech is a safeword for most anarchists, if anyone wants to take up the charge and drive critical consciousness in that mod team.
Nelson Mandela was a communist. Was the final recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union. And (re)wrote a book titled “How to be a Good Communist” while in prison where the first lines of the book reads:
A Communist is a member of the Communist Party who understands and accepts the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism as explained by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin , and who subjects himself to the discipline of the Party.
His remarks on receiving the Lenin Peace Prize after finally getting out of prison are here: http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/2002/021028_lenin.htm
I think this part is relevant:
As we remember the support from the Soviet Union and the socialist states, it is fitting that we also pay tribute to our historic partnership with the South African Communist Party.
We remember how South African communists came to the material support of the ANC at a time when the police were raiding our offices almost on a daily basis, depleting us of our resources to pay our full-time officials. We can never forget those concrete acts of solidarity.
The SACP has been trustworthy and dependable allies over decades as part of our movement in all its formations. Our relationship with the Soviet Union and the socialist world had much to do with their presence in our ranks.
Of course, liberals leave all of this out when praising Mandela.
The list of people whose socialist, anarchist, and communist politics have been written out of history is enormous. One that strikes me has always been Helen Keller. She was a noted and popular speaker in the early 20th century, but when she began speaking authoritatively about leftist struggle she was blacklisted from media and the story that gets told in schools - a story mostly about the teacher she worked with to develop speech and communication methods suitable for her disabilities - began to be shaped.
Recommended reading:
Why I became an IWW by Helen Keller. (Socialism For All narration with commentary here)
This is a short read and note that this was in the period when the IWW was dominated by Marxists/communists and prior to the shift where the IWW became dominated by anarchists.
