Some of our most common, ingrained expressions have damaging effects on millions of people – and many of us don't know we're hurting others when we speak.

As a disabled person, I face ableism and ableist language every day. Some people use ableist language without even knowing that it is ableist. I thought it would be good for folks to take a look at the attached BBC article and expand their perspectives a bit.

  • DessertStorms
    -8•1 year ago

    Now, as for actual discussion to be had, unfortunately our language is entirely coded in slights towards different groups of people. In calling someone “a sinister villain who’s a part of a cabal”, I’ve called them a left handed

    if left handed people were still marginalised your comparison might be valid, but they aren’t so it isn’t.

    At some point we do need to accept that these negative words, which are at their fundamentals, slights to certain groups of people, have taken on a new meaning, and that their misuse as slights against those people only really applies contextually.

    No we don’t, especially since no, they haven’t

    I do think that terms like “stupid” and “idiot” have achieved that level of shift.

    you would be wrong
    https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/stupid-is-an-ableist-slur-breaking-down-defenses-around-ableist-language-liberating-our-words/

    I’m not here to tell you you or your experience is wrong,

    yet that’s exactly what you are doing.

    You should be able to remove a few words from your vocabulary to reduce harm to already marginalised people, without arguing about it or trying to “logic” your way out of it. It isn’t a big ask, but rather the very bare minimum.

    • ramEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      Uh, I’d rather good faith discussion instead, actually.

      Just noticed you’re using kbin.social. Checks out.

      • livus
        3•1 year ago

        Just noticed you’re using kbin.social. Checks out.

        @ram

        Not the person you were talking to but wait… why… I thought kbin was one of the more chill instances? Have we got a bad reputation in your neck of the woods?

        • ramEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          It’s a personal observation I’ve noticed, I go into more detail here if you’re curious.

          • livus
            2•1 year ago

            Thanks, perspective’s a strange thing, to me it always feels like the bad faithers are from the biggest instances but that’s just because of the size of them.

            The theory we joined kbin over politics surprises me. I joined because I found the interface so much easier to use than lemmy, and also it has a lot of features like the ability to block domains or instances by myself, and the cool interfacing with mastodon. We also turned out to have a cool dev and transparent finances which is nice.

            I think some of us who joined kbin before we federated are kind of in a bit of a diy small magazines vibe and don’t really mix it up as much.

            Although we can see the names of people who upvote and downvote us, Kbin doesn’t seem to federate all downvotes, so I guess we can be kind of oblivious to disapproval from outsiders.

            • ramEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              wrt not federating all downvotes, you sure that’s not because the commenter or poster is from an instance that disables downvotes? If they disable downvotes, then all downvotes will only be localized to your instance (i.e. every downvote you’ll see on that comment/post is from kbin.social users, and me, lemmy.ca users)

                • ramEnglish
                  2•1 year ago

                  Huh that’s really interesting. I wonder why that is then.

                  • livus
                    1•1 year ago

                    @ram

                    Not sure, I’ve only been able to find snippets of dev discussion on it but as far as I can tell it’s part of Ernest’s philosophy.

                    He used to have the upvote button mean sharing and the “boost” button for upvotes, but he reconfigured it because we all got too confused.

                    This way we can never vote brigade, or be brigaded either, I guess?

                    But kbin is still being built, it’s a lot newer than Lemmy, so who knows what the future holds. It’s interesting that different instances will have a wildly different picture about whether a comment is popular though.

      • norapink
        2•1 year ago

        Does kbin.social have some kind of reputation or something? I’m not defending the commenter BTW.

        • livus
          2•1 year ago

          I’ve never noticed us having one before, I think (hope) it’s just that one person.

      • comedy
        2•1 year ago

        I’m not defending the other guy, but what’s wrong with kbin?

        • ramEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          I just notice time and time again that kbin.social is populated by users who act in bad faith. I assume it has something to do with people repulsed by communists tending to stay away from lemmy instances due to the M-L association. Of course, kbin.social is the biggest instance of its software, but it’s a trend I keep noticing.

        • hypelightfly
          2•1 year ago

          Nothing inherently, it’s an open instance with almost no rules regarding discourse though so you will find a lot of trolls and bad faith comments coming from kbin.

      • keegomatic
        1•1 year ago

        I agree with you, but why are you disparaging kbin? Plenty of good discussion here, and a good community.

        • ramEnglish
          0•1 year ago

          Ad hominem only applies when using an attack on a person as an argument. This person’s clearly not behaving in good faith, so why are they entitled to a good faith reply?