“Idiot” has not been a medical term for decades. It no longer refers to a particular diagnosis. Nobody who is not an idiot thinks “idiot” in its current incarnation is ableist. See also: imbecile, cretin, crazy, bonkers, etc.
Well that’s my attempt to understand a novel point of view for today… I can now hopefully say I’m no longer “ignorant”, I simply disagree.
Any word which describes something seen as negative takes on a stigma. Those sympathetic to the victims of the stigma will blame the word and insist on a new one. The new word gains the same stigma while the old one loses its original meaning and takes on a new one based entirely on the stigma itself. Rinse and repeat and we slowly build a lexicon of words which are problematic for reasons forgotten by society. A special few retain or rediscover the original meaning, and thus we have a perfect misdirection from the vast and growing wealth and power inequality orchestrated by our capitalist overlords.
You "disagreeing" (more like maintaining cognitive dissonance, and clearly not reading the links, especially the last one) doesn't make it any less ableism. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
E: also - ableism isn't some thought experiment for you to "test out" your debating skills on, it's an actual form of oppression that affects billions globally, and it feeds on deep rooted smug and dismissive attitudes like yours.
Yeah, after reading through, those articles equally contain cognitive dissonance. From how I read it, it’s ableist to insult intelligence because intelligence is primarily a proxy to insult mentally handicapped people, and because its criteria are largely arbitrary.
What about doing something unwise? Touching a hot stove, poking a bear, trying to jump across a wide gap you’re not sure you can make it over, these are not good ideas. The thing is: the criteria for what is “wise” is equally arbitrary! The arbitrariness of a socially-constructed idea are less important than how important the cultural zeitgeist deems the idea to be. Most socially constructed ideas have arbitrary criteria because their definitions are not strict, that alone is not enough to dismiss them outright. Their harm to the mentally handicapped could be, but I see this as a red herring to solving that problem.
Policing the language used won’t prevent them from being insulted for being mentally handicapped. People will just make up new terms, as has happened time and time again. If it becomes blasphemous to insult intelligence, another proxy for it will appear, and that will be insulted instead. They’ll insult the unwise, the foolish, the unprepared, etc. In my opinion, the attempt to stamp out ableism as you’ve described it is a thinly-veiled attempt to try to prevent people from insulting each other at all, which, while morally virtuous, is rather naïve.
What alternative word would you use in this case, as a pejorative insult to someone’s intelligence?
Looking at the list you’ve provided, they’re all generic insults not specifically aimed at someone for doing something dumb. If the problem is that the pejorative is aimed at intelligence…ableism will never go away. People will always insult the intelligence of others when they do something dumb.
Then ableism will never die. What you are requesting be done is absurd. People say things they do themself are stupid, “I just touched a hot stove without thinking, how stupid of me”, they of course would do the same to others. If that’s the correction you want, you’re going to be in the vast minority and will be fighting a losing war against core fundamentals of human behavior.
Edit to be clear: and not because it's a lot of information, but because bigots are so rarely willing to challenge their bias and risk being better, I wasn't really expecting you to (but that doesn't mean you're wrong or that others shouldn't know why).. 🙄
Are you really trying to take the moral high ground while arguing that the term “idiot” should be revived and solely reserved for people with mental disabilities related to intelligence? JFC this is what happens when you take sniffing your own farts a little too far.
It’s like you want to enshrine the word in its most hateful form rather than allow its meaning to be diluted into something powerless and inconsequential.
I can appreciate what you’re doing but I do think there’s an issue in this case.
From your second link regarding the word “idiot”, the term this community is using,
It is here that we start to see the problematic connotations of the word; it became synonymous with “ignorant person.” This meaning passed with the term throughout history, resulting in our use of it today to mean someone we perceive as being ignorant or stupid.
Looking into it further, for the majority of the time it’s been a word, “idiot” has meant an ignorant person. Which is absolutely not the same as having any certain mental condition. Calling someone ignorant isn’t inherently ableist. It wasn’t until (imo) one of the worst time periods of psychology (late 1800s, early 1900s) that it was appropriated to be used as a medical diagnosis along with “moron” to describe someone with a low IQ or “mental age”. Now that we’ve mostly moved past those ignorant concepts, we’ve changed diagnostic terms and started using those old words to mean something akin to their original definition.
Where we likely agree and what people replying to you may be missing is that ignorance is being used as an insult, which is not helpful. And while the community name may be accurate (a community to discuss ignorance on Facebook) it is toxic and low hanging fruit to post an image online for everyone to point and laugh at another person’s ignorance. Especially as the poster may assume it’s ignorance when it may actually be a manifestation of a certain mental condition.
So the community will likely be unintentionally ableist but will almost certainly be toxic and an easy way for people to feel superior to others. So I personally will not judge their use of “idiot” but I will judge those who find this content amusing and entertaining. p.s. thank you to anyone who was silly enough to read my entire comment haha
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