I mean, what's the project there, I think, is the question. In the same way that the f-slur can be used in person by people who are LGBTQ, I suppose people who are neurodivergent/disabled might use that term amongst themselves.

The issue is that you have people with intellectual disabilities under that umbrella along with the nerudivergent. So while the neurodivergent person has the agency, perhaps, to be reclamatory like your friends, I feel like the intellectually disabled don't really have the same agency. Like, there's diminished capacity there that I think makes it a lot more complicated than other oppressed groups. I'm being somewhat paternalistic here, perhaps (in part because I have a family member who is disabled and I have a paternalistic role to a degree due to their capacities), and obviously there's a huge spectrum. But I think that's actually an important distinction between it and other slurs that can be reclaimed.

Again though, I say this as someone who isn't disabled/neurodivergent, so I'll say that all of this is very much just my personal take and not programmatic.

I don't think this is what's happening here though, it's not just ND people using it (if the mod's saying it, I assume it's considered acceptable language there), and that would be pretty impossible to enforce in an anonymous online space. Plus they didn't just use it but removed criticism with no explanation beyond calling our guy "braindead."

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.

[as a neurospicy person] I've certainly heard other neurospicy people use it to refer to themselves. It still hurts me when they say it and I see nothing of value to be "reclaimed" by saying it but if they really want to I'm not going to stop them