Stuff like "stupid, idiot, moron, dumb," you know the ones. If you’re insulting someone for their shitty garbage beliefs and all you can manage to come up with is ways to insult their intelligence, appearance, or other aspect about them that has nothing to do with their cruelty and shittyness, you should maybe reevaluate.

Just saw a thread on here where a user was stubbornly refusing to adjust their language when another user politely pointed out that it was harmful to our comrades as well, and the person refusing was massively upvoted and the comrade trying to explain why it was harmful was downvoted. Thought we were better than that

I'm not calling anyone out, just wanted to make a post explaining my feelings on it and that when stuff like that happens (not the intelligence based insults, I know its hard to switch, but getting insulted for asking people to avoid them) it hurts and makes me feel less welcome here </3

Using words like “You’re being ignorant” or “That’s a cruel belief” is actually more effective than just going “lmao idiot”.

If those are the words you actually mean to convey I'd say use them instead :)

Edit: if the reception this post got isn't a good proof that this is something this community needs to grapple with, I don't know what is.

  • Civility [none/use name]
    1·
    4 years ago

    I agree that my earlier post should have read "than other people" instead of "than me".

    Intelligence isn't the only form of personal or social power but it is a form of personal power and society does value people perceived as "more intelligent" and make them feel special and denigrate people perceived as less intelligent and make them feel like shit, especially children in school.

    Intelligence is an ill defined term but it generally refers to something along the lines of being better at thinking and learning, which are both forms of power. Just because the term is ill defined doesn't mean people can't be more or less intelligent or more or less powerful as a result of that intelligence.

    Just because intelligence is hard to measure sure as fuck doesn't mean that people can't or don't discriminate on basis of perceived intelligence.