I'm like just coming up on ableist language & trying to rebuild my daily word choices to not include it - and holy fuck do alot of us do a terrible job.

Can someone whip up an ableist language bot that just points it out when we do a boo-boo?

No scolding, no shaming, - just a bot that points it out with a simple reply. Hell, "hey my ableism detector is going off" and have it rotate through with some loving positive messages.

I think alot of us would be surprised at how much we could grow in this department

  • Pezevenk [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I don’t see the difference between calling someone autistic & calling someone stupid - they’re both rooted in their abilities or capabilities, no?

    So is noob, is noob ableist too? Hell, even just calling someone incompetent insults their ability, is it to be taken as a nasty ableist term? If the difference is that one is inherent and the other isn't, stupid isn't necessarily inherent either. People say "stop being stupid" or "x idea is stupid" all the time. Stupid isn't rooted to anything specific, unlike r*tard, which is the slur against mentally challenged people.

    Or are you suggesting that stupid isn’t part of anyone’s identity? Nobody identifies as a stupid person? Nobody recognizes themselves as having reduced cognitive function?

    I really don't think many people identify as "stupid". People with reduced cognitive function tend to think of themselves as having learning difficulties and they don't necessarily consider themselves stupid.

    I have a hard time believing that putting an end to demeaning people based on intellectual ability or whatever wouldn’t promote any meaningful change

    I have a really hard time believing it would, because of the nature of these people's issues. Again, I don't believe language can do much more than make people feel more welcome and I don't think many people with cognitive difficulties at all are made to feel unwelcome by casual usage of a word as common and abstract as stupid, unless you are calling them stupid of course. At least I don't know anyone who's said that. Similarly I haven't heard of sexual assault victims or women in general argue that people shouldn't say "fuck this" or "fuck you" or whatever. I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere has argued that because everything has been argued by someone somewhere but I don't think it's a common issue.

    I’m proposing a prompt that reminds us there are other more effective words that can be used in place of these habitually promoted words.

    The issue is that words like stupid, dumb, lame etc are used so frequently that any bot like that will just badly spam every thread and it's gonna be very annoying. And, like, blind? That's not even an insult.