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.
I sometimes wonder how to ride the line between sensitivity towards marginalized people like disabled people, and being understanding/tolerant about the problematic language of most people so as not to be alienating and harmful to growth. I can see why the words you listed present issues, but given that they’re so common to most people’s language (not to say that it should remain that way), what is a good course of action (not that it’s all on any one person to come up with a solution)?
that’s a solid point, but consider this for a second: every word that is accepted as being, well, unacceptable was once acceptable. it starts by politely correcting someone when they say it and explaining why the language can be harmful. from there, most people will change their wording and move on. you’ll always have some people who fight back, but the idea is to have enough people that using these terms is no longer the norm