There’s a clear campaign against the mentally ill with the global rise of fascism. Lots of it shows up in anti homeless rhetoric, but you can see it in the MAHA and anti vaccination movements.
There’s no reason to use the word “r-tarded” to describe someone. As someone who’s worked with the intellectually challenged, it’s an insult to them to compare them with people who are willfully ignorant.
I don’t like the euphemism treadmill. Normalize all slurs. Get more creative with your language & learn how to reappropriate & reclaim.
The worst take I’ve seen on slurs is the online activism to make the noun female a slur. When I explain that their advocacy accepts a sexist premise that something is wrong with the name of an entire gender & thereby consents to the stigmatization of that gender, they erupt into an irrational rage.
The reason people have a problem with the noun female isn’t because “there’s something wrong with the name of an entire gender” it’s because it’s extremely often used in such a way that people (typically men) will refer to men as men and refer to women as females. It’s why you may see the phrase “men and females” thrown around as a response.
(For the record, I think referring to women as well as men as females or males is pointlessly degrading. The noun version of those is acceptable for non-human animals, e.g. the males in a flock of birds.)
Where
Enough that people made a whole subreddit about it.