The folks saying that this is ablesist. I hear you and I think I mostly agree. But this is one I kind of struggle on. Which “haha person is stupid” kinds of things are making fun of people who are mentally handicapped? And which ones are just making fun of people for being plain old stupid? Or is it ablesist to say that a person behaving stupidly is stupid?
Like, if you’re making a meme and want to portray the anti-vaxer or nazi or whatever as being stupid or cruel or whatever, how do you do that without being ablesist? (“Inteligence is biological”, “psychopathy is a disease”, etc)
edit: oh whoops. And fuck tankies. Forgot to add that
Calling something or someone ‘stupid’ is just evading actual criticism. The fact is that nazi’s and anti-vaxers aren’t necessarily ‘stupid’. And people with learning disabilities are often neither anti vax nor nazi.
Nazi’s are evil because they want to remove queer people, non-white people, disabled people etc from society (probably by either killing or enslaving them).
Anti-vaxers are either dangerously misinformed or so arrogant that they think they know better than scientists who studied years to understand the human immune system.
Which “haha person is stupid” kinds of things are making fun of people who are mentally handicapped? And which ones are just making fun of people for being plain old stupid? Or is it ablesist to say that a person behaving stupidly is stupid?
Kinda, yeah. And this is somewhere some hard conversations have to happen in leftist anti-ableist spaces to figure out the way forward. Memes play on stereotypes and cultural shorthand to communicate with very few words, and the culture is ableist so our memes sometimes will be too. There’s a split in definitions - stupid can be a perjorative for disabled people, or it can be a remark on willful ignorance and self-sabotaging malice. And using SAT words to more accurately describe their behavior leads to the wall 'o text leftist ‘memes’ that nobody wants to read. But calling them stupid is still ableist.
In some cases you can get around this by playing on anti-intellectual stereotypes but then you’re usually just using classist stereotypes… am I just forgetting some or is every insult that doesn’t make you sound like an egghead punching down on someone?
The folks saying that this is ablesist. I hear you and I think I mostly agree. But this is one I kind of struggle on. Which “haha person is stupid” kinds of things are making fun of people who are mentally handicapped? And which ones are just making fun of people for being plain old stupid? Or is it ablesist to say that a person behaving stupidly is stupid?
Like, if you’re making a meme and want to portray the anti-vaxer or nazi or whatever as being stupid or cruel or whatever, how do you do that without being ablesist? (“Inteligence is biological”, “psychopathy is a disease”, etc)
edit: oh whoops. And fuck tankies. Forgot to add that
Calling something or someone ‘stupid’ is just evading actual criticism. The fact is that nazi’s and anti-vaxers aren’t necessarily ‘stupid’. And people with learning disabilities are often neither anti vax nor nazi.
Nazi’s are evil because they want to remove queer people, non-white people, disabled people etc from society (probably by either killing or enslaving them).
Anti-vaxers are either dangerously misinformed or so arrogant that they think they know better than scientists who studied years to understand the human immune system.
Kinda, yeah. And this is somewhere some hard conversations have to happen in leftist anti-ableist spaces to figure out the way forward. Memes play on stereotypes and cultural shorthand to communicate with very few words, and the culture is ableist so our memes sometimes will be too. There’s a split in definitions - stupid can be a perjorative for disabled people, or it can be a remark on willful ignorance and self-sabotaging malice. And using SAT words to more accurately describe their behavior leads to the wall 'o text leftist ‘memes’ that nobody wants to read. But calling them stupid is still ableist.
In some cases you can get around this by playing on anti-intellectual stereotypes but then you’re usually just using classist stereotypes… am I just forgetting some or is every insult that doesn’t make you sound like an egghead punching down on someone?
IDK. Everything is fucked.