(no subject)

[supergee]

According to the great philosopher Carlin, we have 3 classes of problems in this country:
1. the genuinely stupid
2. the full-of-shit, who sound stupid but aren't...
3. the fucking crazy"-- R.A. Wilson

womzilla has a post about whether the people who say, e.g., that Procter & Gamble is run by Satanists, are stupid, crazy, or lying. (Perhaps George W. Bush scored a trifecta.)

There are those who say we must not use the words stupid and crazy to describe people because it's "ableist." To me that's one of the few ideas that deserve the dread epithet politically correct (as opposed to, e.g., "Black people are no worse than white people," which is simply correct). What I value in people is their minds, which is why I consider people more valuable than animals (yes, even PETAmanes), so while everyone is valuable, I value mean people, stupid people, and boringly crazy people less than people without those traits.

Further thought: Ideally, one might treat the words stupid and crazy like racist, as qualities of ideas and actions, rather than people.

Comments

[piranha]

a few years ago i decided that i could safely ignore any post that used "politically correct" to disparage people the poster suspected of greater sensitivity than zie was willing to grant, because those posts simply never had anything insightful to say, but were just defensive about their attitude, and usually misstated the maligned position.

unfortunately, you didn't break the streak. next we know you're gonna call me a bleeding-heart liberal, like that were a bad thing.

i would say "that's disappointing", but what i've seen from SFF fandom in the last year has lowered my bar for that tremendously. now it just seems par for the course.

[serene]

Whenever I see someone claim that my language is "politically correct", I feel really dismissive of that person (as I do of you right now), because that implies that, rather than having given some thought to how my language might be damaging, and coming to a decision that I want to avoid hurtful language, I'm instead toeing some party line with no meaning behind it.

There's a really good discussion of why ableist language is hurtful here: http://vito-excalibur.livejournal.com/223281.html