So, I want to preface this by saying I do not write well. My thoughts rarely form paragraphs with beginnings, middles, and ends. I get off on tangents and forget my original point. I’m sure a lot of others here are similar, but this disclaimer is more for the neurotypical readers whom I am hoping will see this.
The tone of this entire post is honest and earnest unless otherwise specified.
Tone indicators get a lot of flak for being “cringe” in some circles, and I’m sad to have seen that that mindset apparently pervades here. Trying to put myself in the shoes of a NT person who does not understand the struggles of ND people, I can see why they might have that perspective. Tone indicators can seem unnecessary to someone who implicitly understands tone, and who assumes that it’s a skill everyone has.
But not everyone has the skill to recognize and understand tone. In verbal dialogue some ND people may have had enough experience to build up a reference of what sarcastic or joking voices sound like and file those away for later use, but online there are no such indicators – a problem that tone indicators attempt to fix.
So while to a NT reader a joke comment about, I don’t know, literally wanting to fuck my mom or something, might be immediately obvious, because “of course” a person online from another continent who has never seen her before probably doesn’t want to fuck my mom, this is not always evident to ND people. Neurodiversity is classified as a disability (and while I acknowledge the push back against this idea as inherently ableist by many in the community, bear with me,) and for many of us, one of the abilities we may lack is one which NT people take for granted: the ability to parse tone. To some of us, that flippant joke someone made might be confusing, or hurtful.
And while I don’t expect everyone to indicate tone online all of the time, what I do think should be expected from users on Hexbear, as a space that strives to be inclusive and uplifting to marginalized groups, is that if they are asked to clarify tone, they should. And I’d like to thank the user who made a thread on that topic. This should be the absolute bare minimum.
Now, some of our NT readers might be thinking “but I put a meme face image after my statement! It should make it obvious its tone!” But I don’t think that is sufficient to indicate tone. Tone indicators are numerous, but the list is somewhat short. I know of: sarcastic, joking, half joking, honest, confused, and a few others. This is not much to memorize, and their meanings are easily looked up. Meme images… not so much. There are hundreds here on Hexbear, many of which have no documentation like “mainstream”^★ memes do, so their meanings can be even more confusing than your jokes.
So try to put yourself in the shoes of a ND person who has trouble with tone, especially online. They are trying to understand your joke and get in on the fun. They want to be a part of the group. They’re having a little trouble understanding, so they ask you to clarify. Do you want to be inclusive and simply clarify your tone, or do you want to continue to uphold the paradigm of ND exclusion that pervades other spaces?
Speaking of exclusionary spaces, this leads me to point two. Intent.
I have already had an experience here, and seen many other such moments, where someone immediately jumped to hostility when they didn’t understand another user. I understand that that’s just the way online life is now, but again, shouldn’t we be trying to be better?
When you read a comment here and immediately jump to the conclusion that a user is bad-faith and start to dress them down, consider that on the other side of the screen might be a ND person with a different communication style than you, or a user whose native language isn’t the same as yours^†, who may have not communicated their thoughts in a way that best connected with you but who certainly doesn’t deserve to be immediately attacked over it.
ND people already have to put up with so much of this kind of thing in real life. It’s exhausting to be excluded or attacked for using language slightly differently, or for trying but failing to mimic our peers, or for talking about things in a “round about way,” et cetera. When it happens in a space like this that purports to be inclusive, it’s especially harmful.
Does it really harm you so much to ask a clarifying question to determine if you understood correctly before jumping to attacking a user’s message? There’s a good chance that there was a communication failure between you, and if so then 1) you stand to harm the other person needlessly by attacking them and 2) you waste energy breaking down an idea that was not even real – it was merely your mistaken interpretation of what the idea was.
And speaking of attacks, let’s move on to point three: slurs.
Ableism is so normalized in society that the vast majority of our personal attacks attempt to degrade someone’s intelligence or sanity in some way. Here’s a non-exhaustive list off the top of my head:
ableist terms
idiot, dumb, stupid, insane, crazy, lunatic, loon(e)y, nuts, “are you blind??”, “deaf to [an idea]”, lame
Plenty of the terms on this list are alive and well on Hexbear. Please consider how you make ND comrades feel when you use these terms as attacks – not just on ND comrades, but also on takes you think are bad in the Dunk Tank. These are terms a lot of us have been called all our lives. They carry a lot of pain. And by continuing to use them in the way you are, you’re upholding normalized ableism by equating neurodiversity with badness.
They’re not even good insults, very low effort. Liberals don’t inherently lack intelligence – and even if they did this wouldn’t be what makes their takes bad. They are willfully ignorant, and it’s the willfulness that makes it especially bad. People who are just ignorant have a chance to learn.
Speaking of ignorance and chances to learn, neurotypicals: this space is not actually as inclusive as you might think it is. I am calling you out on it. What are you going to do to get better?
★ Honestly, the assumption that everyone from everywhere in the world is going to understand your screenshots from western television shows kind of strikes me as a sort of western cultural hegemony anyway.
† Oh wow there’s that anglosphere cultural hegemony again
Honestly question, how do I say
spoiler
that someone is stupid?
All words I know seem to be ableist.
“no investigation = no right to speak”
“what you’ve typed does not make sense”
“this is not based in material reality”
“what do you mean by this? it does not make sense”
“what a silly thing to say”
“you are a reactionary bigot”
“your arguement has no merit”
“what you’ve said is your feeling, and is devoid of fact. Facts don’t care about your feelings”
Thanks comrade!
I’ve found that excising a word from my vocabulary rarely involves finding a drop-in replacement that will always work. To take an example that’s seen as more extreme,
discussion of ableist slurs
the r word has gone from being colloquially acceptable to being seen as a slur over the past 20 years. Most people I know took one word that was ableist and replaced it with other ableist language that is just perceived as less aggressive.
The problem there is that you’re not changing the underlying thought patterns.
When you’re about to call someone an ableist word, stop yourself and think, “what actually bothered me about what this person did?” You may find that, without these generic catch-all words that literally mean “similar to a disabled person in a way that I don’t like”, you can’t quite pin it down. The feeling is there. You can feel that you’re annoyed at the behavior. But articulating why you don’t like it is a skill that in many of us has atrophied due to lack of practice.
I just call them a Redditor. It gets the message across.
The fundamental problem is that people, by and large, do wish to refer to people being incapable of or having difficulty with arriving at a correct conclusion, with understanding a situation, being unfit for a task or position, or otherwise not competent, within certain contexts, as a bad thing.
There isn’t that much difference between calling something unwise, calling it stupid, or using less accepted language.
I personally largely avoid referring to people with any of this and prefer to refer to actions, statements, or other behaviors, because at least then you’re putting some separation between a bad behavior and someone’s inalienable self. But that’s not really solving the core issue either.
Are they incompetent at everything or at a particular thing?
Stupid indicates that they are stupid at everything.
ignorant or foolish
Fool does feel ableist now that I’ve seen the list
It’s definitely a problem I have especially in daily speech when I have to catch myself. The people I am with wouldn’t mind and that’s not why I don’t want to do it, I’d really like to be able to adjust my language so in the event there is someone who may find it offensive or hurtful, the frequency of such events is as close to zero as possible.
That said I think for people being a jerk, I tend to use physical body parts or excrement. Like poo-face or something. I get that it doesn’t work in more formal situations and it’s a bit childish, I figure no one is going to defend excrement as it is sorta seen as something most people don’t like. I also say the cruder version of butthole for the same reason.
Braindead? The medical roots is that someone’s essentially inanimate so there’s no person to be hurt by the statement I’d think.