Exactly. I asked earnestly because we already know that it wouldn’t be okay to use the n-slur in the same context. I want to challenge people to take ableist slurs more seriously.

Ironic.

I didn’t say that we had to do away with tone, though? I’m confused.

If you were parodying a racist, would you use the n-slur?

Can we not use r-slur derivatives here please?

Bonus thoughts that got lost in the original composition process:

Tone indicators being used by ND people can be a defense mechanism against being misunderstood, because so often people misunderstand our words and then ridicule or attack us for it, so many of us will go to great lengths to avoid being misunderstood again. I hope you can see how calling that cringe is harmful.

I often get accused of trolling when I call out ableism or talk about something else that’s very outside of the scope of what the dominant group has had to think about. It’s really painful, I feel for you. :(

Nah, I wrote it while having breakfast. My best rants always come to me in the morning when everyone else I know is asleep so there are no distractions.

Our neurotypes synced up, evidently /j

It is definitely used by most people to mean that they’ve never been with a man. But of course, transphobes don’t see trans women as women, so… 🤢

It’s because none of these people seem to have ever seen an actual safe space in their lives.

Of course “nobody” uses neopronouns in general society. We all know what would happen if we did. Shame, ridicule, and violence would follow. And we’re very attuned to reading online spaces for transphobia as well. Despite what a lot of people would like to think, many online queer spaces are NOT inclusive and safe.

I was an old-school redditor, and I browsed the trans subs for a few months. I saw so much hatred there. The general spaces erased all identities that didn’t fit the “mtf” experience, so the trans men stayed away in their own space. Both their space and the general ones were OPENLY hateful of non-binary people for years.

This is one of the first spaces I’ve ever seen online that is truly inclusive. The neopronoun options are already there, you don’t have to ask for them. Everyone is forced to show their pronouns, none of this “well mine are normal” garbage. There is a culture that promotes repressed voices.

And when some people see this, they can’t even fathom it. To them, being “an ally” means allowing trans people to wear a pronoun pin and respecting those pronouns so long as they are “normal” enough, then carrying on with life as normal. If queer discussions ever start taking place in the open, they get uncomfortable because they’re not used to it. If someone who uses any pronoun besides they or she or he, they get uncomfortable. This is transphobia. They just don’t recognize it as such.

This is amazing lore! Thank you for sharing.

Or, god forbid, use their Eminent Domain to take some private land along the sidewalk to improve life for poor people without impeding the ability of wheelchair users to navigate the city.

But that would anger the landowners, of course.

For the unfamiliar: “la sombrita” is the name of the corrugated metal piece on this bus stop post. It is designed to provide shade to people waiting for the bus, because the areas where these are installed have very little shade.

Due to a multitude of reasons from NIMBYs to building codes, it’s difficult for the city to install anything much bigger or better than this.

If you find this interesting, you can learn more by listening to episode 545 of the podcast 99% Invisible. It’s called “Shade Redux”

It’s a song that lures in discontented working class types with lyrics that court their hatred of their bosses and rich people who flaunt their wealth, but it also promotes right-wing talking points like “welfare queens.” It’s being talked about here because it has become very popular on social media recently. You do not have to listen to the song, it is not very good.

You just did, now. I’m saying that we know that not all of those are bot views simply because of the number of people talking about the song, and we shouldn’t dismiss its impact because it is absolutely having an impact.

Yes, I understand that. What I am trying to say is that they are dismissing the song’s impact as if every view was from a bot, when they are not. Real people are listening to and talking about it.

I think a simple part of the problem is that fascism “has it easy” when it comes to messaging: they get to scapegoat easy targets, and appeal to populism. We do not have the luxury of such easy-to-consume messaging. This is also why our memes get made fun of for being wordy or hard to understand, whereas right-wing memes can be easily distilled to “haha minority bad.”

We’re also fighting against decades of entrenched liberal propaganda in each individual we try to reach, whereas fascists get to build upon that foundation.

I feel like we need to make an effort to understand what people are trying to say and not shame them for communicating their ideas in a way that we don’t understand. To do the latter can be unintentionally ableist.

Am I reading something different than everyone else here? Because I completely understand what she’s trying to get at.

Leftists are dismissing the song because its early interest was astroturfed. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because it has actual interest among people now, because of the astroturfing. How do we combat this problem? Just because we dismiss the song as astroturfed right-wing propaganda doesn’t mean the listeners are. The right is changing minds with content like this, and it’s problematic for us.

“It can’t be viral because it was astroturfed” isn’t a helpful assessment, because the song absolutely is viral now. It even came up in my feed on a music community. I clicked it because it looked like it would be up my alley based on the title and thumbnail (I enjoy folk music that shits on capitalists) and I only realized it was that song once I got to the line about people “milking welfare.” The astroturfing may have raised the song up the hill, but at a certain point it had enough views and such to carry it based on momentum.

What I think the author is trying to say is that the right is succeeding here, and largely leftist media fails to make the same impact. Probably because we don’t have the same connections that allow astroturfing that the people who pushed this song do. But that does leave a meaningful question: how do we reverse this trend and get people interested in leftist topics through arts and culture? How do we promote the material we have already created?

Edit: Oh no, I just heard it on the radio.