I do not care about the word or what language people use broadly, as long as they’re using their “offensive words” to punch up.

If you’re punching up, if you’re attacking power, I do NOT care and genuinely wish people would pull the gloves off more. But Joe Rogan IS power, he is so high up that anywhere he punches is down. People with great power who use language recklessly need to be knocked down for abusing the power behind their language.

I don’t care what words people use as long as they’re punching up.

Words are words. If the best ideological stance you can make is policing the words your potential allies use, you’re not a very effective activist. Sure, we need to make sure people aren’t using language to hurt people undeserving but we need to keep focused on outcomes, not giving average people a sense that a leftist state is going to police what you say. We already have the right for that.

All that said, it’s hugely inappropriate for Rogan to take delight in being able to use a slur to insult someone. He IS power. He can only punch down.

Not trying to be an ass here, just genuinely curious, the words “idiot” or “moron” or “imbecile” which were also in the same diagnostic tools as “retarded” so what makes them different?

I have seen earnest attempts at starting movements to abolish these words as well, (and usually at that point a lot of people start tuning the conversation out,) so I’m wondering where people’s feelings are on the broader topic or if it’s the use of the singular word and how it’s used that bothers people the most.

All through my younger years, I never cursed.

I had this idea that if you never curse, the times you DO it will make people around you jump and feel shock and take notice. I thought it would be my secret weapon for really driving home a point or getting attention. I was Mr Clean Language for all my childhood and adolescence and into my 20’s.

Then I fucking bought a fucking home and the fucking thing fucking fell apart from the first day, then I got fucking betrayed by a fucking friend, fucking laid off, spend years fucking unemployed, watched my fucking family drink and drug themselves all to the grave, fucking buried everyone and started over and now I realize I have no hair and I’m old and angry so whatever. Fuck it.

Rampant, regurgitated right-wing rhetoric really reeks.

I also have no real dog in the fight, I grew up with the word being slung around with casual ease, and honestly it still is in most places, despite a lot of what the sensitive younger generation might be seeing in their own spaces, the culture between “average people” would seem highly problematic to most activist-minded individuals.

I have curbed my use, but I’m not going to attack people who say it to criticize power or insult someone who truly deserves it. This is one of those lefty “purity tests” that I can’t connect with fully, so I know average moderates will be wildly pushed away from this kind of mindless scolding, so I also don’t make it an issue. I literally do not care.

Now all that said, I think we need to collectively LAY WASTE to Rogan and all he stands for. His delight in being able to say a slur again is the most crass, stupid, R-word statement that he’s made yet, and he deserves to suffer as much as the people with intellectual disabilities who are going to be bullied and harmed because of his cavalier and inept attitude towards language and logic.

Guys, it’s okay to not be totally consistent. It’s okay to condemn Rogan for saying this and you aren’t going to be judged. Seriously, get on that soap box and knock this ape down a peg.

They’re massively performative and make the plebs and cretins who think politics is WWF theater feel like things are happening. They can be hugely destructive and cause massive repercussions, but they’re not as long-reaching and permanent as actual policies and bills being passed through house and senate.

Also, I realized recently that because all of our current stories, all of our current narratives of “forces of good versus evil” and all the political drama and inexplicable human decisions we see being made in the highest levels of power, are actually really dumb stories of people just saying shit and trying to be liked… this isn’t even new, these people doing all this stupid, absurd bullshit are genetically identical to the creatures who ruled empires in the past, who led armies, who had songs written about them going down thousands of years… so that tells me that all our great epics are probably mostly bullshit, and the reality was a lot more stupid.

The idea that most of history was stupid people doing stupid things and then writing fancy stories about it later, that is also strangely reassuring. These are just people, just idiots like the rest of us. Everyone is just improvising as we go and trying to make the best of it.

Curious what the positive sequel would be…

On good days, I remember that the sheer finality and certainty of the state of our world, our universe, the idea that we may not even have free-will at all and this is all just an inexplicable, passing moment of a universe becoming aware of itself, the grandure of it does more for me than any religious ideas or poems or songs or inspirational messages. It’s wholly absurd and beautiful and we exist in the intersection of scales that are so immense they cannot be fathomed by our primitive minds… these ideas make all the struggles, pains and hardships I experience feel a lot less tangible.

I am aware that a lot of this sensation is simple disassociation from depression, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, disassociation is either a survival trick to keep us alive when our minds get the best of us, or it’s a consequence of something actual and special inside us, a type of awareness that seems to reside just outside of the things we can quantify and explain, a sum greater than its parts. Disassociation is like standing just outside yourself watching the story unfold, and it used to terrify me, now I realize it can’t be helped, we’re all on tracks and it’s just a ride. But if you look around, it can be a beautiful ride, even the shitty parts exist as a strange kind of reminder that the universe doesn’t owe us anything, take it or leave it, it’s all just experiences.

I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end.

My blackest pill in my adult life was the realization that we’ve leveled off as a species. This is as good as it gets.

Our brains made monumental leaps in development over the last half-million years, with the strongest changes being made during the last ice-age, times when resources were scarce, and survival was extremely difficult and humanity was caught up in many wars and fights with other humans and animals and weather alike. Our brains were shaped to do a couple of things better than others: invent stories to explain feelings, and join communities. These adaptations worked amazingly, it allowed us to band together and pool resources, to defend each other and spot signs of danger. These adaptations allowed us to develop language and agriculture and formed our whole society, but lets not forget what they are at heart: brains invent stories to explain feelings, and we all want social identity and in-group. Deeply. This shit is hardwired into us.

Nearly every major societal problem we have today can be traced back to this response system from the average human brain to either invent a story to explain a discomfort, and those discomforts are often the simple desire to have a group identity.

Our world will get more complicated, but our brains aren’t moving. We can only push brains so far. They’re not designed to know how to form words and do calculus, we trained our brains to do those things, but our systems are far more complicated than language and calculus. Complex problems produce results like lack of necessities, which create negative feelings, which the brain invents stories to explain (or are provided stories by the ruling class.)

So this is it. Nobody is coming. Nothing is changing.

We MIGHT be able to rein in our worst responses over enough time, we MIGHT be able to form large enough groups with commonalities that we achieve tenuous peace. But we will never be a global species, we will never form a galactic empire, we will never rise above war and hate and starvation and greed. Not in our current forms at least. There’s no magic combination of political strategies and social messages that will make everyone put down their clubs and knives.

This is it, a cursed, stupid primate on a fleck of dust spinning around a spark in a cloud of sparks, just looking at every problem like it’s either a rival tribe or a sabertooth-cat hiding in the bushes. Maybe if we don’t destroy ourselves someday our AI descendants will go out into the larger universe, but it certainly won’t be us.