We have decided some brain quirks are disorders (and get accommodations, as is compassionate), whilst others are flaws (and get slurs). But no one picks their hardware. You cannot earn a better prefrontal cortex or deserve a calmer amygdala. Nor does one get to pick the environment they are born in, which will inform their choices later in life. Even the capacity to “learn better” is a roll of the dice, some brains start the race with sprinting shoes, others with lead weights.

So when we call someone stupid, lazy or insane we are not describing a choice, but simply announcing which kinds of unlucky we’ve decided are worthy of scorn.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
    25·
    9 days ago

    You spend almost the entire duration of this comment pretending not to understand what an insult is, then in the last sentence, you use the concept of insulting others as an insult itself. “Well maybe YOU insult people but that behavior is completely beneath ME, I’m not such a terrible person who would do that.” Ironically this post and all your comments come off judgy af.

    It sounds like you’ve been called these insults and filter out possibilities outside of your perception. You assume the insults come solely from some condition(s) you might have. I think I can safely say, that is not typically what anyone thought about or meant.

    Every single day, these insults are used to describe bad behavior and bad choices and my point is that this will continue, at most we switch to different insults. But that wouldn’t satisfy you either and it certainly wouldn’t solve anything. There is no evidence whatsoever that these insults are used even slightly in the direction of being only for people that “cannot help it.”

    If you had simply said “maybe insulting people is bad for us ourselves. Think about it” then almost no one would be pushing back here. But instead what you did is you already decided (incorrectly in most cases) what other people mean when they use certain words and you’re here to tell those people that using those words makes them bad/lesser people.