The problem of cowering to and enabling SJW's

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It's quite sad for me the number of WP forum users who appear to consistently be apologetic for organisations, groups, individuals (Trump..cough..) who not only use these type of slurs in every day use but probably apply these attitudes in believing that disabled people are a burden on society. Trump famously chose Breitbart editor Steve Bannon to be his chief strategist, Bannon has a long and open history of being anti-ableist and sanctioned articles in Brietbart that commonly use the r-word as a slur (two that come to mind include "if parents smack their children there would be no mental illness" and "there are only three genders - male, famale and "ret*ds" - he managed to slur LGBTQI and intellectual disability in one foul swoop); he also coined the term "liberal" drawing on his derision of intellectual disability to slur democrats).

I accept the "AS" is not a disability (mantra) but a gift is helpful to uplift a person's self-esteem with the desire to better integrate and social inclusion in NT society etc...but consistently it's more commonly used by certain individuals to distance themselves from the "autistic" tag to impress the NT crowd. The hypocrisy here is mind blowing.

I do all too often encounter it, autism as an insult, not directly at me, but in the videos I consume and their comment sections. But the bottom line is no one is perfect, and sometimes you have to take the rough with the smooth. I'll take mostly right over mostly wrong any day.

Let's be real though, while it would be wrong to say all disabled people are a burden, loads are the opposite, disabled people as an entire group are a burden on society. Able bodied people pay out to shoulder our burden. If they killed us all, their prosperity would rise. A huge burden would be lifted off healthcare, social and education services. I am grateful that by their grace I have a good life. Since we also had this:

I take your point that social norms are the way the way they are but I would have thought we would hold WP to a higher standard especially given most Aspies would be (lets face it) slurred with that label if not to their face then behind their backs. Not all NTs use this term (thank god) my parents found any form of unrefined speech distasteful and so we never used it (although I have heard my sister joke with her friends using the r-word in school).

Totally absurd. It's not even gendered. I don't understand why people have this failing with the English language, it's gender neutral, a woman would still be chairman. man woman human mankind

What about the French language?

College students disgusted by Trump's racist statements ... until they discover they are from Obama.


VIDEO: Students say Obama immigration quote racist…when they think it’s from Trump

Campus Reform's Cabot Phillips traveled to Georgetown University to ask students about a president's statements regarding illegal immigration and deportation.

The students assumed the statements were from President Donald Trump but they were actually from Obama.

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=13464

College students disgusted by Trump's racist statements ... until they discover they are from Obama.


VIDEO: Students say Obama immigration quote racist…when they think it’s from Trump

Campus Reform's Cabot Phillips traveled to Georgetown University to ask students about a president's statements regarding illegal immigration and deportation.

The students assumed the statements were from President Donald Trump but they were actually from Obama.

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=13464

Defenders of free speech in the public sphere often add that private organizations, too, should safeguard free speech zealously. Even seemingly innocuous social proscriptions—conventions against the use of racial epithets, for example—can restrict speech that should be protected.

I wrote in February about Philip Adamo of Augsburg University, who used the n-word in a discussion prompted by a student’s use of it. The student was quoting directly from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Augsburg, in response to student complaints, suspended Adamo and relieved him of his duties as chair of the honors program. Adamo has since retired. Earlier this year, Laurie Scheck of the New School for Social Research was placed under investigation also for using the n-word while quoting James Baldwin. That investigation, which lasted months, concluded that she had violated no rules.

The decision to use jarring and offensive language when quoting or discussing a writer who uses it, or teaching a court case that hinges on it, is a judgment call. But hard and fast rules against the very mention of an epithet settles matters that shouldn’t be settled by social taboos.

Consider in this context the case of the novelist, Walter Mosley, which concerns not a university but the “writer’s room” of the TV show, Star Trek Discovery. Mosley boldly went where the human resources department felt no man should ever go when he used the n-word in the course of telling a personal anecdote. As Mosley explains, the story concerned a “cop who explained to [him], on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all n****** in paddy neighborhoods and all paddies in n***** neighborhoods, because they were usually up to no good.”

Mosley is black. When human resources told him that it had “been reported that you used the N-word in the writers’ room,” Mosely replied, “I am the N-word in the writers’ room.” Human resources politely explained that, nonetheless, someone had complained that the word “made them uncomfortable. Mosley would not be permitted to use it. Mosley, a successful novelist, could afford to resign, and he did.

He resigned in part to protest the speech restrictions imposed on “a black man in America, who shares with millions of others the history of racism.” How dare his employer demand that he discuss racism in terms with which everyone feels comfortable? Here we have an instance of a phenomenon Nadine Strossen describes in her superb book, Hate: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship. Rules against offensive speech are also deployed against the people they are supposed to protect.

A member of the editorial board of The Nation, Mosley is no conservative. Neither is Philip Adamo. And neither is Laurie Sheck. It’s fair to complain, as the political scientist Jeffrey Sachs has, that conservatives often downplay threats to free speech that emanate from the right. But when conservatives complain about threats to free speech that emanate from left-liberals, they are complaining about threats to everyone’s freedom.

Presidential campaigns exacerbate solipsism. Not only the solipsism of the candidates and the journalists who cover them but navel-gazing of campaign staffers, who all too often mistake an intense period of political work during a high-stakes election for more worthy labor than it is.

But until recently, campaigns themselves were understood as a tough but rewarding form of employment for people eager to work in the political trenches. Popular culture lionized the “war rooms” of some campaigns (at least when the candidate was a Democrat) and praised the hell-for-leather, relentless nature of the people who worked for them.

No longer. In our hypersensitive times, fear and loathing on the campaign trail have evidently been replaced by diversity retreats and microaggression surveys. As Reid Epstein describes in The New York Times, millennial darling Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is the exemplar of such efforts.

Recently, staffers on Buttigieg’s campaign who “identify as a person of color” were asked to complete a survey about “Microaggressions in the Workplace” that included such questions as whether or not a “white colleague” has “interrupted/ talked over” them, or failed to include them on a “relevant email chain.” Further questions explored their feelings about having an idea dismissed “without explanation” and even asked, “What does good allyship feel like?”

As well, in early December, the campaign hosted a “mandatory half-day retreat about diversity and inclusion.” This event evidently didn’t achieve its intended goals, since, as one staffer told the Times, “there was a daily ‘emotional weight’ on people of color who felt they were employed in order to help the campaign meet its ambitious diversity targets.”

Buttigieg has struggled to gain support from non-white voters since he first launched his campaign, and his eagerness to discuss his own diversity hiring practices is clearly part of his effort to bolster his bona fides on race. “Team Pete” took its struggle sessions public in response to the Times’ story, posting a lengthy description of its diverse staff and boasting: “We’re proud that 40 [percent] of our campaign’s senior advisors identify as people of color, 46 [percent] of our senior leadership and department heads identify as people of color, 40 [percent] of our entire campaign staff identify as people of color, 52 [percent] of our staff are women, and 28 [percent] of our staff identify as LGBTQ+.”

Team Pete also emphasized that the campaign was dedicated to fostering “safe, supportive environments where people on staff can speak freely about these issues in a trusted space.”

But a presidential campaign is about the furthest thing from a “safe space” as one can imagine. It’s a relentless, often brutal slog with only one winner. People who work for campaigns usually do so with the knowledge that the job requires a tolerance for behavior and demands on their time that are different from a regular job. That’s no excuse for bad behavior by campaign staffers, of course, and, in some cases, candidates have been pressured to fire staffers whose behavior is outlandishly offensive.

Still, while it is routine for campaign staffers to leak to the press in order to further a positive narrative about their candidate (or a negative one about their opponents), it is unusual to find them blathering on to reporters about their own hurt feelings. Or spending valuable time in the lead-up to the first Democratic primaries engaging in tearful emotional wellness sessions about “Building Belonging” into the campaign.

The real test of Buttigieg’s trust-building exercises and microaggression questionnaires is this: Have they made his campaign better? If his polling numbers among non-white voters are any guide, they have not.

Diversity might be a strength, but diversity pandering might prove at best to be a harmful distraction for his campaign, and at worst an example of inauthenticity on matters of race that, ironically, could further sour the already-skeptical non-white voters Buttigieg is so eager to get.