#(abnormal) reflections

[lesbianlothcats]

I just want to say one more thing for now, to anyone who is struggling right now because the Bad Batch has been your comfort show but how they handled Tech has potentially ruined that for you, you’re not alone. I know that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with, but you aren’t alone.

[bobbinalong]

"kon would wear a crop top, jon would not" says WHO

[implicitdemandforproof]

if i think too much about tyler joseph self titled era i start getting sick to my stomach

[iamdangerace]

Screaming Sneakers, (Abnormal) Reflections from the Marching Orders E.P. (1982)(Limited Edition Pressing (100 copies)).

[katchwreck]

Hi comrades, itʼs been a minute. Sorry for being inactive on here over the past months, but I thought I would share something here that I wrote two years ago on this day.

🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹

The ever so misanthropic and cynical arrogance of the petty-bourgeoisie is a universal class trait spun from the intensified monopolizing tendency of capitalism.

*Why did not the lousy serf chose to become a noble? The sub-human deserves no dignity nor affection in their own miserableness. It is not I who have made it the way society functions; it is their own faults for not being capable to determine her own desire.*

... Such is the rotten and mischievous mindset of the dissonantly deflecting oppressor, who steadily is on the hunt to advance in itʼs own economic, and thus hierarchical societal ranks of sorts.

Fear and trickery is constantly used as inducement by the oppressing part (again)st the oppressed part.

Capitalism is, by no (but also every) means, different than feudalism in this regard. It is only the material circumstances and structures that has developed, mainly due to the variousness of technological advancements throughout, and mainly so in the imperialist cores by the extraction and transfer of resources and labour power, which produces both value and, moreover; abundance and scarcity.

As Karl Marx described it when he so eloquently detailed the result of the increased antagonism between two conflicted, yet inbound, poles:

“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”

Let me be perfectly clear to you who may read this: the ongoing treats and attacks against the proletariat across the bourgeois states by the capitalist class – behaviorally and rhetorically as individuals, or from the state power itself, whether it comes to austerity-packed reforms or state police and military brutality and repression — is ONLY going to intensify (grow worse and, with that, more obvious) unless the working class study to become class-conscious (awareness means vigilance) of the systematic dependency and thereafter organize, and fight back to put an end to the perpetual spiral of exploitation that is both in- and out of control.

The ruling class perpetualizes the status quo, and they hold on to it by every and any tool possible; from mass media to manufacturing consent through education and various of everyday material and holding of means of communications to productions, to mass-surveillance, to commercially glamorous nothingness, to parlamentarism to manufacturing and determining monetary value and societal laws, norms and abnorms, thus what “is” and what feels right and “is” and what feels wrong, passionate passivity, social alienation, division, wars, meaningless conflicts, better versus worse, competitions, appropriations, corruption, controlled linguistics, receptions, meaning... our very existences.

[cuntstable]

the whole feeling of ”i wasnt supposted to live this long” is fairly common with people whove grown up w various mental health problems like depression and suicidality etc etc. and i can definitely relate to that too but like theres something about like… when you grow up in a scary actively dangerous enviroment where you as a child are just actually fearing for your life on the regular, just expecting that one of these days youll die. and then that day just never comes, at least not until youre already an adult. its difficult to accept that youre alive! its so crazy i feel like ive been trying to adjust to Not Living In Mortal Fear for like over a decade now and it still feels strange. like its hard to plan for future and to believe in it but i guess i AM just happy to be alive and safe. that has to be enough too

[roobylavender]

i’m torn between indian and pakistani mainstream media bc i feel like the former tends towards wanting to be progressive as a whole but often makes haphazard attempts in the process that certainly have their heart in the right place but are still not doing quite enough and then the latter is like 90% straight women hating shite from the gutter but the leftover 10% that is actually worth something is some of the most phenomenal stuff you have ever seen and near close to perfect. but it’s only 10% and you have to wait and wade through so much of the shite to even get to it

[jainenkept-a]

ignatius has been acting like a little hussy in my brain lately. so. in the spirit of sunday funday, if you send 🤫 (hush. if it's not showing up for you), he'll dirty-talk your muse and leave them with a fantasy/scenario to do with whatever they please. we'll start out with established ship partners and then maybe i'll open it up to everyone in a separate post, if it goes well.

[ap-trash-compactor]

.

[chipjrwibignaturals]

yall ever had people that have had such a different life experience to yours that it like. annoys you.

and realistically and morally that person isnt in any wrong, but the things they say are just so incompatible to your OWN life experiences that it starts to piss you off? because it feels to your stupid monkey brain that theyre just making shit up with the confidence of 1000 suns. or is there something extra wrong with me

[bredforloyalty]

i had a good day i like having things to do but unfortunately i have just remembered i am insane</3

[mangled-by-disuse]

Tried to put this in the replies, but it got long and is relevant to the OP, so:

Less so than the average British/South African white guy of his time, which is to say: yes, but not notably so.

He did also speak very bluntly in his response to the Nazi requests to translate his work, claiming he would have been proud to be a genuine Aryan [that is, from the Indian subcontinent] but unfortunately he's just German and English. Some of that is "Oxford fellow thinks he's being very smart" rhetorical devices, but he also does seem to have been pretty vocally of the belief that different cultures and ethnicities held value, and while he left South Africa very young and considered himself English, he did also remark on the brutality and inhumanity of the apartheid regime there. He also criticised C.S. Lewis' assertion (in The Last Battle) that some people couldn't get into heaven on the basis of race and culture, but "have a theological argument with C.S. Lewis" does seem to have been one of his primary hobbies at the time so idk if that was purely anti-racist.

At the same time: this was at a time when the N-word was in common parlance (including in children's nursery rhymes and even in leftist discourse), when Britain had an empire and Tolkien had been raised in one of its colonies, and when the school system emphasised "the white man's burden" and the savagery and primitivism of "lesser" cultures. And Tolkien was not a radical, and not sufficiently concerned with race as a topic to break fully from that social conditioning. So it's not like he wasn't a racist, but he wasn't a racist by the standards of his time, background, and immediate environment. (Bearing in mind that his immediate environment was the same one that saw the rise of Oswald Mosley and Winston Churchill.)

What Tolkien WAS was a genuine, old-school British conservative, which I think is what right-wingers pick up on in his work. He had an engrained belief in hierarchy and traditionalism, and his arguments against capitalism come from Catholic semi-feudalism, not socialism. "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly and each to his estate" is very much an underpinning of a lot of Tolkien's work, which emphasises the importance of working to, and being satisfied with, your status in life - Sam's strength is his humility and desire to be a simple gardener, but, while humility remains valuable throughout, Aragorn's strength is that he knows that he is born to be King. Ruling is all he can ever ethically do (noticeably, whether or not his people consent to be ruled - note that the first Man of Gondor he comes into contact with is Boromir, whose response of "ok mate where the fuck have you been when we were fighting and dying for the past forty years?", and that is cast as a mistake on Boromir's part, and he is told to sit down and respect the rightful king by Literal Voice Of The Gods Gandalf), and it would be wrong and evil for him to try to do anything else, just as it would be a moral wrong for Sam to try to be a king.

Lord of the Rings in particular is very concerned with noblesse oblige and the burdens of power - while, yes, the core story is "minor gentry [Sam is the only actual working-class character] rises above his presumed station and, through being literally and metaphorically one of the little people of the world, slips under the radar and completes a heroic quest", almost all the surrounding stories are about the difficult duty of managing power. And, unfortunately, this lends itself very readily to a "white man's burden" kind of reading - these people, you see, are simply of superior race (literally, in the case of the Elves, and in the case of Aragorn, Boromir, and the ruling class of Gondor being measured by their proximity to Númenorean bloodlines), and so it is their unfortunate duty to command and to cleanse the lesser (Orcish, and by extension Easterling and Haradrim) races from their nice, functional societies.

To be clear: I do not think this is how Tolkien intended it. I think, in his own traditionalist, cloistered-academic, Catholic way, he was pretty egalitarian. He doesn't treat the ruling class as actually better than the working class - Sam is no less a hero than Frodo, Merry, and Pippin, all of whom are gentry or nobility, and none of them are lesser as people than Aragorn or Elrond or even Gandalf or Galadriel - even if he does view class distinctions as fundamental and immutable differences. He values friendship, peace, and the laying down of grudges (against all the problems caused by revenge, note that Éomer's first and most noble act of kingship is "accepting the Dunlendings' surrender, treating them kindly, and making peace with them", and they are so impressed by this that they too put aside a centuries-long war and help rebuild the country they helped to destroy). While he often forgets that women exist (I will die on the hill that "three out of 22 rulers of Númenor were women, despite equal inheritance being explicit" is evidence that Tolkien just did not think of women as being half the population), he is quick to defend their value in both masculine and feminine pursuits, and to express them as people outside of marriage and childbearing - and his own life, in which he married a much older divorcée from a different religious background against all voices from their families, reflects that same sense of valuing women on human terms. He is a humanist, not in the religious sense but in the sense that he values humanity above all things in his writing; he writes consistently against power for its own sake, against war as glory, and against bigotry and condemnation.

BUT

he was also a traditional, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, Catholic-restorationist, pro-feudal Oxford don who was raised in a much more conservative time, place, and social class than most of us, and he brings that to his writing too. From a conservative perspective, reading with an eye for right-wing ideas:

Éowyn ultimately turns from the aberration of being a warrior and becomes a wife and mother, embracing "feminine" traits of healing and caring as part of her own healing.

Class is reified through Sam's heroism being that of a servant, and Aragorn's that of a king, and the return of the king is the source of great rejoicing.

Some races, and some classes, are simply better at things. Dwarves are better craftsmen. Men are better warriors. Elves are better at everything because they're special. they are also tall and fair and European

The idyllic Shire is a cottagecore dream of traditional British rural life, in which people know their place, women are real women, and everyone has good manners.

Most of the "good" societies are coded with European or Classical trappings (the exception is actually Gondor, which is pretty easily read as Byzantine), and opposed against a literal rampaging horde from the East. Some of the horde from the East are literally inhuman, while others are elephant-riding brutes who hold oblique historical grudges and strange religious customs. Compassion against these foreign invaders is looked upon favourably by the narrative, but only after you've killed them.

With the previous point, and the films, in mind, it is easy to conclude that regardless of species diversity, the Fellowship is a cadre of brave white men fighting to protect their society from a monstrous foreign threat - one in which a cunning trickster from within the main setting has puppeted the less evolved races into destroying Western civilisation.

While the story is anti-war, it is anti-war in a way that allows for cool battle scenes and noble deaths, and there are several points at which Dying For A Cause is lionised and seen as redemptive in a way that slots nicely into a lot of more militaristic ideologies (including fascism).

again, I cannot underline enough, I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS IS A FAIR READING OF THE NARRATIVE. I think it's an ideologically-motivated reading that ignores both Tolkien's personal views and large chunks of the text. But the thing is: the people who read it in the way I've described would probably say the same thing of your description.

The thing about Tolkien's much-discussed distaste for intentional allegory is: Lord of the Rings is not 1984. It is not an explicit political polemic. It is one man unpacking his Great War trauma and political anxieties, his expertise in Anglo-Saxon literature, his special interests in folklore and etymology, his love of the English countryside and his dislike of modernity, his Catholicism and his conservatism and his egalitarianism and his loneliness and his loves. It is not absolute in its politics, because it isn't trying to give you a political solution: it's trying to give you morals, yes, but they're as much personal ones as societal ones.

It is not a shock that right-wingers latch onto Tolkien's work, or see parts of their beliefs reflected there. It's still a fucking insult to the work, but it's not a shock.

Seeing conservatives and bigots being fans of Tolkien works is a special type of jumpscare bcs what are you doing here man? In the franchise about folks from different backgrounds and races come together in brotherhood to vanquish the villain? Where kindness and compassion and sinple happiness were seen as the best ways to keep evil at bay? Where war is not glorified and seen as a grim necessity to the point where the son of the author gor criticised the movies for glorifying the war too much? Where men openly engaged in feminine activities and were open about emotions other than anger? Where multiple characters gender presentation varied from those we normally associate with their gender? Where women were empowered in multiple different ways? Where greed was presented as turning one into a literal monster?Where the villains are all thinly veiled depictions of capitalism? Where care for the enviornment is seen as a given?

[divinedomainn]

Stream and Scream | reader x multiple men

play previous song? || ◁ PART 2 ▷ || play next song?

summary : Your inbox has turned into a horny battlefield—six familiar usernames, six neck-down thirst traps, all hard and very, very eager.

No faces. Just bodies. Dicks. Bold lighting choices. Questionable bedsheets.

You sit cross-legged in your underwear like you’re judging Olympic figure skating, except everyone’s naked and begging to be picked.

Time to start scoring.

contains : camgirl!reader x a whole ass roster, rotating cast, university AU, smut, porn with kinda a crack plot, casual sex, anonymous sex, exhibitionism, recording, oral sex, piv sex, rough kinky sex, everyone wants to fuck reader, horny simp men, sukuna being sukuna, reader being willfully ignorant for her own sanity.

A/N : time to make your first choice for the first week by voting in the poll at the end, i'll be doing this all in descending order based on who was the most voted to the least - so vote well >:) goodluck reader ! (i wonder who the mystery man could POSSIBLY be)

You sat back for a few hours, letting it really settle in for yourself and your viewers. You had hundreds of messages and you hadn’t even finished scrolling through the first wave of submissions when the familiar usernames started sliding into your inbox—like wolves answering the call. And it was obvious, immediately, which messages you were actually going to open.

These weren’t just horny randos with messy lighting and desperate angles.

These were your regulars.

The six you already knew by username. The six who tipped with the intensity of men bidding for real estate inside your body. And now they were showing themselves to you. You hoped to whatever deity was listening that these guys were hot with huge cocks. What? It was fun to be a little superficial sometimes. First up:

EmoWithaBoner.

His message was soft-spoken, despite the picture attached being the exact opposite of that, just like always. No emojis. No bravado.

“Didn’t know how to pose,” it read. “But I thought about how you’d look on top of me, and it kind of just happened.”

It was soft, unfiltered, and a little shaky. The photo was reflected from his mirror and showed him stretched out across gray sheets, pale skin dusted with faint freckles. He looked like he went to the gym often with how built he was. Narrow hips. His cock sat flushed against his stomach, long and lean—at least seven inches, maybe more—and wait.. was that? You looked closer towards the image, inspecting it like you were trying to solve a case. Yep. It was pierced at the frenulum with a delicate curved barbell. A glint of silver. Great heavens. Saved.

TempleOfSin.

His body was art. Broad chest, warm tan skin like satin, sculpted muscle that looked carved. His torso was tapered, lean and strong, with a small trail of black hair leading down to a thick, curved cock—seven inches minimum, hand loosely resting at the base like he was showing it off without trying too hard. He was neatly trimmed. It looked like there was a bunch of robes beside him haphazardly taken off for the photo. “Consider this a formal offering,” the message read. “You could worship every inch of me truly, my loyal little follower.” Odd as always, but hot. Saved. You could hear your prayers being answered, two down and so far all was good - in fact, perfect. You were surprised these were the guys paying you, and for a second or two you felt like you should be paying them for the photos.

SixEyesOnly’s submission hit next—and of course, it came with a $500 tip before you even clicked on the message. The sight that hit your eyes made you choke a little on your own spit. 

Of course he sent multiple angles—three, actually. You picked your favorite: a half-reclined shot on luxurious navy bedding, torso lit with just the right amount of golden light. He was toned, lean muscle over abnormally long limbs, subtle abs. A soft trail of white hair led down to a perfectly girthy cock, mid-stroke—maybe just under eight inches, thick enough to stretch you open. His other hand was holding a handwritten sign: “Good enough for you?” “Oh, SixEyesOnly, absolutely.” You spoke to yourself whilst your eyes remained glued to your laptop screen. Saved. Then—unsurprisingly unhinged—daddyissuez.

“i jerked off right before i took this and got hard again just thinking about fucking you.”

And the photo… Jesus. The photo was taken in low lighting, like a scene from a noir porno. He was sitting wide-legged on a leather couch that looked like it needed replacing, legs thick and powerful, thighs dusted with black hair. His chest was solid, scars faintly visible across his abs and ribs. You closed your eyes for a second and tilted your head up to your ceiling in a silent ‘thank you’ before looking back down at the image. His cock was huge, just like the rest of him. Probably just shy of nine inches, you couldn’t keep your eyes off it. Balls heavy. Tip already glossy with precum. One hand gripped the base. The other rested lazily on his thigh like he was used to being admired. With a cock like that you couldn’t blame him. Saved. OfficeAfterHours was, predictably, meticulous. His message read like an email you’d get from someone managing your retirement plan, if that person also wanted to bend you over a desk.

“Apologies for the delay. Here’s my formal submission. Discretion guaranteed. Let me know if you'd like a second angle.”

Shot in high-resolution against crisp black sheets, his body was a symphony of intention. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, abs that looked like they’d been sculpted from marble. Not huge, but built like someone who took care of himself for discipline, not vanity. A thin trail of blonde hair led down to a cock that was gorgeous—perfect shape, thick but not excessive, probably seven inches on the dot, with veins that begged for attention. Trimmed. Clean. You could almost imagine his voice saying something like, “Breathe through it, sweetheart. You’re doing so well.” A weird sound came out of your mouth in excitement from your own fantasy. Saved.

You were already overstimulated and halfway folded into your sheets when the final message hit.

KingOfRot.

You hovered over it for a second like it might bite. Which was ironic, considering he probably would. He was always the most feral in chat—filthy, relentless, tipping like his wallet had a death wish.

You clicked.

Instant regret. Instant need.

The photo looked like it had been taken during a crime.

Bathroom mirror. Harsh yellow light. Shirt pushed up to his collarbones, muscles tensed like he’d been fucking someone just before he snapped the photo. Chest broad. Arms thick. Veins roped down to his forearms. Stomach lined with clean muscle. Ink everywhere—heavy black bands around his biceps, tattoos sharp and ceremonial-looking across his chest and stomach like a ritual.

And then his cock.

You actually flinched at the offensive monster staring right back at you through the screen. Long. Thick. Too thick. Heavy. Veins running down the shaft like it had a pulse, flushed red like it had been hard for too long. The kind of cock you’d have to apologize to your body after taking. You didn’t even want to hazard a guess at the size.

He wasn’t even touching it. It was just there holding its own weight up like a pole rather than a piece of actual flesh. 

But what got you, what really made your stomach drop, was the tattoos.

They were familiar.

You’d seen them before.

There was a guy on campus—tall, smug, terrifyingly hot in the way that sent your libido into a frenzy—who had tattoos just like that. You’d seen him walking out of the athletics building once, sweatpants slung low and his shirt mysteriously missing, laughing like he knew every secret in the world. He had loudly shouted “What!?” at you when you had stared for a little longer than needed. Embarrassingly seared into your memory for that exact reason.

You squinted.

“Nope,” you muttered. “No. Not connecting the dots. That’s above my pay grade.” Surely it couldn’t be the same guy, right? The tattoos were probably, like, one of those trends that everyone was getting. That's what you were telling yourself at least.

You were about to save the photo when you finally looked at the caption.

“Pick me. I’ll fuck you so hard your ancestors will feel it. You’ll be a fucking shrine by the time I’m done.” Was that a death threat? Probably. Should you block him? Probably. “Ancestors. Okaaaaay.” You nodded your head slowly as if he was across from you saying it with a gun pointing at you. 

And then you saved it. Of course you did. Then flopped onto your back, one arm flung over your face, trying to mentally prepare for the chaos you had just invited into your life. All at the right price of course. “Thank you to whoever is listening for blessing me with viewers that are hotter than the guys I have wilfully hooked up with for free.” You spoke to your ceiling, a common theme nowadays. Seven men. Seven bodies. Seven chances to let your subscribers watch you get absolutely wrecked on camera.

Your legs were trembling from what you decided was mostly horniness.. and a little bit of fear for your own pussy by the time you shut your laptop fully. Friday couldn't come soon enough.

Now, the real question was - who would you choose first?

taglist : @syubseokie @frozenmallows @90s-belladonna @moncher-ire @kunareads @blublublubby @grignardsreagent @soozeu @mochiivqi @sweetsformysoul @killak9mi @celloccino @gurlhere4fluff @gorouenjoyer @linaaeatsfamilies @lov3-ly @des-todoroki @aiicpansion @lazylunarlover @kentoslvr @cherry-berry-21 @cure-alexandrite @yourname-exee @pinkyogoart @sillymortalblob @kyvyes @xxxieli @swoozleee @augustineyukimura @uniquecutie-puff @ayepitita @luna-v-roiya @kill-your-darling274 @babiestarrcandy @b3bybunny @midnightwriter21 @miizuzu

[shotmrmiller]

god going on a date with johnny whom you matched on tinder and he's the type of guy you avoid like the plague; jaw-dropping good looks, cheeky ㅤㅤsmiles, hits the gym more in a week than you've done all year and worst of all, could charm the pants off a snake.

so it's truly no wonder that you end up letting him bury his face between your thighs and lap at your glistening sex until your moans almost turn into screams and you haven't even left the bar's driveway, then left to watch johnny wipe the condensation off the windshield with a spare shirt so he can drive you home all the while his chin drips with your slick.

he fucks you against the front door once inside, legs hooked over his arms, then again over your couch, hand curled around your throat, and again, in front of your full length mirror while he tells you how pretty you look taking all of him, to look at how pretty you look, his crystalline eyes latching onto yours through the reflection, pretty as a peach.

then he leaves you with his spend sticking your thighs together, a languid kiss that tastes of you, and with his personal number on a scrap piece of paper.

and that's the last you hear of him. he'd said that he's quite a busy man, military and whatnot, and all in all, while you'd raked your nails down his back on the first date, it had been a date. you require more than good sex to get into a committed relationship.

a swipe of your thumb brings up tinder again, and you match with another bloke not your type. big, broad man, biceps the size of your thighs with a deadpan stare that sees right through false bravado. but he's doesn't seem to care in the slightest that he makes you nervous, doesn't care that you stutter out responses to his rather abnormal questions.

simon takes you home and sits eerily silent with his hands dwarfing the steering wheel as you chew on your lip before tentatively inviting him in for a nightcap, and you must be the luckiest person on the planet because he's just as devoted to your pleasure as your last partner.

he brings you peak after peak with his tongue, his fingers, swirls your pearl with the tip of his misaligned nose. then he lets you be on top first, concentration knitting your brows togethee as you try to fit all of him in and pride warms your cheeks when you can hear his teeth audibly grind as his fingers bite into the soft of your waist once you take him to the root, thighs flush against his hips.

you come undone more times than you can count, the neighbors more than likely knowing his name by the time he walks out the front door (after checking the locks on your windows) and that's that.

until it isn't because a text from johnny awakens your phone screen, an invite to a restaurant downtown next saturday, one you've only ever fancied of eating at and well-

a date is a date, isn't it?

you tell him to pick you up at seven and he tells you to wear something you wouldn't mind letting him keep underneath, preferably something in red. (must've seen that particular number while you looked for some sleeping shorts before he left that night.)

hopefully you won't feel too bad breaking things off with whoever doesn't ask you to be theirs first.

(simon and johnny fuck each other to the thought of you back at base, simon's fist viciously tight around johnny's cock as he's got him drooling into the flattened pillow, almost like she's fucking you too, eh, johnny?)

[magnus-and-the-dragon]

one time the silt verses said “you can never really overreact to a parent; you’re just yelling back through the decades making up for lost time”

and i literally had to pull my ass over while driving to jot that shit down

and i’ve been thinking A Lot about my dad lately and i put on my next episode in my silt verses relisten today and, coincidentally, encountered that quote Again

and i’m just. over here Dwelling. pls don’t contact.

[cat-witch]

I feel like this casts the euphemism treadmill as just people generally trying to be polite, and sure in the cases of the history of words like toilet, but moving past words like the r-slur was usually pushed by a lot of advocacy. People were made uncomfortable by using words like moron for intellectual disabilities because people forced them to be. Sure, I don't know how many people see Ctrl+F replacing a word as Fixing Ableism, but there are clearly connotations and methods of use to words like the r slur that don't get applied to other words like silly; even if the person using it doesn't "use it that way," people have fraught histories with the terms and, y'know, people will feel sensitive about the word yelled at them when they were beat up after school for having a wheelchair.

Besides, terms like mentally subnormal reflect psychiatric theories at the time which we know now to be false. R----- (in most contexts besides insults) doesn't make as much sense without it's helping words "severly" et al., replacement terms like high support needs are more precise and reflect more current understanding. It's a euphemism treadmill as much as the move from Nous to Newtons was a euphemism treadmill for energy.

One of the things they went over when I took linguistics was the "euphemism treadmill", the tendency of initially-clinical or neutral words to undergo pejoration to the point that someone felt the need to replace the pejorated word with one that was clinical or neutral. And then of course the process of pejoration would start again.

The best example of this were words related to what we now call intellectual disability. In the past, "idiot", "simpleton", "moron", "feeble-minded", and "imbecile" were all relatively clinical terms. (This is one of those things that's often repeated, but if you go looking at newspapers from the 1920s, you do kind of wonder whether the negative connotations were just completely acceptable then, especially when they're talking about the successes of sterilizing the feeble-minded.)

The reason that pejoration happens is that while the word changes, the societal attitude toward the underlying thing most often does not, and so if they change the word and declare that this new word is totally neutral, then society's negative view is just going to keep making those words take on bad connotations. This will happen even with the most anodyne descriptions, like "mentally handicapped", which Google will inform you with a little warning is offensive and dated.

The linguistics class I took in the early 2000s spent a little time on the word "retarded", which by then was well on its way to complete pejoration (federal law was changed in 2010, from "mental retardation" to "intellectual disability"), but had not reached the point when it was "the r-slur". If I recall correctly, this was when "mentally handicapped" was still relatively in vogue, and sitting in that classroom I had thought that "retard" was going to go the way of "moron", a word that was used exclusively in a disparaging way. I thought it would be about as acceptable as calling someone an imbecile, I guess, which is impolite but which doesn't rise to the level of "slur".

But no, I was wrong. The euphemism treadmill will probably continue because we have not done anything about the underlying condition (that people with intellectual disabilities are less valued and looked down on), but "retard" has now become a slur, even if every other fucking word for low intelligence is still in common use as a disparagement.

It's wild how much you can see people dancing around this. I said above that Google gives an "offensive and outdated" tag to the term "mentally handicapped", but they also give that to "retarded". However, if you go to "imbecile" they don't give that tag. To save you the trouble of looking it up:

noun: imbecile; plural noun: imbeciles

a stupid person.

archaic a person of low intelligence.

Ah, lovely. So it's okay, because it just means "a stupid person", it used to mean "a person of low intelligence", but it doesn't mean that any more, so ... not offensive, I guess?

Except hold on, what does "stupid" mean again?

adjective: stupid; comparative adjective: stupider; superlative adjective: stupidest

having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.

Oh, okay, I see. So in the archaic sense "imbecile" meant a person of low intelligence, but now it means a person who has a lack of intelligence. Totally different, very understandable. Nevermind that "imbecile" was pejorated in the same way that "retard" was, and that using a negative word to refer to someone who is lacking intelligence is basically the same thing.

I think if you want to fight against the pejorative use of the word "retard", you should probably be fighting against a lot more words, and you should definitely be fighting against the societal view that people with lower intelligence are lesser. You can fight the language issue all you want, but it's just going to lead to more cycles of pejoration. There's no way that switching over to saying "person with a learning disability" (as it seems the UK bureaucrats now favor) is going to somehow end it.

Personally, I'm the kind of person who just goes with the flow. I think people with intellectual disabilities are just as much people as anyone else, deserving of care and compassion, but I also value intelligence at least as much as my surrounding society does, and while I do make attempts to temper my language, saying that an idea is stupid rather than casting contempt on a person who is stupid, that's a mighty fine line to tow, and ... people just don't care. If I call a politician a moron, no one will bat an eye. I will refrain from saying the r-word, because people get mad at you when you do that. I think if I got hit in the head tomorrow and became intellectually disabled, I would be more or less happy with this.

I don't have a strong principled stance, more a stance of "come on, what are we doing here". Euphemism treadmill goes brrrr, language gonna language, I just wish the whole linguistic and social process didn't feel like some out of control machine that wasn't actually doing anything for anyone, and that people would pay more attention to the underlying mechanisms for how/why pejoration actually works. Changing the word is not going to usher in an era of understanding and equality, we've proven that, haven't we?