The Honey Badgers file their suit in moon court. And possibly in Alberta, too.

I thought the Slytherin girl was me for a second because she has the same color hair and hairstyle that I do. XD

(Pssst, Paradoxical. Team up with Ravenclaw if you want to “http://here-be-fangirls.tumblr.com/post/118650578624/ravenclaw-friendships”>rule the world.

Mwahahaha! TOGETHER WE SHALL BE UNSTOPPABLE.

The actual link >:(

http://here-be-fangirls.tumblr.com/post/118650578624/ravenclaw-friendships

@EJ (the other one)
Are you sure we’re not the same person? Because I’m a Ravenclaw too. Add that to the list of similarities.

I laughed through the Ravenclaw/Gryffindor list because that pretty much describes my relationship with a former coworker. There were days when I felt like half my job was to say, “No. That’s a really bad idea. We’re not doing that.”

The Ravenclaw/Ravenclaw list also sounds a lot like my relationship with my boyfriend.

Adding to the list of Ravenclaws here. Ravenclaw is me, I was sorted into that house by none other than the official Pottermore site.

Which reminds me, why think about the Honey Badgers/Gamergate when I can be playing around on the internet and do witchcraft.

Is there an appropriate forum for raising possibly contentious issues. I was too busy to participate in the latest round of discussion about ableism (re: gun nut), but it reinforced an impression I had already formed, which is that I simply don’t understand what posters here are talking about when they use the word “ableism” — I thought it was a term I understood, but I think I have been using it quite differently from some other people.

It’s easy enough for me to refrain from using contentious words — I don’t think I ever have used language that anyone called out as ableist — but I’d like to interrogate the assumptions behind those judgments, if anyone is willing to have that debate with me.

@Orion:

I can give you my take, if you like.

Ableism is pretty much anything that uses any sort of disability as an insult or a pejorative, or part of an insult or pejorative. Obviously you want to avoid splash damage with your insults when possible (and our culture’s view of people with mental illnesses or disabilities is already bad enough), but also ableist insults tend to be pretty off-base in my opinion. And even if they were accurate, they still miss out on the actual problem.

I’m trying to purge the word “stupid” from my vocabulary because people just generally aren’t stupid. That’s not what makes them misogynists or what-have-you, and there are plenty of high-profile cases where “intelligent” people do or say some really terrible shit, but other people get trapped in the idea that because those people are “intelligent,” there must have been something to what they said.

But eh, that’s just me. “Stupid” is kosher on this forum. It’s easier to see the issue with dismissing anyone with terrible opinions as “nuts” or “crazy,” because generally that’s not what defines them and the insult has major splash damage on people who are “crazy” and facing enough issues.

The Honey Badgers are indeed, without a shadow of ambiguity, performing the work of the Lord, and clearly you are all acting in a very sexistic manner by insulting them. Indubitably, and consequentially, they strive vigorously to free the female of the human species from the autocracy of intersectionality, which calls women to bow down before the avaricious goddess of marriage equality and privilege economics.

Finally! A white knight come to save the Honey Damsels…er, Money Badgers! (repairs to fainting couch, swoons)

Also, wow. Same-sex marriage is so threatening to those who like their inequalities as unequal as possible, and their society so bass-ackwards it could actually eat its own tail. How is is “avaricious”, though? Unless you’re talking florists and caterers, that makes no sense.

those whom know the truth about civilizatory remobilization.

What am this shite? DO YOU EVEN ENGLISH, BRO???

John Steinbeck in the Grapes of Wrath also writes about how feminism is an encomium on the social relations of the family.

Actually, no, he did not. He wrote about the Joad family and how they were forced to flee Oklahoma during the dustbowl years, and how they got treated like shit in California for daring to seek work as migrant laborers. Nothing about feminism or encomiums there.

(I’m pretty sure this troll is just a random word-salad generator, but I’m trying to see if it engages meaningfully with us or not.)

It’s like Hobbes is taking the straw-feminist idea where criticizing any woman for anything is sexist as a given, then wondering how we could all be so sexist for not being straw-feminists.

Cut out the middle-man Hobbes! There’s a much simpler explanation for why we confuse you so greatly when we don’t follow your script.

@takshak
““Augustinian liberty”

wasn’t Augustus the one that killed the Republic for good?”

Short answer: Pretty much

Long answer: There’s almost a century of wiggle room where you can make a decent argument for the Roman Republic ending. Caesar or Augustus are probably the points with the best cases, but there are other points. Additionally for almost a century before Augustus the Roman Republic was very dysfunctional at best and the Romans kept pretending they were a Republic long after it’s pretty obvious they weren’t.

@EJ

http://i.imgur.com/M7DgVn7.gif

Here y’go. =)

I swear, it says so much about society that “Don’t use “Crazy” as an insult” is the most contentious rule I’ve seen in all my decades on the ‘net. Even rules that flat-out don’t make sense (for example, I know one site where talking to the mods is grounds for a suspension) don’t result in this many arguments.

Okay, let me lay out my perspective, then.

People with mental illnesses are pretty much just people. They are equally likely to be good or bad, and while they are by definition impaired in some way, they are usually not entirely debilitated and usually don’t look like anyone’s stereotype of a “mental patient.” In many cases you would never know that someone was mentally ill if you didn’t interact with them in a very specific context.

Psychiatric ableism is the tendency to confuse “being mentally ill” with “being unbalanced, unpredictable, emotional, dangerous, foolish, malicious, or confused.” Linguistic ableism is language that confuses or equates the two. It is important to choose wording that maintains a clear distinction. This is difficult to avoid because these ideas are historically intertwined and because both ideas are useful, even vitally important. People are never going to stop calling each other out there/ unreasonable / berserk / out of control / profoundly confused / etc., so the important thing is to make sure that (a) they realize this isn’t the same as being mentally ill and (b) they know how to expresses themselves in a way that acknowledges the distinction.

As a temporary measure to facilitate dialogue and preserve safe spaces, it may be necessary to avoid this area of language all together, but this is not a long-term or universalizable solution. The ideal goal would be to take the existing slate of words that mean “mentally ill or dangerous,” “mentally ill or mistaken,” “mentally ill or extremist,” and so on, and split them down the middle. We would agree as a culture that some words refer to disorders, some refer to behaviors, and go from there. It is possible that some words will be so strongly attached to both meanings that they can’t bet fixed. I’m thinking mostly of “crazy” here. It might be impossible to get people to agree on one way to use it, which is why it makes sense to cut the word out altogether from use in social justice spaces.

At the same time, “crazy” is such an oft-used, well-loved, powerful word that I don’t we’ll ever convince the general public not to use it, so I do think as a matter of long term strategy we should pick one side of the line and try to push “crazy” over. I myself use “crazy” in my common speech, and in fact I use “crazy” when I am explaining what ableism is. When I give someone my standard spiel on mental illness, I say something like this:

“I have a mental illness, but I’m not crazy, at least most of the time. I have irrational thoughts about some topics, but honestly so does everyone. It does affect my mood, but not in a way that makes we especially scary, weird, or exciting. I mostly just get quiet or evasive.Mental illness can certainly make someone crazy. There are a handful of unfortunate people who are permanently crazy, many more who get crazy if they don’t take the right medicine, and lots who go crazy temporarily under specific circumstances. That said, you don’t have to be mentally ill to be crazy. Extreme stress, extreme emotion, or extreme ideology can make you just as crazy as any biological defect. So can wounded pride or willful ignorance.”

I’m not advocating that was start using “crazy” here — I think it’s a sensible rule because it’s such a hot-button word, and anyway it’s not hard to refrain from using any one phrase. I’m just trying to explain the way I understand the problem and the way I make judgments about what is and isn’t acceptable. I’m bringing this up now because I was surprised that so many people objected to “gun nut.” “Nut” isn’t used as a term-of-art in any caring profession, and in my part of America, I have never heard actual mentally ill patients described as “nuts, “nutty,”, or “nutters.” If anyone did do that, I’m sure we would call them out as ableists. Maybe it’s different in the UK, but in my experience “nutty” only means people with odd beliefs or quirky obsessions. If we’re not willing to let people call sick people “nuts,” then I should think we ought to allow them to call cranks, eccentrics, and obsessive types “nuts.” Otherwise we’re just banning more and more words and creating a euphemism treadmill; I feel it would be more useful to ask the public to use these words more thoughtfully than to ask them to reject these words, which will only lead them to find new words to express the same confused concepts.

Therefore, I personally am fine with “gun nut.” I’m also fine with “lunatic fringe,” and with “sheer lunacy” as a shorthand for “rash, foolhardy behavior,” because it has been a long time now since anyone was diagnosed with lunatic disorder. I try to avoid “idiot” because it takes an essentialist view of intelligence, but I am fine with “idiocy.” The consensus here seems to be against “gun nut,” so I would be grateful if someone could explain where they feel I’ve gone wrong.