Whoa, I was not "comparing disabled people to Nazis", I said that Nazis should be an oppressed and marginalized group.

what disabled people have to say about the matter

I literally was quoting the links you recommended to read!

trying so hard to justify continuing to use intelligence based insults

There is a disparity in YOUR SOURCES between how they are discussing slurs, and I am asking you what YOU believe, between those sources, is the answer:

• Affinity is taking an absolute stance against intelligence-based slurs in any form
• Cultrface is directly offering intelligence-based slurs like "ignorant" and "inept" as acceptable alternatives to 'stupid'
• Genderbitch is differentiating between "oppressive" slurs and non-oppressive ones, and saying only the power dynamics matter

I've removed my first comment, since it was too unproductive.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can mobilize an entire society in violent hate against me. And we should never forget that fact.

Great ending to that piece on offense vs reinforcement of systemic oppression. Since this is the Chat community, I am interested in discussing some of the arguments in the pieces you linked.

In the Affinity piece, Stop Using Intelligence-Based Insults If You Care About Disabled People, they make the argument that essentially any intelligence-based insult is inherently ableist, even if not deployed against someone with a disability, but then use WW1-era eugenicists' attempts to weaponize intelligence to attack the idea of intelligence at all, claiming

Thus ‘intelligence’ as a concept has ableist (as well as racist and xenophobic) foundations

This is quite the claim, given that 'intelligence' as a concept has existed for hundreds or even thousands of years, and the author gives no historical evidence of it being founded with that meaning. It most certainly did not originate with Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, as the author tries to imply at the end.

It also somewhat contradicts the second link, Alternatives to ableist terms, which lists 'ignorant' and 'inept' (among others) as acceptable replacements for 'stupid'. If any insult to someone's intelligence is ableist, how can you offer replacements without them being ableist as well?

All words that can be used to attack a person, will always be more effective and more-often-deployed against marginalized groups, because of the intrinsic power disparity that exists that makes a group marginalized. And some should be marginalized (e.g. Nazis). And society has and will always need to attack people, because people do commit acts that need to be called out and even shamed over, to dissuade them and others from repeating them. Social groups that cannot attack intrusion are vulnerable to subversion by anyone willing to break with their social norms.

For instance, in the case of the now-toast GOP ghoul who insisted that women's bodies can "shut down" pregnancies resulting from "legitimate r***", is calling it "misinformed", "incorrect", "mean", or "silly", really the appropriate reaction? None of those convey, through their tone or meaning, the seriousness of the breach of acceptability that his statement is. Sure, they are correct, but it certainly doesn't signal to anyone else that they're going to face a harsh reprimand if they echo his rhetoric?

There was quite a lot of ink spilt publicly shaming him, not so much with technical refutations of the ways he is scientifically incorrect, but by viciously attacking his intelligence and character. He lost his reelection bid following that incident, but would he have if he had simply been called "misinformed"?

The Words and Offense piece differentiates between "oppressive slurs", and non-oppressive ones:

An oppressive slur fits more towards a mixture of definition a and b (an insulting or disparaging remark or innuendo that has a shaming or degrading effect) and is additionally built into structures of systemic oppression.

But the Affinity piece does not seem to distinguish between them?

Is all language that attacks a person inherently bad? And if so, does that mean that it is never appropriate to attack someone (verbally), even in defense, even to stop them normalizing harmful rhetoric that "mobilize[s] an entire society in violent hate"?

I was not talking about tone at all.

And literally nothing I said was an attack on what you said, I was adding to it.

edit: I have changed my first comment to make that clearer.

Voting can have an effect, of course, but whether it does is dependent on many things.

if it were true that voting does nothing, nobody would put such effort into discouraging us from voting

This is not necessarily correct.

Never assume that the thing that an opponent loudly and visibly opposes is their actual goal; it may very well be a distraction to keep you from their real goal/ or the real threat to them. That's not some abstract hypothetical, either; this is done all the time in politics. Putting non-starter provisions in bills in order to expend your opponents' political capital killing the extreme provisions in order to get your real goals passed, is a common practice, as one example.

An inexperienced opponent telegraphs their real moves unwittingly. An experienced one feints.

Yes, but and don't allow your resistance to be selected and controlled by the owners. Be wary of people telling you the "right" and "wrong" ways to resist. Resistance takes myriad forms, some of them clean, some of them markedly less-so. Some of them legal, some not. Some of them safe, and others dangerous. If you find yourself policing others' resistance, make sure you aren't becoming a tool of the Owner Class to funnel resistance into less effective, more easily-ignored or countered methods.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

Holy shit.

Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own assessment?

I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials.

Even the then-head of the DNC knew she was going to lose. It was too late to do anything at that point, but people are over here blaming Bernie and young voters for 2016, when Donna Brazile knew Hillary was going to lose the election, and Hillary had completely controlled the DNC to shut Bernie out.

Much of the mainstream media covered this week’s “unified reich” posting as if this were just part of a typical campaign. “Trump’s latest flirtation with Nazi symbolism draws criticism,” one headline in the Hill put it.

Yep, this phenomenon was examined recently by The Intercept, who note that the need to sell news means that media organizations are unable to sustain the level of heightened alarm that Trump and the GOP's actions merit, because very quickly people burn out (analogous to what in security is called "alert fatigue") trying to constantly keep up with the unending stream of dangerous rhetoric he spews. So instead it gets treated as old-hat, and normalized, or falls through the cracks.

True, but it is far better than just saying, "well we called but no one picked up welpguesstheresnothingwecando!"

We're getting 2942 :P

Because your protest...

Let me stop you right there: the protests that are being talked about by us (Frog and I), and by Trump, are the actual, real-life, on-the-ground protests against the Genocide in Gaza. We're not talking about hypothetical protest voting in November.

Or hey, maybe I'm being naive, and you really are saying that people shouldn't be protesting the Genocide in Gaza?

They all could manage that, as they are already managing similar attestation requirements from suppliers e.g. ISO 9000-family controls.

VW can demand transparency (e.g. access to supply chain facilities by 3rd party auditors) as a prerequisite to doing business with a partner company. It is absolutely standard to demand that business partners have had 3rd party audits to prove they comply with laws and regulations. This is not some insane ask, this is everyday stuff in the business world.

If a company can't or won't get an auditor to validate that they comply with PCI-DSS, for instance, they're not going to be signed on for processing payment card information by other companies.

And slave labor is a tad bit worse than retaining too many data fields in a credit card for too many days.

I would say everyone should protest anyways, but then again I'm just one of "the usual suspects" who some other folks in this thread seem to be in agreement with Trump in believing that we are ruining America. :P

Also, where is he sending me? That one is important.

Being wanted/needed should be viewed in relation to everything else you could do with the resources available is my point.

Except that this is a red-herring; they invested in a company (e.g. Squenix) in the first place because they believed it would outperform other investment choices. They gambled, and they lost, and they are trying to make that out to be the company's fault instead of their own. "But I could have invested elsewhere"- but you didn't, and now you're trying to socialize losses, while you would have privatized gains.

And I still maintain that if you want pure art, you are better off lowering your expectations for professionalism and find people who do it for reasons that are not financial.

No thanks. I'll just continue rejecting the premise that corporate profit is a good thing to measure all things in life by. This is just another variation of labor devaluation that Capitalism does to all things that it can't (easily) exploit to enrich the Bourgeoisie.

This misses the point in so many ways, I'm not sure where to start... but here goes:

That is how you ensure people’s skills are being utilized where they are needed/wanted.

Except that that's the opposite of what happened here; their skills were wanted by many people, to the point of profitability and sustainability, but other people, who didn't care about the skills or how they were utilized, decided that whatever the product was, it wasn't good enough. Their skills were literally not part of the consideration here at all.

And yeah, it is conceivable that the video game industry would have to shut down at some point in response to developments happening in society. Other forms of entertainment becoming more preferred. Or things going sideways so the focus becomes meeting more basic needs. That kind of flexibility is a good thing.

Except that's not what we're talking about either. Once again, this was not a situation where the actual demand for the product was not present due to media evolution, or product quality, or lack of consumer discretionary spending; the demand was present. The product was both in-demand and in fact profitable.

That kind of flexibility is a good thing.

This was not flexibility, this was- again- the opposite of that; a rigid metric that did not consider anything beyond cash growth, despite the fact that products are the point of a company. Without products, the company will not generate any profit. Without companies generating profit, the market as a whole will not grow. Without market growth, there is no ability to invest elsewhere (or at least, at a level to measure against).

That's why this (and all the other hyper-growth-minded investment planning) is so short-sighted; sustainability ensures continued operation, which enables future profits. Demanding unsustainable growth ensures collapse, which precludes future profits. And eventually people who have been burned by this will start cutting investors out of the equation anyways, which also precludes profits (for investors).

The whole, "I could have put my money elsewhere in the market and made more" as a justification to demand unsustainable growth is also form of gaslighting by investors; as you note, if they knew where to put their money instead to make more, they would have done so. They invested in a given company because they hoped it would outperform other companies, and they should have to suffer that loss personally just as they would enjoy above-market profits personally. This is just another attempt at "socialized losses and personalized gains", by trying to make themselves out to have been engaging in something other than gambling (which is exactly what investing in a company whose products you don't care about is).

If you have people investing millions of dollars into something, it isn’t art but business.

No, it is both if it is a business that creates art. Without the art (product), it would not have a business.

Art is just a product. Like any product, it can be produced for profit, for personal use, for communal use, or for any other reason. But without goods and services being produced, no money will be exchanged. The goods and services are a precondition to business, not the other way around.

Man, there are a lot of assumptions from y'all, mostly seemingly based on your inability to accept the fact that you can't shame the electorate at large into voting a certain way. I voted for Hillary in 2016, but I was screaming to the rafters that she was going to lose because she was a bad candidate, and should never have been put up in the first place. This is shaping up to be a repeat.

It doesn't matter what arguments you make about people voting for Biden, because you and I have no real reach; this is why it's critical to select good candidates. If you keep putting up "hold your nose" candidates, they're going to lose sometimes, no matter how much arguing and shaming and cajoling you do. When you do it multiple times in a row, it just compounds that effect.

Y'all are the ones living in the fantasy world where you can change millions of disaffected voters via web forums. Also, you're stooges for the Democratic Party's scapegoating for never listening to their base, and losing elections because of it.

Latest round, meaning October 7, or Rafah? Because according to the IDF, the recent rocket attacks out of Rafah didn't injure anyone.

And if you're treating an occupying force as being the same as the occupied population that is resisting them, you're starting from a false premise of innocence.

Is it alright for Hamas to kill civilians? Of course not. Is it okay for them to attack Israel with the means they have available to them, when they are being regularly attacked by Israel? Of course. They're both evil, but one is much more understandably so, assuming you don't for instance think Nat Turner was wrong for fighting his oppressors?

when people like you refused to vote for Hillary in 2016?

Nice assumption.

Trying to pretend like they might not and Trump might somehow not be worse

Where did I do that, exactly? Please be precise.

Please tell me about your hypothetical future where you don’t vote for Biden.

Please show me where I expressed who I was or wasn't going to vote for?

When you actually have a good-faith question about what I believe is the path forward, or what needs to happen, and are done shouting at an imagined person that you created post-2016 to explain the absolute failure of the Democratic Party to stop a fascist from taking power, I'll be here.

The international pressure is clearly making Israel step up their timetable in Rafah, and they seized the crossing to stop that flow of aid, that was holding southern Gaza back from descending further into famine as rapidly as northern Gaza is.

They are going to try to "solve" this before the international community increases pressure, or moves to actual meaningful interventions.