Autistic people aren’t retarded, constantly linking the two together kind of bothers me. I know the intentions are well-meaning, but I can’t get over that.
I don’t think he’s trying to link the two. I just think he’s trying to go against the linking of those two by other people.
Indeed, but most times it’s used here, they aren’t linking the two.
So if I use the n-word, not intending to link it to slavery, it’s fine?
That’s ridiculous. The two words are completely different.
They offend people in similar ways, right?
Do they? In the context of the relevant incident, the person who said R was calling a TLJ character an R for not seeing something coming when he thought they should have, as an example of the film for not living up to their expectations. Afterward, he seemed to think calling a fictional character R was not as offensive as calling an actual person that.
A lot of the people using derogatory slurs probably don’t know how derogatory they are.
Personally, I didn’t know that to say “that is retarded” about some annoyingly unfortunate event occurring is extremely offensive.
But you still agree it’s offensive, though? The point I was trying to demonstrate with the post you quoted was to explain that trying to peg a level of offensiveness to derogatory words is a hopeless endeavor since derogatory words, by their definition, offered people, and that’s what we should be trying to avoid.