Friday 15 August 2014

the 'r word' again

hey,its the old r word in the limelight again.
robins? rollercoasters? roosters? rhinos? roombas?
no.
robbing bastards? rigormortis?
not quite.

its retard/retarded.
have been seeing it rear its ugly head on forums the world over in recent months,including on a disability forum;AKA wrong planet where most recently one user today instructed people to act silly but not to 'act retarded'.
in this useage,its not a direct insult but it ignorantly and offensively insults those of us who have intelectual disability by people relating us to childish behavior,we arent children,we are adult with adult brains and dont deserve to be what people think of when they want a representation of stupidity,we deserve the same basic respect as everyone else,and woud especialy expect more from people who also have disabilities and know what its like to experience prejudice,stigma and disablist ignorance and insults.

am sure the support staff of mine will say am anything but stupid when it comes to general computer problems and having a visual sat nav in brain which has got them out of trouble time and time again.
the only stupid thing is the way we are continuously believed to be children in adults bodies, compare people to computers;we are the ones who have a single processor;we have a limited capacity to process things which has a impact on our functioning, non intelectualy disabled people are those who have dual core or quad core processors,being a single processor unit doesnt make us worser people it just makes us more limited-we age and become adults the same way as everyone else,just because we arent functionaly adults doesnt mean we are stupid or adults with child brains.

stupid is using a group of people have got no understanding of as a comparison for something- especialy when negative.
stupid is using a disability to represent a behavior that can be found in even the most highly inteligent adult.
stupid is when people are ignorant of a group of highly vulnerable people and choose to tarnish them and their disability by association; on the internet,knowing the majority will not have the capacity or the equipment to argue their own view back at them.

1 comment:

Em said...

Us autistic people don't have single core processor, nor dual core... Nor quad core! Autistic people both low functioning and high functioning have a quad core processor with hyper threading but are bottle necked by our RAM.

Neurotypicals averagely have 8GB of RAM, whilst autistic people only have 1GB of RAM because too much things going on in the background screws us over. We can't handle too many things happening at once but if there is only one thing going on, we are brilliant at it.

I don't mind the 'retard' word anymore because it getting taken over by the word 'autistic', 'aspie' and 'autist'. Just look at the YouTube comments, calling someone an autist is the new retard...

By the way, I loved the fact that you compared human brains to a CPU... I'm very knowledgable in computers (taking a two year course in college) and I always compare things to computers.