This popped up elsewhere in this dumpster fire. I eliminated moron (which was specifically called out) from my dictionary because I’ll put my money where my mouth is.

Idiot has a similar history. Most clinical terms and words describing someone with an intellectual disability ends up turned into an insult.

Further, the idea of shaming people for lacking knowledge is by itself problematic. Intelligence in general is not a single factor but context specific. I don’t know a lot about a lot of things and that doesn’t make me a worse person, those just aren’t my fields. XKCD’s lucky 10000 is a great example of why shaming people into pretending they know things makes the world worse. Bear in mind, pride in not knowing things is foolish and worth derision.

Its not even pride necessarily, sometimes its an active mental shield and I find both revolting. Refusing to see the truth of something for mental comfort is pathetic and extremely selfish. I'm not a virtue ethicist, but emotionally I am one towards people like this. In order to make the most ethical decisions, you need to face the truth. By purposefully avoiding the truth: rational ethical decisions become impossible, meaning anyone who does this is just a straight up bad person.

Not even close. I lived through that word dying off in middle school. Early to mid aughts. In my small town it became taboo to say fairly rapidly.

I guess I'm mostly referring to internet usage as well as its taboo nature being equivalent to swearing or using expletives which are merely not acceptable around authority's, stuffy people, at school, or at work. I remember playing online games among even progressive people who would call people the r-slur a lot as late as 2014 or interacting on Forums, Reddit, Twitter, etc and seeing the word thrown around. Among my friends (who were democrats, while I was a republican because my dad said we were lol) they would call people retards when teachers were not around.

Outside of the main topic:

If I remember right (not looking up studies right now so I’ll eat my words if I’m wrong), the mentally disabled are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators thereof. Might be crossing my wires with mental illness

Also without looking it up, pretty sure both are correct. Though with the asterisk that mental illness includes a broad variety and that many of the "violent" mental illnesses are more rare than the non-violent ones. Untreated schizophrenia, bipolar, NPD, ASPD, most substance abuse disorders, and even ADHD all have associations with higher rates of committing violence compared to the average. Its just that for every 1 person with one of those there are like 5-10 people with PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, eating disorder, chronic depression, autism, etc who are significantly less likely to be violent, so they drag down the average. And almost all of them are more likely to be victims than perpetrators.

Aside: I appreciate the candid debate. Many thanks.

I unironically love good faith and intellectually honest debate. It gives me energy.