You don't have to be mentally ill to be these things. Considering the type of people that rule our world
(
) it seems that the most well adjusted people in our society are not only more than capable of being this, it seems like a requirement.
So I am no longer comfortable using the word psychopath (or any other "dark triad" nonsense) to describe these types of people. These people aren't struggling to function with a mental illness, they're of the exact mindset that thrives in our backwards society.
However I'm struggling to think of a suitable replacement word that carries with it the same "This is serial killer coded shit" vibe that calling someone a psychopath carries (and associating such a thing with psychopaths is ableist so I don't want to use the word in that way anymore)
Calling them ghouls, fascists or nazis doesn't carry the same weight. What kind of word bests describes the casual, dangerous heartlessness of people without throwing the mentally ill under the bus?
Related, but I'd also like a punchy non-ableist word for someone who is just monumentally and deliberately ignorant. Like, whatever the fuck Matt Yglesias is.
Perhaps 'dense motherfucker' is suitable
The Hiberno-English word "gobshite" (which I like to americanize as "gubshit") is good enough for most cases, I reckon. "Nezzie" is the idiosyncratic one I like to use in my inner monolog, but it's pretty opaque, coming from Russian "ne znáyu" ("I don't know").
If I were to make up some less opaque but still idiosyncratic words on the spot, then I guess "plug-ear" would work — we love a good "cutthroat compound", do we not? Or if we want to get more vulgar than that, then "earfuck" or "earfucker" would take the finger as a phallic symbol and crudely liken these people constantly going
to them fucking their own ears.
I dunno, it's something to riff on, at least.
Deeply unserious
Garlic hater
Cartoon villain
Satanmaxxer
Hell builder
One way brain
Paid floating head
Underpaid floating head
Unpaid floating head
One Way Brain rocks, thanks for that one
BioLLM
Onionvore
Fukuyama acoylyte