We’re gonna have to use a new words for magnets, too, I guess.
Taffy
Why?
Casi
Probably because MAG reads as Make America Great to many people now because of Trump and the MAGA republicans, and it’s hard to dissociate that reading of the letters, even if it means Music And Games Festival or it’s original name Mid-Atlantic Gaming Festival
Plaaaa
I used to take a Krav Maga class, now we just call it Israeli self defense.
Taffy
Alright, so I guess the worst people on the planet get to just take not only whatever they want, but also anything that looks or sounds similar as well. That’s fair, sure.
danimagoo
It’s kinda always been that way. I mean…the Nazis didn’t invent the swastika, but it sure as hell is theirs now. The NYT crossword puzzle a few weeks ago looked vaguely evocative of a swastika and a ton of people got upset. Of course, it didn’t help that the puzzle was published at the start of Hanukkah.
Taffy
I dunno, maybe I’m just weird or something, but I don’t think it’s right to move heaven and earth to avoid using words that look kinda similar to a single group of worthless shitheads who aren’t even going to notice.
thejeff
It’s not that the worthless shitheads are going to notice, but that a lot of other people who don’t recognize what your intent is will react badly to it.
Taffy
That doesn’t even make sense. Any reasonable person is going to know that a word or name that’s existed for years and years isn’t related to terrorists just because they share a few letters. I’m sick to death of normal things having to be stifled and altered and rearranged just because some pile of barely sentient shit wants to take something that’s tangentially similar. How is that right?
huesatlight
The choice is do you want people to do a double take and wonder if you’re one of those pieces of shit. Like, I get it’s not fair. It’s like the least of the unfair things they cause.
Sorry everyone born/graduated in 1988 or is a Gretzky fan, but if you have 88 in your handle, personalized license plate, etc, I am going to wonder if you’re a nazi.
Yumi
I don’t know about the “any reasonable person” argument… again with the example of the swastika, it existed well before the Nazis used it. That doesn’t mean that the idea a clothing company had a few years back to “reclaim” it by putting it on clothes with a different intent was a good one. Not everyone is going to know a more extended history of the symbol, and even if they do, they might not know the intent with which the person they see on the street is wearing it.
I don’t know that something named MAGFest should need to change it’s name– if it were MAGAFest, like you said, sure– but it’s also still reasonable to think that it might be a good idea. You don’t have to change things to avoid people getting the wrong idea, but sometimes you might want to, for a number of reasons.
Yotomoe
The fucked up part is that MAGfest was here first. They were here LONG before MAGA and then MAGA showed up. MAGA never said “oh god we might be associated with MAGfest, we should rethink our name” cuz they didn’t care and don’t have to. It’s like branding chicken. They showed up late and are waiting for you to swerve because they have no intention of doing so and I HATE that we can’t STICK IT TO THEM. WE CAN’T GET ‘EM BACK WE JUST HAVE TO LET THEM KEEP RUINING SHIT.
Taffy
Yeah, see, I understand the broader point of people not being able to psychically know your intent without being told outright. That’s fine. What I can’t accept is that the subhumans keep getting everything they want just because they want it and decent people have to kowtow to their whims or else risk earning the ire of other decent people.
Yumi
@Yoto: Well, yeah, that’s kind of a given, like with the swastika example. It can suck, but it’s also like… things change, associations change, and we do our best to adapt.
It’s like, say I opened up a therapy practice back in 2000 (I did not do this, obviously, because I was a small child at the time but). Say I picked out, as my logo, a blue puzzle piece. Why did I select this? I don’t know, this is hypothetical, imagine it has a few layers of meaning for me. Now, time goes along, and the hate group that is Autism $peaks comes into existence, using a blue puzzle piece as their symbol. I’m changing my logo. Should I have to? No. Because groups spreading hateful messages like this shouldn’t exist in the first place. But also, we’re well past that.
Mark
Sounds like a teachable moment.
Yotomoe
It just feels like, to me, that’s what allows this shit to be so pervasive. They can take spaces away from people. Blue puzzle pieces (hypothetically) had a meaning for you. A positive meaning and without your consent it was ripped away from you and tarnished by these people and you cannot, and will not reclaim it in your lifetime. Every positive aspects of our lives is slowly being eroded away bit by bit and there’s no way to stop it and yes that makes me angry.
@Yoto:
i mean… there is something to do about it. but it can’t be done individually. Reclaiming symbols or slurs, as someone else mentioned, happens, it has been done very deliberately by marginalized communities. And we can (and do) also collectively create new symbols, new meanings, new words.
Like it or not, while fascists and assorted bigots are trying to jizz their venom throughout our culture, they will only be as successful as the absence of opposition and political imagination against them, pulling society in a different direction. this is not a tragic unfolding of events, it’s a political struggle.
Bicycle Bill
But as long as MAGFest is going to capitalize the first three letters of their acronym, then most people who come across it (without knowing what it actually is) are understandably going to equate it with the red hats and red necks of #45’s highly visible power base. So were it me, I’d try to find another name ASAP.
Taffy
Yeah, a political struggle that good people are losing because it’s considered better to be polite and engage in good faith and waste time on pointless fights that don’t ultimately matter, instead of doing what needs to actually be done and removing the other “side” from the board entirely. They act like they’re being silenced if somebody dresses in a different-colored shirt than them and that gets treated with respect and deference and sympathy, when they actually should be completely silenced and censored and put down and walked over and treated as the collateral damage they fucking are.
yeah, it’s fucked and i get so despondent a lot of the time.
take care Taffy <3
i tell myself, the worst is never certain. that fighting doesn't mean winning but not fighting can only mean losing. i mean, it's platitudes but it's true. it helps sometimes?
Roborat
@huesatlight : I have a vague awareness of the 88 and nazi connection, but what does Gretzky have to do with this?
Yotomoe
Evil people can ruin things and good people won’t touch them afterwards. That’s the true evil. They get to win and we’ll let them. There’s a style of facial hair you can’t wear anymore cuz one evil guy decided to have it WHILE being evil. I hate it. I fucking hate it.
huesatlight
With all due respect, systematically murdering millions of people is true evil. Making a particular mustache taboo is an inconvenience.
Yotomoe
With all due respect, I meant True Evil moreso as “The generational trauma caused by that awful thing he did is so bad that anything associated with these visual memes has now been tainted as well” and I chose the moustache purposely because it’s incredibly mundane thing that is now tainted by those horrific acts. I did not mean to imply that ruining the toothbrush style moustache is the most evil thing he did, moreso that it’s a side effect of the influence all the pieces of shit have even hundreds of years later.
Taffy
Remember the far-off past of 8 years ago, when you could wear a red baseball cap without being mistaken for a pile of mobile refuse suitable only for filling in potholes? Can’t do that anymore, thanks to the enemy. I used to wear one, right up until it was ruined. That’s an entire classic piece of attire, spoiled forever because one dried-up satsuma decided it wanted to be in charge.
Psychie
This has been my objection to a lot of instances of political correctness, like the “ban the R-word movement”, the replacement of midget with little people, etc. Some words were basically always slurs, and as such removing them from your vocabulary isn’t an issue because to cease using them is to just stop using slurs.
On the other hand, if a word is a perfectly useful descriptor for something why let the bigots win by allowing them to change it’s meaning when they use it as a slur? Like, it doesn’t matter what terminology is used to describe a group of people that’s oppressed by bigotry, because the bigots WILL use that term as a slur since they view the entire group as something contemptable. Just look at gay, it was chosen explicitly because it meant happy and joyful, now it’s a slur and you get giggles at best if you use it for it’s original meaning. Or black, I’ve had people insist on the “African-American” terminology because calling them “black” was viewed as racist, despite the fact that the term black was chosen for that context BY the black community as a replacement for slurs like “colored” and “negro”, because all the racists started using black as a slur once the community identified with it.
I can understand avoiding slurs, I can understand not wanting to use medical terminology as an insult after learning that’s where the insult comes from, but actively changing official terminology for diagnoses because some bigots decided to use the official terminology as a slur is absolutely taking things too far, especially if the replacement terminology is explicitly LESS ACCURATE as a description, like “intellectual deficiency”, and especially especially if the chosen replacement is ALREADY an insult toward the people with said condition, like “deficient” or “little”.
Regalli
I will say, as someone with a developmental disability who has in fact been called a certain word beginning with the letter ‘r’? Yeah. We treat it as a slur. This is because it’s used as a slur. Ergo, it is a slur. The fact that it was originally clinical doesn’t make it less of a slur now, and the history of ableism in the medical community is long and storied and absolutely horrifying, there are times I have read histories of disability rights and eugenics where words I DON’T usually flinch at come up in a clinical sense and I ABSOLUTELY feel it as a slur. (Because “moron” is dulled enough I rarely react to it – though I’m sure it’d be different if I had been called it enough times – but ANY word used to justify sterilizing someone without their knowledge, much less consent, is going to hit like a slur in that context.) A LOT of clinical terms that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular got used SO negatively, by doctors and laypeople alike, that they’re now exclusively used as insults or recognized as slurs. LPs say the same thing about the OTHER ableist term you used here, and consider “little person” the neutral term. I know at least some willingly use “dwarf” but that might be a choice of reclaiming on an individual level, and to my knowledge they don’t object to “dwarfism” being the blanket term for the conditions that cause it (and then there are specific, clinical terms for said causes, like achondroplasia.) No one willingly chooses to self-describe with the third one. In both cases, the targeted communities in question have led the push in removing those words from the cultural lexicon, because we consider them slurs. (I’ll also say that there are several clinical terms in psychology – “psychopath” and “sociopath” in particular – where the clinical terms were changed specifically because they had been SO misused by the public that they were no longer USEFUL as clinical terms. You probably misunderstand what those terms are in a clinical context, so hearing you have it will only freak you out, and they are SERIOUSLY heavily stigmatized by the public at large, so people with them can’t really safely disclose.)
We currently go with things like *modifier* disability, with “disabled/disability” being the neutral term. It’s not an insult the way either of the other terms is, it’s a statement of fact that our bodies and brains are built differently from what society accommodates for, and there are some things we can’t do. Yeah, LPs are shorter than most adults and tend to face both social discrimination and health issues as a result, and need a neutral term as a community to talk about the struggles they face. In general, please talk to a disabled person before you assume it’s not a slur.
Now, there is a genuine concern about what we call the “euphemism treadmill” – especially with disability, our neutral or clinical terms have frequently been co-opted to be used as insults, which eventually become slurs when directed at us. Which they inevitably are. I focus less on the whole with removing ALL terms with ableist roots (we’ll be here all day) and more on “cut out the active slurs, the absolute most loaded ones” and trying to challenge the ableist IDEAS. I actually have a similar gut reaction as the r-word to being called “special,” derogatory with no modifiers as an insult towards intelligence. (The logical process being special education->special->special being used as a direct 1:1 to replace the r-word.) No one is pushing for special to be removed entirely. We all recognize that would be ridiculous. We DO ask people to stop insulting other people’s intelligence like that, because ANY word inserted in that place will become a slur with that intent. The only way to stop getting ableist slurs is to make intelligence and physical ability relative to other people neutral qualities.
Psychie
@Regali I never said those words weren’t slurs, I explicitly stated that bigots took the medical terms and used them as slurs. My issue is that we’re letting the bigots win by letting them dictate what is and is not acceptable terminology. Once again, bigots will use literally ANY term as a slur if they think it identifies the groups they are bigoted toward, it will literally NEVER end so long as we keep giving them that power over our language.
I’m autistic myself, and have also been inaccurately called retarded as an insult, and I have ALSO done some research on the history of psychology, given I majored in it in college. I’m not speaking from a place of ignorance, nor as someone who hasn’t dealt with this crap personally. I’m fully aware of the horrors committed in the past, and how the disorder in question used to be officially referenced using terms like stupid, idiot, and moron. That is also not what I’m talking about.
Mental retardation was an ACCURATE description for the disorder, because to retard means to SLOW. IQ basically measures the processing speed of one’s brain, essentially how quickly one thinks and learns. People with ID (formerly MR) have an IQ of 70 or below, or rather two standard deviations below the mean IQ (the mean being 100 and a standard deviation being 15, any tests that produce an average or standard deviation other than those are flawed since we define the average intelligence, whatever that may be, as 100). This basically means they think and learn at a significantly slower rate than at least 97.5% of people. Hence the name, mental retardation, they process information at a slower rate.
Now, considering how prevalent the term became as an insult, even outside of it’s use as a slur, I don’t necessarily blame people for wanting to move the official terminology away from that, it’s not a call I agree with, per se, but I can certainly understand it. I do think changing it to intellectual deficiency was an incredibly misguided decision and am actively scornful of the psychiatric community for doing so.
It was the WRONG choice for two reasons. First, deficient was ALREADY used as an insult regarding intelligence. Sure, it’s less common, even now, but I have heard the word being used in that context since I was a child, long before the change was made. Choosing a pre-existing insult because the current medical term has been co-opted into an insult is such a ridiculously bad idea I honestly thought it was a JOKE when I first heard about it.
Second, people with a low IQ are NOT deficient! THEY ARE SLOW! If given a sufficient amount of time and perfect teachers and resources, someone with ID could ABSOLUTELY reach a doctoral level understanding of quantum physics or literally any other subject. Granted, it might take thousands of years, which is much greater than a human’s natural lifespan, but that’s a practical limitation, not a personal one. Ergo, deficient is NOT an accurate description!
Replacing an accurate term that’s been co-opted by bigots into an insult with an inaccurate term that’s ALREADY an insult was a genuinely terrible idea.
As for midget vs little person, I am aware that the community of people who have those conditions are actually DIVIDED on what they want to be called. I went to high school with someone who had midgetism (being abnormally short but otherwise fully proportional, as opposed to dwarfism where certain body parts are out of proportion). I am less researched on this subject since I studied psychology and not medicine, so it’s possible that I’m misinformed about the various specific disorders involved, but I trust he was a relatively good source of information on the subject. The individual I went to school with HATED being referred to as a little person, because little is comparative and diminutive BY DEFINITION, whereas he claimed midget was just an accurate descriptor. His position was that if bigots wanna use his condition as an insult that’s their problem, he was more bothered by the intent than the actual terminology, a philosophy I obviously agree with. Meanwhile, all of the people around him insisting on using “little person” to describe him were taller than him, so he viewed it as being talked down to, regardless of how well meaning, and when they wouldn’t factor in his OWN preferences it was clear that they cared more about LOOKING like they were supportive than actually BEING supportive. I don’t know who’s idea it was to make little person the acceptable term, and I am fully aware that there are plenty of members of that community who prefer little person, and when I’m talking about those people I DO use little person, because I think taking the views of the individuals in question into consideration should be the foundation of any respectful discourse, so I’d be failing at compassion by refusing to use a term they prefer just because I disagree with it. I am also well aware that my old school friend was FAR from alone in disliking little person. When I don’t know the preferences of the individual, I do use little person, because I am aware that is more commonly accepted, but when an individual HAS expressed their preferences to me I try to accommodate them, even if it means using midget or dwarf or elf or whatever else they want to be called.
Also, it should be noted that just because I use these terms in discussions regarding whether they should be changed or removed or whatever, does NOT mean I support using them as slurs, and it does NOT mean I use them outside of these particular contexts, or when individuals specifically request being described with them as previously noted. I just believe that in order to have a frank and honest discussion about a difficult subject it’s a waste of energy to try and dance around the terms that are actually being discussed, especially because it can come across as incredibly condescending, in my experience. Words are tools, and like any tool the way we wield them is what matters. I can use a hammer to build a house, to smash a house, or to smash a skull. I can use a word to describe a thing, to help a person out, or to hurt people. That’s not the word’s fault, but the person who spoke it. Intent matters. I sincerely believe that allowing words that were originally innocent to be corrupted by bigotry and removed from our lexicon because some bad people decided to use them as slurs only serves to harm our language, and our society, because we are shifting the blame from bad people doing bad things onto words that were being misused in the first place. And with the r-word in particular, there were a LOT of people who used it as an insult due to ignorance, not bigotry, and I’m sure that’s the case for a lot of words. I know I used both retarded and gay as insults as a kid because I didn’t know the context, and when I learned what the words actually meant and how they came to be used as insults, I stopped using them that way. Differentiating between genuine bigotry and ignorance is vitally important if we want to fight bigotry, but people are FAR too quick to reprimand transgressions without actually explaining what the problem is in the first place these days, which only serves to foster resentment and can turn people who were merely ignorant into bigots because of how they are treated. Therefore if we want to fight bigotry we cannot be afraid to actually TALK about things that are problematic.
thejeff
Maybe we listen to the groups affected by the slurs rather than construct elaborate theories about what should or should not be acceptable.
Tan
It’s not FOR the bigots. On the contrary, the bigots would prefer you keep using the language they have appropriated (stolen), so as to provide them with cover. That’s why they stole it in the first place. They want to hide in plain sight, blend in with everyone else so they can pretend they’re the silent majority.
We distance ourselves from the bigots to make the bigots stand alone, making them easier targets. If that inconveniences you, kindly take it out on the bigots.
Taffy
Alright, no need for the reductive part. It’s not “iNcOnVeNiEnT”, it’s genuinely distressing to have to frequently restructure my entire lexicon around the whims of the worst “people” in society.
Bryy
Bingo. Mag in general is problematic, but the caps is what really does it in.
Taffy
I’d understand if it was MAGA Fest, probably they’d wanna take out an A , but… It’s not. It has absolutely nothing to do with those freaks.
Yup, until I came back and saw my silly offhand comment went completely on a weird political tangent that even I the 45-hater didn’t think about (my spouse made fun of when we went to visit my parents and saw the billboard for “WTFM” – Tennessee FM (but Spouse read “WTF”-M)
[also, j/k it’s always great being at MAGFest in particular bc it means I’m not at WORK, and we don’t even get post-con depression anymore other than the “have to go back to work” part]
I hadn’t really thought about it until now but everyone is on different schedules yet Ethan…We haven’t seen him going to or coming from a single class since the Mike situation happened.
Lol. Did we ever see him go to a class before Mike died? Maybe once. The dudes are never really the focus unless they’re named Walky and he mostly hangs with the girls so that’s why we see his daily routine. I don’t even remember what Ethan majors in or what subjects he had last semester. He wasn’t in math or gender studies, which were the two big classes to be in, and maybe the computer science class.
Breaking routine is dangerous. Dealing with depression like that it can be the only thing that keeps you going. First day you miss class and the world doesn’t end? It feels powerful. Addictive.
i imagine part of the tuition would cover room and board (tho apparently we see they still have tp oay for cafeteria food) tho at some point i imagine the parents would be contacted? or whoever’s paying teh bills
Nicoleandmaggie
If he’s 18, they won’t be contacted for him not attending class. If his RA is worried more generally or the school has not attending set up as a flag to a counselor or academic advisor, then he will be contacted first and his parents might be contacted about the school being worried about him. But not about his academics. It has to be a more general worry.
Needfuldoer
Room and board costs more than in-state tuition. The school’s site estimates undergraduate programs cost about $27,456 for the year.
I’ve done it. But I graduated from high school at sixteen and was absolutely not ready to be on my own at seventeen. The only thing my parents ever taught me about taking care of myself was to keep my head down and my mouth shutl
Imagine spending the money and then discovering that, actually, it’s completely impossible for your brain to study the thing you’re interested in much further than the level you’ve already reached, although you won’t learn why for another ten years…
thejeff
Not quite that, but I did hit the wall in Math in the first semester of my Senior year as a Physics major. Managed to scrape out with some kind of a degree, but knew I couldn’t go on in the field.
hey, fun dream about money and education i had last night. So, for context i’ve been into origami lately, and apparently money has been on my mind (can’t imagine why).
so, i’m a student, i’m struggling, and this guy shows up (at my door??) and offers a loan. (the precise amount is 30k€, idk) and the way this works is that every month i pay back the interest on the loan for that month (not the principal, just the whatever % interest the loan has accrued in one month? my subconscious doesn’t know how loans work) and also i receive a sheet of paper, and i have to make a specific fold, and every month after that i have to fold all the papers over again once, it’s a specific fold that allows me to stack all the sheets papers in a pretty pattern lol. And once i can no longer make an extra fold because there’s just too many layers of paper to fold and it’s too rigid and thick, that’s when i have to pay back the full loan. =D
I had the “classes are for losers” opinion to a degree as a student, too, but my and my brother’s college funds were in largest part from an uninsured motorist settlement from when Mom almost died in an accident, so I was a bit dismissive of the whole thing (I found out the accident bit years after graduating)
Definitely it didn’t do me any favours to have gone straight from high school into fully-paid-for college, bc I didn’t use ANY of that in my adult life =p it would’ve helped me more to have even a shit job for a while to know what I REALLY wanted to learn and for that to motivate me
I was thinking similarly. “I got lucky — all my day classes are on MWF and I have a night class on Thursdays,” or something. Gotta be fast on the ball with these excuses!
You basically described more than one of my semesters when I was in college.
That wasn’t my proudest moment, though; my proudest moment was in my senior year when I was able to get a full semester of credit by only taking 12 hours of classes a week. That was pretty great. I spent the rest of the time playing video games and drawing comics, which arguably have been way more important in my life and future career than English literature, so… maybe not the worst decision I ever made?
i wouldn’t be surprised, even if college is a bit more ‘freedom/flexible’ than public school that there’d still be BS credits required to fill, but potential debt aside, rather than say, a full on culinary arts school, going to like a community college to do a cooking class once a or twice a month might be nice (tho i assume even if you can pay for only one class, an actual degree/graduation certificate or whatever requires you to be a full time student)
I’ve. . . I can say that I dealt with that very personally.
It’s sincerely not great to be in, especially since it’s couple by self-loathing for doing it in the first place even as you look for any and all excuse to not go to class, even though you WANT to know you need to but you can’t stop yourself from sabotaging yourself in that way to the point of just sitting int he car after driving to the college.
hopefully it wouldn’t make things worse/he’d pushback on ppl suggesting it to him, but i imagine he wouldn’t be in the state of mind to be like “Yeah, i need to see someone about this”, not to mention therapy isn’t free.
(So while there might be ppl with ‘annoying’ moments like booster armchair diagnosing ppl, i can imagine a flipside where it’s like “Y’all are psych majors right, let me traumadump and vent all my issues to you for free”)
Re: “therapy isn’t free”– mix of: as a student, he’d have access to the counseling center, which would be already covered by his tuition; also acknowledgment that college counseling centers aren’t always the best and he might not get what he needs from going there.
I’ve been thinking “Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that, honey… but he was a bad influence on you. This is your chance to get a fresh start, and improve your grades, without him distracting you.”
Axel
Essentially a second of insincere platitude, then onto all the reasons that this is actually a good thing. Doubling down on Danny in his brain.
170 thoughts on “Hyper”
Ana Chronistic
“You were at MAGFest weren’t you”
“No that was Ana”
“…oh yeah”
Ana Chronistic
(that prolly sounded better in my “I didn’t prepare a statement like normal bc I get no signal on my phone in a basement arcade” head, hi everyone)
Bryy
MAGFest really is gonna need to change its name.
The Wellerman
No shit.
Jamie
We’re gonna have to use a new words for magnets, too, I guess.
Taffy
Why?
Casi
Probably because MAG reads as Make America Great to many people now because of Trump and the MAGA republicans, and it’s hard to dissociate that reading of the letters, even if it means Music And Games Festival or it’s original name Mid-Atlantic Gaming Festival
Plaaaa
I used to take a Krav Maga class, now we just call it Israeli self defense.
Taffy
Alright, so I guess the worst people on the planet get to just take not only whatever they want, but also anything that looks or sounds similar as well. That’s fair, sure.
danimagoo
It’s kinda always been that way. I mean…the Nazis didn’t invent the swastika, but it sure as hell is theirs now. The NYT crossword puzzle a few weeks ago looked vaguely evocative of a swastika and a ton of people got upset. Of course, it didn’t help that the puzzle was published at the start of Hanukkah.
Taffy
I dunno, maybe I’m just weird or something, but I don’t think it’s right to move heaven and earth to avoid using words that look kinda similar to a single group of worthless shitheads who aren’t even going to notice.
thejeff
It’s not that the worthless shitheads are going to notice, but that a lot of other people who don’t recognize what your intent is will react badly to it.
Taffy
That doesn’t even make sense. Any reasonable person is going to know that a word or name that’s existed for years and years isn’t related to terrorists just because they share a few letters. I’m sick to death of normal things having to be stifled and altered and rearranged just because some pile of barely sentient shit wants to take something that’s tangentially similar. How is that right?
huesatlight
The choice is do you want people to do a double take and wonder if you’re one of those pieces of shit. Like, I get it’s not fair. It’s like the least of the unfair things they cause.
Sorry everyone born/graduated in 1988 or is a Gretzky fan, but if you have 88 in your handle, personalized license plate, etc, I am going to wonder if you’re a nazi.
Yumi
I don’t know about the “any reasonable person” argument… again with the example of the swastika, it existed well before the Nazis used it. That doesn’t mean that the idea a clothing company had a few years back to “reclaim” it by putting it on clothes with a different intent was a good one. Not everyone is going to know a more extended history of the symbol, and even if they do, they might not know the intent with which the person they see on the street is wearing it.
I don’t know that something named MAGFest should need to change it’s name– if it were MAGAFest, like you said, sure– but it’s also still reasonable to think that it might be a good idea. You don’t have to change things to avoid people getting the wrong idea, but sometimes you might want to, for a number of reasons.
Yotomoe
The fucked up part is that MAGfest was here first. They were here LONG before MAGA and then MAGA showed up. MAGA never said “oh god we might be associated with MAGfest, we should rethink our name” cuz they didn’t care and don’t have to. It’s like branding chicken. They showed up late and are waiting for you to swerve because they have no intention of doing so and I HATE that we can’t STICK IT TO THEM. WE CAN’T GET ‘EM BACK WE JUST HAVE TO LET THEM KEEP RUINING SHIT.
Taffy
Yeah, see, I understand the broader point of people not being able to psychically know your intent without being told outright. That’s fine. What I can’t accept is that the subhumans keep getting everything they want just because they want it and decent people have to kowtow to their whims or else risk earning the ire of other decent people.
Yumi
@Yoto: Well, yeah, that’s kind of a given, like with the swastika example. It can suck, but it’s also like… things change, associations change, and we do our best to adapt.
It’s like, say I opened up a therapy practice back in 2000 (I did not do this, obviously, because I was a small child at the time but). Say I picked out, as my logo, a blue puzzle piece. Why did I select this? I don’t know, this is hypothetical, imagine it has a few layers of meaning for me. Now, time goes along, and the hate group that is Autism $peaks comes into existence, using a blue puzzle piece as their symbol. I’m changing my logo. Should I have to? No. Because groups spreading hateful messages like this shouldn’t exist in the first place. But also, we’re well past that.
Mark
Sounds like a teachable moment.
Yotomoe
It just feels like, to me, that’s what allows this shit to be so pervasive. They can take spaces away from people. Blue puzzle pieces (hypothetically) had a meaning for you. A positive meaning and without your consent it was ripped away from you and tarnished by these people and you cannot, and will not reclaim it in your lifetime. Every positive aspects of our lives is slowly being eroded away bit by bit and there’s no way to stop it and yes that makes me angry.
milu
@Yoto:
i mean… there is something to do about it. but it can’t be done individually. Reclaiming symbols or slurs, as someone else mentioned, happens, it has been done very deliberately by marginalized communities. And we can (and do) also collectively create new symbols, new meanings, new words.
Like it or not, while fascists and assorted bigots are trying to jizz their venom throughout our culture, they will only be as successful as the absence of opposition and political imagination against them, pulling society in a different direction. this is not a tragic unfolding of events, it’s a political struggle.
Bicycle Bill
But as long as MAGFest is going to capitalize the first three letters of their acronym, then most people who come across it (without knowing what it actually is) are understandably going to equate it with the red hats and red necks of #45’s highly visible power base. So were it me, I’d try to find another name ASAP.
Taffy
Yeah, a political struggle that good people are losing because it’s considered better to be polite and engage in good faith and waste time on pointless fights that don’t ultimately matter, instead of doing what needs to actually be done and removing the other “side” from the board entirely. They act like they’re being silenced if somebody dresses in a different-colored shirt than them and that gets treated with respect and deference and sympathy, when they actually should be completely silenced and censored and put down and walked over and treated as the collateral damage they fucking are.
Us arguing with each other helps them, not us.
milu
yeah, it’s fucked and i get so despondent a lot of the time.
take care Taffy <3
i tell myself, the worst is never certain. that fighting doesn't mean winning but not fighting can only mean losing. i mean, it's platitudes but it's true. it helps sometimes?
Roborat
@huesatlight : I have a vague awareness of the 88 and nazi connection, but what does Gretzky have to do with this?
Yotomoe
Evil people can ruin things and good people won’t touch them afterwards. That’s the true evil. They get to win and we’ll let them. There’s a style of facial hair you can’t wear anymore cuz one evil guy decided to have it WHILE being evil. I hate it. I fucking hate it.
huesatlight
With all due respect, systematically murdering millions of people is true evil. Making a particular mustache taboo is an inconvenience.
Yotomoe
With all due respect, I meant True Evil moreso as “The generational trauma caused by that awful thing he did is so bad that anything associated with these visual memes has now been tainted as well” and I chose the moustache purposely because it’s incredibly mundane thing that is now tainted by those horrific acts. I did not mean to imply that ruining the toothbrush style moustache is the most evil thing he did, moreso that it’s a side effect of the influence all the pieces of shit have even hundreds of years later.
Taffy
Remember the far-off past of 8 years ago, when you could wear a red baseball cap without being mistaken for a pile of mobile refuse suitable only for filling in potholes? Can’t do that anymore, thanks to the enemy. I used to wear one, right up until it was ruined. That’s an entire classic piece of attire, spoiled forever because one dried-up satsuma decided it wanted to be in charge.
Psychie
This has been my objection to a lot of instances of political correctness, like the “ban the R-word movement”, the replacement of midget with little people, etc. Some words were basically always slurs, and as such removing them from your vocabulary isn’t an issue because to cease using them is to just stop using slurs.
On the other hand, if a word is a perfectly useful descriptor for something why let the bigots win by allowing them to change it’s meaning when they use it as a slur? Like, it doesn’t matter what terminology is used to describe a group of people that’s oppressed by bigotry, because the bigots WILL use that term as a slur since they view the entire group as something contemptable. Just look at gay, it was chosen explicitly because it meant happy and joyful, now it’s a slur and you get giggles at best if you use it for it’s original meaning. Or black, I’ve had people insist on the “African-American” terminology because calling them “black” was viewed as racist, despite the fact that the term black was chosen for that context BY the black community as a replacement for slurs like “colored” and “negro”, because all the racists started using black as a slur once the community identified with it.
I can understand avoiding slurs, I can understand not wanting to use medical terminology as an insult after learning that’s where the insult comes from, but actively changing official terminology for diagnoses because some bigots decided to use the official terminology as a slur is absolutely taking things too far, especially if the replacement terminology is explicitly LESS ACCURATE as a description, like “intellectual deficiency”, and especially especially if the chosen replacement is ALREADY an insult toward the people with said condition, like “deficient” or “little”.
Regalli
I will say, as someone with a developmental disability who has in fact been called a certain word beginning with the letter ‘r’? Yeah. We treat it as a slur. This is because it’s used as a slur. Ergo, it is a slur. The fact that it was originally clinical doesn’t make it less of a slur now, and the history of ableism in the medical community is long and storied and absolutely horrifying, there are times I have read histories of disability rights and eugenics where words I DON’T usually flinch at come up in a clinical sense and I ABSOLUTELY feel it as a slur. (Because “moron” is dulled enough I rarely react to it – though I’m sure it’d be different if I had been called it enough times – but ANY word used to justify sterilizing someone without their knowledge, much less consent, is going to hit like a slur in that context.) A LOT of clinical terms that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular got used SO negatively, by doctors and laypeople alike, that they’re now exclusively used as insults or recognized as slurs. LPs say the same thing about the OTHER ableist term you used here, and consider “little person” the neutral term. I know at least some willingly use “dwarf” but that might be a choice of reclaiming on an individual level, and to my knowledge they don’t object to “dwarfism” being the blanket term for the conditions that cause it (and then there are specific, clinical terms for said causes, like achondroplasia.) No one willingly chooses to self-describe with the third one. In both cases, the targeted communities in question have led the push in removing those words from the cultural lexicon, because we consider them slurs. (I’ll also say that there are several clinical terms in psychology – “psychopath” and “sociopath” in particular – where the clinical terms were changed specifically because they had been SO misused by the public that they were no longer USEFUL as clinical terms. You probably misunderstand what those terms are in a clinical context, so hearing you have it will only freak you out, and they are SERIOUSLY heavily stigmatized by the public at large, so people with them can’t really safely disclose.)
We currently go with things like *modifier* disability, with “disabled/disability” being the neutral term. It’s not an insult the way either of the other terms is, it’s a statement of fact that our bodies and brains are built differently from what society accommodates for, and there are some things we can’t do. Yeah, LPs are shorter than most adults and tend to face both social discrimination and health issues as a result, and need a neutral term as a community to talk about the struggles they face. In general, please talk to a disabled person before you assume it’s not a slur.
Now, there is a genuine concern about what we call the “euphemism treadmill” – especially with disability, our neutral or clinical terms have frequently been co-opted to be used as insults, which eventually become slurs when directed at us. Which they inevitably are. I focus less on the whole with removing ALL terms with ableist roots (we’ll be here all day) and more on “cut out the active slurs, the absolute most loaded ones” and trying to challenge the ableist IDEAS. I actually have a similar gut reaction as the r-word to being called “special,” derogatory with no modifiers as an insult towards intelligence. (The logical process being special education->special->special being used as a direct 1:1 to replace the r-word.) No one is pushing for special to be removed entirely. We all recognize that would be ridiculous. We DO ask people to stop insulting other people’s intelligence like that, because ANY word inserted in that place will become a slur with that intent. The only way to stop getting ableist slurs is to make intelligence and physical ability relative to other people neutral qualities.
Psychie
@Regali I never said those words weren’t slurs, I explicitly stated that bigots took the medical terms and used them as slurs. My issue is that we’re letting the bigots win by letting them dictate what is and is not acceptable terminology. Once again, bigots will use literally ANY term as a slur if they think it identifies the groups they are bigoted toward, it will literally NEVER end so long as we keep giving them that power over our language.
I’m autistic myself, and have also been inaccurately called retarded as an insult, and I have ALSO done some research on the history of psychology, given I majored in it in college. I’m not speaking from a place of ignorance, nor as someone who hasn’t dealt with this crap personally. I’m fully aware of the horrors committed in the past, and how the disorder in question used to be officially referenced using terms like stupid, idiot, and moron. That is also not what I’m talking about.
Mental retardation was an ACCURATE description for the disorder, because to retard means to SLOW. IQ basically measures the processing speed of one’s brain, essentially how quickly one thinks and learns. People with ID (formerly MR) have an IQ of 70 or below, or rather two standard deviations below the mean IQ (the mean being 100 and a standard deviation being 15, any tests that produce an average or standard deviation other than those are flawed since we define the average intelligence, whatever that may be, as 100). This basically means they think and learn at a significantly slower rate than at least 97.5% of people. Hence the name, mental retardation, they process information at a slower rate.
Now, considering how prevalent the term became as an insult, even outside of it’s use as a slur, I don’t necessarily blame people for wanting to move the official terminology away from that, it’s not a call I agree with, per se, but I can certainly understand it. I do think changing it to intellectual deficiency was an incredibly misguided decision and am actively scornful of the psychiatric community for doing so.
It was the WRONG choice for two reasons. First, deficient was ALREADY used as an insult regarding intelligence. Sure, it’s less common, even now, but I have heard the word being used in that context since I was a child, long before the change was made. Choosing a pre-existing insult because the current medical term has been co-opted into an insult is such a ridiculously bad idea I honestly thought it was a JOKE when I first heard about it.
Second, people with a low IQ are NOT deficient! THEY ARE SLOW! If given a sufficient amount of time and perfect teachers and resources, someone with ID could ABSOLUTELY reach a doctoral level understanding of quantum physics or literally any other subject. Granted, it might take thousands of years, which is much greater than a human’s natural lifespan, but that’s a practical limitation, not a personal one. Ergo, deficient is NOT an accurate description!
Replacing an accurate term that’s been co-opted by bigots into an insult with an inaccurate term that’s ALREADY an insult was a genuinely terrible idea.
As for midget vs little person, I am aware that the community of people who have those conditions are actually DIVIDED on what they want to be called. I went to high school with someone who had midgetism (being abnormally short but otherwise fully proportional, as opposed to dwarfism where certain body parts are out of proportion). I am less researched on this subject since I studied psychology and not medicine, so it’s possible that I’m misinformed about the various specific disorders involved, but I trust he was a relatively good source of information on the subject. The individual I went to school with HATED being referred to as a little person, because little is comparative and diminutive BY DEFINITION, whereas he claimed midget was just an accurate descriptor. His position was that if bigots wanna use his condition as an insult that’s their problem, he was more bothered by the intent than the actual terminology, a philosophy I obviously agree with. Meanwhile, all of the people around him insisting on using “little person” to describe him were taller than him, so he viewed it as being talked down to, regardless of how well meaning, and when they wouldn’t factor in his OWN preferences it was clear that they cared more about LOOKING like they were supportive than actually BEING supportive. I don’t know who’s idea it was to make little person the acceptable term, and I am fully aware that there are plenty of members of that community who prefer little person, and when I’m talking about those people I DO use little person, because I think taking the views of the individuals in question into consideration should be the foundation of any respectful discourse, so I’d be failing at compassion by refusing to use a term they prefer just because I disagree with it. I am also well aware that my old school friend was FAR from alone in disliking little person. When I don’t know the preferences of the individual, I do use little person, because I am aware that is more commonly accepted, but when an individual HAS expressed their preferences to me I try to accommodate them, even if it means using midget or dwarf or elf or whatever else they want to be called.
Also, it should be noted that just because I use these terms in discussions regarding whether they should be changed or removed or whatever, does NOT mean I support using them as slurs, and it does NOT mean I use them outside of these particular contexts, or when individuals specifically request being described with them as previously noted. I just believe that in order to have a frank and honest discussion about a difficult subject it’s a waste of energy to try and dance around the terms that are actually being discussed, especially because it can come across as incredibly condescending, in my experience. Words are tools, and like any tool the way we wield them is what matters. I can use a hammer to build a house, to smash a house, or to smash a skull. I can use a word to describe a thing, to help a person out, or to hurt people. That’s not the word’s fault, but the person who spoke it. Intent matters. I sincerely believe that allowing words that were originally innocent to be corrupted by bigotry and removed from our lexicon because some bad people decided to use them as slurs only serves to harm our language, and our society, because we are shifting the blame from bad people doing bad things onto words that were being misused in the first place. And with the r-word in particular, there were a LOT of people who used it as an insult due to ignorance, not bigotry, and I’m sure that’s the case for a lot of words. I know I used both retarded and gay as insults as a kid because I didn’t know the context, and when I learned what the words actually meant and how they came to be used as insults, I stopped using them that way. Differentiating between genuine bigotry and ignorance is vitally important if we want to fight bigotry, but people are FAR too quick to reprimand transgressions without actually explaining what the problem is in the first place these days, which only serves to foster resentment and can turn people who were merely ignorant into bigots because of how they are treated. Therefore if we want to fight bigotry we cannot be afraid to actually TALK about things that are problematic.
thejeff
Maybe we listen to the groups affected by the slurs rather than construct elaborate theories about what should or should not be acceptable.
Tan
It’s not FOR the bigots. On the contrary, the bigots would prefer you keep using the language they have appropriated (stolen), so as to provide them with cover. That’s why they stole it in the first place. They want to hide in plain sight, blend in with everyone else so they can pretend they’re the silent majority.
We distance ourselves from the bigots to make the bigots stand alone, making them easier targets. If that inconveniences you, kindly take it out on the bigots.
Taffy
Alright, no need for the reductive part. It’s not “iNcOnVeNiEnT”, it’s genuinely distressing to have to frequently restructure my entire lexicon around the whims of the worst “people” in society.
Bryy
Bingo. Mag in general is problematic, but the caps is what really does it in.
Taffy
I’d understand if it was MAGA Fest, probably they’d wanna take out an A , but… It’s not. It has absolutely nothing to do with those freaks.
The Wellerman
Well they can always just change it to Games and Music Fest
Taffy
But if they change it to GAMFest, leg enthusiasts will be confused and possibly very put out.
milu
we WERE beginning to wonder (probably) (i was)
you had fun?
Ana Chronistic
Yup, until I came back and saw my silly offhand comment went completely on a weird political tangent that even I the 45-hater didn’t think about (my spouse made fun of when we went to visit my parents and saw the billboard for “WTFM” – Tennessee FM (but Spouse read “WTF”-M)
[also, j/k it’s always great being at MAGFest in particular bc it means I’m not at WORK, and we don’t even get post-con depression anymore other than the “have to go back to work” part]
Grimey
I hadn’t really thought about it until now but everyone is on different schedules yet Ethan…We haven’t seen him going to or coming from a single class since the Mike situation happened.
Sirksome
Lol. Did we ever see him go to a class before Mike died? Maybe once. The dudes are never really the focus unless they’re named Walky and he mostly hangs with the girls so that’s why we see his daily routine. I don’t even remember what Ethan majors in or what subjects he had last semester. He wasn’t in math or gender studies, which were the two big classes to be in, and maybe the computer science class.
Nono
Joyce met him once while he was going to lab.
Lars
Danny met Amber on Computer Science. Joe and Walky were in Gender studies. Jacob was in same law class as Sarah. Buckets of Blood Guy …
Bruceski
Breaking routine is dangerous. Dealing with depression like that it can be the only thing that keeps you going. First day you miss class and the world doesn’t end? It feels powerful. Addictive.
Rayndel
There’s also the other side of it. If you start doing “normal” daily things, then that means you’re moving on.
Sirksome
Classes are for losers anyway. Imagine spending money on an education! I’m definitely not projecting here.
deathjavu
Imagine having already spent the money on it and then *not* going. Not that I ever did anything incredibly stupid like that…
Jo_cubstar
I know I definitely didn’t *shifty eyes*
anon
i imagine part of the tuition would cover room and board (tho apparently we see they still have tp oay for cafeteria food) tho at some point i imagine the parents would be contacted? or whoever’s paying teh bills
Nicoleandmaggie
If he’s 18, they won’t be contacted for him not attending class. If his RA is worried more generally or the school has not attending set up as a flag to a counselor or academic advisor, then he will be contacted first and his parents might be contacted about the school being worried about him. But not about his academics. It has to be a more general worry.
Needfuldoer
Room and board costs more than in-state tuition. The school’s site estimates undergraduate programs cost about $27,456 for the year.
https://studentcentral.indiana.edu/pay-for-college/cost-of-iu/estimated-cost.html
BarerMender
I’ve done it. But I graduated from high school at sixteen and was absolutely not ready to be on my own at seventeen. The only thing my parents ever taught me about taking care of myself was to keep my head down and my mouth shutl
Daibhid C
Imagine spending the money and then discovering that, actually, it’s completely impossible for your brain to study the thing you’re interested in much further than the level you’ve already reached, although you won’t learn why for another ten years…
thejeff
Not quite that, but I did hit the wall in Math in the first semester of my Senior year as a Physics major. Managed to scrape out with some kind of a degree, but knew I couldn’t go on in the field.
Jamie
Having recently played Lost Judgment, this gave me very strong Kotoko Itokura vibes.
Yarrr
Yeah, that would be dumb, and definitely wouldn’t cause psychological damage for year afterwards… ha…
milu
hey, fun dream about money and education i had last night. So, for context i’ve been into origami lately, and apparently money has been on my mind (can’t imagine why).
so, i’m a student, i’m struggling, and this guy shows up (at my door??) and offers a loan. (the precise amount is 30k€, idk) and the way this works is that every month i pay back the interest on the loan for that month (not the principal, just the whatever % interest the loan has accrued in one month? my subconscious doesn’t know how loans work) and also i receive a sheet of paper, and i have to make a specific fold, and every month after that i have to fold all the papers over again once, it’s a specific fold that allows me to stack all the sheets papers in a pretty pattern lol. And once i can no longer make an extra fold because there’s just too many layers of paper to fold and it’s too rigid and thick, that’s when i have to pay back the full loan. =D
Ana Chronistic
I had the “classes are for losers” opinion to a degree as a student, too, but my and my brother’s college funds were in largest part from an uninsured motorist settlement from when Mom almost died in an accident, so I was a bit dismissive of the whole thing (I found out the accident bit years after graduating)
Definitely it didn’t do me any favours to have gone straight from high school into fully-paid-for college, bc I didn’t use ANY of that in my adult life =p it would’ve helped me more to have even a shit job for a while to know what I REALLY wanted to learn and for that to motivate me
Lux
What if we learn next strip that he just doesn’t have classes on whatever day of the week it is in the comic.
pixiekhatt
I was thinking similarly. “I got lucky — all my day classes are on MWF and I have a night class on Thursdays,” or something. Gotta be fast on the ball with these excuses!
Greg
You basically described more than one of my semesters when I was in college.
That wasn’t my proudest moment, though; my proudest moment was in my senior year when I was able to get a full semester of credit by only taking 12 hours of classes a week. That was pretty great. I spent the rest of the time playing video games and drawing comics, which arguably have been way more important in my life and future career than English literature, so… maybe not the worst decision I ever made?
anon
i wouldn’t be surprised, even if college is a bit more ‘freedom/flexible’ than public school that there’d still be BS credits required to fill, but potential debt aside, rather than say, a full on culinary arts school, going to like a community college to do a cooking class once a or twice a month might be nice (tho i assume even if you can pay for only one class, an actual degree/graduation certificate or whatever requires you to be a full time student)
William Leonard Reese Jr.
Ah that kind of College Burnout.
I’ve. . . I can say that I dealt with that very personally.
It’s sincerely not great to be in, especially since it’s couple by self-loathing for doing it in the first place even as you look for any and all excuse to not go to class, even though you WANT to know you need to but you can’t stop yourself from sabotaging yourself in that way to the point of just sitting int he car after driving to the college.
CallynD
I fucking feel this. Ethan, be better than me and get some therapy.
anon
hopefully it wouldn’t make things worse/he’d pushback on ppl suggesting it to him, but i imagine he wouldn’t be in the state of mind to be like “Yeah, i need to see someone about this”, not to mention therapy isn’t free.
(So while there might be ppl with ‘annoying’ moments like booster armchair diagnosing ppl, i can imagine a flipside where it’s like “Y’all are psych majors right, let me traumadump and vent all my issues to you for free”)
Yumi
Re: “therapy isn’t free”– mix of: as a student, he’d have access to the counseling center, which would be already covered by his tuition; also acknowledgment that college counseling centers aren’t always the best and he might not get what he needs from going there.
tim gueguen
I’m sure Ethan is in class in spirit at least.
Axel
it’s good that someone on campus is noticing and caring.
on note of people who might care (that he’s missing class, not about his emotions), I wonder how terribly his mom reacted about Mike.
Needfuldoer
I’m assuming the worst.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/remainder/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/placate/
Spriteless Aunty
You know, mourning away from that woman seems like the better option.
Axel
I’ve been thinking “Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that, honey… but he was a bad influence on you. This is your chance to get a fresh start, and improve your grades, without him distracting you.”
Axel
Essentially a second of insincere platitude, then onto all the reasons that this is actually a good thing. Doubling down on Danny in his brain.