WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?

Wait who's Lennon.

Pizza, are you edible, and if so, how tasty are you?

author=Corfaisus

author=Pizza

author=seiromem
Wait who's Lennon.

He's a piece of Pizza.

He's a pizza-shit.

I'm a pizza pie , hat's what I AM

author=wildwes
Pizza, are you edible, and if so, how tasty are you?

I am not edile. But if you added toppings and cooked me I'd probably taste good

>JonTron calls A PS4 retarded.
>Two days of being called out by random fucking morons who seriously will not give up this white knight crusade against nothing

I am seriously sick of people. It's 2014, and we've socially moved backwards into this zone of fucking insanity. You can't say fucking anything anymore without someone feeling like their opinion is important enough to influence everyone around them into doing their bidding.

The best part is that these people don't even watch JonTron, or they'd understand that it's really not out of character for him to say something as oh-so-horrible as retarded. To an inanimate object.

For fucks sake, he got accused of de-humanizing people. DE-HUMANIZING PEOPLE

FOR CALLING A PS4 RETARDED

I'm glad I don't own a gun cause I probably would have fucking offed myself already

Every day I'm more and more convinced that our entire species is just a screaming, wailing fucking infant

It was always that bad, it's just that before the internet, we didn't have to interact with those people regularly once we graduated from high school, because there was no simple forum with which to communicate with them.

Also, those particular people are probably still in high school, at best. On the internet no one can tell you're not a professor of human rights studies! Unless they think for a second, and realize that you're posting lengthy arguments defending the PS4 on a youtube video by JonTron. Then it might occur to them that you're probably in 8th grade.

(Eh... I'm not looking through this clusterfuck to see what really went down... was it really worth print-screening all those comments?)

I've seen people campaign against words like dumb, lame, moron, stupid, and crazy as well.

Thing is, when it comes to mental disabilities, any term used to describe it eventually becomes an insult. A decade or so from now they'll probably have to purge "mentally challenged" and "intellectually disabled" from all the books and such as well. How these new terms are supposed to be less offensive is beyond me -- I think they actually sound meaner.
I think "Autistic" is slowly becoming as common an insult as "retard", to the point that they're pretty much interchangeable. Even words that the communities of these people come up with themselves, like "aspie", become insults almost immediately.

And no, I don't think impossible sentiments like this are new at all. After all, there were some clans of Jains (offshoot of Buddhists or Hindus or something like that) that wore face masks so that they could reduce the number of insects (and later microbes) that they inhale and kill.

I really don't think this kind of slippery-slope nonsense has any place in a discussion about slurs.

similarly, if you think that calling something 'retarded' is totally harmless, I think you need to respect that other people's experiences differ from yours -- it's a word that's still, as in literally to this day, used to demean and dehumanize (yes, dehumanize) mentally disabled people, and I don't think asking a prolific internet funnyman not to rely on words with those harmful connotations is at all unreasonable.

the bulk of the backlash wasn't sparked by his use of the word alone, but by the fact that after the first reaction to it on twitter (a casual, politely-worded request to not use that word in the future, thanks), he responded by calling the person who asked that retarded too, then starting on a long tirade about how he was being censored and that obviously everyone was choosing to be offended and so on. it was a ridiculously childish response to a reasonable request, and I don't think people are wrong to be disappointed by that.

are some people taking it too far? it's the internet -- I'm sure that some are. should this be used as an excuse to say that the entire concept of asking people not to use slurs in casual language is similarly an overreaction? not at all, and I'm disappointed that so many of you are lazy enough to resort to that. others among you are falling back on hyperbolic 'political correctness gone wild' scenarios, and I'm disappointed in that, too. demand more of yourselves.

the takeaway from this is that if it seems as though people are 'getting offended for no reason', it might be time to stop and check whether they actually know more than you. there is such a thing as justified, righteous anger, and the fact that you're lucky enough to not have this sort of thing affect you personally doesn't make you the moral arbiter of the situation

author=slashphoenix
Idk, if someone's trying to be a comedian, I'd rather see them work up some creative wordplay rather than fall back to the kind of cheap half-baked insults I used when I was a high-school dumbass.

There's gotta be about a million ways to insult something without using words that simultaneously degrade a whole lot of other things or people for no good reason.

yeah, this is the most basic fucking tenet of humour: Don't Punch Down. don't rely on lazy techniques that exploit marginalized people for funnies.

author=slashphoenix
That said, screwing up is absolutely guaranteed in life and I get the strong impression that there are people out there who care less about seeing the world and the people in it improve and care more about finding occasions to bring out the pitchforks.

this, on the other hand, is the laziest tool in the disaffected internet person's belt. pretending that people who start this outcry are 'just looking for something to be offended by', or that they 'don't really care', or whatever is a hell of a stretch, and it reeks of desperation. people invented the 'social justice warrior' archetype because it was easier to drum up a group of furious strawmen than to admit that people who speak out might actually be speaking from personal experience and personal hurt. I see no reason to assume that this backlash is the product of some ridiculous creature who goes around looking for reasons to be angry, and I encourage you to recognize that assertion as exactly the baseless moral dodge that it is.

I gotta disagree, even an innocuous mistake or total misunderstanding can lead people going for the eyes and throat of someone who's genuinely screwed up but is also trying to improve or fix their mistakes as best they can. It doesn't soften the blow of whatever was done, but there's a key difference between the kind of people who are trying to learn and the kind of people who obstinately refuse to listen.

Not that this is a valid excuse or reason to write off any and all complaints; the people who plug their ears to stuff like this aren't the ones I'm worried about getting hurt.

Personally, I'd like society to fucking grow up and grow a pair. You don't have to use a dehumanizing word to offend half the people on the fucking planet, but even if you do, a fucking crusade to ruin that person's life is beyond going to far, it's tyranny.

People talk, and people aren't smart about what they say, and everyone is guilty of it, so why is it so essential that the slightest slip of the tongue is so unforgivable, that society has burn every trace the offender's career, history, and influence?

I don't care if I offend anyone, because frankly, it's impossible not to. People get into this mob and become so rabid, they're barely human.

Defending the status quo is pretty uninteresting, though; smart guys like them can probably come up with something better than late-Family Guy level humor.

It was mostly some stupid death threat stuff I saw directed at jontron earlier, mawk, nothing here - I just had it stuck in my head. Those kind of responses to situations like this seem to miss the point so hard it makes my head hurt.

Anyway, if you all use the word retarded on the regular you should read some Shakespeare or just going to thesaurus.com, get creative with your insults.