90% of her twitter is complaining about tankies and the uyghurs and the authoritarianism
someone in the comments says “im cuban and castro was not a real communist”
retweeted something about how can china eradicate poverty when people in hong kong live in tiny homes
I dunno, if the person with the most similar political development on Youtube was freaking Shoe0nhead, that would probably make me want to rethink my beliefs.
Like, there’s non-tankie leftists online like hbomb, philosophytube, big joel, the chapos, contrapoints, hasanabi, but they talk about actual fucking left-wing ideals, the injustices in the present day and what could be done to fix them. They don’t turn their entire online presence into “im one of the good lefties, not like these evil tankies, im one of the good and reasonable ones”
She was getting flak for her use of the R-slur and then suddenly she announces that she’s autistic so she can pretend to have an R-word pass.
My questions to her are as follows:
If you don’t have an intellectual disability, by what right do you claim your use of the R-word is legitimate?
If you are implying that you’re reclaiming the R-slur then how are you using it in reverse discourse rather than perpetuating its use as a slur?
If you feel you have a right to use this word because it’s been used against you then would you agree that, as a white person who has occasionally had the N-slur used against me, I also have a right to use the N-slur to denigrate others in the same way that you use the R-slur?
I’m not questioning your self-diagnosis but if you, as a public figure, are openly announcing that you are autistic and positioning your use of slurs as activism, what other autistic activism have you engaged in and which of the prominent leaders in the autistic activism space do you defer to and take up the charge from as a newly-minted autistic activist yourself?
Even as a medically diagnosed autistic guy, I wouldn’t even consider using the R-word.
There isn’t a ‘pass’ for using it, as, unlike the N-word amongst African-Americans, it doesn’t come with any connotation of ‘friend’, or ‘shared heratige’ among neurodivergents. It is purely used derogatorily.
The N-word was reclaimed by black people to be used with those connotations by taking the original word and its meanings and subverting them into something either positive or neutral. The exact same thing happened with the word queer.
It’s a very conscious act to reclaim terms like that.
I’m not saying that the R-slur is beyond reclamation, far from it, but it’s not going to be reclaimed by people who aren’t the object of the term and it’s not going to be reclaimed by using the word in exactly the same way that it has historically been used.
Honestly Keffals’ proclaiming her autistic status is just a veneer of progressivism to make her audience feel comfortable with her use of slurs.
It reminds me of people who use the f-slur as a claim that they’re reclaiming it.
When people use that as a rhetorical shield to cower behind, my go-to is asking them how.
They’ll invariably trip over themselves in trying to justify their actions because they don’t understand what the reclamation of words looks like.