I mean, my crippled ass is perfectly willing to crack my cane upside someone’s head, while calling them all sorts of names.

I know, you probably meant retard, right?

Well, retarded is no longer the medical term for people with learning disabilities. Just like moron, idiot, and other categorizations of the past.

At this point, retard has nothing at all to do with people that have a learning disability. It definitely no longer refers to them in any accurate sense, and has been fully co-opted into slang.

Calling someone a retard at this point is no more about a disability than calling them dumb. Seriously. Dumb used to mean the same thing as mute.

Truth is, it doesn’t matter what terms get used for people with learning disabilities officially. That term will be taken and used as an insult. That sucks, but it’s a long standing part of language, at least in english. If you’re gong to disparage someone’s intelligence, you do so using terminology related to categorization of intelligence.

Now, would it be better if we stopped that, and used similar terms that aren’t related? Sure. But the typical brain dead, addlepated, shit-for-brains, thoughtless and air-headed twerp is going to ignore that and use learning disabled instead.

It’s already a thing where people will say “what the fuck are you, learning disabled?”

We ain’t getting rid of that. Those of us that would suggest avoiding such terms that used to be about disability aren’t the ones that would need to be asked this question, and the ones that would need it asked aren’t the ones that would agree to it.

But, yeah, we’re all fucktards on the internet, and that term has joined things like moron and idiot in being genericized rather than about an actual form of inborn disability at all.

All of this applies to things related to mental illness too. Even mental illness as a term is being slangified into not being about actual mental illness, it’s just the new way of saying crazy.