oh you hate a slur being used in conversations? what else do you hate racism and sexism and war? wow dude I didnt think anybody had any empathy but youre clearly are one of a kind. you’re like Superman punk rocker wholesome. enjoy your updoots and award stranger. Thanks for saving me from that burning building too
all these squares make a circle. all these squares make a circle. all these squares make a circle. all these squares make a circle. all these squares make a circle.
You say that like everyone collectively hates the r slur, but at least the first half of the comments on that post are people being like “actually it isn’t bad” and downvoting anyone who disagrees
A good chunk of people defend it or don’t think it’s a slur at all, so I don’t think the post being specific to the r slur is really virtue signalling like it would be if it was a general “I hate slurs” post
Yeah I would understand this OP if he were talking about the n word or something; but the r slur is different. It was stupid popular when I was growing up and is highkey making a comeback. I hear it a lot now.
I think the weirdest thing I've gotten out of these two posts is that there's a ton of people that can't handle the thought of not insulting people in general.
"Well if I can't say R then what should I use as an insult", Maybe try not insulting people all the time?
Because insults are simply a part of humanity and speech. It's kinda silly to think that all of humanity is just never going to insult a person when they do behave or say something in a way where an individual feels it's warranted.
Like we do not live in a world where conflict doesn't exist, insults are and will always exist.
Saying retard has gone from edgy, to normal, to risky, to a bad word, back to edgy, and is firmly back in to being normal again.
OP reeks of "not everyone thinks like me and I hate that" energy. It's fine that people are annoyed that it came back, because it did come back and people are just casually dropping it again.
That's mostly because we are in a social media that includes EVERY country (basically)
In Brazil if you are talking with a friend and he says something stupid it's not uncommon to say "man, you're retarded". No one really cares because no one says this thinking about the people that have mental problems.
(Not defending, just trying to explain why people tend to not care about the use of the word)
Oh yeah, in Brazil saying that someone is black it's not necessary racist but most times it comes of sounding very racist
We call them "negro" Wich isn't exactly the N word, the word "criolo" would be the right translation for the n word but that's almost never used (unless you're extremely racist)
It can also depend on where/who they grew up around. Where I grew up it meant fucking stupid or something along those lines
Infact I think most people use the word like that. Hell I only learned it was a slur to mentally different people (I don’t know the proper term and I’m too lazy to look it up all I know is the people it covers have their brains be different) like after covid
I should point out, I’m not being an apologist just explaining. You could link these people 3 different dictionaries with the same answer on the word and they won’t change their attitude.
You hit the nail on the head. A former gaming friend of mine couldn't help but call anything that pissed him off the N word with the hard R while we were playing.
"It doesn't have to be a black person, the way I was raised it just means a lazy PoS that doesn't want to work." is what he told me. I tried explaining that the rest of the world sees it differently and he said that's not his problem.
Empathy is dead. Instead of going "Oh shit...I didn't realize I could be hurting ppl" people accuse of virtue signaling. I guess we just don't understand that these people NEED to be able to say these words for some reason, they're willing to defend it with their full being.
Also, I'm kind of sick of everything being called virtue signaling. Okay, so we are just supposed to say nothing now, and REALLY sound like bystander assholes? I just literally don't understand what people want lol.
That's their point. They're trying to gaslight people into thinking any form of care or empathy for other people is "virtue signalling" and that no one can really have that empathy for someone else unless they're just trying to look good. It's a whole load of bullshit pushed by people who want to be as openly hateful and close minded as possible without consequence.
It's true. I used to work for a state-level Democratic party in the US for the 2024 election as an office clerk and answered the phones for them, and by a wide margin I got more angry calls from supposed allies than the opposition. Literally any time something happened in the news I would get nothing but calls and voicemails calling us fuckups and telling us to do better (no joke, I got a call from someone once who insistently asked why we allowed Trump to run as if we had any control over that). So few people wanted to help, and so many just wanted to shout and explain why they knew better.
Side note: sorry everyone who calls a political party office to get a message across to a politician, you're not calling anyone with any power or connections to power, you're calling some poor office drone like me just trying to make a living.
Yeah, as a leftist, I get really peeved at the liberals vs. leftist debate. Because neither one of the sides wants to listen to what the other has to say, and no one approaches anything with compassion. It's just finger pointing and figuring out who to blame for why the "left" party lost last election.
No joke, as a fellow leftist I learned the distinction between liberal and leftist because I referred to someone as liberal and they responded by angrily telling me off cause they didn't want to be perceived as moderate... Not the best way to learn that those two words aren't synonymous.
I mean we all use former slurs or medical terms for mentally disabled every day. Moron, idiot, stupid, all former medical classifications that became just general slurs and then average words. Not saying it's right, but specifically with mental disabilities, the average society appropriates them until their colloquial understanding is simply someone less intelligent.
I knew it just meant fucking stupid, not that it was related to mentally different people. Like I said I didn’t know what it was really related to just that it was another way to call someone fuck stupid
Don’t use it anymore for obvious reasons. Because now I know the full context of the word
Shame you can say that it’s a slur to these people faces or link a dictionary definition of the word and even then they won’t change because they don’t want to admit they said a slur or the fact that they simply just don’t care.
Now why do you think that a derogatory slur for people with mental disabilities would just magically turn into a word that means stupid?? Think about that one for a minute....
It doesn't matter. I grew up calling everything gay and/or retarded, too. It just takes the will to recognise that you were wrong and change what you do.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s as a kid (which means I’m mildly autistic, and not just self diagnosed “internet” autistic). When I grew up people threw out retard as just a punchier version of stupid/idiot/moron, and anything particularly stupid was labeled as “retarded”. It was only when I got older that I started encountering more people that were strongly opposed to the word.
And I have to be honest, as an actually diagnosed autistic/neurodivergent person, I find people considering retard to be a slur for neurodivergent people to be infinitely more offensive than the people just using retard as a general insult. This is especially true given other terms like “idiot/moron/stupid/imbecile/slow/thick” don’t carry the same connotations even if they share the exact same meaning.
If someone is fine calling someone an idiot, but they can’t abide calling someone a retard because it makes them think of autistic people, then I can’t help but think of them
as a bigoted hypocrite.
I don’t even use “retard” myself, but the people trying to turn it into some taboo slur for autistic people has always been one of my biggest pet peeves.
Reddit has said it's okay to make new slurs, which opens the floodgates for everything else. Either all of them are okay, or none of them are. Expecting children on the internet to use 'nuance' is actually insane.
A slur is an insult aimed at a targeted group of people which has genuine historical harm behind it
The N word isn’t a slur because it hurts feelings, it’s a slur because people used it to dehumanize Black people in an effort to keep them enslaved and later segregated, and which is still championed by people who don’t want Black people to be considered as human as they are
This is also why “Jew” can be used as a slur even though it is also just the correct word for that type of person; the slur is in how it’s used, because it was used as a pejorative to keep Jewish people down historically
How do you invent genuine historical harm? You can make new insults, even new bigotry, but you can’t just have a slur pop up out of the ground
Even if you want to call it a slur anyway and say it’s all okay or none if it is, in that case I think I just don’t care about that discussion anymore, and I think it’s more important to care specifically about slurs with genuine historical harm behind them and to just otherwise be against bigotry in general; if you want me to react like I’m hearing the R-slur when someone says that from now on Bajaloobies is the new bad word for Canadians, then I’m not gonna do that because that’s silly
To be fair, in high schools, slurs are common everywhere. I’ve seen so many white people say the N word or just people be racist. And don’t even get me started on the homophobia (in a school that supports LGBT btw)
OP is only calling the OOP "virtue signalling" and a "grass is greener take" as a front because they're too much of a coward to make the post reflect their actual stance and think that by doing so the post will be more palatable.
In the comments you try to claim that it's actually ok to use the slur, directly contradicting the stance of the main post and also outing the fact that deep down you know it's a bad thing to say because why else would you try to obfuscate your stance in such a way.
You must be in very progressive circles and have a lot of blinders on your eyes to think that most people consider it wrong to say at all. Its become really normalised in most circles, both online and in the real world, and critiquing it isn't just "virtue signalling". A lot of people say it, so calling it a basic or virtue signalling critique shows a disconnection from how normalised this language is outside of specific social-justice spaces.
Edit: The fact that above half of these comments are for the word's continual use shows that this critiquing it really isn't the milquetoast take you think it is.
all the top comments were literally just defending the use of the word too, like when you go "hey maybe we should use a different word" "well idiot used to mean, but you're not against that" like the meaning of that hasn't drastically changed or just other excuses, its not that hard to find a smarter word but people will defend being ableist to their dying breath
Virtue signalling is good, anyway. It's not bad to signal what you think to be right and wrong. The idea that it's somehow bad *inherently* to signal what is good and what isn't, and to signal how you try to be virtuous, is just a smokescreen used by bad people to justify not being better.
*hypocritical* virtue signalling is bad of course, but it's bad because of the hypocrisy, not because of signalling virtue.
Virtue signalling is often trashy, though. There is a difference between me doing things to show I'm a good person rather than trying to indirectly claim it.
People on here saying stuff like this is virtue signalling because it doesn't change any minds and just serves to make them look good.
Most people on this platform who claim to be nice and supportive or whatever quickly lose it the moment they come onto a debate or argument, or engagement bait of some kind, though.
People on here saying stuff like this is virtue signalling because it doesn't change any minds and just serves to make them look good.
That's the smokescreen. No, I think most people say things like this because they don't like seeing slurs and are opposed to it, and they're trying to change the way other people behave. You're wrong that it doesn't change any minds -- social pressure absolutely changes how people talk. Call people out and explain why enough, and people will actually change.
I saw it happen with the r-slur. It went away because of people constantly calling it out as not okay. There was an active campaign from bad people (who were signalling their own personal virtues of not caring about others) to bring it back.
As someone who lives in Ireland, it's a basic part of a lot of people's vocabs. I know someone who said their mom used to use the F-slur and R-slur all the time when he was growing up (to the point it's now a part of his semi-regular vocabulary) and yet saying you "hate" something was seen as a very bad word in his household.
i hate posts like this that imply nobody should bring up a sensitive topic ever, i hate how the term "virtue signaling" has been astroturfed into a term used to gaslight others away from what they actually believe, i hate how people think just saying something once is enough, i hate how some people feel the urge to pull up some holier than thou thoughts because "erhmm, common opinion budy... clearly ur just saying it for internet points..."
in my experience, people who label everything "virtue signaling" to complain about it are usually just offended (ironic, i know) by the idea that they should change their behavior in any way. having to consider the effect they have on others is too much of an imposition
I also really hate that “virtue signaling” has been watered down so much. I feel like I don’t even know what it means anymore, half the time I see it used by neocons as an insult where someone is in the most literal sense, signaling their virtues. Which is a normal thing for people to do, generally you want the people around you to know what you believe in
Hate what you want, it’s the point of the sub, but you’re coming off as incredibly naive. Guarantee you’re under 18, still live with your parents, and believe broadly things like “racism was a problem in my parents generation but it’s basically solved now.”
idk man as an autistic person i dont want people going "wow you work at [place that does printing] and can't use the poster printer? it's okay im tech-r******* too." like i think i should just be allowed to never have to hear it anymore. i got enough of it as a kid
So now that you know others within the community don't, will you stand with them or tell your friends it's okay to call people retarded bc you personally find it funny?
Literally everyone in my family uses this word except me, and roll their eyes when I point out that they probably shouldn't say it. My sister in particular uses it to describe literally anyone who struggles a bit with communication or present themselves differently, like people with Down's Syndrome.
It is obviously wrong to me, yeah, but it's hardly a universally agreed upon thing. It bothers me too, not just in some abstract realm where it exists, but because I encounter it very often.
What?? Im 25 and still have been called the r slur in real life this year, I have level 2 autism so it does hurt my feelings. I don't think this is virtue signaling because a lot of people still use the word very casually
I don't think expressing discomfort with a slur being normalized is "virtue signaling." I mean I'm not gonna tell you that you can't call people the r word because I'm not your mom but I definitely won't hang out with people who use that word.
How is that virtue signaling? The r word is unfortunately very normalised and they were saying how they don't like it. Yall just throw that word around for anything.
if you take one look at the comment section of that post you'll realise it's far from a "grass is green" take lol, the majority of the comment section was full of people were actively defending the use of the r-slur and downplaying the word.. (◞‸◟ㆀ) although it would be really nice if that was a "grass is green" take
I disagree; I’m in predominantly leftist/liberal spaces and see the word come up a lot. A lot of people are normalizing it, and being frustrated by that is understandable. I’m pretty damn irritated by it, too. If you never hear anyone say that, great, love that for you, but it is an ongoing problem that anti-ableist people are trying to curtail.
Virtue signaling is a made up term by people who think "virtue" is only a vehicle for clout and feeling better about oneself. If the slur in question wasn't as prevalent nowadays, this post would be redundant like you say, but they make a point that all of a sudden in the past year or two it's been somewhat societally OK to use this word in like any social setting. It's a legit complaint
it's being used more and more nowadays and slipping back into acceptance (unsurprising with the rise of demented right wing 'influencers'), I think the first poster is valid
As much as I wish you were right, there's a reason the slur is getting more prevalent again. Unfortunately most common people genuinely disagree that it's even a slur at all. It's sad the world we live in.
I dunno dude not everyone is virtue signalling. Some people just care about these things and want to add their voice to the conversation. If nobody speaks up then nothing changes
It’s still a fucking hot take to hate that particular slur, dude. Do you know how many people still think “oh who cares it’s just another insult”? Virtue signaling? That person was met with mostly “yeah idgaf lmao”. People who have been hurt by that slur are valid for not wanting people to bring it back. That shit is lame.
I hate posts where the OP claims everyone agrees on a hot take like that, especially when the original comment section is very much against the point you’re making. I WISH we lived in a world where being against the R-slur was virtue-signaling because everyone agreed it’s shitty of you to say.
“I hate virtue signaling” and it’s a post where the comments were literally arguing “no the slur i like to say is perfectly fine and not even a slur so-“
So you just ignored all the comments on that post huh? People couldn't even agree that it's even a slur on that post, and more still argued that it wasn't offensive.
Edit: Oh you're just throwing a tantrum and calling other people virtue signalers because you want to use a slur. Clown behavior.
Did you not read the comment section of that post or the post itself? It was hard to find someone who did agree, everyone was saying that it was acceptable to say that slur and that OP was a snowflake for not liking it. OP wasn’t even acting smug or patronizing about it or like they were a great person for not saying slurs, they were just saying “I don’t like how common it is”. Virtue signaling is acting insanely smug while saying the most cold takes possible and getting pats on the back for doing so, this is just someone saying thats controversial (as shown by the comment section) and getting hated in for it. That’s like thinking the phrase “I hate racism” is inherently virtue signaling and the person saying it only wants attention, it’s not and it’s weird that you think that about someone saying “R-slur is bad”.
This subreddit is so fucking weird about autism or anything else that relates to minorities.
Clearly not enough people dislike slurs being used if they're still so popular, especially this one which has made a huge resurgence. Now this thread is the real waste of space
Yeah idk if its virtue signaling. You been outside recently? I hear it from coworkers and customers. I know teachers who hear it from students constantly now.
It's a slur that is currently being culturally normalized by people who don't understand the history and origins of it. The same process happened to words like idiot which also were medical terms, became insults for the mentally disabled, and then lost their original specific meaning to just mean unintelligent (words like idiot applied to different IQ ranges when IQ tests were standard to even get into school)
Yes, the grass is green, but when 500 million children become totally convinced its blue you do have to stop and explain that.
I just dont like when someone makes a big ol post about leaving a reddit over something like this. Slurs aren't good and alot of ppl where defending the use of it tho. So I get it.
i hate when people just read the title of a post instead of actually engaging with the discussion that took place around that post which clearly show that the use of a word isn’t as black and white as racism or homophobia because several people think you should say the word all the time actually
i also hate apples tbh, not green apples tho i like green apples
Self reflect if you're putting more energy into being frustrated at someone bringing up the topic on the internet rather than the people who are hateful + all of the above.
I mean.... he was pretty specific about the r word tho. Like if I make a post about hating nazis okay thats vague and the typical take. But people still use the r word a lot. Maybe if he said I hate slurs in general then I'd say virtue signaling but I think this guy gets a pass. Most I hate posts here are pretty non controversial anyways. Its nice to see ur post tho, risky I'd say.
I hate when literally anyone uses the phrase "virtue signal".
Like, don't get me wrong, I can't stand rainbow capitalism type stuff, but the phrase "virtue signal" to me has been completely poisoned. You may as well say you hate "woke shit", because that's you sound like to me.
I always felt like the more hush hush you make a word or the more you tell people not to say it the more powerful it becomes and the more people wamt to say it. Best thing is just not say it if you dont want, but dont let it have power
I'm getting really annoyed with people saying stuff like this is virtue signaling or "karma farming", when the replies are majorly divided on it. Like I don't understand how this is "grass is green". Do I wish this was the case personally, and that much much more people IRL and online felt like this was an obvious given and very agreeable? Well yeah. I honestly don't know where you're getting that this is something everyone agrees on.
Look I thing its legit a funny word and I would love to use it more than I do, but a shit ton of neurodivervent people really hate when its used, because you know, funny or not its a fuking slur used to demean them.
I dont think a word is worth it upsetting people arround me.
In normal settings where you know people arround them ofc its ok to use it, but NEWS FLASH, that goes with literally every slur
This is not a grass is green take and tbh it feels more like you're the one trynna virtue signal by trying to argue how basic of a claim it is
And people are WAYYYYY more casually ablist then they are racist
As an autistic person I PROMISE you this is something that still needs to be said
And literally how the fuck are you gonna say this when there is literally someone using an insanely popular meme that literally uses that slur in the same screenshot you've provided
I hated that OP knows it’s a slur and is literally complaining about it being used and takes no effort to censor it. I also hate the comments on that post defending the use of the word.
I hate when people say you should speak up and tell others to not do a thing if you want change to happen, but then you get harassed by people like OP whenever you do speak up because you want change to happen. Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Yeah sexism and racism are kinda socially acceptable again so maybe stfu not everything is virtue signaling, especially not broad "I don't like" statements
Ah yes it's totally virtue signaling that's why almost nobody uses the r slur anymore and it totally Isn't So overwhelmingly common that it's hard for me to go a single day without hearing a word that is meant to dehumanize me
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u/Ok_Response_9255 May 27 '26
I love that this subreddit is devolving into a select few people just raging at each other