Honestly, no setup can do the stupidity of this article justice, so lets just start cutting it up. If you're worried I'm taking things out of context, see for yourself, this asinine bullshit is exactly what I am presenting it as.
Following on yesterday’s profile of “cretin,” I thought I’d tackle “idiot” this morning.
What an honor to get a lesson from an expert in the field. The following couple paragraphs are linguistic word history shit, I don't care and neither do you, so we'll skip ahead to this:
So, we can see that “idiot” is ableist from several perspectives. It’s yet another word used to denigrate lack of intelligence, and it’s a word with a history as a specific diagnostic term. So, what can we use as an alternative to “idiot”?
How about "dipshit"? As in "are you seriously writing an article crying about the horrific slander behind the word 'idiot', you fucking dipshit"
One of the things about exploring ableist language is that it forces us to think about the actual meaning of a sentence; when you find yourself wanting to refer to someone as an “idiot” or something as “idiotic,” pause and think about the meaning of what you are trying to say.
Y'know, generally what I'm trying to say when I'm using the word idiot isn't very complimentary, and I can proudly say I usually have a pretty decent understanding of the overall theme I'm trying to convey with my word selections. When I'm at a restaurant trying to get the balsamic vinaigrette on my side salad, very rarely do I accidentally refer to it as a cat rapist.
“Idiot” is also used in rhetoric to talk about someone who is uninformed about an issue or someone who is unaware of the complexities of a topic. In this sense, a value judgment is being made about someone’s intelligence on the basis of the fact that this person is not familiar with the fine and nuanced details of everything on Earth.
What the fuck is this idiotic shit? This excerpt does not word for word say "it's unfair to think somebody is an idiot until you've very thoroughly grilled them on every topic imaginable", but you can certainly argue that is what it is implying. It's more or less saying "just because somebody doesn't know about X doesn't mean they aren't a scholar of Y". That in itself is an accurate statement, but not when it's blanketed to this extreme. Lets see how NO EXCEPTIONS strategy plays out in real life.
"Hello, person with pants on backwards trying to eat the side of a building. Are you aware that attempting to wipe your ass with a belt sander is a poor decision?"
"No, I did not realize that"
"Okay. I have lingering feelings you may be somewhat unintelligent but coming to that conclusion without interviewing you about astrophysics would not be justifyable, so allow us to speak for several more hours"
What the fuck does this have to do with disabled people anyway? Do disabled people get made fun of sometimes? Sure, but it's been a while since I've seen people run up to a guy in a wheelchair to go LOL IDIOT. For a while this article was just a boring entry on the history of a word, which hey, good for you I guess. Then it translated into a rally against "the I word", which, Jesus Christ. Get fucked.
Then, on January 1st this year, something the only reason I wasn't begging for earlier was due to not knowing about the existence of this stunning display of pointlessness (DON'T CALL ME AN IDIOT THOUGH, I KNOW OTHER THINGS) happened.
Dear Readers:
We agreed when we began that this site wouldn’t run indefinitely, that we would move aside when the time has come, and that time has come.
And nothing of value was lost, because they won't fucking get rid of it. In closing, lets read the description of the author.
s.e. smith (who used to appear under the pseudonym ‘meloukhia’) is a genderqueer, fat, white, lower middle class person with disabilities who lives in Northern California.
Okay. So "genderqueer" and "fat" are okay, but "idiot" isn't. What.
Long time coming on this one. Lets talk about Minecraft, Notch's bastard child that was never good, was never a game, and breaks more and more every day. Let's talk.
Minecraft was originally developed as a fun little project by Notch. It, for some unfathomable reason, became immensely popular quite quickly. Why? Why did this happen?
Because in Minecraft, you can do ANYTHING! Anything, meaning, of course, you can build shit with horrendous looking pixel blocks. How exciting. There are also elements of other things, but they're so beyond insulting in how half assed and broken they are, they really should be taken out of the game.
But they can't be, because Minecraft is so completely devoid of content, they must stay. The "first person shooter" aspect, aka build a few stupid weapons and hack away in piss poor animation style at a small collection of things that have no A.I. whatsoever and just run at you even if they can't conceivably get to you, has to stay in the game, because without it, it's just a building program. A pretty shitty one, mind you.
So, instead, we have a building program with unspeakably bad "combat" in it, "combat" that is looked at as an annoyance and not a reason to play the game. That's really great.
Updates come infrequently. They rarely, if ever, address problems in the game, which are numerous. Notch rarely shows up to work, and thinks it's not only okay, but downright funny to post things on social networking sites like "too sick to work today", only to ask who wants to meet him downtown for some drinks several hours later. He's also freely admitted to forcing an update out the door so he could go home and play Portal 2 upon its release. How responsible. At least he's honest, I guess.
He was honest too when he recently decided the next big thing in Minecraft would be to include an addition that allows people to work with the software and improve it. Expand the game. Etc.
He expected people to pay money for this.
The Minecraft community, one of the most biased thumbs up brigades I have ever seen in my life, got pissed at this. So Notch said lol jk it's free. How gracious of you, allowing people to do your job for you for free.
I don't blame him for how he acts, mind you. I don't blame him for not giving a shit about this game. He doesn't need to, because the community rubber stamps this thing to a level that is outrageous. He'd actually be pretty stupid to try at this point.
It is "the best game ever". The music is "beautiful". The pigs are "so cute" (see above, ISN'T IT FUCKING ADORABLE). It doesn't matter. Frankly I gotta hand it to the guy, he's making a ridiculous amount of money off an unfinished piece of shit that isn't even a video game. If I was in the position he was that no matter what I did (or more commonly, didn't do) there were people saying PLEASE TAKE MY MONEY ALSO LET ME DO YOUR JOB PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, I probably wouldn't be busting my ass to improve the product too much either.
Look. I can see how this could briefly be fun with a few friends online, but that's it. Stop calling it the best game ever. It isn't. The 12 year olds telling you Halo 3 is the best game ever look significantly less retarded than you, and don't get me wrong, Halo 3 sucks. Halo 3 sucks a lot.
I didn't really have an exit strategy for this rant, so instead I'll just leave you with this. I think it kinda says it all.
Any of the Notch Defense Force members that read this will probably tell me to get a life. As a preemptive rebuttal to that, please see above video.