It's true that developmentally disabled is a vaguer term than mentally
retarded. Perhaps that's the reason that it's been substituted. If you use the
term, "mental retardation", it's very specific. However, it, too can be misused
inadvertently. I saw, while doing my adoption work, many situations in which
babies and toddlers who had been in orphanages, especially those in Eastern
Europe and Russia, appeared to be mentally retarded or actually,
developmentally disabled, in several ways when they were first placed with
their adoptive families. But this was most often a temporary condition which
would disappear, once the child was in a normal family situation and had good
nutrition. But Russia officially categorized all of those children in
orphanages as neurologically disabled. Every kid had a horrible sounding
diagnosis. The problem was to figure out which children did, and which did not,
have disabilities. As for the word, "nigger", it's a word that I've heard and
read black people use in reference to each other. Certainly, it's not
acceptable for people to use in conversation. But if one is quoting what one
has read or heard another person say, one isn't using the word in an
objectionable manner. Would I use it in any manner in a racially integrated
social situation? Absolutely not. But if Amy Goodman is reporting a news story
and the cops used it, I don't think she should use a substitute phrase. I'm
also tired of her saying in every broadcast, "The following video may be
upsetting", or whatever the phrase is. Just like I think it's ridiculous for
NLS to warn us about strong language and explicit descriptions of sex in book
descriptions. There was a time, of course, when such books weren't available to
us at all. But way before the general public was treated as if it might have a
nervous breakdown if it was shown violence, they were warming blind people
about violence and sex in the books they read, as if blind people were
children.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 9:39 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The War on Privacy
I have heard the term developmentally disabled, but I have never assumed that
it was the same thing as mentally retarded. After all, there are numerous
things that can go wrong in one's development that would lead to disability
even if mental retardation is one of them. As for that N word. I will have to
admit that I have an aversion to pronouncing it myself. That was an aversion
that I learned from a number of incidents, but one stands out to me. It was a
certain college class. I have told about this class before. I told about the
story of how I finally started calling myself an atheist rather than an
agnostic. It was a nontriditional class in which all the student desks were
pulled into a circle and we discussed issues. I used that N word. I thought I
was using it in an acceptable manner, that is, quoting someone else. And it was
someone else whom I thought I was making it clear that I considered a scumbag.
A black student got rather upset at me for uttering the word at all. Since it
was an interactive forum others asked him why he got so upset about it when I
had used it in the manner that I had. I don't clearly remember all he said and
even if I did it would be too long for me to repeat here, but the gist was the
history of the word and how offensive it is to hear a white person say it no
matter in what context it is said. Like I said, there were a few other
incidents too, but I learned that to be on the safe side I should never say
that word no matter what context it is in. For a long time I had no substitute.
It is really hard to talk about a word if you can't pronounce the word itself.
But then N word became popular and that finally allowed me to at least talk
about the word.
___
Emmett F. Fields “ Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not
exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an
attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly,
always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
” ― Emmett F. Fields
On 2/8/2021 9:15 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
I think that the latest acceptable term is, "developmentally
disabled", and perhaps if one is so afflicted, one might not comprehend
this fact? But this is just one example of the language police at work.
Coincidentally, I started reading a book last night which is newly on BARD,
but was written by James Baldwin in 1968. He is an absolutely fantastic
writer. This is a novel, but I think it has an autobiographical side to it.
At any rate, the title of Part One is "House Nigger". Thank God they didn't
edit it so that the narrator would say, "House N Word", instead.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 8:58 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The War on Privacy
The word retard simply means to make slow. For example, a coal truck
traveling to the point of picking up a load of coal will travel at a certain
speed. Once it has been loaded with coal its return journey will be at a
lesser speed. The load of coal has retarded the coal truck. In the realm of
psychology the term is qualified with the word mentally to indicate a
slowness of mental processes. That is, the phrase is mentally retarded even
though it is unclear that slowness is exactly what is going on in people with
the condition. Perhaps I should say conditions plural because the causes and
manifestation of the syndrome are variable. I remember when the phrase,
mentally retarded was perfectly acceptable even though it was still being
used as an insult. Most people could tell when it was being used insultingly
and when it wasn't. I remember back when I was an advanced placement college
student - that is, attending college classes while not having yet graduated
from high school - my advanced placement group took a tour of the West
Virginia Rehabilitation Center. It was located just a short distance from the
college, so we walked there. I don't remember why, but there were very few
clients or perhaps none in evidence at the time. Maybe it was during an
intersession, but I don't know. We just toured the facilities. We were shown
where prosthetic devices were fitted and where various classes were held and
so forth. We came to a room that was dedicated to training retarded people.
The tour guide, an employee of the rehab center, used the word retarded quite
freely. But then he did mention that if the clients were present at the time
he could not, of course, come in here and say that these were a group of
retarded people. I remember asking myself why not. After all, if that is what
they are then why keep it a secret from them? In fact, there used to be a
certain television commercial advertising the American Council of Retarded
citizens. I think that is the name. It featured a man who identified himself
as retarded and went on to praise retarded citizens as reliable workers. I
think that television commercial did come along well after I had my tour
though. Many years later I became a client of that rehab center myself. By
then things had changed. One did not dare utter the word retarded. The
clients who were afflicted by that particular malady were called slow
learners. Since all of us there had some kind of disability it was common to
ask a fellow client, What's your disability?
The slow learners openly admitted to being slow learners. There was one
exception that I remember. It was a woman who was obviously one of the slow
learners who insisted that she did not have a disability and that her field
counselor worked hard for her to get her into the center.
Well, I suppose it would have been pointless to have pointed out that she
would not have had a field counselor nor would have gotten into the rehab
center if she had not had some kind of disability. Nevertheless, it seemed
that among the people, clients or staff, who were not one of the slow
learners there was an understanding that one did not say anything to let them
know that they were slow learners even if they called themselves that. And
that is something else I have noticed all my life. If you have a disability
there is rarely any attempt to avoid talking about it. Personally, once I
became blind it seemed like the main topic of conversation when I met someone
new was my blindness. If someone is an amputee there seems to be no problem
with at least mentioning it to the amputee. The same goes for other
disabilities too.
But there is one disability that most everyone seems to try to keep it a
secret from the people who have it that they do have it. That is mental
retardation or slow learning, whichever you are going to call it. You don't
dare to mention it within hearing of the afflicted person. I suppose that
explains why the woman who thought that she didn't have a disability could
persist in thinking that. No one had ever told her. By the way, even though I
never counted it did seem that slow learner was the very most frequent
disability at that rehab center.
___
Emmett F. Fields “ Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not
exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an
attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly,
always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
” ― Emmett F. Fields
On 2/8/2021 3:28 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
I have some comments on this which I wanted to make when I read
Greenwald's post. For years, I have thought that the censorship of
unpleasant words is a mistake. Several years ago, we had a debate about the
subject on this list.
I think that the word in question was, "retarded". For decades, it
was a perfectly respectable word, used to describe people with
limited intellectdual functioning. Then, it began also being used as an
insult.
That was when it became a forbidden word. To me, that seems insane.
Now, apparently, it can't even be used ironically. So now, instead
of using one word to simply and easily describe a person with a
specific disability, we have to substitute a complicated phrase. I
remember when people began attempting to use complicated phrases in
order to avoid using the word, "blind". Somehow, that didn't stick,
even though people do use blindness as an insult as, "Even a blind
person could see that!". And on Democracy Now, each time they quote
a racist statement or describe something racist that the police say,
they substitute, "the N word" for the actual word. It's like if you
actually pronounce the word, it means that you are demonstrating your
hatred for black people, even though you're just reporting something
that someone else said. And if I hear one more person talk about how
college students need safe spaces, I'll vomit. At the same time that
our thoughts are being controlled and our speeched censored, our
society is becoming more and more predatory. I heard two podcasts
this morning, both describing economic entrapment of everyday people and
dozens of books about it are appearing on BARD.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 3:08 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The War on Privacy
The War on Privacy
Five years ago, official abuses of secrecy were the scandal. Today,
the scandal is you
Matt Taibbi
Feb 8
My colleague Glenn Greenwald hit the nail on the head this weekend
when he wrote about "tattletale journalism," in which media reporters
for the largest companies spend their time attacking speech, instead
of defending it. The miserable trend just reached its apex when
Taylor Lorenz - a dunce of historic proportions unleashed on the
world by the New York Times - attended an invitation-only Clubhouse
chat and not only reported that Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc
Andreesson used the word "retarded" in a discussion about the
GameStop uprising, but published the names and faces of those who
were guilty of being present and silent during the commission of this
heinous crime:
Lorenz was wrong on three counts. One, Andreesson never said the word.
Two, the person who did say the word was merely relaying that the
Reddit users betting on GameStop "call themselves the 'retard
revolution.'" Lorenz was confusing reporting on speech with actually
speaking, the same error that's led to crackdowns on videographers
like Jon Farina and Ford Fischer, punished for shooting raw footage
of people saying and doing supposedly objectionable things (a story mostly
uncovered by these same media priests).
Thirdly, WTF???? Private utterance of the word "retarded" is news? As
Greenwald points out, this would be joke behavior coming from a
middle school hall monitor. Such deviance-hunts however are now a
central concern of media reporters like Brian Stelter and Oliver
Darcy of CNN, Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC, and Mike Isaac,
Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel, and Lorenz at the Times. Somebody,
somewhere, is saying or thinking a bad thing, and this crew seeks the
rot out, with the aim of publicly shaming those individuals.
The subtext isn't hard to decipher. These people believe bad-think,
left unaddressed, results in Donald Trump being elected. Therefore,
as Chen and Roose put it in a chat last week, it's "problematic" to
countenance platforms that allow large numbers of people to assemble
in non-monitored, "shadow" social networks, where they can spread
"misinformation" and wreak, potentially, a "ton of havoc." Countless
stories have been written on the theme of what speech should be
"allowed," as if they are the ones who should be doing the allowing.
This is how we've traveled in just two and a half years from banning
Alex Jones to calling for crackdowns on all unmonitored or
less-monitored spaces, from podcasts to the aforementioned Clubhouse
to encrypted platforms like Signal and Telegram to Parler, even to
Substack, which ludicrously is beginning to come under fire as a purveyor of
unapproved thought.
Let's stipulate, for a moment, that these people are right, that
private spaces breed fascism and bigotry, because as William Blake
wrote, we should "expect poison from standing water," making
transparency the ultimate public virtue. Let's agree that all private
spaces must have their windows thrown open, so that New York Times reporters
can sit watching for transgressions.
I disagree with this creeptastic point of view, but let's admit it,
for sake of argument.
How do we square that belief with the attitude of these "reporters"
toward Wikileaks, or Edward Snowden, or the secret budgets of the
intelligence services, or our global network of secret prisons, or
our regime of secret National Security Letter subpoenas, or any of a
dozen other areas where official or corporate secrecy has expanded?
While self-styled heroes of anti-fascism at places like the New York
Times have been outing the likes of "Jules," "Fab," and "Chloe" for the
crime of listening to the word "retard,"
the exercise of actual political power has more and more become a
black box, and nobody in these newsrooms seems to care.
These culture warriors are collectively making a clear statement:
Personal privacy is dangerous, official secrecy is not. They seek
total transparency when it comes to our personal beliefs and
opinions, and oppose it for governments or tech monopolies.
Roughly five years ago, when we first started to see the outlines of
a new union between ostensibly left-wing intellectuals with
corporate-funded neoliberal politicians in both the Democratic and
Republican parties, the arrangement seemed to make little sense. At
most, the decision by politicians like Hillary Clinton to adopt the
language of campus intersectionality in campaign rhetoric seemed like
a temporary cynical gambit, a handy little bullshit-cloud for use in
discrediting a populist challenge in the form of the Bernie Sanders
campaign, whose army of "Bros"
were said to lack solutions to America's "real" problems:
Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton
We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges. We need
solutions and real plans for all of them. #DemDebate March 7th 2016
913 Retweets1,390 Likes
Years later, it's obvious the partnership was about more than
denouncing political opponents as racists, sexists, homophobes,
transphobes, or (in the case of Jeremy Corbyn) anti-Semites. The new
#Resistance politics marries aggressive interventionist foreign
policy and secret government with a strain of pseudo-leftist thinking
that despises privacy of any kind, as a hidey-hole for bigotry, sexual
violence, and "sedition."
It's a perfect cover story for propagandizing the expansion of the
surveillance state. We now take it as a given that we're surrounded
at all times by white supremacy and patriarchal oppression, which
curiously exists everywhere but inside the CIA, NSA, FBI, the banking
sector, etc. This belief system has given us a press corps that's
averted its eyes from institutional secrecy, becoming instead the
tattletale army Greenwald describes, obsessed with the sins of
private human interaction, a Junior Anti-Sex League brought to life.
Not long ago, liberal America was mortified by the revelations first
of Wikileaks, then of Snowden. A Pew survey in 2015 showed that 40
percent of the country was "somewhat" or "very" concerned that their
private communications had been violated. A third of Americans
reported changing their phone and Internet habits, and studies showed
significant drops in searches for terms like "al-Qaeda," "car bomb,"
"Taliban," "dirty bomb," and even "pandemic," as people worried they
would attract investigative attention.
There was initially a rush of public support for Snowden, just as
there had been for Chelsea Manning and even Julian Assange after
Wikileaks not only disclosed war crimes in Iraq, but began leaking
horrifying information about the behaviors of some of the world's
biggest companies - the dumping of toxic waste by Trafigura, broad
tax avoidance by Barclays and others, massive fraud in the Icelandic
banking sector during the financial collapse, etc. The people who
brought the Snowden story to light, i.e. Greenwald and documentarian
Laura Poitras, were granted the highest societal honors, with a
Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar. We even for a time saw momentum behind
bipartisan efforts to defund the national information police at the NSA.
What a difference a few years makes! In the wake of Trump's election,
the Podesta leak, the Russian interference story, Assange's
never-adjudicated sexual assault case, and other headlines, public sentiment
reversed.
Suddenly leakers are villains, and even genuine documents full of
true information are regularly christened "misinformation," if they
have the wrong political impact.
Civil liberties are now widely understood to be a canard, protecting
racists and disinformation agents, and high priests of journalism,
like Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll, are clear that free
speech has been "weaponized," especially in the form of information
that passes between individuals without the benefit of the media's
contextualizing efforts. As Greenwald notes, Coll went on TV to fret
that "our facts, our principles, our scientific method" cannot
compete with Facebook's unacceptably dangerous mission to "connect everybody
in the world."
Both Snowden and Assange are now denounced as foreign (and probably
Russian) agents, and efforts to let us know what might be going on
under the hood of governments, banks, and political parties are
decried as foreign interference, designed to destablize the country.
The Intercept, founded to publicize the Snowden material and
challenge officialdom, is often seen on the front lines in the
campaign against free speech, and it's also now forced out both
Poitras and Greenwald, who's regularly pilloried by mainstream
commentators as a Trump-lover, misogynist, and agent of Vladimir Putin.
We've seen something like this pattern before. Seymour Hersh won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for exposing war crimes at the Vietnamese
hamlet of My Lai. Four years later, when he broke arguably a bigger
story about a "massive, illegal CIA domestic intelligence operation,"
the reaction of many colleagues was to say he'd overreached. The
Columbia Journalism Review printed a piece by Senator J. William
Fullbright saying, "I have come to feel of late that these are not the kind
of truths we most need now."
Americans, said Fulbright, needed "stability and confidence" after
the Nixon years, and the media needed to exercise "voluntary restraint."
Collectively, the press decided not to pick up that story.
Stories about the expansion of official secrecy during the Trump
years similarly did not interest mainstream news organizations much.
We stopped worrying about the illegal use of counterintelligence
evidence in domestic criminal cases, were uninterested in government
assertions that American citizens do not have the right to know if
they've been targeted for "lethal action" (I was one of just two
reporters in the courtroom for a related lawsuit, in which the
plaintiff was not even entitled to know what federal agency the
government's lawyer represented), and magically lost our animosity
for Trump Attorney General William Barr, when his Justice Department
refused to allow Twitter or any other company to reveal how many secret FISA
orders they'd received.
Instead, our fears are more usefully directed now, toward other
members of the general public. We've been trained to think of once
cherished private spaces as breeding-grounds for bigotry and
incitement. Marriage is a haven for sexual violence. Parents are
transphobes. "Relatives" are biological trivia, as exemplified by the
story of the Massachusetts teen who turned in her parents for
attending the Capitol riot, triggering an outpouring of affection from
Tweeters desperate to step into the role of her "real"
family.
Rights to assembly are suspect, because open doors invite malefactors
in, as Jimmy Kimmel noted recently when he suggested (without any
evidence) that "Russian disruptors" were among those betting up
GameStop. We can't even permit certain individuals or groups to
continue communicating just because they have large, enthusiastic
audiences willing to support such relationships, as those free
assemblies might lack the aristocratic refinement to ensure adherence to
what Coll calls "our principles."
Thus this new generation of media cops exults in the firing of people
like New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, campaigns to get Spotify
to renounce the likes of Joe Rogan, and begs corporate daddies at
Comcast and Charter Spectrum to pull commercial competitors like Fox
off the airwaves. The press is supposed to challenge power, but the
current iteration has decided instead to be a most aggressive agent
of it. And they're just getting started.
