this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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Thorpe and now Cox... they really dropped the ball on vetting senators in 2022 it seems.
This is tangential, but it feels kinda weird where the "R word" is atm, seems like we can't decide if it's genuinely offensive or not. I have some social circles where saying it would be almost like saying homophobic/racist slurs, but other social circles that throw it around as a synonym of "idiot/lunatic". I'm almost afraid to ask at this point what the correct answer is/should be, but I think humans will be joking around about mental cognition for many generations to come, R-word or not.
Grossing up in the 90s and early 00s, saying “that’s gay” for something that sucked/was bad, and “that’s retarded” for something stupid/nonsensical were just common phrases amongst millennial kids.
Not saying that either should be acceptable nowadays (especially the former), but having a brain-fart and reverting to a phrase from Torre childhood can happen. Best we can do in that situation is to apologise, and move on.