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Would you rather be illiterate or have no legs?
(beehaw.org)
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Would you rather post a ridiculously offensive question or just keep your thoughts to yourself?
What's offensive about the question? Legitimately asking, in case I'm just ignorant at the moment.
The hell do you think you're going to learn by asking other ignorant people?
If you want to understand what it is like to have a given disability, search out materials written by and for people who have experienced those disabilities. If you get a chance to ask a disabled person about how that disability affects them, without being a boring, insensitive, dehumanising dickhead, do so.
Don't ask a bunch of people without those disabilities to debate which would be most awful. And do not pretend it's about educating yourself when you're addressing your question to people who are mostly as clueless as you are. You're not going to learn anything useful at all and you can't possibly have imagined you would. You're just adding to the mountains of awful dehumanising bullshit that is already out there.
I feel like you've just projected a lot of your own context onto OP's question. I think I understand what you're getting at, but there's a of anger in there that feels misplaced.
You understand what I'm getting at but you don't think it's worth getting angry about?
Yeah, sure.
Let me rephrase:
When I try to read between the lines of your unnecessarily aggressive rant, I believe what you're getting at is that the question could be perceived as being insensitive to those that cannot read or are missing limbs.
I however think that you're communicating in a manner that displays very little control over your emotions, and a penchant for theatrics, and you are loading a lot of your own context onto a question that lacks it.
I don't know who the hell you are, but I think you're great.
Can you hear yourself?
You may be illiterate, or have no legs, or neither, and be offended by the question. You feel your feelings and nobody can tell you they are valid or not, regardless on their opinions of those feelings.
It's not fair for you to decide for everyone that this is objectively offensive. It's patronizing. People who are illiterate or have no legs have their own thoughts and feelings that are just as valid as yours, and you don't get to speak for them or anyone except yourself. They may or may not be offended, and that is not a choice you get to make for them.
It's great that you are concerned for those people and have empathy - I believe, or at least hope that we all do - but nobody can speak for them but themselves. I think that is part of the reason for the pushback you have received in this thread.
OP is not asking people who are affected by these disabilities to talk about their experiences. He is asking randoms to discuss which is worse, from a position of near total ignorance, for entertainment.
I understand that.
Would you agree that the question isn't making light of either, though? It's not making fun of people in either situation.
I would argue that the question makes us pause and consider what difficulties people who are in either category must experience on a daily basis. How often does the average person with legs consider accessibility challenges? How difficult would it be to be illiterate in today's world? OP's got us empathizing here and having a healthy discussion. At least that's how I see it.
For some reason I cannot see your post in context or see it on the thread. So I don't know exactly what you're responding to.
But the question absolutely is making light of it. It doesn't have to make fun of people to be making their lives harder.
How does having people imagine what it's like do anything other than reinforce stereotypes? On a very quick skim I can see people saying illiteracy would be fine because it's so easy to learn to read. And others saying they've had to spend time in a wheelchair so they reckon they'd be fine without legs. Shut the fuck up, all of you. Jebus.
There's been quite a lot of output from disabled people speaking out against this kind of context-free 'empathising'. Most recently due to some exhibit that has people walk around in the dark so they can 'experience' blindness. They can't. They never will.
Disabled people don't need a bunch of randoms cod-empathising in the middle of a bunch of other randoms speking their branes. They can speak for themselves. And they do. If only the rest of us thought they were actual human beings worth listening to, and could shut the fuck up for long enough to hear them.
My reply was on your comment here (don't know if linking will work or not) https://feddit.uk/comment/1959414
I think I get your point. Nobody who hasn't experienced these things will ever understand what it's like. And no amount of imagining what it's like will ever come close to living it.
Speaking for myself here, I think at least trying to fathom the challenges is better than never even thinking about it. Awareness is better than ignorance. I agree with you that it would be better to hear about the real experiences of people who actually live with these challenges than randoms taking guesses. I don't think it's all bad though, and it's ok if we disagree about that.
Of course its better to think about it. And you don't have to think very hard to realise that pulling the answers straight out of your own brain is not going to give you anything useful to think about.
I've had people chastising me in this thread for discouraging the OP from educating himself, and others chastising me because he clearly wasn't trying to educate himself.
I do not know why this point is so fucking difficult to grasp or why you're all scrabbling so hard to excuse it. The slogan is "nothing about us without us" FFS.
That's a ridiculously offensive question. What if Wesker is hearing-impaired?
Yes, that's one of likely many differences between us.
I can't hear anything over your ranting
You sound fun
I think you're maybe reading too much into it... pretty sure it was just intended to be a hypothetical for discussion, not an attempt to learn about disabilities. It's like, "Would you rather have unlimited money but be perpetually depressed, or always be happy but be perpetually broke?"
If someone who actually has no legs came in and offered their opinion, that'd be a bonus, but it doesn't strike me as the intended purpose of the post.
If there's anyone here who actually has no legs who is offended by this, I'd be interested to hear from them, but... if you have legs (because you're clearly literate), are you sure you're not just taking offense by proxy where none should exist or was intended?
Exactly. How the hell you constructed the rest of your thoughts around that basic fact is beyond me.
I mean, you seem to have constructed your objection around a completely different premise, so... if this is a basic fact, than what is your objection, really?
I don't know what the fuck is going on in your head but my objection is to dehumanising discussions of disabled people. How is that so very hard to understand?