Same shit happens every time anything like this happens. During the occupy wall street stuff, a video came out of a cop bumping into a protester with his motorcycle. Obviously an aggressive and unwarranted move, but it was barely a nudge, and the protester collapsed in a heap screaming like a slasher movie bimbo. It was so obviously a dive. But still, anyone on the left had to scream police brutality and speculate on the severity of the protester's injuries, while anyone who pointed out that it wasn't that bad was labeled as a bootlicker, and "defending the cops". Same shit, just the roles are reversed from time to time.
Would be really interesting to find out a lot of lefties in red states had guns that were off the books... Don't look at me, I lost mine in an unfortunate boating accident.
I think you misunderstand a little... I am someone that grew up riding the short bus. I have been on the receiving end of this kind of ableism all my life, even before I knew it was a thing or what to call it. That's why it pisses me off so much anytime some person or forum or whatever discourages use of specific words - it's not helpful and often tends to backfire and hurt the people you're so valiantly trying to defend.
I disagree, though I know I'll get roasted for it... Landlords do serve a purpose to a point. Not everyone wants to own property. Owning property ties you to a particular place, makes it difficult to leave. If you know you want to stay in an area for the rest of your life, or even just the next 10 years, absolutely, you should be able to buy, and not being able to is a societal failure. But if you don't know where you want to spend the rest of your life, you still need shelter now, and renting provides that, and when you decide to go somewhere else, it's relatively easy. One of my bigger regrets in life was feeling pressured to buy a house in 2005... Just in time for the subprime mortgage crisis. I had a traditional mortgage, but nonetheless, my house went from $150k to <50k in months. I was stuck. Couldn't sell without coming up with extra money to pay off the mortgage, but I wasn't in as bad shape as some people, I could afford the payments, so I couldn't justify walking away, just had to wait for it to rebound, which took another 5 years roughly. Had I been renting, I would have been able to leave much more easily.
(If an owner is so disconnected from their property that they don't notice someone living there that they didn't allow, have they really lost anything?)
I think you have it backwards - calling someone a slur doesn't make the negative association, society as a whole has already decided those traits are negative, and as a result, we use them as slurs. Stopping people from using hurtful words does not fix the problem, I think it lets some people self-righteously think they're helping, but it doesn't really do anything.
We've seen that happen with using "gay" as an insult - society has shifted over the years, so that being gay is no longer seen as a bad thing (at least not so much so as it was in the 90s, we still have some room for improvement...) therefore it has lost its power as an insult. Somebody calls me gay today, I don't really care - it's inaccurate, but it doesn't hurt me any. And because it doesn't hurt me, they're not going to use it as an insult, because that's what they're going for, and it's not effective.
But certain classes of people will always be looked down on, so those traits will always be used as insults. If society makes it unacceptable to use those words, assholes will continue to use them when they think they can get away with it, or find new words. Think of how many words there are for "mentally deficient". Many of those words were the clinical term for specific disabilities until they fell out of favor after being used as insults. Stupid is one, as is idiot, moron... The only real difference is recency.
But sometimes you want to convey the backwardness, or that something is a product of a past that should be let go... is it still a slur if you're not using it as a slur? Kind of like cracker, if you're using it to refer to a white person it's a slur, but nobody is going to stop you from calling a saltine or a cheese-it a cracker because that's what they are... Or do we have to call them mass produced unleavened bread products?
Tell that to the high voltage power lines I go for bike rides under... There's no visible ionization, but I can feel tingling in my hands and sometimes nuts...
The problem is "path of least resistance" implies that there is only one path, which laymen tend to take literally. I go for bike rides along a canal which also has high voltage power lines running above it. If I hold my handlebars just right, with my hands just barely touching the metal of my brake levers, the (I assume) corona discharge gets rather painful. "Path of least resistance" seems like it should be confined to the wire, but in fact includes ~100 feet of air between wire and ground... And me.
Same shit happens every time anything like this happens. During the occupy wall street stuff, a video came out of a cop bumping into a protester with his motorcycle. Obviously an aggressive and unwarranted move, but it was barely a nudge, and the protester collapsed in a heap screaming like a slasher movie bimbo. It was so obviously a dive. But still, anyone on the left had to scream police brutality and speculate on the severity of the protester's injuries, while anyone who pointed out that it wasn't that bad was labeled as a bootlicker, and "defending the cops". Same shit, just the roles are reversed from time to time.