OK, I hope my question doesn’t get misunderstood, I can see how that could happen.
Just a product of overthinking.
Idea is that we can live fairly easily even with some diseases/disorders which could be-life threatening. Many of these are hereditary.
Since modern medicine increases our survival capabilities, the “weaker” individuals can also survive and have offsprings that could potentially inherit these weaknesses, and as this continues it could perhaps leave nearly all people suffering from such conditions further into future.
Does that sound like a realistic scenario? (Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves along with the environment first…)
natural selection does not choose whats best overall, just those that can reproduce. steinmetz was a hunchback cripple dwarf who was the actual intellectual powerhouse behind GE and responsible for much of our quality of life in the modern age.
I never want to hear anyone say again that “nobody calls someone a ‘cripple’ anymore”. Perhaps consider this somewhat less grotesque alternate phrasing: “Steinmetz was a person who experienced significant and debilitating disability”.
That’s not only an incorrect understanding of natural selection, i’d add that Steinmetz chose not to reproduce. If he hadn’t been the topic of your next sentence, I wouldn’t have felt the need to emphasise his personal agency. Or his existence as a person
I know he chose to not have kids and the phrasing I used has been used with him in particular forever to emphasize the extreme challenges he had to deal with. Its great you like a certain more generic phrasing which could be applied to anyone.
If you wanted to emphasise the challenges he dealt with, adjectives for his physical appearance were not a good choice. The challenges he would have dealt with may have included chronic pain, limited mobility and discrimination. You could even have said he suffered from kyphosis. But words which have been frequently intended to be derogatory don’t do much to create a sense of empathy.
And it’s nice to see disability being normalised, even if that wasn’t your intent.
where do you get cripple is a physical appearance description? do video game thieves use differentialy abled strike? ten years from now you will have folks say using disability or disabled makes you worse than hitler. the words only have deragatory meaning to those who have decided they are such.
Even if we ignored the entire history of the word cripple, it still would be remarkable to not consider hunchback or dwarf as physical descriptions. Given that your next question references video games and then we fall down Godwin’s slippery slope, I’m not convinced you’re honestly engaging with the concept of connotation.
Yes, and when the people who have to live with the consequences of discrimination tell you that you’re speaking in the same way as those who have discriminated against them, it’s worth considering. Even momentarily.
Have a great day, I’m going to go be a cripple elsewhere now. Nah, just kidding, it will still be my couch. Just not this thread.