Stuff like "stupid, idiot, moron, dumb," you know the ones. If you’re insulting someone for their shitty garbage beliefs and all you can manage to come up with is ways to insult their intelligence, appearance, or other aspect about them that has nothing to do with their cruelty and shittyness, you should maybe reevaluate.
Just saw a thread on here where a user was stubbornly refusing to adjust their language when another user politely pointed out that it was harmful to our comrades as well, and the person refusing was massively upvoted and the comrade trying to explain why it was harmful was downvoted. Thought we were better than that
I'm not calling anyone out, just wanted to make a post explaining my feelings on it and that when stuff like that happens (not the intelligence based insults, I know its hard to switch, but getting insulted for asking people to avoid them) it hurts and makes me feel less welcome here </3
Using words like “You’re being ignorant” or “That’s a cruel belief” is actually more effective than just going “lmao idiot”.
If those are the words you actually mean to convey I'd say use them instead :)
Edit: if the reception this post got isn't a good proof that this is something this community needs to grapple with, I don't know what is.
Any term we use as insult must refer to a property and all properties define subsets. There is no descriptive word of any kind that would not refer to the group of people having that property.
See examples: 'blue eyed', 'hat wearing', 'lonely', 'impoverished', 'elated', these all refer to groups of people having that property.
I don't know how I would define the difference between slur and insult; but I would have to think about that, and is probably much like the definition of a 'game', I'll know it when I see it.
But more than anything, it is a category not worth rigidly defining. Who cares if it is a slur? What matters is the effect these words have on people.
And even if I managed to change your mind that 'stupid' is in fact a slur by definition, that is likely not enough for you to stop using that word anyway, at least it shouldn't be.
TERF is arguably a slur by your definition, it refers to a specific group of people, am I going to stop using it? fuck no.
Again, my argument here is that this whole line of thinking is unproductive.