this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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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.