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The Fearless Flyers With Chris Thile: "Daddy, He Got a Cessna"

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b.d.7/11/2020 7:08:25 am PDT

re: #86 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

So, the debate here about whether to use the name “Karen” to describe an entitled forties or fifties something woman demanding particular preference because she (or he) believes they are simply entitled to it, is a slur, leaves me pondering. I don’t use the name that way, but language evolves. My own name of James is no longer used to mean “usurper,” that definition is deprecated. But it used to mean that. Not all Jameses.

It is regularly argued that:

“Boomer” used negatively doesn’t mean all boomers, particularly when a boomer says in self-defence “I don’t do that.”

“Me too” and “Time’s up” does not refer to all men, frequently when a man says in self-defence “I don’t do that.”

So I wondered where the pushback against the term “Karen” for the entitled middle-aged woman first became a complaint it was a slur, and started searching. It doesn’t refer to all Karens any more than complaints about Boomers don’t mean all Boomers or Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean fuque all those other lives.

The earliest on-line complaint I can find about Karen being an insult to all Karens and therefore people who use it are bigots comes from Julie Bindel, defending a friend named Karen when the name was used.

In case you don’t know who she is, she is a TERF, and since TERFs have nothing better to do in the time of the Trump virus, and they are funded by right-wing outrage machines like the Heritage Foundation, she latched on to the Karen meme to try to drive a wedge into discourse about what the name applied in that way represents.

The point is sealioning: By focusing on people named Karen who are not entitled assholes and promoting to them that they are being slurred by people who use the name to identify a set of entitled assholes, TERFs and their backers are successfully deflecting the debate from the conservative asshole to a debate about what to call them.

Has anyone asked Dick how he feels about the name Karen being adopted as a demeaning term?