Let's talk about Vice Magazine

or is it that it's more easily co-opted because they're not able to defend themselves?

That's true too -- although there are varying degrees of retardation. Some "retards" are normal, functional people; some of them have fairly decent cognitive skills and might very well understand what "retard" means. But there isn't much they can do to stop the epithet from being used.

jbr, if we accept that this word is commonly used b/c the ramifications are far less severe than if we were to use, for example, the n word with similar abandon, i think we could probably draw some ugly conclusions about society in general...

Apparantly they should get their arty friends to publish articles in a magazine that make reference to their retard friends.

Vice makes me laugh, which is more than most things do these days.

I 'love' a white guy living in Japan telling black guys in New York that they're wrong to object to these white guys using the word 'nigger' and trying to act like the black men are being patronising! Hilarious irony!

My best gay friend likes and uses the word faggot, but the wrong person uses it the wrong way, in the wrong tone, he's liable to break them in half.

(actually I just posted that because I wonder where I fall)

[also I tried to call you a "f-g" as a joke right here and I couldn't do it, not evern doubly or triply ironically or whatever the hell it would be at this point].

sterl, if you have to ask you'll never know, etc etc.

so wouldn't that sort of cycle be eventually repeated if the arguments momus espouses hold true -- and wouldn't the underlying message of these mass-marketed uses of these words, then, also mutate into an affirmation of already-existing prejuidices that are held by the majority of americans, for the simple purpose of making as many dollars as possible?

i don't know how this fits with maura's statement but i don't want the dream lost forever. (her coochie is still burned into my memory.)

Uh anyway, back to Vice...I don't think that made any sense.

also, as maura just brought up in conversation with me, it's equating purchase with a creative act which is one of the things that's made american culture so fucking vacuous to begin with.

second, wouldn't you argue though that the original sentiment and the mass-marketed version of it have two very different public connotations? this is important, because the provocations that these word-images would have on their viewers were essential to their being scrawled in the first place.

also, a hypothetical: if a girl bought this mass-marketed shirt and wore it to school unadorned, and then ran into 1 or 3 or 5 people wearing that shirt in the same way, since it is, after all, mass-marketed, how would her 'empowering' wearing of the shirt come across? so much of the way messages are looked at is rooted in context -- would this 'more empowered' 11-year-old then change the rest of the shirt's context (including, perhaps, the shirt itself) to make herself and her intentions stand out?

(spoken in a non-normative tone of voice)

I also read way too many Japanese fashion magazines.

(unless bc meant my beat digger analogy which i also thought was on point)

but Vice started in Canada!

haha Dave Q to thread!

To relate this back to Vice, it's perfectly fine for them to ironically fling epithets back and forth under the guise of changing the world but they should be cognizant of the fact that the majority of the people who wander across them aren't going to buy their interpretation and be prepared to deal with the consequences of it (ie, my family beating your ass).

(and then they all lez up)