You don’t have to be mentally ill to be these things. Considering the type of people that rule our world
(
) it seems that the most well adjusted people in our society are not only more than capable of being this, it seems like a requirement.
So I am no longer comfortable using the word psychopath (or any other “dark triad” nonsense) to describe these types of people. These people aren’t struggling to function with a mental illness, they’re of the exact mindset that thrives in our backwards society.
However I’m struggling to think of a suitable replacement word that carries with it the same “This is serial killer coded shit” vibe that calling someone a psychopath carries (and associating such a thing with psychopaths is ableist so I don’t want to use the word in that way anymore)
Calling them ghouls, fascists or nazis doesn’t carry the same weight. What kind of word bests describes the casual, dangerous heartlessness of people without throwing the mentally ill under the bus?
demon
say it with as much disgust and venom as you can muster
prob bonus points as the target is likely a christian supremacist
ie: “You relish in grinding up the poor for your own gain. You don’t even pretend it’s bad, you enjoy it, you think it’s normal. You’re a demon, there’s no two-ways about it, and one day you’ll get what you deserve”
borderline sephiroth posting here but fuck it, the bounds of liberal civility really do let these freaks off scot free for demonic shit and they aren’t scared enough
Edit: formatting
I felt inspired to write a poem about this just now. Might be a bit rough around the edges.
The Demonic Impulse
With so-called holy furor
They abolish your freedoms
And relish in human suffering
Your agonies are their lullabiesThe impulse exists within most of us
The desire to see enemies laid low
Put in their place
For daring to resist ‘the obvious truth’It matters not which god you do it for
It matters not which master you serve
Or if you do it for no one at allIt is the path of demons
The path of cruelty
The path of treacheryWhen it becomes your agenda
To mete out the absolute
To define truth as your words alone
And disagreement as treasonWhen it becomes your right
To punish the punished
To torture the tortured
To ridicule that which you do not understandTo slide down the scale
And let contempt consume you
That they deserve your hatred
For not being youIt’s to plunge your humanity into the tarpit
To wrest it by the neck and hold its face beneath the threshold
To revel in the bubbles which rise to the surface
And to spit on its weakness when the last one popsYou pull it back up, lungs full of rot
Flesh seared and melded with the impulse
This is what you breathe now
This is what you feel now
This is what you are nowUnfit for power
Unfit for polite society
You murdered the human within
And joined the ranks of the DemonsAnd so now we ask each other
Huddled amidst ourselves
What is to be done about the devils
Who seek a thousand thrones sewn from our facesWhat is to be done
When you try to act
Like what you’ve done
Is normalWhat is to be done
When you continue trying to pretend you’re human
When the stench of your dead, rotted soul
Wafts in with every word you belchThe vile contempt you hold
For all that is living and good
The very concept of goodness in your mind
Has been unrecognizably disfiguredFuck you.
We’ve given you a billion chances
To keep your disgusting mouth closed
Before we came to the foregone conclusion
That you’ll get what’s coming to youOne way or another
IIRC They say the Antichrist will appear to people as a godly person, right?
I’m tossing around an idea where the Great Satan is the Dragon spoken about in Revelations. Trump is the beast of the West (had a head injury, mouth flows with blasphemies, has power granted to him by the Dragon), and AI is the beast of the Earth (it’s literally made of minerals from the earth, it will make the world and all the people in it worship the first beast). The war being “waged against the saints” is actually the war waged against the Axis of Resistance, the fire he makes come down from heaven is air strikes, the miracles he deceives with are AI slop, the “Mark” is face ID if they don’t just lean into it and chip us.
Turning the Evangelical obsession with Armageddon on its head. Rub it in their fucking faces. 10He that leads into captivity shall go into captivity: he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.
Whenever I heard that all of god’s chosen would ascend unto heaven I assumed that meant they were all killed.
What my pastors always said is that the Antichrist would essentially have their own cult. It might be a political cult, but of course those are those nasty socialist liberals, not chuds.
Yeah I like this one. Works great if you almost hiss it
I second demon
meh i don’t think that or satanic etc have any weight when they say it either.
Related, but I’d also like a punchy non-ableist word for someone who is just monumentally and deliberately ignorant. Like, whatever the fuck Matt Yglesias is.
Perhaps ‘dense motherfucker’ is suitable
The Hiberno-English word “gobshite” (which I like to americanize as “gubshit”) is good enough for most cases, I reckon. “Nezzie” is the idiosyncratic one I like to use in my inner monolog, but it’s pretty opaque, coming from Russian “ne znáyu” (“I don’t know”).
If I were to make up some less opaque but still idiosyncratic words on the spot, then I guess “plug-ear” would work — we love a good “cutthroat compound”, do we not? Or if we want to get more vulgar than that, then “earfuck” or “earfucker” would take the finger as a phallic symbol and crudely liken these people constantly going
to them fucking their own ears.I dunno, it’s something to riff on, at least.
Deeply unserious
Garlic hater
Cartoon villain
Satanmaxxer
Hell builder
One way brain
Paid floating head
Underpaid floating head
Unpaid floating head
BioLLM
Onionvore
Fukuyama acoylyte
One Way Brain rocks, thanks for that one
inhuman
Early in the genocide i called “israelis” inhuman and my partner got in an hours long argument with me that their actions are actually very human and how dehumanizing people is bad even if they’re the worst people alive. I wonder what she thinks now though.
I don’t believe dehumanizing people is bad from some moral standpoint, or is somehow inherently ‘fascistic’, but I believe it clouds our analysis. These monsters are human. That’s material reality. Humanity isn’t some pure superior condition that only some human beings obtain. Systematic forces make fellow humans act like this. And make no mistake, this is not a call for mercy, nor misanthropic. It’s a rejection of the mainstream moral that all human life is unconditionally valuable, and the lazy coping mechanism of dehumanization that arises when we want to justify the removal of “human rights” from a human. IDF soldiers are people, and because of their social role, it’s important to kill them.
This clip from a documentary on the '43 Group (starting 17:19) makes an important, related remark about how delusion shapes action:
The fascists were victim of their own propaganda. For years, they’d created this image of the Jew as the little shopkeeper, the little tailor. They hadn’t reckoned on the Jewish ex-servicemen […], they didn’t recognize these people as Jews. And suddenly they came up against these guys, they never knew what hit them. They couldn’t change their point of focus. These weren’t the Jews they had in mind.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think insults tend to have that ableist skew, turns of phrase however (eg ‘they ain’t seeing heaven’) can be evocative without the ableist connotations imo.
Describing someone’s actions nakedly (such as: murderous, manipulative, incurious, gullible, cowardly and so on) feel more appropriate and truthful than the ‘innate’ descriptors like the ones you said you want to get away from (which I think is where the ableism is rooted in)
Parasite is my goto. Vampire might also work, but they are romanticized to all hell.
Vampire and cryptlord I’ve been using lately too. Not even to be mean necessarily it just rolls off the tongue and fits.
I agree with the other commenters who say phrases are better.
With single words, for it to have punch it has to be uncommonly used like a slur or a “smart” word.
Slurs aren’t an option for obvious reasons and most “smart words” fall short because no one knows what they mean (the exception are words like “ingrate” which vaguely sound like a slur but are actually just “smart words”).
Even with phrases, it can be tricky. Quips like “fatherless behavior” are funny even amongst those with a dad sized hole in their heart- but you risk hurting people all the same.
One thing that works for me is to make uncomfortable comparisons:
- My contemporary that watches mass shooting videos a little too often isn’t “evil”, he’s entertained by cannibalism.
- Your coworker isn’t a pedo for liking loli, they’re someone with an “Epstein-like fascination for little girls”.
Being laughed at ostensibly can be worse than being called any slur, I like the above examples because they have a pretty good chance of igniting laughter in a group setting. Getting other people in the room to clown on your target is a quick way to shut them down. And the pain of social ostracization is one that lingers for a long time.
I assumed “featherless behavior” was a stand-in for the n-word. At least that’s how I’ve seen it used. Similarly to how TikTok users would say “basketball people”.
“featherless behavior”
behold a man!First off, funniest shit I’ve seen all week. But why the desecrated animals?
deleted by creator
Then desecrate your grave.
Ok I see that we are operating at different layers of irony; my apologies. I have no idea why that emoji exists.
Thank you for your acknowledgement.
I keep coming back to Fanon’s observation, that the colonial situation dehumanizes the colonizer. They’re ontologically evil, at the core of their being they are creatures that have made themselves inhuman so that they can benefit from colonization and imperialism.
Isn’t the quote you’re thinking of from Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, not Fanon?
They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.
Yeah, I probably got some wires crossed, but Fanon also talks about this in The Wretched of the Earth:
National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it— individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank — decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless.
We could go on to portray the rise of a new nation, the establishment of a new state, its diplomatic relations and its economic and political orientation. But instead we have decided to describe the kind of tabula rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization. What is singularly important is that it starts from the very first day with the basic claims of the colonized. In actual fact, proof of success lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out. This change is extraordinarily important because it is desired, clamored for, and demanded. The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colons, the colonists.
But, these two “species” aren’t immutable:
The people who in the early days of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manichaeanism of the colonizer—Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel —realize en route that some blacks can be whiter than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the population giving up their privileges and their interests. The people realize that there are indigenous elements in their midst who, far from being at loose ends, seem to take advantage of the war to better their material situation and reinforce their burgeoning power. These profiteering elements realize considerable gains from the war at the expense of the people who, as always, are prepared to sacrifice everything and soak the national soil with their blood. The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building another system of exploitation. Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on one side and the good on the other.
The idyllic, unreal clarity of the early days is replaced by a penumbra which dislocates the consciousness. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a black or Arab face. They cry treason, but in fact the treason is not national but social, and they need to be taught to cry thief. On their arduous path to rationality the people must also learn to give up their simplistic perception of the oppressor. The species is splitting up before their very eyes. They realize that certain colonists do not succumb to the ambient climate of criminal hysteria and remain apart from the rest of their species. Such men, who were automatically relegated to the monolithic bloc of the foreign presence, condemn the colonial war. The scandal really erupts when pioneers of the species change sides, go “native,” and volunteer to undergo suffering, torture, and death.
These examples defuse the overall hatred which the colonized feel toward the foreign settlers. The colonized welcome these men with open arms and in an excess of emotion tend to place absolute confidence in them. In the metropolis, stereotyped as the wicked, bloodthirsty stepmother, numerous and sometimes prominent voices take a stand, condemn unreservedly their government’s policy of war and urge that the national will of the colonized finally be taken into consideration. Soldiers desert the colonialist ranks, others explicitly refuse to fight against a people’s freedom, are jailed and suffer for the sake of the people’s right to independence and the management of their own affairs.
Decolonization effectively dissolves the two species, making them into a single humanity again.
Reading Fanon has been something I wanted to do for a while now (I can’t read much due to a brain injury) but this is compelling me more, that is an excellent analysis
“Satans” or “shayateen” is where my own inner monolog tends to go. Or sometimes I’ll say “shaitans” or even the double plural “shayateens”. I also sometimes call those types of people KESS-kə-SAYZ (spelling varies) in my inner monolog, but given that that’s a reference to the song “Psycho Killer” maybe it inherits ableist baggage from that song? Not that I’d expect anyone but myself to use such a term, anyways.
Edit: “Alex DeLarge types” or “droogs” are some more terms I use.
Predator is a good one. The only reason groomer is so firmly in right wing vocabulary now is because their feelings were hurt with it first.
Evil and cruel fit the bill
I feel like those words don’t really carry weight anymore.
Learn to put appropriate level of disgust into your speech, skill issue
People think them childish, but that’s because murican nuance brain, they are perfectly legible words
you can fit a lot of venom into the word “monster”
I shall employ a lightening machine to create the proper ambiance when saying them
Depends like if you are trying to hurt someone in front of you (then truth works better anyway), behind the screen (unknowable 50% chatbot, who doesn’t care about words), gossiping about third person (legibility is important again) or third person on social media (being nicer there is more of a plus i think), only one on one i can see some value in being inventive
bourgeois?
Call them what they are - supremacists
asshole
I feel like any derogatory term for someone who should be shunned and made to feel lesser that doesnt have racist or exist connotations has been used as an ableist insult cause that’s what people has left. So while some may feel this way, I do try to avoid terms where the literal meaning is ableist. I call these people freaks very often, etymologically a freak is an overly capricious person, which later led to it being used to describe a capriciously obsessive person and then broadened into a term for a hateful circus act. The adjective Disgusting gets passed around alot in my speech, I feel it fits the bill.nicely. I use monsters and ghouls a lot cause the bill fits. They arent hot enough to be demons. I don’t think Butcher gets thrown around enough. I generally make it up kn the spot to suite whichever loathsome fuck i have the the displeasure of being aware of. Loathsome fuck was on the spot for example. When seeing how much impact a word has, try it out loud. Be poetic. Or anti poetic, ‘loathsome fuck’ is a decent example. It sounds like a star wars alien name, and those all sound like slurs. Do a 5 dollar word followed by a really childish insult and you’ve got the best combo generally. Just don’t go 2010s reddit and call people Incandescent Dunderheads. Informative adjective followed by a swear word. Ricky from trailer park boys herd it right. Just call someone what they are doing followed by Dick. Security guy bothering you? Security dick, sometimes describing the kind of dick someone is tskes a paragraph but the summary can hurt.
Geek seems to get under people’s skin in a weird way. Same with weenie
I thought maybe sociopath, but looking it up I find it IS a medical condition.
Unfortunately culturally the words that resonate with the most power are ableist. You don’t find the other words to generate the same feeling because we’ve culturally turned people’s ailments into our regularly used pejoratives; other words that aren’t ableist don’t strike the same because of culture.
Sociopath and psychopath while once used as medical designations are now considered to be slurs for cluster B personality disorders. People use them interchangeably, doesn’t help the actual DSM designations are asocial personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder
