• I thought I had that covered under "true ones will be either a source of pride or shame", but your amendment certainly clarifies it.

    There probably is third class of attempted insult - the use of derogatory terms about perceived defects in the target of the insult which are true but neither shameful nor a matter of pride. Taking a trivial example, somebody might call me "four-eyes". In the commonly accepted meaning of the term, this is a truth (I do wear spectacles), but I'm not ashamed of being myopic (I'd wear contacts if I wanted to hide it, or buy LASIK to fix it) but I'm also not proud of it. Nonetheless, it's hard to find it offensive. I'm short-sighted, I wear goggles, so fucking what? Of course, with the less common and more disabling afflictions, it takes rather more strength of character to shrug off such comments, but I know from people I've met that it can be done. For my mother's former pupil, now friend, who was born with Cerebral Palsy, which do you think was quicker and easier; to re-educate every prick who might ever call her a spastic, or to learn to say "Yes, and so fucking what?"

    Yeah, ok, there are ways you can man up and live with anything that life decides to call you.
    But, fuck it, I want to live in a great fucking world where we are all just nice to each other and occationally try and make other people's lives a bit less shit.

    So, I fucking bitch about people being a bit stupid and a bit sexist in a medium where they can fucking avoid it, hoping that it changes the way the whole god damned world thinks.

    so fucking sue me.

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