So I'm doing some thinking-in-progress about a word usage I've notice increasingly often in leftist tweets/podcasts: the use of terms like "brain worms" or "brain rot" or "melted brains"

This is thought in progress, I'm not cancelling anyone or unilaterally declaring anything a slur, because that's not how this works - I'm just thinking through it. Because these usages make me feel Something.

They're used particularly with reference to conspiracy theories - QAnon, terfism, the particular kind of radically intransigent centrism that's terrified of Corbyn, etc. And with reference to spirals of radicalisation and loss of contact with reality.

Now. I am aware brain worms are not real. I know people do not have worms in their brain. This is not like the time worm twitter decided worms faced structural violence.

And I think the silliness of 'brain worms' might be why it's being used by people who are trying to avoid other explicitly ableist terms with a history of being used as terms of abuse. It's 'safe', because clearly nobody has actual brain worms.

However... I don't know. I don't know if it gets far enough away to be 'safe', at least in the world I'm trying to work towards. Because it's still situating moral and ethical and factual wrongness in the body.

It's still saying, these people are wrong, and as shorthand for that wrongness I'm going to talk about an unwanted disgusting thing being lodged in their brains, and therefore their brains not functioning properly

It's so hard because the ableist core here is the stubborn link between moral wrongness and bodily deficit or dysfunction, and that is *so* embedded in our language.

And it's also hard because as a form of letting off steam, as a form of comforting each other about the terrifying social and political landscape we're in, we reach for ways of saying "this is beyond. this is laughable/terrifying at the same time. this is extreme"

Anyway I would welcome good faith discussion on this (please read the whole thread lest I am taken out of context as an idpol purity leftist who's trying to cancel worms)