The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, wanting to react to the too progressive wokism, thought of taking a dip in the past: in a decree of January 14, relating to the criteria for the evaluation of psycho-physical disabilities for the assignment of invalidity pensions, he re-examined an obsolete terminology to define disabled people or with cognitive problems of various types. These people are now called idiots, imbeciles or weak of mind, depending on the “degree” of difficulty. According to the president, it is time to return to calling things with their name, freeing themselves of the ridiculous euphemisms invented by the Wake culture.

A great linguist is not necessary to understand that the insulting words cannot be the correct term to define people, in the scientific field even! Milei’s speech is obviously inaccurate from every possible point of view, because the scientific community has long since given name to all these realities, which are then very different from each other: different types of disabilities, different types of deficit, syndromes etc. The only nomenclature to which we must follow is that of the scientific community: the words with which these people are defined in specialist terminology are neither petalose nor euphemistic, are technical terms, which is what should appear in an official document.

Milei is incompatible, but it is dangerous to associate it with reflections against wokismo

It is therefore not necessary to add much more on the words and intentions of this man, who has not so far distinguished himself for acts of great democracy. However, it is important to respond to this type of “reasoning”, because the battle against Wake culture exists, and should be a serious battle. Insulting people has nothing to do with having the courage to look at things as they are; This applies to both a social point of view, of course, because a human consortium that wants to be said to be civilly based on mutual respect of citizens; be from an exquisitely linguistic point of view. In fact, words like “idiot” are not denotative words: they are words that have a much stronger connotation than denotation, in reality.

“Your child is imbecile”

If me – in Italian as in Spanish – I say that a certain person is idiotic, it is Mongol, it is imbecile, any interlocutor will not think that I am referring to someone who has a disability or a cognitive deficit, but he will think he is insulting the person I speak of. This is because they are words that do not indicate, they do not denote, in fact, a contact person: “cat” indicates a domestic feline, “idiot” can be referred to anyone, even to the smartest person in the world, if for some reason I hate it and contempt. It therefore goes without saying that these terms cannot be adequate to indicate the physical and mental situation of a person. In the document attached to the new provisions there is also a sort of scale with the values ​​within which you are idiotic, or imbeciles and so on (it is incredible, but it’s all true); But it is not minimally accurate, as was immediately pointed out by the scientific community and by Andis herself (the National Agency for Disability) for which the document was drawn up. Can you imagine taking your child from a neuropsychiatrist and hear you say “we have the diagnosis: is your child imbecile”? Fortunately, it will never happen, because all possible associations of doctors and psychiatrists have arisen in front of this madness.

The fixation on words is always meaningless, on the one hand or on the other

The attempt by the Argentine president to pass this ignoble bizarre for a reaction to Wake culture can only succeed in a very polarized panorama and not at all accustomed to reasoning. The criticism that moves to wokism, in fact, is precisely that of fixation on words: we have invited to think that words are simply tools for years, they are not reality, and therefore it is on the latter that we must focus, rather than on the way we define it. By changing the words to describe things, the way those things are perceived does not change. If, therefore, the waste of time to decide how to call blind people in such a way as not to risk saying that they are blind, equally useless (and also idiotic – here the word is used correctly), it is to decide to change again acclimatically acclimatically precisely precise, as if this produced some effects on reality as well as that of making the whole world, should be considered unsuccessful. People like Milei, and like many other representatives of the extreme right now everywhere, cause much greater damage to those who promote a healthy and rational dialogue than what they can cause to wokism, which, in the face of these nefaries, is even balanced and intelligent.