For convenience, crossposting Scott’s response from here:
I think “this is a strawman” is the mirror complaint of “the other side keeps motte-and-baileying this”, which is certainly the complaint I made in my original post.
DirectedEvolution thinks I am eliding the fact that the Social Model distinguishes between “impairment” and “disability”, and that most of its apparently absurd implications only apply if you confuse the standard use of disability with the social-model use.
I think I am not doing this—I used the word “impairment” 11 times in my article and tried to explain how the social model uses it. My claim is that the social model’s distinction between impairment and disability, if used consistently, doesn’t back its claims—impairments can be bad separate from social responses to them. But separately, the social model tries to force us into a non-natural framing in order to strategically equivocate between their (new) meaning of the word “disability” and our (old) connotations with it. “disability = impairment + social response” is the same kind of sleight-of-hand as “racism = prejudice + power”. You start with a word everyone universally uses to mean a bad thing, you say “what if we force you to use a new word for the common-sense definition of the term, restrict the word you already have strong connotations with to a new definition, then say by definition you’re only allowed to feel bad about the bad thing if you do so in the way we approve of.” This is an annoying game, and I decline to play it.
For convenience, crossposting Scott’s response from here: