anyone calling themselves "degen" or "degenerate" is already bad
"reclaim", whatever, nah, it is generally just bullshit internalized shame
but anyone calling others "degenerate"
nah, fuck that. That is literally fash framing.
it arises from the idea of a "perfect form" of humanity and culture (in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense), any deviance from which is definitionally impure and toxic to living minds and bloodlines (because while this shit is older than Lamarck, it took off in European political theory while he was popular)
the NAZIs didn't invent it, but they took advantage of it still being a significant school of thought and slotted in "German aryan" to make that nebulous perfect form concrete, and this is explicitly and exclusively the version of the word we've inherited today, because it was 4chan that repopularized it. the word was not in use when I was in high school in the 90s!
