This is an excellent article about and excellent idea. The use of the word deviant is unfortunate. I understand now they mean deviation from the mean. "Positive Deviance Initiative" sounds like a program for HIV+ sex offenders.
It's an inflammatory word whose use is designed to associate with despicable and unpleasant deeds. It's in bad taste to dilute the meaning of the word for personal vanity.
Their culture and values have been much maligned, but you mean malignant. Please don't take this personally, it's just that it seems like this misuse of the word is going viral.
Degenerate's in increasingly common use. I can't speak to the parent's use of the term, indeed from the context of their statement, there's good reasons to be suspicious of their intent. However, my social circle uses it quite heavily to refer to things like people who consider pet ownership equivalent to parenting, neonazis, and karens who fabricate sleights against themselves in order to haggle prices at retail outlets.
Despite its distasteful origins, it's becoming a catch-all for self-aggrandizing anti-social behavior, and destructively anti-normative sentiments.
Feels like a dogwhistle to me, although I hope it is just an unfortunate choice of words. Describing causes as degenerate has a pretty sordid history, with the “degeneracy” in question usually being human rights.
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