Given that he isn't racist and doesn't consider Kek to be racist, what would be the problem with flying the flag? Look at https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kekistan, it looks like a joke that is being taken way too seriously.
It's meant to look like a joke on the surface. I was a big fan of the "feels good man" comic (Pepe the frog) but I wouldn't deny that it's been co-opted by the far right. Also, kekistan is a way worse joke than "feels good man".
So if extremists start using a symbol, everyone else has to stop using it and let them have it? Wouldn't it be preferable to ignore the extremists so they don't get the symbol, and the symbol isn't ruined?
The swastika is forever ruined. If you fly a swastika in nearly any occasion then "nazi" is going to be the interpretation, not any of the myriad previous meanings.
>So if extremists start using a symbol, everyone else has to stop using it and let them have it?
If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.
>Wouldn't it be preferable to ignore the extremists so they don't get the symbol, and the symbol isn't ruined?
That's not how it works. They're using the symbol anyway, so it gets ruined anyway. Ignoring the Nazis would not have had prevented them from owning the meaning of the swastika in the Western world, to use the obvious example.
>If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.
This quickly becomes insane, like with the 'OK' handsign, including the decades old 'circle game', neither of which has any connection to racism other than what desperate mainstream media portrays in search of clicks.
>This quickly becomes insane, like with the 'OK' handsign, including the decades old 'circle game', neither of which has any connection to racism other than what desperate mainstream media portrays in search of clicks.
Those are also all minor blips on the cultural radar no one will care about in a few months time. What matters are the symbols with any cultural weight or staying power.
Because it will have been replaced with another symbol that is now suddenly being portrayed as racist due to click-bait fueled hysteria. Enough already.
In the world we live in, I don't know that I would make snap calls about what symbols will last more than a few months and which won't. In our current memetic climate things may appear to move faster, but getting to the top (news outlets reporting a meme) has a lot of staying power and reverberation that people should not take for granted.
Neither of which had any connection to racism until hard core racists started using it. 'Trolling' isn't an excuse once a certain level of awareness exists. The Christchurch shooter was making the OK sign in court during his arraignment to signal to his frens on 8ch, to their great delight; yet here you are pretending it is all just a media panic and that there is no particular correlation with the far-right, just because there didn't used to be.
>If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.
This is exactly what these people want. There are campaigns to make the pride rainbow a hate symbol, the communist flag a hate symbol and no doubt numerous others.
You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.
>You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.
What have I fallen for, exactly? What's the trick?
Some people already consider the pride rainbow and communist flags to be hate symbols. White supremacists do use coded language and shibboleths online. My comment was simply a statement of fact - the meaning of symbols can be affected by cultural and political influence and can change over time.
That some fools have tried to turn that fact into a meme, or that the media can easily be baited into a moral panic, doesn't make it any less true.
The trick is that by taking every symbol that had positive influence and making it a hate symbol, it's showing that you're a fool for naively associating Symbol A with hate, and are merely acting as a knee jerk reactionary without understanding the underlying context.
If you did understand it, you'd realize trying to stomp out or prevent what is going on is a fool's errand. You can't extinguish the idea; because on each success on your part, a metamorphosis will happen elsewhere, utilizing some other innocuous symbol.
You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.
Which is a rather ugly state of affairs, as it means society as a whole has already lost. It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.
Following that example, what if the Nazis used the letter 'x' as their symbol? Some non-Nazis might be associated with them by using the letter, but surely that effect can be diluted if everyone continues to use the letter as normal.
And is the letter 'x' really ruined? The swastika wasn't ruined for many Eastern cultures as its original meaning was widely known.
The letter x as a symbol already has widespread use and an accepted, common meaning in the Western world, but the swastika really didn't until the Nazis appropriated it. Which is why Nazis probably wouldn't appropriate the letter x because its power as a symbol had already been diluted.
Also, a symbol can be ruined locally and not ruined globally. The swastika wasn't ruined for Eastern cultures, but it was definitely ruined for everyone but Nazis everywhere else. If Buddhists decided to get together to try to "reclaim" the swastika for its original peaceful intent, they would fail utterly, even though they have a perfectly rational and defensible case.
That somebody thinks it’s a funny joke doesn’t cancel out somebody else purposefully using it as a hate symbol knowing that other members of their sick cult know what they really mean.
