[jsjolen]

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".

[jeromic]

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?

[andrepd]

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.

[paulryanrogers]

Symbolism is just another form of communication. And like language I imagine one has to evolve with it or be left out of touch or misunderstood.

[krapp]

>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.

[BurningCycles]

>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.

4chan trolling never had it so easy.

[krapp]

>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.

[BurningCycles]

>no one will care about in a few months time.

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.

[threwawasy1228]

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.

[anigbrowl]

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.

[collyw]

>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.

[anigbrowl]

You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.

They? You are the one asserting other HN posters making a reasonable observation have 'fallen for it'.

[krapp]

>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.

[salawat]

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.

[anigbrowl]

a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward

There's a name for ascribing responsibility for one's own emotional states to other people. NEETs aren't inherently right wing, and if this were really a phenomenon involving an oppressed minority, where is the prosocial behavior aiming to evoke solidarity from other minorities? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all and the last 80 years of western history (or 160 for Confederacy LARPers) constitute an elaborate plot to make one group of people worse off is getting into delusional territory.

[krapp]

>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.

I personally didn't, though. I'm neither naive, nor am I a knee-jerk reactionary. But the underlying context is that idiots on the net pretending to be Nazis want Symbol A to be associated with hate, they're just doing so as a joke.

So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.

And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.

And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.

It's not 2008 anymore.

>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.

If by "get to the root of," you mean "sympathize with and concede to the agenda of," then no. They are not marginalized, nor is their violence and hate justified.

>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.

They haven't been pushed to the brink of violence. That narrative sprung, fully formed and fully clothed, as propaganda from the populist movements of the US and Europe, and in particular from the viral efforts around Trump's campaign, but they've always been around, and always been violent, and always been hateful.

[jeromic]

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.

[krapp]

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.

[pvg]

It's been done. You just gotta use two 'x's.

http://images.amcnetworks.com/ifccenter.com/wp-content/uploa...

[anigbrowl]

As a matter of fact they recently tried something along those lines by creating a bunch of 'fashtag' memes designed to assert that the # sign was a cryptic Hitler reference, complete with fake warning memes designed to look like they came from the ADL, SPLC, antifa etc. and create the appearance of a backlash, in hopes of drawing media attention to a manufactured controversy.

It didn't work well, both because it was such an obviously forced meme and because they got so carried away that they burned a large number of sockpuppet accounts.