[jfengel]

There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to death. That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be related to death, but the noose is.

And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist threats. When a noose appears, lynching is the assumed meaning, and not just by black people [1].

So it's a good thing that Lone Star is taking a look at the entire project. Using a noose was a mistake. One presumably made in good faith, but a mistake nonetheless. So the right thing to do is pull not just it, but to make sure that they didn't make other mistakes -- a sign of good faith.

I'm all for accepting a good and sincere apology. A lot of people have made bad and insincere apologies, and not only does that not help, it makes things worse by giving people an excuse to pretend that good apologies aren't worth doing. This is a good choice and I'd encourage people to take that.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/554694-amazon-closi...

[unethical_ban]

I didn't downvote you, but a noose in a locker is wildly different from making a pun about "headline news", and to suggest otherwise is foolish.

"There is no such thing blah blah" - yes, there is, it's called context. Someone who feels threatened by a pun "headline news" with a noose is not properly adjusted to the adult world.

Do kids not play hangman anymore?

More broadly, I think twitter lowers the bar for whining and manufacturing rage. In a pre-Internet world, would that woman have cried, or otherwise been mortified at the beer top? Would she have taken a picture and sent it to the investigative reporter in Dallas where Lone Star is brewed? Or would she have gone "Huh, that's rude, how strange" and thrown it away?

It's easy to get wrapped up in the hate-think, and I think this is a case of it.

[verall]

Yes, and a part of this context is that Lone Star invokes images of the old state of Texas. When they lean into this, if they are not careful, they lean into some really awful events. It's not the same as the same pun on a bottle of Snapple.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

> in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race

People do frequently hang themselves, and there have been some stories of people tying nooses as jokes about suicide or overwork that were misinterpreted as racist threats.

I'm not sure if a joke about suicide is much better than a joke about lynching, and not being aware of the possible racist interpretation is tremendously ignorant at best, but it's clearly not as horrendous as an actual, real death threat.

We should strive to leave at least a little room for nuance and context, and making broad statements like "in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race" leaves none.

[exporectomy]

The funny thing about this offense is it seems that was created by the offended so they could become victims of it. Nooses used to represent suicide or maybe western movie culture. The race thing seems to have been kind of resurrected by social media. Though I'm only an outside observer of American culture so perhaps the noose=suicide is because that's pretty much always been their only use in my country.

Does this picture suggest to you that he's planning to do some black people lynching in the holidays or something else?

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/218bbe/not_tod...

[SamBam]

> Nooses used to represent suicide or maybe western movie culture. The race thing seems to have been kind of resurrected by social media.

I'm sorry, but this is just ignorant of American history. Lynchings were part of a reign of terror that whites, mostly in the South, inflicted on Blacks for over a hundred years.

Between 1882 and 1968 over 3000 black men were lynched by mobs. Families would go and have picnics, bringing their kids so they could watch the lynchings. They would sometimes then carve up the bodies for people to take home a souvenirs, and many of the hanging bodies of the lynched men were photographed and turned into postcards that were sold all over the South. The postcards were usually inscribed with racist text or poems, and people used to send them just as regular postcards -- photos of men hanging on the back of a casual letter. So many were being sent that the postmaster eventually had to ban them being sent through the mail, though they were still produced and sold.

Lynchings of Black men were absolutely a huge part of the American consciousness. They were one of the main ways that the South kept African Americans living in terror, and a major cause of Martin Luther King Jr's movement and the ensuing civil rights era. Songs like "Strange Fruit" were sung in protest of them.

The last black man lynched in Texas was in 1942. The last black man lynched in the US was in 1981. And the noose itself continued to be used as a symbol of terror, just like the burning cross.

[jfengel]

The noose continues to be used as a symbol of terror:

https://www.espn.com/racing/nascar/story/_/id/29345568/nasca...

It's disappointing how explicitly and consistently HN responds to discussions of slightly-subtle racism with a very explicit not-at-all-subtly-racist pretension that it doesn't exist. "It doesn't bother me therefore it shouldn't bother you" and "You should look at the context", as if being black isn't a context.

[exporectomy]

What an odd example to give. The symbolism was hyped up by the media in recent times, consistent with this noose=racism idea being modern. Also, it wasn't an actual symbol of terror because it turned out to be an innocent door pull rope.

[SamBam]

Funny how you replied to that comment, and not my comment above it, which made it absolutely clear that the noose being a symbol of racist lynching is absolutely not modern. It was the reality for millions of black people living in the South for over a hundred years, where there were decades with an average of one lynching every four days.

And yes, it was a symbol as well as a reality. Here is a noose carried by a Klansman to threaten Black people and keep them from voting in 1939 [1]. Here is a mock lynching at the University of Mississippi in 1962, to scare off the university's first Black student [2]. Black men at work would find nooses at their stations [3]. Nooses were mailed to NAACP Secretary, and in 1956 a noose was hung in a schoolyard tree during a battle over desegregation [4].

You said yourself you're an "outside observer of American culture." Well, this is a history lesson. The noose has been an extremely potent symbol of terror for over a hundred years.

1. https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/masked-ku-klux-klan...

2. https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200623111206-noose-do...

3. https://www.adl.org/media/10204/download

4. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shuler-noose-hat...

[exporectomy]

I didn't know all that. But it looks like it changed from a symbol of terror to a symbol of suicide in the subsequent decades. Resurrecting its old meaning still seems to be a modern invention created as a reason to be offended by dredging up the past.