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by dashdot 4217 days ago
Yes, it means the same like in English.

There were people from the far left wing that tried to establish that it was meant literally, which would then become racist. But that looked so far fetched that it wasn't part of the official strategy of the far left parties.
2 comments
tedks 4217 days ago
...it's racist no matter what. It has a connotation (even if it's unintentional which I entirely doubt) of racism, and the overt message (our unifed in-group needs to expel members of this out-group from our space) is racist.

I literally do not see how you could look at this and not see racism. Is your concept of racism limited to overt statements of the form "People whose skin colours are different from mine are bad"?

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dashdot 4217 days ago
Expelling criminals (which was the topic of the referendum) is racist?

I always asked myself how one can misinterpret such a widely used metaphor (except intentionally).

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notahacker 4217 days ago
Because when their posters aren't urging people to say no to black sheep, they're asking them to say no to... people that have brown skin?

http://vincentarsenault.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/suisse-u... http://voixdexils.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/udc_ok2.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-44n7Zc5xJdM/TigsGejS9LI/AAAAAAAAAH...

In fairness to the UDP, they do also appear to have a poster design involving nice, happy, multi-racial Swiss people holding hands, but I bet the ones involving saying NON to scary dark foreign things (and there are a lot of designs that fit this pattern which don't involve sheep metaphors) appear on more billboards.

When even the Daily Mail - the most-widely read source of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the UK - observes that your campaigns look like they might be jumping on popular racist sentiment, they probably are http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-480493/Proposed-Swis...

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JonnieCache 4217 days ago
The whole point of a metaphor is that it means two things at once, and each reinforces the other. Did this not come up?

(BTW if it were meant literally it would be a poster concerning the aesthetics of animal husbandry. Presumably nobody was arguing this.)

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