Of course not, but likewise you don’t get to control the reactions and interpretations of people who see you use it.
Like it or not, if a word or symbol has been given a new meaning in popular usage (even by a bunch of alt-right trolls), that’s the way many people will interpret its use.
Is it your opinion that the guy in the video flashed that sign innocently ?
Does this mean the stiff-arm salute is safe now?
Or the swastika. After all, it’s really a Buddhist sun-symbol!
I don’t bother with words like “Republican,” “conservative” or “right wing” any more.
The GOP’s philosophy is Stupidism. They pander with lies and stupid ideas to stupid voters. Some of the stupid voters are happy to vote for people they know are even stupider than themselves. But most of the Stupidists are too stupid to even know they’re stupid.
Yeah, when they fell out of the stupid tree, couldn’t some of 'em have TRIED to miss a branch or two?
Hell, they’ve effectively installed an escalator so they can get back up for another go.
(don’t worry; Mexico will be paying for the escalator.)
I think he did it purposefully to troll people. Seems like it’s working.
Looks like it got him reassigned, potentially fired, so … joke’s on him?
Ha ha! He wins! He’s SMRT like Homer Simpson.
It’s been said before, but there is no meaningful nor practical distinction between behaving like a shithead and behaving like a shithead “ironically”.
And yeah, it’s definitely working in a way that should be commended and encouraged. Lose your job to own the libs, /pol !
It’s my opinion that letting /b/ or 8chan or other alt-right watering holes redefine the meanings of common and acceptable signals is utterly idiotic.
Hell, we have precedent here: The alt-right on Twitter tried to make (((the parentheses))) mean “this person is Jewish”, and Twitter culture as a whole didn’t allow it. So many people began to use that symbol it lost all meaning. The assholes weren’t allowed to own it, even though they invented it. Just blindly ceding the OK hand sign isn’t allowable, either. It’s that simple.
Of course there is. Here’s one amusing anecdote: I worked at a bar part-time in Saudi Arabia when I was stationed there. My co-worker was a Mexican-American Air Force guy. Once in a while, when we were working together, I’d serve a drink to a white guy, say “White Power” and then offer my fist for a “fist-bump”. If the customer took the bait and fist-bumped me, which they did 99% of the time, my co-worker would just look at them shaking his head. And then my coworker and I had a good laugh. Was I REALLY advocating “white power”? Of course not. And nobody thought I was either.
Hey, I didn’t say it was good for him to do. Just funny to ME to watch everyone freak out about it.
I have never seen an “okay” sign displayed in the manner that the individual did on camera. Perhaps the final part of his sign display was the “okay” but the entire thing was not.
@Derleth : Granted, but you seem to go 180 and tell people to ignore or dismiss the WP usage of the signal entirely. It’s just as idiotic, when the sign is really used for in-group signalling by the alt-tards. You’re essentially arguing that dogwhistles aren’t dogwhistles because they have other, legitimate usages. Yes, they do. And yet there are contexts in which the whole point is to pretend they’re innocuous when they’re really not. Such as this particular case.
14 and 88 are just numbers, too. And if your kid states “I’m 14 !” nobody will think he voted for Trump. On the other hand if his online handle is 14Derleth88, he might just deserve a good smack in the gob.
It’s not about “letting” people do this. If nasty people choose to use a common signal to convey a nasty meaning, and the nasty usage becomes widely recognizable, then the nasty meaning is now associated with the signal. Not necessarily inevitably or definitively, but you can’t make the new nasty meaning disappear.
Heck, I wish that some nasty mid-20thc fascists hadn’t redefined the meaning of the beautiful swastika symbol either, but you can’t erase the redefinition by just personally deciding to ignore it.
This is nonsense. The antisemitic triple-parenthesis absolutely does have the widely recognized meaning “this person is Jewish”. Even though some non-antisemites use it defiantly, it is still commonly associated with antisemitism. It hasn’t “lost all meaning” at all.
Again, it’s not about “ceding”. Some non-racists may choose to go on using the “OK” sign defiantly in its original meaning, and more power to them if that’s how they feel, but that doesn’t mean that the white-power connotations will just vanish from the way people now interpret the sign.
Looks like fairly shithead behavior to me, tbh. “Hey, I’ll fake being a vicious racist in order to shock my customers and/or fool them into thinking I share their vicious racism!”
I’m perfectly willing to take your word for it that you are not and were not at the time a genuine “White Power” advocate. But I think you’re giving yourself a bit too much credit if you think that your “ironically” shithead behavior didn’t still make you look like a shithead.
The difference is that target of your humor such as it was was white supremacists, while the target of these jokers is people who oppose white supremacy.
The whole OK/whitepower thing somehow reminds me of the old “I’m not touching you” tactic for tormenting siblings.
“I’m not flashing a white power symbol, I’m saying just OK. Look I’m saying OK again. Why are you getting mad, all I’m doing is saying OK, what do you have against my saying OK. etc.”
So while its possible that less than 100% of the people who are white supremacists, it is guaranteed that 100% of them are assholes.
missed edit window should be :
So while its possible that less than 100% of the people who do this are white supremacists, it is guaranteed that 100% of them are assholes.
“Tee hee, people think the things I do and say have meaning. Tee hee.”
Later that day
“How dare people think the things I do and say have meaning!”