It could mean someone has bad taste in music, I suppose.
The more charitable reading is that they think it’s strong evidence that someone is racist, especially when combined with other evidence.
For example: Wearing the uniform of a Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer is usually pretty strong evidence that you’re racist. However, that is completely negated if you’re acting in a movie. It becomes good evidence again if you’re playing Gandhi and you’re wearing the uniform on your day off. More context provides more evidence, one way or the other.
So:
How much evidence does the OK sign provide?
How eager should someone be to do something which provides any evidence whatsoever of being a racist?
People say that correlation is not causation. They never say that correlation is still meaningful. They definitely never say that correlation is usually all the evidence we’ll ever get for most things.
Depends. Perhaps they want to troll people? I think it would be pretty funny to change my avatar to a milk/Taylor Swift picture just for laughs. But the moderators frown on that so I won’t.
Besides, I’m sure that having white skin provides more evidence that a person is racist than the OK sign will EVER convey.
See, if I saw somebody doing something because they think it’s funny to playact as a racist, I start making inferences about which sorts of people think it’s funny to playact as a racist.
Nope, that’s just snowflakey whining. MRA-ish stuff about how the white man is soooooo oppressed.
I’m actually not planning to. I have better things to do with my time.
And let’s be clear, I know what parody and satire are. But just saying, “I was just joking!” does not make something parody or satire.
I’m white too, but that doesn’t make me oppressed. Or racist, for that matter. I came by my racism through good hard work, not thanks to my skin color, thank you very much.
However (and contrary to his own statement), it wasn’t him capping it with “(joke)” that made it one. It was an explicitly absurdist comment, and easily recognizable as such.
Seriously folks, I get that comedy is hard, but it’s not structureless. It’s not imaginary. Were I to say, “Shakespeare sucks.”, that’s not a joke. If I were to say “Shakespeare sucks. Just kidding!”, that’s still not a joke. This is something Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer don’t understand about (non-scatological) comedy - you can’t just make a statement or put something in your film and have it be funny just because it’s there. There are a bunch of different ways of doing comedy but that’s not one of them.
But the quoted post was one of them. Even without the identifying tag.
The people in the link in post 254 are using the right-side-up version that I think of as the OK sign. So presuming the caption’s accurate, apparently that version is also in use by racists.
The original 4chan hoax post was talking about the normal OK sign, and in fact the notion that it stands for (W)hite (P)ower is based on the right-side up sign. (cite)
As an aside, I’ve been considering getting a 1488 tattoo on my arm to commemorate Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias’s rounding the Cape of Good Hope. I’m a history buff!
