Hey, what would happen if we just ignored those assholes who really are making it a white power thing? No pearl clutching, no seeing who has the best SJW credentials, who can manufacture the mots outrage. Just fucking ignore their use of the Ok sign? They would stop. See?
You are being trolled, and your response to being trolled is to buy Purina troll chow by the truckload, rather than DNFTT.
You have the power to stop them, and instead you are encouraging them.
And again, I ask, **why do you want to ruin the lives of those young cadets? **How does ruing their lives gratify yours?
It can be both, and *is *both. It is a 4Chan hoax that you and the racists have been gulled by.
By "raise the question and to expect the leadership to look into it " and “needs to be investigated” you mean ruin the lives and careers of those young cadets. Because that is what will happen. I dunno if they will be Court Martialed but I can tell you that in general, any time a Officer is brought into that court- his career is ruined, if if totally exonerated.
They arent secret closet racists. They are young men goofing around. Nothing needed to be “investigated”.
And when you demand such investigations, you are feeding the white power and 4chan trolls, who are giggling happily in their caves. They want and enjoy this sort of thing.
Yea, it’s difficult to keep track of each others’ position in a thread discussing such a nuanced topic like this. I’ve tried to state from the start that I do believe white supremacists have adopted the “okay” symbol, but that this particular incident at West Point just isn’t about WP and isn’t even an “okay” gesture to begin with.
I remember that incident. Without getting too far into it, I’ll just say that police units and military units share a lot of the same mentality. A lot of Facebook groups catering to guns or tactical equipment or merchandise targeted to veteran/law-enforcement, etc. They are all full of Circle Game memes and people taking stupid pictures exactly like the one of those SWAT guys. It’s ubiquitous! And none of the comments are, “Hell yea, White Power!” or anything like that. There is the occasional “Hey, that’s racist now!”, but for the most part, all of the comments revolve (no pun intended) around the Circle Game. So when I see a picture like that, based on my experience, I immediately just see the stupid circle game unless there is evidence to suggest otherwise. It would be racist to suggest that being an all white SWAT Team counts as evidence. I don’t think any WP enthusiasts have adopted that particular gesture at all. If they have, they are very ineffective at signaling, since even other white nationalists viewing the photo can’t even be sure of the intent. It’s not effective to use such a commonly used gesture to secretly signal your White Supremacist ideals. Nobody is going to know that’s what your’re communicating. Secret gestures like that only work if they are discreet and unambiguous. Otherwise, what’s the point.
Overt, proudly raised “okay” gestures on the other hand? Those have certainly been adopted by some white supremacists, and I can see how they might enjoy the fact that the gesture makes kind of a W and P with the fingers and wrist. So, what started as a hoax has been adopted, at least by some neo-nazi types.
But the important distinction is that, since we’re talking about two different gestures, proof of adopting one of them doesn’t equate to the other.
An investigation is absolutely reasonable. Regardless of intent, cadets should not be flashing any kind of ambiguous hand gestures.
Another hand gesture that had nothing to do with a game, or WP, was the WEST SIDE gesture. Are you familiar with this? Lot’s of people just flash the WEST SIDE gang signal in pictures. Stupid. There was a time when that was as popular in pictures as “bunny ears”. And there are tons of incidents where soldiers are just ironically flashing the gesture in pictures. Whenever such an incident gets brought up to the chain of command, it gets investigated. That’s not unreasonable. After all, we have a zero tolerance policy.
This is kind of explained by your next sentence:
It was an impromptu act. He was caught in the moment of being on the camera and thought it would be cute to get everyone while on camera. He was just trying to awkwardly get it in there, into frame. Even when played off-camera in the real world people often do it above the waist for whatever reason. Especially when it’s done spur-of-the-moment. Of course, everyone then gives them shit about it and says, “That doesn’t count!”. But of course… whether it “counts” or not doesn’t really matter. Nobody’s keeping score.
There’s always the possibility. All things considered, though, this particular incident just screams stupid “Circle Game”. I think a 15-6 investigation that thoroughly explores the WP possibility is appropriate, but unless it turns up something, I’m convinced this is just cadets getting carried away with a juvenile game. There have been at least a half dozen incidents I can think of where some soldier is caught sneaking a Circle Game gesture into an official unit photo. People get rightly pissed off, and there is usually a quick investigation and some sort of non-judicial punishment for it. But not because it expresses belief in an extremist ideology, but rather because it’s immature and unprofessional to do that on camera where everyone will see it. But, the risk is part of the “fun”, I guess.
We agree.
Oh, we completely agree. I want it investigated, and it would be a dereliction of duty for the investigating officer to not explore the possibility of a WP intent.
But just like anything else that happens, we start discussing it among ourselves here and give our best guess at what happened and what we think the investigation will turn up. All my money is betting on “Circle Game”. This one seems cut and dry to me. That doesn’t mean I think it shouldn’t be investigated, though. I’m just sharing my experience and trying to provide some primary sourced data that supports my conclusion. Trying to let everyone know that this one very likely isn’t something to get upset about. Unlike some other events in the news where there is good reason to get upset even while the investigation is still on going, and even before all the facts are in, there is obvious reason to get upset. For this particular incident, I think everyone can relax.
Quite. I think we’re pretty much on the same page.
It’s somewhat obscure however the hand gesture is apparently associated with the Black Sun symbol from the SS Generals Hall in Nazi Germany.
If your making symbol handcuffed after murdering a group of people in a New Zealand mosque I get the context.
I went and looked into this incident further. It turns out, they were never suspended. The department looked into it and determined there was no WP message behind the gesture.
I find the Police Chief’s statement about the incident to be appropriate and similar to what will come of the West Point incident.
There is a thing you might wish to read up on, called the Presumption of Innocence. It’s a good thing, one that could save your ass someday. Instead of trying to tear it down, maybe you should try expanding its reach beyond the scope of criminal justice.
Correlation without context is no evidence of ideology, just as it does not indicate causation. To use your example, a person can identify as Christian and not identify with the ideology of a certain sect, or be accepted by that sect as a “real” Christian. I believe the issue at the root to all of these arguments is that some people resist the idea of individuals being forced into groups while others believe that group cohesion relies on consensus. There is strength in simplicity, and nothing is more simple than having a binary world-view; “You are either with me, or you are against me.” More complex thinking offers more variety and individualism, but it makes collaborative efforts harder. Politicians know this, that is why they all take"It’s US versus THEM" positions. It is also why Democracy is in danger when politics trains the citizens to refuse to recognize opposing ideas as having any validity.
This is sort of like saying that if people had ignored the Nazis they would have stopped using the swastika and the Bellamy salute.
I don’t believe that the whole reason that the racists use symbols is to trigger liberals. I believe that they are proudly announcing their allegiance to the burgeoning movement. Remember, the whole reason that racists are rising now is because they believe that they have support. Presidential support, sure, but also peers. The internet is GREAT for subcultures, because it allows disparate loners to find likeminded people, which allows them to conclude that they’re not weirdo losers - rather, they’re just part of one group rather than another. This phenomenon is why nobody’s ashamed of being a geek anymore, and it’s also why the racists and MRAs and crawling out of their holes too.
Once you have a group, it’s time to start identifying yourself to others of that group. The goal is to demonstrate to each other that you’re not alone, that you have solidarity. T-shirts are good for this. So are hand signs - the vulcan ‘live long and prosper’ gesture comes to mind. Hippies co-opted the ‘V’ sign, using it as their peace sign. These examples demonstrate the use of a gesture to show your own allegiance, to announce your position and support for the cause.
So what makes racists co-opting the OK sign different? You seem to be of the opinion that the ONLY reason they are doing it is to trigger people, in defiance of how symbols have been used from the dawn of time. Now admittedly, a lot of what conservatives do is done solely to piss off liberals and for no other reason, but not everything they do is shallow malice. Some of it is grounded malice. Hard to believe, but conservatives actually do care about some things: guns and abortion, for example. And racism. A bunch of people really genuinely are racist, and aren’t faking it at all.
When bastards like that announce their racism, it’s not just to trigger the libs - it’s to publicly announce their position, to take a public stand. And to be able to publicly take a stand about being a racist and get away with it must be really empowering - it tells you that you’re winning, that you’re taking back ground against the people who’ve been stifling you and telling you not to murder those filthy n*****s for generations!
So yeah, let’s just let 'em do their hand signs, post their Pepes, wave their flags, and burn their crosses, all without even making comment. Let’s just slink away and leave them to their devices. They’re just nazis, after all. And when has a nazi ever done anything bad?
Ignoring them will make them go away, eh? Just like it worked back in the thirties?
It doesn’t gratify me at all. But actions, even stupid actions, have consequences. If getting this kind of attention from your military superiors can ruin your lives, maybe they shouldn’t have been caught making hand signs that look like the OK sign while it’s gaining infamy for being racist.
“Well, as it turns out, those WHITE SUPREMACIST cadets were simply playing the circle game”, right? I mean, they have to be in order to use that symbol. I learned that here from these posts. There is apparently no other option. None.
Whether white supremacists are using the “OK” symbol or the “circle game” symbol to denote solidarity with each other sure seems like a distinction without a difference.
It sounds like they did a thorough investigation, including a background check and interviewing a bunch of people. I’m glad they took it seriously and glad it turned out to be nothing. At least for my part I learned a lot from this fiasco. I underestimated the prevalence of the circle game (it was done, but not that often, in my college days, and I never considered that adults were doing it in any numbers), and I failed to discriminate (ha!) between the game and the OK gesture, which white supremacists have coopted. I have a more nuanced view than I did a few days ago. Thanks for your posts, Bear_Nenno
I have extreme doubts that white supremacists are morally opposed to pointing their OK gestures sideways or even downwards if the situation requires it.
If you believe them, and for page after page you’ve made it clear that there’s no way to convince you that they weren’t; they were playing a childish game in a setting which resulting in the service academy being embarrassed by their behavior. Behavior that I would be embarrassed by in a middle school child, much less a midshipman in the Naval Academy. I’d expel them without a second thought.
