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The OK symbol was just one of the many items designed to twig the left-wing paranoia over "dog whistles." See also "milk and racism." Essentially, people who
by at_a_remove 6y ago
The OK symbol was just one of the many items designed to twig the left-wing paranoia over "dog whistles." See also "milk and racism." Essentially, people who see racism (or the Red Menace, or whatever) around every corner end up suffering from a kind of pareidolia of symbolism.
The worst thing you can do is to take this kind of thing seriously.
- th0ma5 6y agoThere is a point where many don't get the memo you did however, and it becomes a thing anyway, no matter how ironic it was supposed to be. Ironic racism is still racism.
- at_a_remove 6y agoI dunno, how ominously can one drink a glass of milk? How does it inconvenience people selectively based on race? The answer is it cannot, not without people doing absolute backflips of contorted reasoning, and that's what it highlights. Drinking milk isn't racism, the worst it can do is emphasize the absolute paranoia of people who cannot stop looking for the devil under every bed.
- th0ma5 6y agoI know that, and you know that, but other people don't know that. Look at cow tipping, snipe hunting, tide pods... "Everyone" knows it is all BS, and yet...
- at_a_remove 6y agoSo drinking that glass of milk selectively inconveniences people on the basis of race how?
- th0ma5 6y agoHey man I don't make this shit up, but people buy into it... Even when they too think it is BS even if just to fit in.
- at_a_remove 6y agoYou are not answering my question. How can drinking a glass of milk selectively inconvenience someone on the basis of race? How? Please describe the mechanism. Hint: It can't. Which means that it isn't racist. Which means that it isn't ironically racist, either. This in turn means that it's just tweaking the noses of the paranoid, not that it is racist.
- th0ma5 6y agoYour rhetoric is part of the problem. You want me to absolve right wing extremists for some reason. It is absurd, and it's absurdity is part of its mechanism of spread. Your inquiring rhetoric is trying to minimize it as absurdity when the ineffectiveness isn't even the point.
- at_a_remove 6y agoNo, the irrationality is part of the problem. I can ask you again and again to describe how this thing might be "racist" and you cannot do so. It is only racist by fiat, as if someone could declare a particular letter of the alphabet racist. That's the absurd bit. I can ask and ask and ask, and you won't answer the question because you cannot. That's the absurdity.
- th0ma5 6y agoI'm not sure why you are supporting a racist symbol, or trying to convince me or anyone reading it isn't racist. Either you like to fight very low stakes or you've given into the rhetoric that causes these things to spread (eg tide pods look delicious so I can see why people would want to do it, but it is obviously stupid). I have conceded that I cannot explain it as racist on the surface, but you cannot accept that it is racist in its mechanism of spread as an idea that it could be racist... Which is racist enough for racists.