At the same time it is in an odd position because it was also very early on, before it was widely known what was happening with the Soviet government, adopted by anti-authoritarian socialist and communist groups, some of whose members risked their life against Stalin, and it was later knowingly adopted by groups opposed to the Soviet regime, such as e.g. the Trotskyist 4th International, as well.
This makes it quite different to symbols that are singularly attached to totalitarian governments and movements, in that it also has nearly as long history of use by their opponents.
Personally I think it's unhelpful to use it, but I also understand those who use it as an attempt to "reclaim" socialist imagery that has been relentlessly abused.
I have seen people here advocating anti-authoritarian socialist ideologies of the types that would get you executed by regimes like those of Mao and Stalin.
Or your preconceived notions of conservative people are wrong.
It's not a preconceived notion that /r/the_donald is filled to the brim with hate speech and trolls. You simply have to go there and look for yourself.
Before the election, there was a narrower meaning, but as soon as the Clinton campaign mentioned it and the media picked it up, any hope of the term having any concrete meaning was lost forever. (This isn't helped by the fact that people love using it to attack arbitrary conservatives, in much the same way that SJW is sometimes used to attack anyone who expresses views supportive of social justice without behaving badly).
EDIT: I don't let myself get worked up about downvotes in political conversations, but this one has me pretty curious. My comment wasn't even remotely offensive to any part of the political spectrum.
Supposedly the Trump Supporters at The_Donald attempted to create a few Trump memes and Pepe frogs, but gave up and concentrated on keeping the US flag intact.
Other than that, the right couldn't get much traction at all.
It's an identity, not a political statement. It'd be like calling christian crosses "political"
Moreover, LGBTQ pride is definitely political, even in Western democracies (see contentions about gay marriage).
LGBT activism is definitely marked on the left political spectrum in the USA. Christians values will inherently push toward traditionalism, so social conservatism.
It is the same in many European countries.
Similarly, most things, including fandoms, are political in nature whether they want to be or not. By liking Star Trek, you're buying into a box of propositions, some related to the art and some related to the real-world universe around that art. By (as in the Reddit experiment) working to expand it, you're making a political claim.
People are political, people are never not political, and drawing an imaginary line to try to separate some political acts from others is pretty fruitless.
I can't like Star Trek without "buying into a box of propositions"? Really? First, you're going to have to tell me why I like Star Trek.
Drawing those imaginary lines to segment off Some Topics (because otherwise one might have to defend them) is nonsense. People draw these lines anywhere from religion to fandoms to allegiance to political parties--but none of them are meaningful. You are your impact on other people and every impact on everyone else is inescapably, inextricably, definitionally "political".
It's this kind of maximalism that makes our politics so disgustingly toxic. It's entirely consistent for a hypothetical person to think that Hillary Clinton's hawkishness and role in the Middle East escapades of the last decade and a half are more damaging and evil than the Republican Party's association with racism in 2016's America. Your equally-ignorant doppelganger on the other side could say "it rings hollow that you say you didn't vote for Hillary _because_ of imperialism" and "see for example the useful idiots of the Democratic party who provide air cover for legitimizing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents"[1]. Both of you can sit on your high horse, convinced that everyone else on the other side is guilty of the worst sins and too ignorant to know or evil to care. In the meanwhile, the level of political discourse drops ever lower and the level of political dysfunction climbs.
Being unable to separate people's intent from their n-degrees-of-separation theoretical impact isn't enlightened, it's childish. I know it's a lot of mental effort to consider the fact that those that disagree with you aren't evil, but hey, being an adult is hard.
[1] Note that none of the hypothetical political views in this comment are necessarily ones that I hold.
Do you support the Democratic party? If so, are you okay being defined by Nancy Pelosi using a Muslim person as a prop?
Even if one buys into your premise, your examples are quite notably biased and there is an obvious left wing analogue to each of your right wing boogeymen.
By the same standard, then, I can safely write off BlackLivesMatter as a group whose members are inherently racist, and in some cases engage in literal terrorism (definition: violence applied for political goals) with the sanction of the larger group?
Why or why not?
You are your impact on other people and every impact on everyone else is inescapably, inextricably, definitionally "political".
Except most of these definitions of yours, that are entirely yours as far as I can see, don't have anything to do with the actual definition of the word political. To wit:
relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.
Where's the connection to government and public affairs and Star Trek? You did make that connection, and I'm curious to see how you go about defending it, especially since you called out this division of political vs not as a rhetorical device used to avoid defending things.
On that same note, humans "draw lines to segment off topics" because that is literally the only way human reason about things. Your definition of politics implies that I can't watch a Goddamned fictional series about spaceships without a bunch of other ill-defined ideological baggage attached to it. I don't see the practical or metaphorical usefulness of this definition, and up to this point, you have not demonstrated it.
They were describing a situation of 99% bad people where you write off the 1%. You seem to be describing the inverse. That's not the same standard.
There's a big difference between "almost all of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush" and "a tiny fraction of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush".
It's a fully general statement, not about particular groups.
As for the LGBT flags, I don't view those as political but rather as communities within reddit that together make up a large userbase who were committed to protecting each other's art and flags.
What is this if not politics? Politics isn't a dirty word you know...
In the sense of /r/place and their arrangements: that is politics, or more so rather diplomacy. They have common grounds and worked together, that's all.
My meetup dedicated to showing off old hardware is not political. If I tried to force a tax on everyone through a referendum to support my group, then I've made it political.
Can you be absolutely sure? How do you decide who shows and tells today? Who is the meetup "leader", and how did they get that position? What do you do about that old software meetup that always meets across the hall from you at the same time and steals your donuts and coffee? Almost anything groups of people do entails politics, without necessarily even going to the obvious case of forcible taxes.
Besides we were talking about staking out pixels on a limited canvas, which is a zero sum game, involves other groups and the need to consolidate efforts, a decidedly political affair.
I am having trouble understanding why you think this. Care to explain why?
There are various flags of different anarchist movements, very long trans* flag, LGBT flags here and there. IMO, all these count as "actually political".