If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.

>Wouldn't it be preferable to ignore the extremists so they don't get the symbol, and the symbol isn't ruined?

That's not how it works. They're using the symbol anyway, so it gets ruined anyway. Ignoring the Nazis would not have had prevented them from owning the meaning of the swastika in the Western world, to use the obvious example.

This quickly becomes insane, like with the 'OK' handsign, including the decades old 'circle game', neither of which has any connection to racism other than what desperate mainstream media portrays in search of clicks.

4chan trolling never had it so easy.

Those are also all minor blips on the cultural radar no one will care about in a few months time. What matters are the symbols with any cultural weight or staying power.

Because it will have been replaced with another symbol that is now suddenly being portrayed as racist due to click-bait fueled hysteria. Enough already.

This is exactly what these people want. There are campaigns to make the pride rainbow a hate symbol, the communist flag a hate symbol and no doubt numerous others.

You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.

They? You are the one asserting other HN posters making a reasonable observation have 'fallen for it'.

What have I fallen for, exactly? What's the trick?

Some people already consider the pride rainbow and communist flags to be hate symbols. White supremacists do use coded language and shibboleths online. My comment was simply a statement of fact - the meaning of symbols can be affected by cultural and political influence and can change over time.

That some fools have tried to turn that fact into a meme, or that the media can easily be baited into a moral panic, doesn't make it any less true.

If you did understand it, you'd realize trying to stomp out or prevent what is going on is a fool's errand. You can't extinguish the idea; because on each success on your part, a metamorphosis will happen elsewhere, utilizing some other innocuous symbol.

You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.

Which is a rather ugly state of affairs, as it means society as a whole has already lost. It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.

There's a name for ascribing responsibility for one's own emotional states to other people. NEETs aren't inherently right wing, and if this were really a phenomenon involving an oppressed minority, where is the prosocial behavior aiming to evoke solidarity from other minorities? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all and the last 80 years of western history (or 160 for Confederacy LARPers) constitute an elaborate plot to make one group of people worse off is getting into delusional territory.

Undercurrents existed at one point, yet the flames were fanned by the increasing utilization of online media to increase visibility. One will absolutely not stop that.

Furthermore, the phenomena of placing blame on others for current emotional states isn't necessarily that far off. Mental/memetic contagion is a well known phenomena; it seems to be fundamental to how information transfer works.

The issue regarding contagion though, is that there is a model which currently exists with regard to thought and behavior that largely downplays the pliability of individuals and vulnerability to external influences on their reasoning. We see this philosophy in our justice system espoused time after time. X is a bad apple. X can never change. X should be removed from society. Preaching of this model weakens our most vulnerable populations. They end up never developing any sort of memetic immune system, or framework to guard against entirely rhetorical or emotional form of attack or influence.

Of course, that all assumes that there was a solid foothold gained in the first place development wise.

I personally didn't, though. I'm neither naive, nor am I a knee-jerk reactionary. But the underlying context is that idiots on the net pretending to be Nazis want Symbol A to be associated with hate, they're just doing so as a joke.

So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.

And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.

And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.

It's not 2008 anymore.

>You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.

If by "get to the root of," you mean "sympathize with and concede to the agenda of," then no. They are not marginalized, nor is their violence and hate justified.

>It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.

They haven't been pushed to the brink of violence. That narrative sprung, fully formed and fully clothed, as propaganda from the populist movements of the US and Europe, and in particular from the viral efforts around Trump's campaign, but they've always been around, and always been violent, and always been hateful.

You're sure acting like one. Albeit one who actually bothers to try to elucidate their case; which I do appreciate.

>So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.

Given. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with the dynamic aside from the fact you're still falling into the ideological trap I mentioned previously.

>And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.

>And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.

So everyone on the Chan's are psychopaths looking to shoot up mosques? Now who is starting to sound extremist?

>It's not 2008 anymore.

It most certainly isn't. In 2008, no one in their right mind would endorse outright suppressing discourse to the level people do today. I don't see that being the fault of "those crazy kids on the Chans". I see it as a result of an increasingly technologically savvy oppressive majority starting to tighten the noose around populations they consider problematic and not worth trying to rehabilitate/understand/integrate.. But hey, what do I know?

I've just been observing the phenomena in action for the last decade or so, and how whenever the Chan's are brought up by the mainstream media, it's as some sort of internet based cesspool of evil instead of as just what it is; a glorified bulletin board.

And is the letter 'x' really ruined? The swastika wasn't ruined for many Eastern cultures as its original meaning was widely known.

Also, a symbol can be ruined locally and not ruined globally. The swastika wasn't ruined for Eastern cultures, but it was definitely ruined for everyone but Nazis everywhere else. If Buddhists decided to get together to try to "reclaim" the swastika for its original peaceful intent, they would fail utterly, even though they have a perfectly rational and defensible case.

http://images.amcnetworks.com/ifccenter.com/wp-content/uploa...

It didn't work well, both because it was such an obviously forced meme and because they got so carried away that they burned a large number of sockpuppet accounts.

Tptacek's "It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who casually evoke "Kek" and then are shocked to learn people believe them to be white supremacists." made my brain spin in my skull and had me reading sewage-filled Wikipedia pages on a Saturday (of Souls, no less).

Not a bad thing at all, I've just not run into them in so long.

I don't know whether they're hiding or gone, it doesn't seem like a movement that would be big on recruiting so who knows?..