Damn, that's scary.

I even used the SCUBA shop, which is next door, for reference.

No-one that I've seen has advocated that the OK sign be abandoned for divers. I've been mid mouthful at a restaurant when a server has asked how my food is and I've made this sign and not been called a racist.

However, should I and half a dozen of my buddies, armed an in full tactical gear, standing 10 ft from a BLM protest, waving my Confederate flags, all choose to make this sign for a photo, then a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this as "we know exactly what we're implying here, and we're not all just telling the cameraman that "everything is perfect"."

yeah, but that's the story required for your credulity.

another 'reasonable person' with an axe to grind could have a much more minimal story required for credulity, say someone resting their hand outside the window of their car, tweet the photo with a license plate, and ruin someones life.

my meaning : don't expect your reasonable demeanor is going to be the same as some other random bystanders' 'reasonable demeanor'.

It was discussed here a few days ago. Stop firing the innocent or something, from the Atlantic.

Wasn't the story that people in another car taunted him and urged him to make the symbol, and they recorded it when he did? He may have not known what the meaning was (I believe that is what he claimed) but that is an entirely different defense to make than "I wasn't doing it, it just looked a bit like it".

And that is before we talk about the problem with firing someone over this in the first place.

Context is important.

I have had to tell my kids more than once that when an elderly person use their middle finger to point at something it isn't offensive because they grew up in a time when it didn't matter. That elderly person sure doesn't mean "F* you" as they are pointing their middle finger horizontally towards something while saying "look there".

In fact I think we all do something every single day that would be considered offensive by someone at some point.

The point is he didn't make a racist gesture, so why are we even talking about it.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

We are saying that if you use a potentially racist sign (hand OK) in real life it's not a big deal, since you're not using it in conjunction with other racist stuff.

At the same time you cannot use another potentially racist sign (the confederate flag), even if you were just trying to make a videogame version of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and are not trying to associate it with white supremacists.

I mean, I assume the confederare flag was not too problematic at some point, but now it is, so likely the OK sign will become problematic too.

Think of the "pepe" meme, which is now an alt-right thing and can't be used anymore in a neutral way!

I could see white supremecists doing this for fun.

(There is a similar, earlier sign used by a milita group called the "Three Percenters", but that was not the source of the spread. They are an extreme libertarian group, not a white supremacy one. Though one can imagine some overlap. Their hand sign became so closely associated with white supremacy partially because of the 4chan hoax.)

MonkaS dude.

Pepe is fine, even the group that classified it as a hate symbol weren't referring to general usage.

One group of people I watch on Twitch use it all the time in the way it's meant to be used. As a very expressive cartoon frog that can convey emotions extremely succinctly.

And before you assume they're all closet neo-nazis: this group includes members who stopped streaming for about a month after Trump was elected, who frequently talk about eating the rich, and most recently they just ran a charity drive across multiple channels to raise money for BLM.

Context is key here. Lookup racist pepe images, and compare them to a picture of a sad/happy/etc cartoon frog. You won't have much difficulty telling the difference.

Alas, it’s not up to reasonable people to interpret the rules, it’s up to those in power, who can and will interpret it in whatever way benefits them

(See also, the Shirley Exception - https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1004400861865488384 )

how many times does that have to be proven wrong?

Mob-justice is all the rage right now.

All that matters is that someone is pointing the pitch-forks at you or your cause.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

Early last year she made a kid run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs.

Then she gets an angry text message from the kid's mother who believed her son was being punished specifically for making the "ok" symbol. This woman had found a picture of my wife on Facebook where she can be seen pulling her shirt down by pinching the bottom of it between her thumb and pointer finger, inadvertently making the "ok" symbol. She basically said she was going to put my wife on blast and out her as a racist. Ridiculous (Hilarious, even, in retrospect).

My wife didn't respond, of course. She immediately looped in her admin and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.

Well, the hunt began when your wife made a kid run laps because he made an OK sign on his leg because he thought that was a 'cool' thing to do comparable to giving the person in front of you 'rabbit ears' by making a V-sign behind their head, not when that kid's mother started social media dumpster diving for 'evidence' to use against your wife. The way to avoid these witch hunts is to avoid starting them, not to make the first step and then complain when others follow suit. She could have taken the kid aside and asked him why he made that sign, he probably would have replied he got it off the 'net or from his friends who made him think it was 'cool'. She then could have told him why it is not cool, i.e. that him making that sign would be interpreted by some as him being a supporter of a nefarious ideology. By singling him out to run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs she more or less handed that kid's mother all the ammunition she needed to follow in pursuit.

In Dutch there is a saying which applies to this; "Wat gij niet wilt dat u geschiedt, doet dat ook een ander niet", it translates to "Do not do unto others what you do not want to have done upon yourself".

I don't get this - it was clearly a summary of events. The only detail you really have to go on is "after". How you can assume all of this somehow went down without any talking-to or explanation is beyond me. Even so, the admin would probably have said the same at the time.

Based on what you said, isn't that exactly what happened? This paragraph makes it seem like your wife was punishing him for making that sign:

>Early last year she made a kid run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs.

Sorry, but as others have said your wife is the bad guy in this story. She abused her authority and bullied a kid, then had an “oh shit” moment, as all bullies do, when someone stands up to them. She is lucky that that kids mother is a better person than her and let her off with a warning.

Your wife punished a kid for making a symbol she disagrees with, heck, you could even say by making a political statement. If that happened to my kid I would probably go after you as well (not in social media, but with a formal complain to the school to get you punished).

If he wore a MAGA hat would she made him run laps? What about a BLM tshirt? Rainbow pin?

It is not her job to punish someone she disagrees with. She can talk with him and explain what the symbol means and let the kid make his own conclusion, but she can't, and shouldn't punish a kid for disagreeing with him. (which I think is the reason we are now in this place in the world, where you either agree with everything I defend or you are a racist/fascist, or if you are from the other side, you are a communist hippie skyflower)

i hope you stopped eating them 2011 ;-)

Absolutely. But the corollary is that every time someone claims that something (a flag, a gesture, a tradition) is racist, then it actually transforms it into something racist. Because at that point you're forced to abandon it or consciously make a statement that you don't care about being considered racist.

If next year someone comes up saying that Santa Claus is racist, then dressing as Santa Claus becomes a statement, that you want it or not. This is a huge power that is easily abused.

This sounds like something out of a Borges story. Final scene narrated in the few remaining words designated as not harmful.

I don't like it when folks say such things, but I understand it. Instead, what many folks seem to be saying is that based on one thing they can tell what the person is like inside. It's an amazingly-broad generalization and people seem to be enormously confident of themselves when they make it. I can look at your shoe or color of your shirt and conclude that you are a bad person inside.

I don't find that to be especially rational, but what is one to do?

The op is not wrong for supposing it's possible for someone to be targeted due to wearing "shoe or shirt color".

The topic was "amazingly-broad generalization".

Context matters.

> It is from these Minutemen where the 3% name originated. It is a rough estimate that only 3% of the colonists were actively fighting in the field against British forces at any given time.

Come to your own conclusions, but mine is: fuck that - I'll be the judge of what is acceptable and what isn't, not some kind of thought mob.

On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. They _themselves_ were choosing to imbue political meaning on it, as much as anyone was choosing to _take_ meaning from it.

Based on what? If you go looking for things with a specific interpretation in mind you're going to find a lot of it even in places that it wasn't meant that way. The adage about malice and incompetence comes to mind.

"wasn't meant that way" - you're going have to try harder than that. Saying "oh, they meant nothing inflammatory, even though they're the group (3%ers) who are most associated with the nefarious intent and are absolutely aware of it's purported meaning" is wilfully disingenuous.