Your argument is that, if society was more tolerant of bigots and their symbols, then Dylan Roof might not have murdered nine people? History indicates otherwise: the US was a lot more tolerant of racism in the past and there was a lot more violence.
In your defense, that may be the surface level interpretation of what I said. However, I am not saying that in any way shape or form. Closer to what I'm saying is that, censorship artificially reduces the number of monsters in our polity that we are able to identify. They are prevented from expression so we don't hear or see them and thus have the mistaken belief that more progress has been made when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I want people to be open with their racism/bigotry, so that I know to steer clear.
It's all well and good to be able to identify these people, but the downside is that their victims have to put up with more racism and bigotry.
Frankly, if we drive it underground, great! Let's keep driving it underground until it suffocates.
Whereas for Asians, native Americans & for much of the ancient world it has entirely different meanings.
https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/from-devi-in-hijab-om-as-...
I'm also getting a little sick of down votes every damn time I mention Native Americans. I'm starting to wonder.
Seventeen million people died in the Holocaust. That number is larger than the dollar amount that many of the companies on this website raise. That's more people than you'll meet in your entire lifetime, perhaps more than you'll _see_ in your lifetime. This is the population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston put together. Those people were physically destroyed by folks identifying with that symbol.
It's really, really hard to say this symbol doesn't carry hate universally—even if a Buddhist practitioner were to use it—because putting it on your video game car on _a global game_ whose audience is ~100% folks who are well-aware of nazism (and, in fact, people whose histories are tainted by the effects of the Holocaust). But more to the point, the confederate flag _was invented_ to represent hate. It had no established use before the confederacy. Pedantry about whether swastikas are universally racist or not is pointless, because the topic at hand is about a symbol which is universally recognized as one of hate.
The Mao era probably around 75 million. Lets ban any symbol related to them (sickle and hammer, red flags, etc).
(ps: I am not in favor of the swastika, just don't like how a symbol can be used for thousands of years, hijacked by some pricks, and now everyone can't use it anymore, and the people that have an emotional connection to it have to censor themselves. Also, isn't the buddhist one reversed from the Nazi one? Mirrored? Which makes it even worse as you are using a similar but not exactly the same symbol and ignorant folks can't spot the difference)
https://www.facebook.com/upwordindia/videos/2662610620694569...
Coincidentally, a news item from yesterday about swastikas: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645
https://www.facebook.com/upwordindia/videos/2662610620694569...
And then these people vote. People who feel (rightly or wrongly) persecuted tend to lash out, whether it's by breaking statues or electing far-sides candidates.
The current polarization happened before Microsoft stopped letting you make racist cars
Does the popularity of a racist symbol have any correlation with whether it should be suppressed? Swastikas were a lot more present in the 1940s but that doesn't mean they were less reprehensible.
If a far-right group started using a brand-new symbol to signify their racist ideology, is it suddenly worth waiting for the symbol to pick up steam before prohibiting it? That doesn't make a lot of sense. The people using the symbol are saying "I don't think you should exist" _right now_, not when there is a sufficient number of others rallying around their belief system.
The confederate flag is hundreds of years old. Waiting for "informal social pressure" to kick in is a great way to ignore a problem.
If someone is specifically using the Nazi version of the swastika, then by all means handle it. But if it's the non-Nazi version, then why do people not get to reclaim it?
My concern with these sort of deplatforming moves while understandable, is they tend to drive these bigoted ideas underground. So maybe they cant express it publicly but boy, do they find other ways to do it as certain church members' families can attest. I don't have a definite solution but there is something to be said for using informal social pressure (i.e confederate decal dude all of a sudden not finding anyone to play with, because people quit the game as soon as they see the flag) rather than deplatforming.