>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'.

I understood your underlying point immediately. There's no shortage of people actively seeking to be offended by something. Add an out of context image grab and a clickbait title and you can be the next viral enemy of the internet in a few hours.

Hi, sorry, but “credibility” is the word you and GP want. “Credulity” has basically the opposite meaning. Sorry.

A bloke (and a less privileged bloke at that, 75% non white according to himself) was recently fired because someone had shot a photo of him resting his hand out the window of a company truck in what lpoked line an OK hand.

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

oh, come on. "resting his hand ... what looked like" ???

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".

Point is it seems he did it after they kept following him and trying to get him to do it, it seems the guys in the other car even did it first to try to get him to mimic 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.

What are you talking about? You need to defend yourself for hand gestures now? You need to preface your arguments with "I'm not white" now?

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

One person being fired doesn't prove anything. The person who took the video is even upset that he accidentally hurt the person he was videoing.

The person who took the video went to significant effort to ruin Emmanuel Cafferty’s life and it is a great shame that he has suffered no consequences from doing so.

>NBC 7 spoke to the man who originally posted the picture on Twitter. He has since deleted his account and said he may have gotten "spun up" about the interaction and misinterpreted it. He says he never intended for Cafferty to lose his job.

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

but things can change to make the OK sign tabu too, can't they?

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!

So all racists have to do is adopt something as a “inside” symbol, then publicly advertise its “real” meaning, and everyone rushes to avoid it no matter how common it is.

I could see white supremecists doing this for fun.

yeah, it seems we've ended up giving too much power to hate groups instead of reclaiming their symbols.

Have we really got to the point where we talk about “reclaiming” the Ok symbol from white supremcists!?

Amusingly, given the starting point for this discussion, what you've described part of how the "OK" sign became associated with racism. In 2017, someone on 4chan's /pol/ board suggested "Operation O-KKK": flood Twitter etc with warnings about the supposedly racist meaning of the "OK" gesture. The initial target of the hoax was the regular "are you all right?" sign, but the inverted "circle game" version came under fire as well. Later, after the hoax had run its course, those who are wont to "own the libs" used it ironically as a joke. Time passes, only the most dedicated continue to use it, and its meaning becomes less a farce and more a serious signal.

(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.)

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

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.

> a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this

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 )