Well, looks like they were very successful then.
No one is seriously arguing that devoid on the context and who pushes that specific phrasing, that it's "not ok to be white"
You have to intentionally disingenuous to seriously believe that.
Seriously, these white supremacists are twisting you into hysterics and make you look like a fool with your obsession with decoding their secret symbols.
The OK symbol is completely ok. There's nothing wrong with it. There's a certain sect of internet cretins who use it to dogwhistle to each other.
When someone uses the OK symbol, it literally means nothing. If that person also belongs to or is adjacent to that certain sect.. then you can start to ask questions but still mainly assume innocent intent.
If that person is using the OK symbol while wearing a MAGA hat, posting pictures with Pepe the frog doing the OK symbol, etc.. You can see clearly the throughline here and it's not illogical or wrong to see what that person is clearly trying to do and call them out on it.
I'm not 'decoding secret symbols', and if a hispanic person truly was fired for just doing an "OK" sign and nothing else, then no one who is serious on the left should support that as that is beyond absurd. For some reason, my bet is that there was a bit more going on than that though, but I could be wrong!
After the points I made, do you still think I'm being illogical and off the deep end? I really think what I'm saying about recognizing dogwhistles is important and common sense, but maybe I'm wrong.
The Hispanic OK sign dude is one particularly egregious example of this. I think in most of these cases, the company thinks it's easier to fire the person than bother to investigate what actually happened.
So it's very important to verify that a so called "dog whistle" isn't a hoax or overblown, and sometimes even if some Internet trolls are trying to launch a dog whistle bringing attention to what they're doing is helpful marketing for their cause with all the attention it brings.
> It's more important exactly who is using the phrase and why, than what the phrase is.
This is thought-terminating tribal idiocy.
Let's put it in tribal terms for you. If your tribe self-owns by jumping into an obvious bear trap, that's an L for you and yours. Take some responsibility, and maybe slow down to consider the words next time.
Which was clearly the goal of this experiment, to show how quickly and vehemently people over react to anything that seems to deviate slightly from their personal ideology, no matter how slight.
The thing is, you have to see who is using and spreading that message. When it's alt-right people, you can assume malicious intent when they use it.
If someone who is not clearly alt-right says it, I wouldn't even think twice as that's literally meaningless, but you have to acknowledge how they are trying to use it as a dogwhistle
Some people took this as a sign that an evil fifth column was going around trying to win an invisible cultural battle by putting up signs that had no racist content but that implied that someone around town would be willing to put up a racist sign if they had had the chance and the chutzpah.
Other people took this as a sign that the evil first through fourth columns were in such active pursuit of dissenters that they would get mad on Twitter and take down meticulously inkjetted pieces of A4 paper if they so much as implied that dissent was an option.
Few reasonable people took this as a sign that it was, literally, not "OK" to be a white person (what does that even mean? if it's not okay how are they supposed to stop?), but because taking down a sign can be taken to mean that the janitor disagrees with what those cultural mercenaries at Kinko's printed on it, that take got passed around a lot.
So for some people the message of that poster was infuriating. You can't openly disagree with the literal meaning, but on the other hand, many people do it internally. They believe that white people as the descendants of slave owners should inherit the collective guilt of their great forefathers (even if it was a family of a third wave of immigrants from Europe that never owned any slaves). The very fact we are even discussing that is telling in itself.
It is okay to be who you are. It doesn't matter your race or nationality, your sex or gender or creed. It's okay to be white. It's okay to be black. It's okay to be Asian. It's okay to be First Nations, Native, Indigenous. It's okay to be male or female or intersexed or trans. It's okay to be Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia or Jewish or Orthodox or Baha'i or Zoroastrian or Buddhist or Hindu or Taoist or Shinto or any other creed.
For all people everywhere, it is emphatically okay to exist.
If you disagree with that, then I think you need to re-examine who is engaging in supremacist politics.
Not everything has to be black and white and divisive.
Trust me, it's happening.
Mine is as follows. Historically, the colonization was the domain of countries with access to sea, especially a long coast line - starting with Vikings. Among European countries, the colonization was done mainly by the Brits, Spain, Portugal, France, the predecessors of the modern Netherlands and Belgium.
Other European countries either didn't have access to sea, or had it but for various reasons weren't interested in colonization - for example because they were focused on land wars with their neighbors. You won't find many German or Austrian colonies. And you can talk to the Swiss how white people are guilty of colonialism, but you won't find any understanding there. Some with the whole Eastern Europe.
I understand this simplistic point of view ("white people invaded the whole world") seems attractive to some, but it's false, unjust and racist. If you say, "Several European countries colonized a significant portion of the world" - this is accurate, true, and definitely not racist. But it seems people don't care about facts or being precise anymore: it's all about emotion and fitting one's limited set of views.
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EDIT: To people who flag and downvote: I'm a very open-minded person. I don't want to live in my bubble. So please, talk to me. Explain why I'm wrong - or at least why you disagree. HN is a discussion forum, let's use this opportunity to actually transmit some useful information. To me, downvoting and flagging says, "I disagree but I can't find any counter-arguments".
It's great to share your personal experience and fine to edit your comments, but if you're making substantial edits, please say that they're edits.
There are variations of such a feature that might strike a balance - for example only tracking edits once a comment has replies; or simply marking them 'edited' without saying what the edits were.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It’s a common tactic of Fox News and adjacent online outlets. Senators will join in as well. Anything to start a culture war. It’s coordinated and planned. I’m on mobile but I’d send you some evidence about it. I remember Hasan Piker showing some interesting information about it.