> "this sentence could mean y as well as x so you can’t prove I meant x"
It's interesting that a lot of online debate and media commentary uses the opposite technique:
> "this sentence could—with varying degrees of plausibility—mean bad thing y as well as good thing x, so you can't prove you didn't really mean to say the bad thing." The principle of anti-charity.
There's a big prisoner's dilemma thing going on. If you're charitable, and the people you're discussing with are too, you can have better discussions.
If you're operating in an environment like the internet where you can more or less guarantee that there will be one comment based on the the worst possible interpretation of what you said, being charitable in advance just makes things worse for you. You're playing "cooperate" with an endless stream of "defectors". Trolling has always been "defect" in this environment.
Hence the value in having more closed environments for discussion. HN is open enough that people can make throwaway accounts and use them for valid points, and closed enough that the more obvious trolls get downvote-hammered quickly.
I've found it to be pretty effective to simply not engage with those who keep taking the worst possible interpretations of your (or others) arguments. It sort of simulates an environment where everyone is charitable.
That's alright sometimes. But there's usually a 100 (or something) readers to 1 posters ratio. If none of the "trolls" are contested that leaves the impression that it's a legitimate opinion.
I don't think the option of "don't feed the trolls" really works in such scenarios.
Tit for tat has always been the solution to prisoner's dilemma. The people who think "prisoner's dilemma" means "I should be wholly and utterly selfish, because it's the logical thing to do" are just idiots who don't understand how cooperation can work over time and repeated trials to build trust.
> There's a big prisoner's dilemma thing going on. If you're charitable, and the people you're discussing with are too, you can have better discussions.
Privately, I'd very much agree.
However Cardinal Richelieu's quote comes to mind when posting to the internet at large (yes, im counting HN in this):
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
And that is evermore so, with concern trolls and those in mind with being 'wronged' in some way. Because, no matter how charitable you are, there is someone who isn't and will assume the worst. And then you become the brunt of a social media campaign gone awry.
I agree and I didn’t take notice till the day I learned a woman flying to ZA wrote some quick satire on twitter before departing, when she landed many hours later she learned her tweet was taken straight and was summarily fired with the tireless assistance of the twitter-rage-mob.
I think that the problem with this as a steering wheel for discussion is that sometimes what you just said is extremely accurate but also sometimes both happen at the same time, for and against some figure by their defenders vs their offendees, and also often the sentence is part of a long pattern of behavior that has implication tendrils. No sentence exists in a vacuum, but different people have differing desires to reach further in different moments, some based on whether they like the person's face, but also occasionally by guiding principle.
Reminds me of the "motte and bailey doctrine" [1]. You make a claim; when attacked you retreat to an easy-to-hold position; when attackers leave you make the claim again.
Example: "God exist" is attacked; speaker retreats to "but God is just another name for beauty in the universe, do you disagree with that?"
And of course whether charity is applied or not is all about the presumed social fault lines in the situation. For example, in the U.S. right now, if you say, "The expert predictions about the coronavirus are all over the place and changing every day," it's an uncontroversial statement when everyone's politics are assumed to be the same. Among liberals, it will be interpreted as meaning that the coronavirus is extremely dangerous and not fully understood and we need to play it safe. Among conservatives, it will be interpreted as undermining expert authority and casting doubt on social distancing. In a mixed group, though, the important aspect will not be the meaning, which nobody will bother thinking too hard about; the only thing that matters will be the presumed intent to precipitate an argument.
This is why anything partisan or partisan-adjacent in the US, which includes most current "news" events of any kind, has become so supremely boring to me.
It's literally no longer about what is factual or not, or what is actually being said, simply what it it assumed that someone is attempting to imply.
If you're not fluent in euphemism and current-events context, making a plain factual statement can frequently be heard/interpreted by the listener as you saying the opposite, and the listener is usually totally unaware of the fact that they're flipping things around like this.
It's one thing when I'm acting like like the beep boop robot I am, but it's leaked out and over, into just plain speech.
Human communication is so densely laden with nuance and context and subtext that it takes soooo much work and a dose of generosity to have a real conversation that doesn’t spin off into something useless.
In a technical context you can define things clearly, but in a political context it’s just too hard, there are so many things that mean different things to different people.
My attempt in daily life to deal with this is to offer a place where my “side” is wrong to foster generosity then try to tightly circumscribe the thing we’re discussing. I think it sometimes works. But it’s a ton of conversational work with unclear payoffs.
I don’t see how we’re not doomed to usually have largely fruitless conversation in the current climate. I don’t like the approach, but I understand why people move towards a “screw convincing them, let’s rally the base.” Bit of a prisoner’s dilemma there, I think, where the whole country is left impoverished by the individually rational approach to rallying the base
> My attempt in daily life to deal with this is to offer a place where my “side” is wrong to foster generosity then try to tightly circumscribe the thing we’re discussing.
This sounds quite interesting; would you be able to provide an example?
Pretty common understanding among biblical scholars. Christian scholars often understand it as dual prophecy, referring both to contemporary (i.e. Roman power structures) and later eschatological ones.
Very interesting that this page talks about serious stuff like which emporer slaughtered whom and then says you can buy those coins, the very mark of the beast!
Two modern equivalents of this kind of thing are the use of euphemisms to bypass Chinese censorship: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Main_Page and the ever-mutating set of "dog whistles" used by the far right ("fourteen words" etc.)
The historical background of the 1700s I'm a bit vague on, but it was crucial for the development of Parliamentary government in the UK through a long series of succession crises from the civil war onwards that only really ended with the childless death of the younger Charles Stuart in 1788.
Essentially there were two incompatible criteria for English monarchs to be publicly accepted: "not Catholic" and "not foreign".
Yes, it was negotiable, but that negotiation was the politics of the time; the Hanovers making concessions to Parliament to retain their acceptance, while being variably popular with the actual public, and unpopular with some of the polemic writers under discussion in the article.
The massive Hanoverian propaganda effort of George IV is written all over Edinburgh street names.
Well assuming you looked it up, clicked on the first Google result, and read
Fourteen Words, 14, or 14/88, is a reference to the fourteen-word slogan
"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,
"[1] or the less commonly used "Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman
must not perish from the earth."[2] The slogans were originally coined by white
supremacist David Lane,[3] a founding member of the terrorist organization The
Order[4] and serve as a rallying cry for militant white nationalists across the globe."
Either you are being disingenuous or you have a very naive understanding of the quote. I could just as easily say: "work sets you free" doesn't sound so unreasonable! How could anyone take issue with that?!
That work sets you free is an unsubstantiated claim. I'm working and I don't think that this set me free. On the contrary, I think it's pretty shackling.
What would be a not naive understanding of the quote? I think it is reasonable to want a future for your own children. How are we living in a world where this is controversial?
It's not a future for "your own children" it's a future for "white children" generally that needs to be "secured" (from whom?) spoken in the context of white supremacy.
If it was "I want a nice future for my own children" that would be uncontroversial.
You'd probably do better not avoiding the elephant sized context in the room here. It makes your replies look deeply disingenuous.
To answer your point if I'm white there is still 50% of the equation that might not be. So my children are not necessarily "white" nor would the be considered so by white supremacists. My children might be adopted. My children might have some sort of genetic disorder that causes skin pigmentation changes. I might deeply consider my cats to be my children. Which is without even considering the deeper implications of whether it is simple to define "whiteness".
There are plenty of reasons why my own children and "white children" might not be part of the same set.
Here's a personal claim: Meine Ehre heißt Treue. (My honour is called loyalty.) Seems like a upstanding thing to say, but it's banned as a slogan in Austria and Germany, because of its relation to the SS.
The words chosen are relatively vague and could mean a number of things, but in context both this and the 14 words are clearly part of the white supremacist movement. You can't ignore the history and context of language.
I think context is the important thing here. Taken out of context, the quote is reasonable. I had never heard of this but if you replace "white" with "black" it seems pretty acceptable right?
In context it sort of means repress and kill everyone else though.
And how do you get from this quote to the context of genociding other people? That's a pretty big non-sequitur. The quote is about securing a future, not to "kill all infidels".
I just got back from reading a blogpost [0] by another commenter (presumably also German, if you are, in fact, German) in this thread about how Americans are so steeped in euphemism that they don't notice how much they respond to what they think their conversational parter is implying and not to what the partner is actually saying. I admit that I am American and the blogpost resonates with my experience.
That being said, you've just made a very interesting sequence of comments in this subthread that, taken as a whole, can be interpreted in at least a couple of quite different ways - and the more comments you make, the more your (probably predominately American) readers are going to build up a mental model of what you might be implying.
Personally, as an American who maybe has spent too much time on the internet, my interpretation of your comments in this subthread is that they are essentially a piece of performance art. Also personally, I am enjoying the performance quite a lot. I'll make no comment about whether or not the performance is appropriate to the spirit of this website as revealed to us by dang.
But! Maybe it's good for me to practice responding to what people actually say. And I think your logic slipped a little:
>How do you get from this quote to the context of genociding other people?
The issue is that GP said "There is a context that the quote was made in, and that context turns the quote bad" and you non-sequitured by asking "How does one, starting from these words, derive the bad-making context?" You're right, you can't. The literal words are fine by themselves. But the words are not all there is (at least to an American audience in the current year, which the audience I'm most qualified to have an opinion on).
This is why when you tell an American "allahu ackbar" they think "suicide bomber". Or "it's time for a change" means "the boundless optimism of a young black presidential candiate". Or "planned parenthood" could mean either "women finally gaining control over their own bodies" or "state subsidy of immoral behavior" instead of, you know, literally planning whether/when one wants to have children.
Americans wouldn't tattoo 1488 on themselves if there were no additional, metatextual information that they wanted to convey to a viewer, so it seems kind of naive to interpret that kind of thing in the literal manner you've been exploring. I don't think you're suggesting they should be interpreted literally, though; I think you're lamenting that some humans have gotten to a place where they see terrible concepts in words that are intrinsically innocuous.
I think that's just a part of being human, but I'm American so maybe it's just a part of being American. I lament it also.
I believe the account is a troll, in the earlier internet definition, someone that goads others, often for the sake of contrarianism, often to make them say odd/unsupportable things in response to seemingly reasonable or mild posts.
When they're good, they have been performance art. I wouldn't rate this one particularly highly though.
"You can call me all the adjectives you want, but I do not care if earth explodes after I die. I just don't. I care for my benefits during my own life. I've said this before and I say it again, I do not have any moral problems with sacrificing other peoples benefits for my own benefits and neither should you. Doing this is insanity. Would you starve yourself to death so you can feed other people? Why should I care for other people? It's a silly notion. Maybe I'd care a little bit if I had children, but I don't."
I'm a bit surprised at how people spend energy engaging with this commenter without checking their history. Anyways, I really do hope it's a troll.
In a statistical sense, in an global integrated society, where everyone is freely equally likely to partner with everyone, there eventually won't be any children by the traditional racist definitions of white, ie, with white. no interbreeding with non European ancestry. (The whole concept of white is questionable and mostly racist, fyi.) This is what is generally called white genocide by the far right, even though it is anything but.
To prevent this scenario, we get some pretty ugly ethnostate and facist ideas. Controlling "race mixing", keeping different "races" separated to different countries, and in some cases, explicit calls for genocidal actions.
All this infringement on freedoms just to prevent an outcome that is just based on some made up unscientific discrimination like race and fear of race mixing.
Basically, 14 words are bad because they acknowledge the constructed idea of race and embrace it in the worst possible way.
Of course, hence the quoted bit. I never said facists had any spec of emperical correctness, I just was trying to explain how 14 words ties inevitably to their ideology.
Not sure who that got down voted by, but I am going to charitably assume it was people annoyed with me engaging in a conversation with a likely troll at all.
Well, I meant that the charitable (albeit probably not correct) assumption is that they must be using a definition of "white" other than the one used by traditional racists, since the whole quote is a non-sequitur otherwise.
> never said facists had any
I think you mean Nazis here? Facism is purely a style of political ideology, and is compatible with whatever views on race you want (of course, being facism, it would prefer that they be nonsensical and used primarily as a excuse to make things worse for everyone, but that's not a requirement).
"Hey white-nationalist, I see that you really like white people and that's okay. You want white kids to be happy, go for it. If someone else wants green kids to be happy, they should do that too. Just don't be a dick to everyone else."
If they're directing their energy towards anything good at all, it's probably best to recognize the validity there, while doing your best to devalidate things they shouldn't be doing. It's not like "fuck everything about you white nationalist" is paying off... it's kind of how we got Trump IMO.
Say I'm white. Say my kids are white. Say I want a future for my kids. So far, so good.
Now, down the street are three other families: one white, one black, and one asian. They all have kids, too. Now what does the saying say?
Here's a family where the parents are white, the kids are mixed, because they also adopted some kids from Africa. Those adopted kids are just as much their children as the natural children are. What does the saying say to them?
Here's an anglo who married a person of another race. What does the saying say to them?
We want a good future for kids - our kids, and our community's kids. Whether they're white has nothing to do with it.
And because whether they're white has nothing to do with it, adding that to the phrase is what makes it racist. It winds up at least implying that white children deserve a good future, and other children don't (or at least don't as much).
What they are trying to demonstrate is that there is a massive double standard. There are organizations, government programs, scholarships, etc which are explicitly designed to help the futures of children of color. Many people are openly, consciously, and unapologetically acting in a focused way to make the future better for them. But merely saying that we should be concerned about the future of white children is hotly contested.
White is a dumb category anyways. A lot of non-whites have significant European heritage. Its asymmetrical in a way that can only be identified as cultural racism.
But yeah, the correct full position is we want to secure a good and fair future for all children, and fair sometimes means compensating for historical and ongoing inequalities and injustices created by racism.
Whether it's a dumb category or not, it is a category that people use for the reasons you describe.
Starting off as AnimalMuppet did (basically, trying to make white people feel bad for merely wanting for people of their category something which numerous institutions openly, explicitly, and unapologetically try to provide to people of other categories) is a pretty good way to convince white people that you can't be trusted to look out for their children without bias.
I reject your characterization of my post. I deny even more your characterization of my intent. You are utterly mistaken, and I would suggest that you refrain from further attempts to ascribe motives to those with whom you disagree.
On to the your point. Yes, there are organizations and programs that explicitly try to help non-white children. And why? Because those children have disproportionately more poverty and worse outcomes than white children. So, you know, if you're going to try to fix things, maybe starting where the problems are is a reasonable idea.
If one of those organizations was explicitly trying to have "other" children have better outcomes than white children, that would be a problem. But trying to get to equal seems perfectly reasonable.
Now, if you want to argue that white parents don't hear that as the intent, I would agree that at least some probably don't. But your position seems to be something beyond merely "some of them hear it that way". I've no desire to put words in your mouth, but I suspect that anything further I will not agree with.
"What does the saying say to them?" You said this repeatedly. What is the point in such a question, if not to make the target feel bad for those hypothetical people hearing the saying?
As far as the institutions go, you're not saying anything that anyone here is unaware of. Everyone here is totally familiar with the justifications for those institutions. That is not the point.
The point is that you led off by pulling the heart strings of white people merely for saying they want something for people of their category, when they can look around and see that not only is every other category allowed to say that and want that for people of their category, they actually have institutions that are openly explicitly trying to provide it to them.
The appearance is that you are holding them to a different standard than those other people, which is an indication of bias. That is how you fell into the trap.
It's not a good starting point if your next point is that you're just trying to make everyone equal. How can they trust you?
No, that wasn't my point at all. I was replying to Kaiyou, who couldn't understand how those words could be considered as being associated with the far right. I explained exactly how they could be considered as saying something within the far right. (That it is associated with the far right is shown by who initially said it.)
So, when those words are spoken by the far right, can you see a problem?
Could someone in complete innocence say the same words, and have no ill intent? Sure. But such words are also said by the far right. Do you hold them as having no ill intent?
I've got a problem with the meaning the far right puts on the words. Do you not?
Frankly, the thing you are arguing and arguing and arguing about is not something I care very much about. Innocent whites can see the words as being completely benign? Yeah, dog whistles are like that.
How does saying "What does the saying say to them?" demonstrate that the words could be considered as being associated with the far right? Please be specific.
The piece you are quoting doesn't. I've said a bit more than that, though - in particular, about the origin of the quote. Others on this thread have also said more on the topic. If you want to see it, it's all there in this thread.
If you don't want to see it, then there's not much point talking to you. And in fact, whether you're honestly looking or not, I'm done with this conversation. You can take the last word if you want.
Pretty basic signaling: people I don't like like it, so I don't like it. They are basically giving horrible people too much control over their thoughts.
The problem with this retort is that of course it is okay to be white, and the details of such a campaign are what make all the difference. But the person who isn't already with you on this will just ask "how is it not ok to be white?"
Yeah. it takes like 20 minutes to communicate the context and how this isn't so innocuous as it looks. I've had to explain this to my aging boomer parents, and they still don't buy it.
It is truly a subversive phrase because it takes control of the argument from a place that requires, IMO, a lot of basics to be explained and/or challenged... which most people don't want to sit through. It's like a self-generating mine field of arguments.
I don't think you can construct "It's okay to be white" as something wrong, because it's just inherently correct. It worries me, that you even try to find something wrong the the slogan.
I’m curious, what is that context? ...why is it “problematic” for an underrepresented group (such as in Harvard admissions), to rally around a claim it’s okay to be them?
Have you ever considered that if you need to do a lot of explaining, and not even your own parents follow your logic, but the other person can persuasively summarize their argument... you might just be wrong?
A question for people downvoting:
Do you think I’m wrong or do you just not like what I’m saying?
It seems easy to correct me about the Harvard admissions point, if I’m just factually mistaken.
I still don't understand, why didn't the left simply reply "yes it is" and resist the urge to hedge/caveat/etc? It seems it would've been tactically and strategically best. Judging from the people I see online who were pushed right by the left's response to this.
It's sort of like the "All Lives Matter" thing. The "it's ok to be white" argument structure is designed so that either accepting it or denying it furthers the goals of white nationalists, because either has to be done in an extremely nuanced way that can't really happen in the context of a protest sign or a meme.
I think accepting would've worked. Implying that some demographic is bad makes the movement lose support, the only people who benefit from it are people trying to gain status within the movement. (Edit: that answers my question above.)
It's not the idea that being white is acceptable that's being rejected though - most of the people doing the rejecting are white - it's the idea that white nationalism has anything to do with 'being white' or that objections to it have anything to do with aversion to whiteness. It's a bit like seemingly innocuous positive statements about 'life' or 'choice' suddenly become minefields if they're used almost exclusively as campaign slogans by one side of an abortion debate.
The whole structure of the "it's ok to be white" thing is to (it it were accepted by the left) to start delegitimizing the attempts to build alternate power structures that aren't available to non white people. For instance, the NBER found that literally changing a name from Tyrone to Chad on a resume increased job callbacks 3x, and stuff like affirmative action is designed to address exactly those systemic inequities. Normalizing "it's ok to be white" was designed to attack those head on if it was accepted.
You don't see that half, because the left didn't take that side. There was no winning either way.
Man, that blogpost [0] really did a number on me. Warning, navel-gazing ahead.
I have a browser extension [1] that lets me set custom tags on HN users. I'm not unconflicted about using it, since I have some ideological hangups that tell me to let people's words speak for themselves and to not let someone's history muddy the waters of a discussion in the present. That being said, HN isn't anonymous and it's a comparatively small community and I decided I might as well try keeping track (to some extent) of who's saying what here because it's practicable and there are other places I can experience death-of-the-author just fine. Besides, it reminds me that jacquesm sorted two metric tons of lego using legos and machine learning that one time, so now that always makes me smile when I see him comment.
So here I am, looking at your comment and trying to figure out what it tells me about you as a commenter - what I would want to remember about you if I saw you again. It needs to be fairly terse, to fit.
The first idea that arrives is "It's not reasonable to be white." I dismiss this immediately, because it's the most cynical and least-founded take on your comment (though darkly funny to me).
The second idea is "The 'It's ok to be white' campaign is not reasonable." I turn this over in my mind a few times and even start typing it out. But while I'm typing, I re-read your edit and pause. Then I realize - I'm doing exactly what that blogpost described. "What did 0xff00ffee mean here?"
What if all you meant to do is ask is the literal question "Are you saying that the 'It's ok to be white' campaign is reasonable?" And it's hard for me to even come up with a way of phrasing this in such a way that it sufficiently emphasises the literal, un-euphemistic, un-implicating character that I'm trying describe.
Then I pause again and realize that I've fallen down a semantic rabbithole and there's a snowball's chance in hell that you meant your comment in the third way. And by this time I've read your next comment [2] and am aware that you're aware of the ambiguous, scissor statement nature of your original comment and the amount of context that must be conveyed in order to disambiguate it. This humanises you. Instead of a snarky internet signaller, you become a real person, with parents whose views you care about and who's already expended effort trying to convey the that large context to people without setting off the self-generating minefield that you know exists. The snappy comment wasn't because you haven't stopped caring about changing people's minds; you're just tired of arguing with apparently superficial people who aren't prepared to take context into account (and you were responding to someone who may be a particularly strong example of such).
> the amount of context that must be conveyed in order to disambiguate it.
Precisely!
I didn't want to assume what the parent was asking, so I asked for more information.
With a highly-context-sensitive phrase like this it is best to ask them to explain. If it is asked in sincerity a conversation can evolve. If it is asked with an obvious attempt to deliver the subtext, it is quite clear in about 3-4 sentences.
I appreciate your documented thought process. I notice you diligently approach the phrase prima-facie and observe the semantics, but then don't move beyond that. You were super close there with "what did 0xff00ffee mean?", then moved on.
Beyond lexing and yaccing some tokens, there is one very important question, often referred to by historians as part of analysis via the "Period View":
"What is happening culturally (socially and politically) at that time and geography when the phrase was uttered?"
Much like how historical record needs to be digested in context, which is where many of the logical dissections of ideological slogans have a colossal, debilitating blind spot.
Not to say semantic analysis is wrong or irrelevant, it is just half of the process. A necessary half, but only half.
I perceive the "It's okay to be white" slogan as a very moderate and constructive reaction to the propagation and even normalization of anti-white messages and memes. And I specifically mean anti-white as an ethnic hatred, not as part of an equality and justice argument. For example, see the "Karen" meme, which besides its horrible sexism, specifically focuses on white women.
Middle-class white people have increasingly witnessed a media and a left-wing political coalition that can vilify them with impunity for gain, be that entertainment value or the easy political cohesion that hate can generate. So, I'd argue it's important to make room for and accept the very tepid and nonthreatening "It's okay to be white." Because if we don't, what follows that will be less palatable.
> For example, see the "Karen" meme, which besides its horrible sexism, specifically focuses on white women.
"Angry black woman" was a trope looooooooooong before Karen hit your screen. If you only care about meanness when it's targeted at white people, then this is not a meme problem; this is a you problem.
It doesn't matter much what is said - consider that as keywords.
The accumulation of keywords that creates a clearer and clearer signal. If you see someone with a celtic cross and 1488 written below, do you really think that person is "pretty reasonable"?
It's not the statement's literal meaning (though that's plenty distasteful on its own), it's the use of a symbol for a philosophy that views social dynamics in the US as a zero-sum struggle between fundamentally distinct "whites" and "non-whites", which is itself just a restatement of reconstruction-era segregationist philosophy, used by the same demographics for largely the same semantic purposes.
It's yucky. It literally took us a century to kill that as policy, and that it survives as meme is deeply shameful.
This is signaling through lingo (keywords), very different from this article, yet also worth studying during this lockdown.
If I simply replied "88 bro", the average reader may not click, and think I was just saying I was born in 1988, like you, and we are maybe "birth year brothers".
Yet to the initiated, it would signal that I have some very special political ideas! Once you have started learning that, you will see custom license plates very differently!
As hackers, we should learn to decode such telltales, to know who may mean us harm.
Here's another one that may look totally innocent: blood type tatooed 8 inches above the elbow.
"SS blood group tattoos (German: Blutgruppentätowierung) were worn by members of the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany during World War II to identify the individual's blood type. [...] It was a small black ink tattoo located on the underside of the left arm, [...] placed roughly 20 cm (8 inches) above the elbow."
Strange tattoo example (and Google-able). Boggles my mind why someone would want to identify so strongly with Nazis, but obviously I strongly agree that we should receive those signals. What a bunch of idiots.
This is exactly why we need to learn these signals - to recognize people who so strongly want to identify, with something that would seem strange or benine to the uninitiated.
About a celtic cross and 1488 written below, someone in this thread said they can't "tell that much about a person based on an accessory."
I believe it is a grave mistake to ignore such extremely strong signals, especially the person seems aggressive or inhebriated.
There might be an important social good in treating Nazis and trolls pretending to be Nazis the same - fairness, at the very least, and a desperately needed bulwark against people only pretending to be pretending to be odious.
All this dogwhistling stuff is fun and games until you start to put innocent people under fire for dogwhistling. If more people start reading Nazi propaganda just to avoid dogwhistling, you will have created more enemies as a second order effect of your actions.
A better approach would be to fill the whistles with noise, so they lose their use for the people trying to use them to identify allies. There's a reason why the phrase "normies ruin everything" is so common
How many people do you know who aren't white nationalists have gotten a 1488 tattoo?
The whole point of these signals is that they seem innocuous, but practically no one is going to signal them in other contexts. So you have the vague auspices of plausible deniability when pushed, but nearly 100% specificity too.
You are defending the Motte here, while someone on this thread is being called a white supremacist for defending the phrase "It's okay to be white". Your example is bad anyway, because 1488 does not have any clear alternative meaning.
Take the "okay" sign for instance. It has nowhere near 100% specificity and is basically useless for declaring their alignment. It's a common hand gesture for god's sake. Yet the whole thing was made to be a huge deal as it "revealed" many prominent people were actually secretly white supremacists. And I think the actual motive lies here: making the opposition make an ass out of themselves and causing the maximum possible collateral damage, without actually doing anything. The stronger you react to innocuous things, the more reasonable the other side looks. I mean, who would want to be labeled a X supremacist just because they think it's okay to be X? By stooping down to /pol/'s level just to fight against them, you lose the reasonable people from your side.
> while someone on this thread is being called a white supremacist for defending the phrase "It's okay to be white".
They're throwing around terms like "white genocide", and saying that they wouldn't judge people who wear 1488 (just so we're clear, the 88 part means heil hitler). They're either a white supremacist, or a troll just pretending to be one.
You're not making a good case for the lack of specificity.
Going to your OK sign, obviously ok signs are fine in the general sense, but if someone is on a rant about how immigrants are ruining the country, then throws up an ok sign, it's explicitly a white supremacist calling card. It's all about context.
I agree that 1488 is a signal, but don't agree that it is invisible. The implied meaning is just a google search away.
>if someone is on a rant about how immigrants are ruining the country
I'd say this is the actual reason you think they are a white supremacist, rather than deciphering their dog whistle. Going on a rant on immigrants specifically is a much clearer indicator of their political alignment (my guess would be r/theDonald poster) and I wouldn't say the okay sign adds more signal.
The real danger of dog whistles is when we start seeing things that aren't there, or when we let white supremacists or edgy shitposters dictate what our behavior means.
So you agree that the person you had previously said is just innocuously defending "it's ok to be white" is actually a white supremacist or a troll pretending to be one?
You keep pretending like there's these innocent victims, and it turns out these people where actually what we had said they were all along.
I am getting confused now. My ESL'ness might be getting in the way of us communicating.
Based on how the okay sign thing went, with all of its false positives (which are the innocent victims), I don't think the "dog whistles" give a clear enough signal. Your examples also use judgement from context rather than the dog whistles which is in line with what I've said.
The other poster turned out to be a clear troll, and arguing with them on what the dog whistles mean is giving them just what they want.
The example you picked, the ok symbol, is well known to have been misattributed to supremacists; another one is Pepe the Frog, which was a meme for almost ten years before it was appropriated by the alt-right (some might also throw a swastika in there, too, but usually from context it's obvious you're not discussing Indian religious symbols). As such, these make for poor dog whistles; actual dog-whistles have little or meaning outside of the context they're brought up in.
> Based on how the okay sign thing went, with all of its false positives (which are the innocent victims), I don't think the "dog whistles" give a clear enough signal. Your examples also use judgement from context rather than the dog whistles which is in line with what I've said.
Can you give an example of one of these false positive victims?
> Can you give an example of one of these false positive victims?
Sure, I can. There was a viral example when Zina Bash, a white house advisor, was sitting in a senate hearing, with her hand on her arms, in a way where her fingers kind of looked like the OK sign, but not really.
As in, she did not "flash" the OK sign. Instead she had her hand resting on her arm in a certain position. And this went viral and everyone accused her of being a white supremicist because of it, even though the situation was clearly ridiculous.
I mean, one tweet called her out, and the left wing media and the ADL came out specifically to defend her, specifically calling out that it needed more context to be white supremacist symbol. Ie. what I've been saying this whole time.
Also, it totally is an OK sign, she's just playing the circle game.
So you agree that the left came out to defend her on this?
She isn't a victim of the this concept being called out, but instead the white supremacists who decided to start using a contextual clue that they're being explicitly racist a common sign just because of the chaos it causes, and not the people calling out that racists are doing this.
> So you agree that the left came out to defend her on this?
No. Instead I would say that some people defended here, and others on the left also attacked her, and the fact that there were basically anyone attacking her is still a huge problem.
Regardless if there were people defending her, the fact that this was even a viral issue at all, is still a big problem.
> and not the people calling out that racists are doing this.
There were many (which is not all, I didn't say all, before you strawman me) people on the left attacking her.
I don't know when, exactly, but I became a lot more aware of this 88 thing in the last 3 years or so, and at times, it's seemed like it's everywhere. I got a prescription filled where the pills had "HH" stamped on them and the price on my receipt ended in 88. I got a loan recently and the account number had 88 and 911 in it.
It is terrifying to me that people who think they are not clinically paranoid can say things like "100% specificity" and be sincere.
Edit: I'm not joking, trolling, or (so I believe) delusional. As far as I know, these are real coincidences that are probably meaningless. The prescription in question is supposed to help with paranoia.
You're suppressing the knowledge of how little time it takes to encounter 10,000 numbers and how long you will remember a bunch of digits that seem meaningful. And how quickly the possibilities multiply when you include everyone you're in contact with that might tell you about something that happened to them.
We're not arguing about one four digit number. Nobody who is paranoid about that is paranoid about just that. Doing a statistical analysis of uses of that number might be instructive if you're really obsessed with it, but it's not the point.
I'm not chasing every 1488 windmill. I don't freak out that some random number came to 1488.
I'm saying that when someone says "1488 - Questionably racist thing" like here https://www.coloradohometownweekly.com/2020/03/19/louisville... , or wears a 1488 jewelry, or gets a 1488 tattoo, that person is broadcasting that they are a white nationalist.
This is a fairly dense article, but it is a really profound intersection of "hacking", "reason", and "context". Hacking a language to sound reasonable while delivering a side-channel message through an established context. I guess I never really thought of poets and writers as hackers, but now it clicked into focus.
It's interesting that a lot of online debate and media commentary uses the opposite technique:
> "this sentence could—with varying degrees of plausibility—mean bad thing y as well as good thing x, so you can't prove you didn't really mean to say the bad thing." The principle of anti-charity.