As a SCUBA diver the ๐ hand symbol has been a symbol of our trade for many decades now. It is the diver-sign for "I am safe" so it has a deep and important meaning for SCUBA divers. But a few ignorant people see fit to call it a right dog whistle or even so far as hate speech. Now apparently a huge group of people who are attached dearly to the meaning of that symbol, particularly because of how many of our fellow divers we have lost to the depths, are told we are racist or alt-right because of what that symbol means to us or how we use it. It's so sad that people resort to such simplistic views of the world to fuel their own hate.
@freemo
Have you seen this interpretation as racist symbol in Europe too? Being in Italy I had no clue
@arteteco
I've never seen it used as a hate symbol. But in the UK they recently got it added to a list of symbols that are defined as hate speech. I've also had many people on Mastodon throw a fit about that symbol in my direction a.while back.
@freemo Aware of 2 meanings of a symbol/word,
one - useful/kind
other - useless/hateful
correct thing to do: deny the useless/hateful, spread the useful/kind
what we often do: deny the useful/kind, spread the useless/hateful, and hate on it. That is, spread what we hate and hate on it... behavior, perhaps stemming from a more fundamental tendency to spread hate that we feel, in this case disguised as positive "anti-hate" action.
@namark Agreed
@freemo Despite all the attacks on them in the comments, the ADL actually debunked this: adl.org/blog/how-the-ok-symbol-became-a-popular-trolling-gesture
@freemo it is an alt-right signaling device and using innocuous things as *actually* their racist thing and then getting whiny about free speech and "hysterics" is their tactic.
You can't automatically assume it is the innocuous thing or not, that's the point.
To people who think that ๐is some kind of dog whistle, I say ๐, in spades.