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I think 4chan is a shit hole and do not in any way approve of them mocking BLM or the movement.
The reason I share this however is to point out the generally harmful group think of people being activists right now, to the extent it is hurting the movement.
4chan consistently has success in these matters. Right now its Bald for BLM which seems to be catching on, and not that long ago they managed to trick everyone into thinking the OK hand gesture was a white supremacist hand gesture and even managed to get it on a list of hate speech.
When 4chan is this successful at manipulating people simply by making something look popular, when that is the only criteria for success, its time to reevaluate the underlying mentality driving our activism.
@freemo Side note, but the whole "👌" debacle is often represented in a way that doesn't quite reflect the reality accurately. The people who started the claim that it's a white supremacist thing were in part also white supremacists. I don't know what the exact proportions of just-for-the-lolz trolls to alt-righters were obviously, but there was enough of the latter, that I think this story can be described relatively accurately as "white supremacists adopting new symbol" rather than "trolls convincing journalists that white supremacists adopted a new symbol". I mean the trolls definitely thought they were doing that, so the truth is somewhere in between. And confusingly the white supremacists also thought they were trolling, as evidenced by the NZ mosque shooter -- he seemes to flash this symbol in some photos "ironically". But if you adopt a symbol "ironically" or "for-the-lulz" you still adopted the symbol...
In my mind BLM isnt really something to mock overall. Its an important voice.
But as I said in their mocking they did manage to reveal a disurbing thread of group think that ultimately makes them easy to manipulate as a group. And its not really even a BLM specific thing, its activists as a whole right now.
Absolutely, its an issue on the radiacal right as it is on the radical left as well.
Horeshoe theory has a lot of truth to it. The left and the right are almost indistinguishable in their maturity and critical thinking skills. Same way of thinking, just slightly different indoctrination.
The story is the same, the main characters just have different names so to speak.
I agree that we're seeing massive amounts of drone, extremist, cult-like behavior these days. Not *just* from the activist demographic, but from almost all sides. Everyone is seemingly becoming a devout ideologue.