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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.
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.
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.
@freemo I actually didn't see that happen -- I know it was widely reported to be a white supremacist symbol, but I don't remember any innocent person being accused of being racist due to using it. And this makes some sense -- the contexts in which people are using this hand gesture normally are rarely ones in which you could confuse the message for "white power".
@kino
as I said wikipedia tried to compile a fairly exhaustive list of times the OK hand gesture was legitimately used in a racist context and it barely reached the dozen mark.
So if its getting on national lists of hate speech with virtually 0 representation as being used in the way described, that alone shows it is misattributed if nothing else.
I mean hell even ive been accused as a racist for using the Ok symbol before.
@freemo Huh, the last claim really surprizes me, Care to tell the story? I'd be quite interested.
If no innocents were accused of using it in a racist manner (which doesn't seem to be the case from what you are saying, but I still think it's an interesting argument in abstracto), then I'd say labeling it as a racist symbol was not entirely incorrect -- after all it was mostly racists talking about it, and no one should confuse people using it to just mean "OK" with racists. Contexts with hand gestures are not as clear as with spoken language, but they should be clear enough.
@kino
It was over a year ago ont he fediverse.
I posted something to the effect of "hey guys not ever use of the OK hand gesture is racist, in fact most of the time it just means OK"... probably 20 or 30 people called me racist for that comment and people pushed to have me suspended and blocked.
If someone has a legitimate racist making a clear OK symbol and it seems clear it is racist in nature, I'll be the first to say "fuck you".. but the point here is it is very rare.
It leads to more false accusations than real ones simply because its use as a real hate symbol verges on non existant, and the use of it as a legitimate hand symbol is overwhelmingly common in every day use.
In fact thats exactly what 4chan was going for and why they exploited the situation the way they did.
You'd be right, but I've seen *many* instances were people have disingenuously called people out for "white supremacy" or "racism" simply because they made the 👌 sign—knowing full well that it wasn't used in any racist or ethnonationalist context, simply exploiting its journo-powered connotations among members of the dogmatic leftist sphere to smear someone they dislike. Now, tbf, that rarely ever goes anywhere and most people making these claims are ignored or lampooned, but it's still being weaponized against folks.
@timorl I'm fine with saying that 4chan are white supremacists for the sake of argument.
But thats kinda the point. They never used it seriously to signal anything about them being white supremacist.
They saw a symbol that was so mind boggling common (something people use many times a day, literally everyone, akin to waving hello) and said "watch how we can manipulate them to absurd extrems.
Their intention was to take a gesture so common by convincing people it was a symbol of racism so people would start accusing ordinary innocent people of racism, specifically to cause non-racists to be antagonistic and hateful towards eachother, ot ensure people who are reasonable and going "guys this is a common hand gesture" are called racist and ultimately come to hate their fellow anti-racists.
The truth is there is a very very small handful of legitimate cases where white supremacists used it to signal racism. Virtually non-existent. Yet a bunch of white supremacists or trolls were able to manipulate a whole nation to act exactly the way they wanted. They were in control and they got the exact effect they wanted.
They never adopted the symbol, they only manipulated people into thinking they did, thats the key.
It says a lot more about the people they could manipulate to act exactly the way tehy intended than anything else.
