
'OK' is now a hate symbol, the ADL says - tdewitt
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/26/us/adl-new-hate-symbols/index.html
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scrumper
There's a curiously large connection between 4Chan's audience and the far
right if satirical memes are getting co-opted that easily. What an odd
demographic they must have; both satire enthusiasts _and_ their targets
coexisting in one happy space...

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krapp
When you create a community that's welcoming to racists, where people share
racist ideology and memes and have racist conversations, with the plausible
deniability provided by anonymity and the implied satire and irony behind
everything, then actual racists will show up and speak openly, and appropriate
the memes as actual symbols.

Why wouldn't they? It's free real estate, as it were.

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brodouevencode
This changes nothing for a lot of people. Divers, as others have mentioned in
these comments as well as in construction/manufacturing (which has a large
population of non-white people) it's used in situations where you cannot hear.
I doubt anyone's going to convince these folks to change years of acceptable
practice on the back of a hoax.

As for the ADL: feed a bear and they will happily take it. Ten minutes of
research and they would have seen it's a troll.

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mighty_bander
Okaaay...

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Clubber
>The OK hand gesture and its link to white nationalism began as a hoax cooked
up by users of the website 4chan, who falsely linked it to white supremacy,
according to the ADL. It was meant to bait the media or people with liberal
ideals to overreact, ADL experts say, and therefore look ridiculous for
condemning such an innocuous sign.

This perfectly summarizes a frail old media trying to survive against a
vibrant uncontrolled new media.

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tdewitt
I think it summarizes the problem of 4chan. It doesn't say anywhere that the
media tool the bait and the ADL has an old blog post making it clear that, at
the time, it was a hoax. Now the ADL has reclassified it as an actual symbol
of hate by alt-right groups and white supremacists.

I think the article paints a picture of the rise of hate groups and the
appropriation of a commomly used and innocuous hand gesture. Hell, as a diver,
I now have to think about the fact that some Bad Actors have taken what I use
to indicate that I'm fine and turned it into "I support genocide."

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scrumper
Ugh no please don't think about it! I'm a diver too and had a lovely time
teaching my little blonde haired, blue eyed kids all the various hand signals,
including this one.

So how about this still means "OK" if you're a normal person and you're not
proudly flashing it at the end of a stiff arm in a crowd of skinheads?

Doesn't context count at all?

Edit: I'm not shouting at you, just generally in despair. Tone is more like,
rolling my eyes _with_ you. And I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

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tdewitt
Because I'm selfish, diving was one of my first thoughts. "I use this all the
time!" Context only counts for a time. My wife reminded men of one of her
favorite childhood books that has "queer" in the title. It wasn't a slur, it
was a synonym for "odd." Then came the 90s and later and "queer" was mostly
used as a slur. Then to LGBTQ community took it as their own. It's nearly off
limits for the rst of us because saying "how queer" has to be followed by "I
mean odd, not a mean way to reference homosexuals." (Is that even the right
way to reference people now? I can't track all the variants of
binary/sis/etc.)

