Comment by gurkendoktor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gurkendoktor | Hacker News Reader

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> That's the entire deal of fascists: take something that has no negative connotation and give it one. It's how they make their way to the public space. > ... even the fucking # (this one is especially dumb).

No, the "fashtag" is a great example. The trolls are trying to exploit paranoia about dogwhistles. Their goal is not to make fascists use the hashtag, but to laugh at (hypothetical) people who avoid hashtags because of internet hearsay that it might be a secret nazi symbol.

It takes two to tango - this particular kind of trolling doesn't work (and didn't work in the case of the fashtag) when we relax a little about dogwhistles. I won't let them take away my feelsbadman.jpg.

> this particular kind of trolling doesn't work (and didn't work in the case of the fashtag) if we all relax a little about dogwhistles.

No, that's exactly when it works. They aren't doing it to laugh at reactions as an end goal, the mockery exists entirely to delegitimize attention paid to racist/fascist dogwhistles, whose whole purpose is to get paid attention to by the target audience but ignored by the wider audience, which doesn't work when the wider audience is sensitized to and vigilant against them.

To stick with the pepe example: It only works as a dogwhistle now because everyone but Frog Twitter has stopped using it. If the rest of the world had shrugged and kept using it, then it wouldn't be a political symbol now.

I think this is the same mechanism as in the euphemism treadmill[1], where it's not clear if it's better to avoid a word or to double down on it (but in a proud/positive way). There doesn't seem to be a consensus about how to deal with the euphemism treadmill either.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill

You're absolutely right. I've seen memes about the "fashtag", including the ones that do their best to attach it some meaning, but that meaning was so stupid that I didn't even bother remembering it. It's a dogwhistle for the sake of dogwhistles.

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