I can see an _argument_ that Twitter, say, should be forced to pander to racists. I don't buy that argument, mind you, but I can at least see the thought process. I can't see any reason that imaginary car livery should have to, though.
And before you say "come on, swastikas are pretty extreme", remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign.
This seems semantic. For example, cheating is banned in many games, and if you cheat, you get banned. Banning cheating and cheaters is effectively the same thing.
You can be as racist as you want in your own head. No one is stopping that. You can express those racist thoughts all you want on your own property.
But you have absolutely no right to express or act on those racist thoughts on someone else's property.
They're two different responses to bad behavior, both totally fair.
My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests.
People can't credulously claim that the half dozen or so people there were all making an "OK" sign then, completely naively, "hey, all good, we're safe, just guarding our gun store". Or maybe they were just making an in joke based on the SCUBA store next door?
Come to your own conclusions, but mine is: fuck that - I'll be the judge of what is acceptable and what isn't, not some kind of thought mob.
On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. They _themselves_ were choosing to imbue political meaning on it, as much as anyone was choosing to _take_ meaning from it.
Based on what? If you go looking for things with a specific interpretation in mind you're going to find a lot of it even in places that it wasn't meant that way. The adage about malice and incompetence comes to mind.
"wasn't meant that way" - you're going have to try harder than that. Saying "oh, they meant nothing inflammatory, even though they're the group (3%ers) who are most associated with the nefarious intent and are absolutely aware of it's purported meaning" is wilfully disingenuous.
Damn, that's scary.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
how many times does that have to be proven wrong?
Mob-justice is all the rage right now.
All that matters is that someone is pointing the pitch-forks at you or your cause.
i hope you stopped eating them 2011 ;-)
I even used the SCUBA shop, which is next door, for reference.
No-one that I've seen has advocated that the OK sign be abandoned for divers. I've been mid mouthful at a restaurant when a server has asked how my food is and I've made this sign and not been called a racist.
However, should I and half a dozen of my buddies, armed an in full tactical gear, standing 10 ft from a BLM protest, waving my Confederate flags, all choose to make this sign for a photo, then a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this as "we know exactly what we're implying here, and we're not all just telling the cameraman that "everything is perfect"."
It was discussed here a few days ago. Stop firing the innocent or something, from the Atlantic.
Wasn't the story that people in another car taunted him and urged him to make the symbol, and they recorded it when he did? He may have not known what the meaning was (I believe that is what he claimed) but that is an entirely different defense to make than "I wasn't doing it, it just looked a bit like it".
The point is he didn't make a racist gesture, so why are we even talking about it.
And that is before we talk about the problem with firing someone over this in the first place.
Context is important.
I have had to tell my kids more than once that when an elderly person use their middle finger to point at something it isn't offensive because they grew up in a time when it didn't matter. That elderly person sure doesn't mean "F* you" as they are pointing their middle finger horizontally towards something while saying "look there".
In fact I think we all do something every single day that would be considered offensive by someone at some point.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
We are saying that if you use a potentially racist sign (hand OK) in real life it's not a big deal, since you're not using it in conjunction with other racist stuff.
At the same time you cannot use another potentially racist sign (the confederate flag), even if you were just trying to make a videogame version of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and are not trying to associate it with white supremacists.
I mean, I assume the confederare flag was not too problematic at some point, but now it is, so likely the OK sign will become problematic too.
Think of the "pepe" meme, which is now an alt-right thing and can't be used anymore in a neutral way!
MonkaS dude.
Pepe is fine, even the group that classified it as a hate symbol weren't referring to general usage.
One group of people I watch on Twitch use it all the time in the way it's meant to be used. As a very expressive cartoon frog that can convey emotions extremely succinctly.
And before you assume they're all closet neo-nazis: this group includes members who stopped streaming for about a month after Trump was elected, who frequently talk about eating the rich, and most recently they just ran a charity drive across multiple channels to raise money for BLM.
Context is key here. Lookup racist pepe images, and compare them to a picture of a sad/happy/etc cartoon frog. You won't have much difficulty telling the difference.
I could see white supremecists doing this for fun.
(There is a similar, earlier sign used by a milita group called the "Three Percenters", but that was not the source of the spread. They are an extreme libertarian group, not a white supremacy one. Though one can imagine some overlap. Their hand sign became so closely associated with white supremacy partially because of the 4chan hoax.)
yeah, but that's the story required for your credulity.
another 'reasonable person' with an axe to grind could have a much more minimal story required for credulity, say someone resting their hand outside the window of their car, tweet the photo with a license plate, and ruin someones life.
my meaning : don't expect your reasonable demeanor is going to be the same as some other random bystanders' 'reasonable demeanor'.
Alas, it’s not up to reasonable people to interpret the rules, it’s up to those in power, who can and will interpret it in whatever way benefits them
(See also, the Shirley Exception - https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1004400861865488384 )
Early last year she made a kid run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs.
Then she gets an angry text message from the kid's mother who believed her son was being punished specifically for making the "ok" symbol. This woman had found a picture of my wife on Facebook where she can be seen pulling her shirt down by pinching the bottom of it between her thumb and pointer finger, inadvertently making the "ok" symbol. She basically said she was going to put my wife on blast and out her as a racist. Ridiculous (Hilarious, even, in retrospect).
My wife didn't respond, of course. She immediately looped in her admin and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.
Well, the hunt began when your wife made a kid run laps because he made an OK sign on his leg because he thought that was a 'cool' thing to do comparable to giving the person in front of you 'rabbit ears' by making a V-sign behind their head, not when that kid's mother started social media dumpster diving for 'evidence' to use against your wife. The way to avoid these witch hunts is to avoid starting them, not to make the first step and then complain when others follow suit. She could have taken the kid aside and asked him why he made that sign, he probably would have replied he got it off the 'net or from his friends who made him think it was 'cool'. She then could have told him why it is not cool, i.e. that him making that sign would be interpreted by some as him being a supporter of a nefarious ideology. By singling him out to run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs she more or less handed that kid's mother all the ammunition she needed to follow in pursuit.
In Dutch there is a saying which applies to this; "Wat gij niet wilt dat u geschiedt, doet dat ook een ander niet", it translates to "Do not do unto others what you do not want to have done upon yourself".
I don't get this - it was clearly a summary of events. The only detail you really have to go on is "after". How you can assume all of this somehow went down without any talking-to or explanation is beyond me. Even so, the admin would probably have said the same at the time.
Based on what you said, isn't that exactly what happened? This paragraph makes it seem like your wife was punishing him for making that sign:
>Early last year she made a kid run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs.
Your wife punished a kid for making a symbol she disagrees with, heck, you could even say by making a political statement. If that happened to my kid I would probably go after you as well (not in social media, but with a formal complain to the school to get you punished).
If he wore a MAGA hat would she made him run laps? What about a BLM tshirt? Rainbow pin?
It is not her job to punish someone she disagrees with. She can talk with him and explain what the symbol means and let the kid make his own conclusion, but she can't, and shouldn't punish a kid for disagreeing with him. (which I think is the reason we are now in this place in the world, where you either agree with everything I defend or you are a racist/fascist, or if you are from the other side, you are a communist hippie skyflower)
Sorry, but as others have said your wife is the bad guy in this story. She abused her authority and bullied a kid, then had an “oh shit” moment, as all bullies do, when someone stands up to them. She is lucky that that kids mother is a better person than her and let her off with a warning.
I don't like it when folks say such things, but I understand it. Instead, what many folks seem to be saying is that based on one thing they can tell what the person is like inside. It's an amazingly-broad generalization and people seem to be enormously confident of themselves when they make it. I can look at your shoe or color of your shirt and conclude that you are a bad person inside.
I don't find that to be especially rational, but what is one to do?
The op is not wrong for supposing it's possible for someone to be targeted due to wearing "shoe or shirt color".
The topic was "amazingly-broad generalization".
Context matters.
Absolutely. But the corollary is that every time someone claims that something (a flag, a gesture, a tradition) is racist, then it actually transforms it into something racist. Because at that point you're forced to abandon it or consciously make a statement that you don't care about being considered racist.
If next year someone comes up saying that Santa Claus is racist, then dressing as Santa Claus becomes a statement, that you want it or not. This is a huge power that is easily abused.
This sounds like something out of a Borges story. Final scene narrated in the few remaining words designated as not harmful.
> It is from these Minutemen where the 3% name originated. It is a rough estimate that only 3% of the colonists were actively fighting in the field against British forces at any given time.
If you don't ban the person displaying the swastika, how can you possibly enforce banning swastikas? There must be a consequence for displaying the offending symbol, otherwise the rule is toothless.
You remove the swastika, and the person just replaces it. What then? Just keep removing it and hoping the Nazi/edgelord/'troll' will get tired of replacing the swastika? Trying to win a battle of attrition with a bad-faith actor is not an effective way to enforce rules.
> "remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign."
"Remember when 4chan 'trolls' said the OK hand sign was a white power sign and then white supremacists started using the OK hand sign as a white power sign?" --- There, I fixed it for you.
If an account gets a threshold number of cars banned, don't let them use customized cars online.
If they're spouting hate on chat, ban them from chat too.
I can imagine a very reasonable argument for this. Someone who puts a Confederate flag on their car seems highly likely to engage in other toxic behaviors. Just like someone who calls someone a nigger once is likely to do it again. So we use the behaviors as a signal of underlying tendency. We don't want people who have this tendency on the platform because they will tend to make life worse for other users, and the loss of their business hurts us less than we gain from other people feeling more comfortable. Therefore we ban them.
But not the people who have the authority to make the call, plainly.
On the other hand, too many on gaming platforms are engaging in clearly racist behaviour, ie. choosing offensive nicks, spamming chat, and need correction.
"Don't let them use customized cars" is extremely different from "ban them".
If conflating the act of violently taking someone's life away irreversibly to displaying an offensive custom skin in a videogame sounds like a reasonable and genuine argument to you, I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince you otherwise.
I agree with the parent comment that restricting customization for the offending users in the game is a reasonable punishment. They can still play the game AND have zero actual possibility of committing the same offense. The desired outcome of the user not using offensive imagery in custom skins is achieved.
When your brother aims down the sights at you in Call of Duty and - gulp - pulls the trigger, you'll necessarily have him sent to jail.
That's okay, though - when you're counting on your fingers and get to three, and... hey.. are your thumb and index kinda.. touching? you'll be right there with him.
Case closed, I don't think there is much left to say here then.
Also this was just an explanation of how it's an option, to the person that didn't understand how. You might want to do a full ban, you might not.
> The 4chan hoax succeeded all too well, and ceased being a hoax: Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white nationalists began using the gesture in public to signal their presence and to spot potential sympathizers and recruits. For them, the letters formed by the hand were not O and K, but W and P, for “white power.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
I don’t understand how people can justify the collateral damage; it is going too far.
But this doesn’t seem too relevant to the confederate flags in video games case.
Not everyone knows that white supremacist internet trolls have appropriated the OK hand gesture, but everyone living in the US understands that the confederate battle flag and other confederate symbols represent slavery, white supremacism, and treason.
Now I think, after hearing his story, that a public apology and explanation would have been enough. But he brought the company into disrepute. Firing him seems to be a valid option they could take. I personally think that raising awareness with a public apology and a statement from the company would have been better for everyone, but so often, a company's first response is to cover their ass. Or maybe they didn't believe him, while the reporter did? I wasn't there and can never know.
Yes, it started as a joke/hoax. Then they started doing it sincerely.
That is, swastikas and the confederate flag have an established history of their meaning, whereas the 4chan sign does not.
Similarly, the stone elephant holding the gate building to the old Carlsberg grounds in Copenhagen bear huge swastikas on their sides, since they were erected in 1901:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Tower,_Carlsberg#/med...
There are a lot of swastikas still present in old sculptures and designs with no relation to nazism.
Removing it feels like a reasonable thing to do, though I'd probably draw the line at chisel it off old-buildings, etc.
That definitely went on for a couple years when I was a kid, to the point where everyone got really sick of those few people that didn't get when it stopped being funny.
That's the thing though, all it takes is one meme to take off to change the meaning of a symbol and you can't really predict what or how.
This was going around my college friends in the early 90s, predating Malcom in the Middle (2000-2006). I have no idea where it originated.
My concern with these sort of deplatforming moves while understandable, is they tend to drive these bigoted ideas underground. So maybe they cant express it publicly but boy, do they find other ways to do it as certain church members' families can attest. I don't have a definite solution but there is something to be said for using informal social pressure (i.e confederate decal dude all of a sudden not finding anyone to play with, because people quit the game as soon as they see the flag) rather than deplatforming.
And then these people vote. People who feel (rightly or wrongly) persecuted tend to lash out, whether it's by breaking statues or electing far-sides candidates.
The current polarization happened before Microsoft stopped letting you make racist cars
Whereas for Asians, native Americans & for much of the ancient world it has entirely different meanings.
https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/from-devi-in-hijab-om-as-...
I'm also getting a little sick of down votes every damn time I mention Native Americans. I'm starting to wonder.
Seventeen million people died in the Holocaust. That number is larger than the dollar amount that many of the companies on this website raise. That's more people than you'll meet in your entire lifetime, perhaps more than you'll _see_ in your lifetime. This is the population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston put together. Those people were physically destroyed by folks identifying with that symbol.
It's really, really hard to say this symbol doesn't carry hate universally—even if a Buddhist practitioner were to use it—because putting it on your video game car on _a global game_ whose audience is ~100% folks who are well-aware of nazism (and, in fact, people whose histories are tainted by the effects of the Holocaust). But more to the point, the confederate flag _was invented_ to represent hate. It had no established use before the confederacy. Pedantry about whether swastikas are universally racist or not is pointless, because the topic at hand is about a symbol which is universally recognized as one of hate.
https://www.facebook.com/upwordindia/videos/2662610620694569...
The Mao era probably around 75 million. Lets ban any symbol related to them (sickle and hammer, red flags, etc).
(ps: I am not in favor of the swastika, just don't like how a symbol can be used for thousands of years, hijacked by some pricks, and now everyone can't use it anymore, and the people that have an emotional connection to it have to censor themselves. Also, isn't the buddhist one reversed from the Nazi one? Mirrored? Which makes it even worse as you are using a similar but not exactly the same symbol and ignorant folks can't spot the difference)
Your argument is that, if society was more tolerant of bigots and their symbols, then Dylan Roof might not have murdered nine people? History indicates otherwise: the US was a lot more tolerant of racism in the past and there was a lot more violence.
In your defense, that may be the surface level interpretation of what I said. However, I am not saying that in any way shape or form. Closer to what I'm saying is that, censorship artificially reduces the number of monsters in our polity that we are able to identify. They are prevented from expression so we don't hear or see them and thus have the mistaken belief that more progress has been made when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I want people to be open with their racism/bigotry, so that I know to steer clear.
It's all well and good to be able to identify these people, but the downside is that their victims have to put up with more racism and bigotry.
Frankly, if we drive it underground, great! Let's keep driving it underground until it suffocates.
Coincidentally, a news item from yesterday about swastikas: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645
Does the popularity of a racist symbol have any correlation with whether it should be suppressed? Swastikas were a lot more present in the 1940s but that doesn't mean they were less reprehensible.
If a far-right group started using a brand-new symbol to signify their racist ideology, is it suddenly worth waiting for the symbol to pick up steam before prohibiting it? That doesn't make a lot of sense. The people using the symbol are saying "I don't think you should exist" _right now_, not when there is a sufficient number of others rallying around their belief system.
The confederate flag is hundreds of years old. Waiting for "informal social pressure" to kick in is a great way to ignore a problem.
If someone is specifically using the Nazi version of the swastika, then by all means handle it. But if it's the non-Nazi version, then why do people not get to reclaim it?
https://www.facebook.com/upwordindia/videos/2662610620694569...
I wonder why it'still considered "taboo" in the Western society in the information-age.
I generally don't like the thought of cultural appropriation (IMO Anyone should be able to wear kimono) but I feel that forbidding something outside western country by western people is a bad cultural appropriation.
I also believe that we should be exploring more ways to fight racism other than censoring it outright. Censorship seems like an easy answer, but it's not going "cure" the racists and has unwanted side-effects on society. I think racism is a complex issue that needs more deeper solutions.
Let's replace Microsoft with Amazon. Should Amazon be able to produce "The Man in The High Castle?" Should "The Man In The High Castle" be available to watch? How about merchandise from the show? Would it be OK to have it?
There are quite a few Eastern Europeans and Jews in NYC. Why was that OK?
n.b. the iron cross symbol is still used in Germany for e.g. the roundel of the German Air Force.
I don't doubt that the design would fall afoul of the MS content guidelines as I'm sure perching the Reichsadler on top of the iron cross would be the kind of thing they mean by "contextual clues".
Heritage of what?
The South has hundreds of years of history. Why are the 4 years of the Confederacy so celebrated?
Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban.
That's exactly what Georgia did. In 1956 they added the Confederate Battle Flag to their state flag in support of white supremacy and segregation, and in 2003 switched it for the Confederate Stars and Bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
>On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from William Ross Postell, a Confederate blockade runner, published an editorial championing a design featuring the battle flag on a white background he referred to later as "The White Man's Flag."[6] In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
I mean it's definitely being flown by racists and edgy teenagers and I think there's a strong case to be made that a different design is warranted since the heritage people have been largely unsuccessful in keeping the iconography from becoming a racist dogwhistle. But I think it's important to meet the heritage people where they are and start from there.
I think the fundamental argument here is this: clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride.
What should happen? There are people who I think have a legitimate non-racist benign claim to the flag but they're now in the minority and being drowned out by racists. And the public discussion on the matter is an absolute shitshow because those people see the desire to ban the Confederate flag as a racist symbol as an attack on Southern culture/pride. Worse! We have people in this fight who actually are doing that because there is a very real anti-rural anti-Southern sentiment that exists in the US. And on the other side we have racists who are hiding behind Southern pride in an attempt to keep their symbol. Ugh.
So everyone thinks everyone else is arguing in bad faith, nobody believes anything anyone else says, some of the people are actually lying and arguing in bad faith and we're all arguing against caricatures of our opponents.
This postulates that the Confederate flag did not start out spoiled by racism.
If it's being used now by people intending it to represent regional pride who are simply unaware of its history (which I find unlikely, but a lot of people are claiming that), then all it should take to convince them to take down their flags is to share that history with them.
As a symbol for part of the Confederate army, it's still racist even in its first use. Some of the people fighting might have been conscripted against their will, but the symbol itself is still one that promoted slavery of black people
That pretty much sums up most modern sociopolitical discouse right there.
The flag was flown as the symbol of the actual Confederacy for a short time sure, because the Confederacy itself was short lived. But it's been flown as a symbol of southern pride for a long time since then.
And traditions need only span one's own lifetime to be meaningful.
The Confederate flag has always been a racist dogwhistle. Right from day 1.
The flag, as far as I understood it, was about being a rebel, “don’t tell me what to do” anti-authority.
Maybe my experience is quite different from yours. I never saw a klan rally or anything like that.
I did only buy a “git ‘er done” lighter from a gas station for its redneck kitsch. I didn’t intend to be a racist signal. Comically it’s stuck somewhere and I suspect should my grandkids ever find it in my estate it will be revered as some nazi memorabilia, incorrectly based on my intent.
One could even argue that it's at best negligent to fly a flag without knowing the most basic history of its symbolism, but if that's really what's going on, then surely it wouldn't be hard to educate all these people who are unintentionally flying the flag.
The point it became a "southern symbol" is a previous set of edgy teenagers and racists who flew it while legislating against black people and trying to stop civil rights.
The point of that iconography is to be a racist dogwhistle, and it's been a very successful one over the past hundred years
That's why it's illegal in Germany in the first place; if there was universal acceptance that it was an obscenity there wouldn't be much purpose in banning it.
Another issue, of course, is that teaching about the US civil war, and general cultural treatment of it, has been, and in some cases still is, far more dishonest than teaching about World War 2 in Germany. Note that in this thread there are people questioning whether it was about slavery. The initiators on the confederate side would not have questioned that, they could hardly have been more clear that it was. There's a huge amount of mainstream cultural baggage glorifying the confederacy and important confederate figures in a way that there isn't about the Nazis (with the possible exception of some rather creepy Rommel apologia that shows up sometime).
Before trotting out the "it's a symbol of heritage" line, ask yourself exactly what that heritage is.
I just saved everyone a ton of time there.
There's a reason they chose Lee's flag and not a CSA flag associated directly with a rabid slaver like Jefferson Davis. Indeed, the Army of Northern Virginia flag used to be a symbol of progressive racial integration, at a time when poor white southern migrant workers and poor African Americans found common cause against unfair wages and unsafe working conditions.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/8gvw5g...
https://images-theconversation-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/im...
History is nuanced. Insisting that your view of what a symbol means should control others is toxic and Orwellian. Our society should be better than that.
[1] https://history.army.mil/books/R&H/R&H-FM.htm, Section VI with Ulysses Simpson Grant as part of the unbroken chain of command.
Unilateral succession is illegal. Those flying the confederate flag were not defending themselves, they were committing treason. Our Union is an indestructible one. It was safeguarded then by the U.S. Army who will continue to safeguard it as long as America endures.
It feels me with great sadness to think of the blood that was spilled, but at the end of the day Americans who take up arms against the U.S. Army are criminals and traitors. No American should fly the flag of those who have killed our soldiers.
To summarize: 1) South Carolina secedes. 2) South Carolina demands the Union remove its troops from their soil. 3) The Union refuses, garrisons a fortress on foreign soil, and attempts to resupply said garrison. 4) South Carolina offers an ultimatum--remove your soldiers or we will attack. 5) The union refuses to remove their troops from foreign soil. 6) South Carolina's militia attacks Ft. Sumter.
South Carolina's militia fired the first shots, but I'm not sure how you can say that they 'Initiated hostilities'. Occupying foreign soil has always been considered an act of war. History is written by the victors, I suppose.
After seceding those who were illegally occupying the land were the secessionists themselves. You cannot unilaterally seceded from the Union. Hundreds of thousands of my countrymen died in the Civil War to establish this principle; it is the law of the land and to imply otherwise is to dishonor their sacrifice.
No unilateral secession, period. That is what 350,000+ U.S. military personnel died for. If you believe it was legal for those folks to secede I suggest you renounce your U.S. citizenship and leave.
An actual moral reason not to fly the confederate flag on your home or your video game automobile would be because many black people interpret it as a racist symbol, and they might feel unloved and alienated.
A philosophical reason would be if you disagree with the sectionalist politics of it. That's why many groups opposed the introduction of the symbol into state flags in the past. That sounds more aligned with your reasons, but is a different reason. The act of flying Italian, German, Mexican, or British flags to celebrate one's ethnic heritage seems quite different than that of flying the confederate flag.
Your arguments are transparently shallow, poorly thought out, and profoundly un-American. If my arguments would satisfy an automated grading system, yours would fail immediately upon parsing. I see no value in continuing a conversation with someone who claims there is no moral foundation in opposing the killing of U.S. troops by illegal insurgents. Feel free to have the last word here on this message board; in the real world the last word was the surrender of the Confederacy.
I mean, it's not like I'm wholly unsympathetic to failed secessionist states and their symbols/paraphernalia. People still use the flag of Biafra where I'm from, after all. But those that do are self-aware enough to acknowledge/be upfront about the values they hold and the message they pass when they use it (it certainly helps that Biafra attempted to secede in response to ethnic tensions/discrimination, not because it wanted amongst other things the right to keep slaves).
It's just a symbol of identity or culture, like most flags. There's a massive cultural difference between the rural south and the highly populated coastal cities. The flag to many is a symbol of that difference, and has many of the psychological undertones that makes the "don't tread on me" flag popular, mostly a willingness to push back against external influences.
And there are a lot of people outside the South who do show and like the Confederate flag.
So while I agree that it's a symbol of an identity and culture, I don't think it's a geographic regional identity and culture.
I think you're arguing in good faith based on your own experience, but I would gently suggest this is an opportunity to consider a wider variety of data and perspectives.
Many times, and I can earnestly say I've never seen that. Nor in rural Pennsylvania for that matter, which I would otherwise characterize as slightly less sophisticated than NY. Are there racists in that region? Certainly. But I can't recall ever seeing somebody in those states flying the confederate flag.
I'm sure it's happened before, I'm sure you can find me local news reporting on instances of it. But it's definitely not a common sight.
Southerner here. The South is a very diverse place with a sizable African-American population.
Perhaps I'm just missing all the African-Americans who proudly fly the Confederate battle flag, but my perception is the flag is used by a small subset of white southerners as an anti-virtue-signaling device.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag flown in service of keeping their ancestors enslaved, or did you mean that the flag had attached to a particular subset of Southern identity? Please expand, I'm curious.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag...?
No, and nothing in my comments suggested that. It makes sense that they wouldn't since their relatives probably didn't after the war. For many people, their relatives did identify with the flag. It probably started as something racist by the survivors of the war, but morphed into what it is today, something that isn't considered racist by most around where I live. Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
Could that be because there isn't just one type of "southern heritage?" Do you really want to equate the southern heritage of black people in the south with those who fly the Confederate battle flag?
I am saying this as gently as possible: the majority of bigots don't walk around thinking or saying "Wow I sure am a bigot!". They mostly just think of themselves as normal people with normal values.
> Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
There is a team in the NFL that is named a literal slur against indigenous Americans. I am not quite sure where one would get the idea that the US sports industry is a bastion of sensitivity.
It was started as something racist and still remains incredibly racist to pretty much everyone else, despite doe-eyed claims from southerners who want people to believe that a 5 year long pro-slavery rebellion represents the history and pride of the South.
Some comment I saw online made me research it, which then made me aware of other symbolism it has.
So don't be so quick to assume racism in those who fly it.
I do not believe those who spend a few hundred to have it tattooed on their bodies, or people who buy one for $7.50 from China off Amazon [1] when they say such things, because there's no value in displaying a representation of a thing that's historically represented nothing but hate.
Owning and preserving an authentic flag shows a commitment to history. Displaying a representation of it shows a commitment to hatred.
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[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/2015/07/17/value-confederate-flag-c...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/ZHENGYU-Polyester-Double-Sided-Milita...
If they assert that the confederate battle flag is a symbol of their heritage, then it is.
Are you going to respect that?
The Confederate flag is even more powerful because people have been convinced it has something to do with Southern (white) culture and Yankee oppression. Maybe they need a new symbol, that isn't intimitely tied to slavery.
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-wor...
The winner gets to make the rules. The South has had 150+ years to celebrate their treason. It's more than enough time that the winners put that symbol to rest.
> resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands
In other words, a war
You can easily find (racist white) people displaying the confederate flag in northern states, but you will be hard pressed to find any black people in the south who feel regional pride toward confederate symbols.
Flying the Confederate flag is a sign to anyone else from the South that you are probably a racist. I would bet money that there is a strong correlation between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage” and “people who display the CSA flag”, because very few people are willing to come out and say “fuck yeah I am totally a racist and proud of it!”.
As a bonus, I would also bet that the overlap between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant.
This isn’t surprising. An heritage is well, an heritage, which is coming from ancestors. Only very few people get to aquire culture heritage accross race boundaries (for example by adoption). It’s like saying the overlap of "people who celebrate Chinese new year" and "people who are not asian" is virtually non-existent to shame them; this make no sense.
Like, okay, sure, I guess the pointy white hood your grandfather wore when he was a Grand Wizard of the KKK is part of your heritage, but if you take it out and wear it around town, people are gonna be all "hey look at that racist jerkass", you know? And if I hung up a CSA flag outside my house in a big Southern city, all my neighbors would say the same thing no matter how much I tried to convince them it's just me celebrating my heritage.
It's got a lot of history being flown specifically to spite black people -- if you want to reclaim that as a non-racist symbol, you'll have to do a lot of work. Otherwise the obvious response is "heritage of what, racism? Why are you proud that your parents tried to keep black people from voting?"
The fact that it isn't racist in, say, China doesn't mean it also isn't racist when spray painted on a synagogue.
> While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol.
You deliberately distinguished between the Nazi flag and the Swastika, an element incorporated into the Nazi flag, and claimed that between the two, only the flag was racist.
And I'm merely pointing out that in the Western world the only part of the Nazi flag even considered racist is the Swastika.
Symbols are not racist, which is what should obviously be taken away from this.
Merely displaying a flag seems like a pretty generous interpretation of "propaganda". It certainly doesn't fit any definition of which I'm aware.
Perhaps there's an argument for banning such symbols, but don't use hyperbole to try and prove your point, you just undermine the legitimacy of this effort.
Suppose trump took down all the American flags in the whitehouse and replaced them with Russian flag, or if Obama had taken them down and replaced them with the Isis flag.
There's no world in which that would be taken lightly
And I'm not American in case you were referring to me.
At best you can say that one is simply being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda, but to claim that the public display of such a strong political symbol as a flag is not intended to spread and reinforce what it represents is just absurd.
While propaganda requires displaying symbols, displaying symbols does not necessarily entail propaganda. The entailment is simply not bidirectional, ie. surgery requires a scalpel, but cutting my steak with a scalpel does not make it surgery.
> At best you can say that one is simply being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda, but to claim that the public display of such a strong political symbol as a flag is not intended to spread and reinforce what it represents is just absurd.
No it's not. Someone who grew up on the Dukes of Hazzard maybe just really loved that car and associates it with great memories of a happy childhood. To call this "being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda" is losing the plot completely.