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Comment by ericjang | Hacker News Reader

> To be fair, meme activism has had its upsides.

The author seems to dislike the meme #BlackLivesMatter, but also praises some memes like "#5DemandsNot1Less to generate pressure on the Chinese government to preserve the relative political freedom of Hong Kong".

Both of these are memes. I am curious, what is the principle by which one decides which memes are "good" and which ones "have gone too far"? They propose 3 recommendations at the end for how to engage with memes, but couldn't this be applied to #5DemandsNot1Less as well?

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My own take (not supported by the article) is that there's more room for interpretation what BlackLivesMatter actually means, and the concrete political statements aren't obvious from the meme.

In the case of 5DemandNot1Less it's clear that the meme is a vehicle for some concrete statements.

Of course, both memes can be used thoughtlessly, so maybe that's not a crucial difference.

Yep. BlackLivesMatter is semantically overloaded. There's the notion of BlackLivesMatter, of which only real racists disagree. Then there's the organization BlackLivesMatter, which has some very anti-traditional-western views that undermine the name.

It's an ideal meme for people who want to employ the motte-and-bailey tactic. The face-value meaning of the words is unassailable, an impregnable motte that only the most violent of racists would disagree with.

I’m confused by this, how are you supposed to communicate a precise agenda in a hashtag? The movement has to do with systemic racism in America. Think of BLM like a “hook” in writing. Isn’t it interesting that a statement of an obvious fact (that black lives matter) has caused so much controversy?

> Isn’t it interesting that a statement of an obvious fact (that black lives matter) has caused so much controversy?

Here, you have fallen back on "the motte."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

> Isn’t it interesting that a statement of an obvious fact (that black lives matter) has caused so much controversy?

No more interesting than the fact that statement of another obvious fact (that all lives matter) has caused just as much controversy. At the end of the day these two statements are just dog whistles for what allegiance you hold and the actual meaning of the sentence doesn't matter much.

> these two statements are just dog whistles for what allegiance you hold and the actual meaning of the sentence doesn't matter much.

The horror?

I'll be honest, I don't see what the problem with short labels that express an ideological affiliation. People who aren't "pro-life" aren't pro-murder, and people who aren't "pro-choice" do not oppose choice in all instances. We all know what they mean though.

The person asked why such statements could cause controversy, I explained why, your post doesn't make sense in this thread.

The problem here is pigeon holing. When you are eager to classify people fast and efficiently into a small number of bins, you trample on a lot of nuance.

For instance, suppose I thought abortion should be legal for the first N weeks, but require case-by-case approval from a panel of ethicists after N weeks. Does that put me in the pro-life bin or the pro-choice bin? Probably more the latter than the former, but it's certainly not a pure 'choice' position to have on the matter.

how are you supposed to communicate a precise agenda in a hashtag

You're not. That's the problem. In the case of #5DemandsNot1Less there is really no context in the hashtag itself to determine its meaning until you learn more about the movement. It is a pointer to the beliefs of the movement, not the beliefs themselves.

With #BlackLivesMatter, that is not the case. The hashtag has its own fairly obvious semantic weight that is not an accurate pointer back to all of the specific beliefs of the political movement.

Do you also believe that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is just a group of people who are for the ethical treatment of animals? Are you unaware they have literally funded terrorism? Were you never taught not to judge a book by its cover?

I think it was because #BLM belies a much more complex political movement than the face-value meaning, while #5DemandsNot1Less directly referred to 5 specific things.

This meant that supporting #DemandsNot1Less implicitly meant you supported its specific tenets. While on the other hand, Supporting #BLM was more complex, where many people would absolutely support the literally meaning, but not necessarily all of the rest of the political goals. This makes it easy to attack critics of a particular BLM political goals as if they did not support the literal meaning.

In that context it it easy to understand why the author drew a line between the two memes. Of course that was their opinion, and opinions differ. The author wasn't advocating that everyone have the same opinion on specific memes, they were arguing that such opinions should be informed & critically examined.

They weren't saying "Here's a formula to discover which memes are bad." They were saying "Here's a method to help you come to your own well-informed opinions on the them."

In this instance it 'went too far' when a politician backtracked on support for Israel.

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