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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

> I tried going to an accountant out there and when I walked into her office for the first meeting, she was wearing a large gold swastika necklace.

> It's manageable as long as you never get into conversations about politics and treat everyone with respect.

I mean, I'm going to have a hard time treating a person wearing a swastika necklace with respect - I'm going to let them know that I will not be using their services and the reason why. I hope you walked out of there and found the services of a different accountant.

(I live in Beaverton and once you get out of the Portland metro area things get pretty maga-hatty. We were planning a trip to Coos Bay a few months back and decided against it partly because COVID was raging down there then but also because of concerns of potential political violence in some of the areas between here and there. Oregon is definitely a state with some pretty wide extremes.)

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> I mean, I'm going to have a hard time treating a person wearing a swastika necklace with respect - I'm going to let them know that I will not be using their services and the reason why. I hope you walked out of there and found the services of a different accountant.

It's probably good to have a dialogue about it, and you should note the person's ethnicity as well.

Try Google imaging "hindu lucky symbol." I'm not entirely convinced that a people should be forced to entirely give up on a symbol they were using first, before it got misappropriated.

sure, if the person was Indian it would be another story - given the location I doubt they were talking about an Indian accountant. Then again, I've worked with a lot of Indians and never saw any of them wear a swastika necklace.

> given the location I doubt they were talking about an Indian accountant

Possibly. As an Indian I'd just appreciate it if people were given the opportunity to have a dialogue around this. I agree that there are many cases where such dialogue is not warranted, of course.

A reply to your comment is perhaps not the best place for this, since I don't disagree with you, but am merely trying to have a somewhat relevant yet ultimately orthogonal discussion.

Personally, I've been forced to give it a wide berth for obvious reasons, as I imagine many Indians you know have too. However, if you came into my home you'd be able to find a few swastikas — I'm not even religious, it's just on gifts from friends and family.

> I've worked with a lot of Indians and never saw any of them wear a swastika necklace

Most Indians don't wear it, but that still leaves a lot who do. I'd also imagine that there's some selection bias going on when you consider only the people you've worked with. If you googled it you'd have noted that most images are clearly of pendants.

I was on the train last week opposite a couple of American tourists ranting about how racist Denmark was, after we passed the Carlsberg entrance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Tower,_Carlsberg

We went to Pacific City a few months ago and ended up in a bar that had some huge "thin blue line" flags hanging inside. Got into a conversation with a guy who seemed to be a nice old pot-smoking hippie who'd moved out there to grow weed. Until about halfway through the conversation he started asserting that the "storm" was coming and Trump was the real president, and Biden was probably already in jail, and we'd just wait and see, any day now.

Personally, I prefer Astoria. No beach, but it's a cooler vibe.

[edit] Just to add, I have a (non-Jewish) uncle who retired to Coos Bay. He's become one of the most extremist and racist people I've ever met, in addition to being a hardcore anti-vaxer. He wasn't like that when I was a kid. Living in that environment changed him radically for the worse.

re: the accountant, I left. I wrote her an email explaining why I couldn't work with her. She apologized and said she didn't realize what it was, that it was a gift from her daughter, something about their Finnish heritage, and it was supposed to be horse heads. I found a nice Jewish guy to do my taxes.

> re: the accountant, I left. I wrote her an email explaining why I couldn't work with her. She apologized and said she didn't realize what it was, that it was a gift from her daughter, something about their Finnish heritage, and it was supposed to be horse heads. I found a nice Jewish guy to do my taxes.

For the curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...

I moved to Coos Bay a little over ten years ago, and I am still as leftist as when I moved here. I think social media has a lot to do with people changing for the worst, whether here or anywhere else.

I agree Astoria is a much cooler vibe, I don't think I could handle the kind of rain that they get. In fact when it rains really hard here I call it a "Goonies Day" and put on an old VHS of The Goonies and point out all the familiar places in Astoria to my daughter.

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