What’s wrong with the OK sign?
A bunch of nazi’s used it as a dog whistle and it got added to a database of hate symbols.
Why exactly are we giving Nazis the power to poison language, emojis, what have you for the rest of us again?
I think we should do the opposite. As soon as some symbol becomes a dog whistle, we should all rush to use it for it’s original meaning as much as possible, thus preventing the dog from hearing the whistle where it’s supposed to be used as such.
By that point, it’s already been tainted and it’s too hard to tell reality from satire from ignorance.
Nazis just love appropriating and poisoning symbols, and it all started with the swastika: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
Well the purpose of the hate list like this isn’t “what symbols not to use” so much as, if a guy uses this and there’s context to suggest it’s a dogwhistle, this is what it means.
As a concrete example, If someone turns to a camera makes the ok gesture then punches a black guy that can be used as evidence in conjunction with a database like this to add a hate crime charge onto the assault charge.
Because when someone uses a symbol while they do something shitty, they are associating that symbol with their shitty behaviors. Human brains are wired to identify paterns and associations for threat identification. That’s why cops all dress differently than EMT’s.
If your ex-girlfriend left you in a nasty break up, you might avoid her favorite restaurant, cry when you hear her favorite songs, or even get upset just seeing a similar car to the one she drove. You cant drown out a dog whistel, all you can do is point it out.
4 chan started a prank saying that the ok sign was actually spelling out “WP” meaning “white power”.
The ADL and a bunch of news agencies bought it hook, line, and sinker. Pretty quickly scuba divers, anyone who has been a teenage boy in the past few decades, and really just anyone with a pulse and a brain cell pointed out how ridiculous it would be to believe that.
Some of the groups that got tricked (the ADL most notably) doubled down instead of admitting that they got got. They found like one fringe neo-nazi group that started doing it (probably after seeing it on 4 chan) and insisted “SeE? RaCiSt Dog whistle!”.
There’s nothing wrong with the “OK” sign. It’s perfectly innocent.
It started as a prank, but now fascists unironically use the ok sign.
It’s a dog whistle. They use something innocent to signal to others in their ingroup, and call people stupid when they call them out on it.
That’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. They only use it because CNN and the ADL wouldn’t backtrack, thus giving their claims validity after the fact.
We, the public, can stop that bullshit in it’s tracks by rejecting the whole premise and insisting on the actual, innocent meaning of the gesture.
I used to believe the “shitpost that got out of hand” excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:
I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.
It also happened to take place on International Women’s Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.
Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.
Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the “media fell for a 4chan prank” story for plausible deniability.
So the “white gamer bros in Dallas, Texas” had no overlap with 4 chan users who realized they were in front of cameras and could do some trolling IRL?
I had heard that “white gamer bros” were few and far between on 4 chan, and certainly weren’t the sort to start or support any of the trolling the site was notorious for. /S
So a white supremacists website created a dog whistle, and now those same white supremacists use it regularly? That doesn’t sound perfectly innocent, especially not when PJW is the one flashing it and making sure we all know there’s a far-right connotation.
So we’re just going to let one fringe group ruin a decades old gesture? We’re going to give crackpots that kind of power?
Fuck that.
This might give some info.
Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, told NPR that for years on fringe online message boards such as 4chan and 8chan, the “OK” sign has been deployed in memes and other images promoting hate. Given the number of white supremacists who have adopted it, he said it can now carry a nefarious message.
