Don’t ignore or underestimate right wing trollies either. They operate in joking-not-joking mode, where everything is ironic and serious at the same time. Enough Nazis adopted the OK sign to establish a genuine connection between the sign and Nazism, even if their purpose was driving trollies.
It has nothing to do with gullibility. The first time I read anything about the OK symbol as an alt right symbol I knew exactly where this originated, what they were trying to do and how it would play out.
However, that doesn’t mean that when a federal agent or a police officer or a Coast Guard member on live TV flash that symbol both they and I know what the intended message is, no matter how many layers of irony and plausible deniability they couch it in.
Not to take the thread further off topic, but she’s got a new book, “Solutions And Other Problems,” supposedly being released within the month, and available for preorder now. I don’t know much else about it yet, but you can google for details. It sounds a bit heavier than “Hyperbole.” She’s had some rough times since the first book came out.
Please be a good citizen and pre-order it at your favorite local indie bookstore instead of here.
Without engaging in excess hyperbole, her essays on depression saved me from depression.
If Pepe the frog started showing up in comics as clearly gay, and that caught on and everyone saw Pepe as a gay symbol, then maybe the nazi folk would stop wanting to use it.
Yes, that is in fact the correct response, and exactly what I’m advocating. Call them an idiot, rather agreeing that clowns and milk or whatever is for nazis.
I’m not sure which character you’re agreeing with
It didn’t work out though
Furie tried to rehabilitate his creation, which is classed by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol, but did not succeed.
So yesterday, in a single page comic included in the Free Comic Book Day title World’s Greatest Comics , Matt Furie killed off his creation.
You’re still missing the point, which is that ironic appropriation cannot be separated from genuine appropriation.
And it’s important to note that it cannot be separated even if everybody involved knows that the expressions or symbols in question are being used ironically/in bad faith.
That’s a simplistic view of what the response really is. It’s very much context dependent. You seem to think that all it takes is for one Nazi to say drinking milk is for Nazis for every “liberal” (as they would define the term, not I) to stop drinking milk. In reality just as the usage of these symbols is complex and context dependent, so is the response. You can continue to wear aloha shirts to your backyard barbecue, just maybe don’t wear them to demonstrations if you don’t want to be confused for a boogaloo boy. The same goes for tiki torches and milk and, yes, even the OK sign. Pepe is a bit harder to reclaim because his use wasn’t exactly widespread independent of the alt right assholes. I’d argue it isn’t worth the effort.
I saw this film in March, at the best last film festival ever. Really entertaining and surprisingly humorous.
Really? You couldn’t figure it out from the context of my words? I thought it was pretty clear, but okay, I’ll spell it out for you.
I agree with the woman on the left who calls the nazi an idiot, rather than agreeing that clowns and milk are now nazi symbols and therefore off limits. In the cartoon, the woman rejects the idiotic attempts to make a normal thing a nazi symbol, and refrains from running around telling everyone that they can’t have clowns or milk because a nazi told her that they now own them. She rejects the idea that those things are now racist, because she isn’t an idiot who happily does what a dumb nazi wants.
The woman in the cartoon responds exactly how everyone should respond when someone tells you a normal thing is now a nazi symbol. I completely agree with the cartoon.
She literally says, “So it ends up being racist.”
You can’t agree with it because you haven’t understood it. Seriously, read it again carefully, and pay particular attention to what the clown Nazi says in the third panel.
If you still don’t get it:
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When Nazis use clowns or milk or whatever ironically as a Nazi symbol, they are nevertheless using it as a Nazi symbol. People who point that out haven’t been duped into asserting a connection that does not exist.
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Nazis graduate from using clowns/milk/whatever ironically to using it seriously.
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Clowns/milk/whatever is now a Nazi symbol, when used in a political context.
As @Doctor_Faustus said, you can wear a Hawaiian shirt at home but if you wear one to a demonstration you will be presumed to be a Boogaloo Boy. The same goes for anything else appropriated by Nazis: don’t use it in a context where you might be misunderstood, and don’t think that an ironic appropriation doesn’t matter or is not even real.
The person telling you that the normal thing is a Nazi symbol is a Nazi who wants to make you look like an idiot for thinking that a Nazi symbol is a Nazi symbol.
I can’t divine what the authors original intent was, but to me, it is saying that their “ironic” use of the symbols is racist, because they are racist that like racist. It does not make people who drink milk and or like clowns racist, or milk and clowns suddenly off limits to non-nazis. The person doing that shit looks ridiculous and insane, not the person who suddenly agrees that they can’t drink milk because milk because milk is now a nazi symbol as declared by a few dozen people on 4chan.
Hopefully the woman in the cartoon doesn’t run around telling everyone that milk and clowns are now off limits because they saw a nazi do it, acting as the vector to spread that dumb meme to all of her friends, exactly as they were hoping would happen.
Surrendering to nazis and spreading their dumb message is stupid. You shouldn’t do it. That goes double and tripple when it is a bunch of 4chan trollies that recruit you to go predictably spread their stupidity.
When the clown guy in the cartoon says, “Haha, you fell for it,” and when you say, “I wish the left didn’t run screaming every time,” he’s expressing amusement and you’re expressing dismay, but you’re both expressing the same worldview, which is that the rest of us have fallen for something.
They don’t want you to fall for a hoax story that Nazis have appropriated X as a Nazi symbol. They want you to believe that you have fallen for a hoax when they really have appropriated X. If you ignore the Nazi use of X or insist that it is just dumb driving trollies with no real significance, you are doing what they want.
As I said, Nazi trollies are always joking-not-joking. Everything is ironic and real at the same time. Doing something to own the libs does not mean that they are not really doing it. You can believe that X is a Nazi symbol or you can believe that it is not. Either way, they win.
