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However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

Yeah thats traditionally not the job of the social sciences or science in general.

Thank you for educating me, I absolutely did get the sappy propaganda version of that story. I do WISH we could convince people not to use the symbol but I admit that’s something I only wish was possible because it would give us a prescriptive answer to emerging hate symbols.

On a long enough timescale maybe people can recoup the symbol back to its/their original forms; but we live now, and I find it unlikely. And the danger we face now from symbols with plausibly deniable hate built into them is considerable.

Did you notice we were talking about an emergant cartoon frog hate symbol and now we’re having a one hundred year old debate about the last great hate symbol? If we don’t draw lines, what is the protocol of protecting ourselves from fully unironic uses of would be hate symbols? I am not saying CENSOR PICTOGRAMS I DON’T LIKE. I am saying there isn’t a way to stop people from abusing our reticence towards censorship and tolerance of the gray without intense scrutiny and educating people about the symbols. That does kinda mean telling Buddhists that their sign of peace is our sign of death. First the culture shock, then the bitter arguments and singed pride. What should come next then?

Its a complicated thing for sure. I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of peace? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?

And that was a decade before the mass killings of the Holocaust. A decade before America intervened.

I fear the answer is there is no right answer. Sometimes groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that, but like hell was it fair to them.

The Swastika interestingly is four right angles, so the symbol occurs all over human society hundreds and even thousands of years before Nazism found it.

People thought any symbol so common throughout history had to be a quasi-good thing. They used it as a general sign of good luck. About the only thing that even comes close to the swastikas ubiquity and thrust of sentiment post-war is the “smiley face” symbol.

The Nazis saw all this and sent scam archeologists around the world to unearth and then piece together a narrative that their Aryan supermen ancestors had been the rightful masters of the earth. From the moment they made that decision, it’s had the stink of human ashes wafting off it ever since. Fire, wind, fortune, ‘North’, Kali’s creative destruction, and dozens more meanings all wiped away. So many cultures and groups robbed of a symbol or perhaps a phoneme even with their own contexts.

Draw the right angles. It is the wheel that crushes now. It means hate. We have a conditioned response as a society to it and each one of us personally has our own gutteral secret feelings about it. But the old meanings are all dead.

One of fascism’s best features is simply bald faced stealing. They stole that symbol from thousands or millions of people who used it every day. Pepe at least carries his own eternal chagrinn with him in protest of being used as a dogwhistle, but thats about it. His expressions are your expressions.

Pepe is damaged goods though. He endures well past his relevance and utility as an internet comic character when very similar concepts (rage faces, Polandball) have had their time and slowly lost ubiquity. But Pepe endures not JUST as a Nazi dogwhistle but as a symbol that even if someone is not right wing they still would like to convey a certain unsociable edginess, like a colorful threat display on a jungle animal. The disposessed middle class, the failure to launch kids, the kissless sensitive souls, all find commonality with the frowning frog. And these are the people they target. People use Pepe as a flare to suggest they’re in pain and only feel safe talking about it to other anonynous people on the same boat. Aka the most vulnerable to radicalization. Clinging to Pepe is advertising that you are looking for something that you don’t even know what it is, but normies can’t or won’t give it to you. Pepe is a green light to radicalization.

And like the various versions of the swastikas before they became THE Swastika, Pepe did nothing to deserve this. Just like everyone else under Nazi occupation.

In case you’re interested, its actually really easy to just grab this big Git repo of hundreds of Linux related wallpapers from different distros. Roughly half are gorgeous landscapes and you can be assured the photographers all gave explicit permission for their work to be distributed as wallpapers. Check it out!

I really feel like you’re forgetting this

I think the guy’s heart is in the right place though, I think he just hasn’t done the legwork yet on studying how modern socialist states are moving on lgbt issues and why they’re doing so.

is how you defend that above screenshot people are pointed out. I don’t understand how you can’t see the contradiction implicit. A person’s heart can’t be in the right place if they say things like what was said in the original comment. It occurs to me on reread maybe I don’t understand it? It’s a bit ambiguously worded. But it has popped up before in these conversations and its cited whenever l.ml users reach out to the other big gay instances.

We should accept each other not based on “how modern socialist states are moving”. That phrase “doing the leg work” is doing a lot of leg work being nonspecific about what someone is actually learning and internalizing.

Its just uncomfortable to be in a supposedly welcoming space where allyship arises from first principles and not from real empathy. Its not a college class you can study for.

I think this is a community organiser and not a faceless national government. Making lgbt policy and learning in your personal life to be better aren’t the same thing. Not dissimilar to when right wingers call something “political.”

One would think class struggle would be the first thing socialists would appeal to instead of a milquetoast attempts to reassure people “its okay, the Revolutionary Cause are slowly learning to view you as people!”

Man is a person. He answers to a community. He’s not actually a party official of the revolutionary guard and you and I are allowed to demand better. The way I wrote the last post gave you ample opportunity clap back at me with proof from Dessines that he felt differently, which I honestly expect exists somewhere at least as damage control. But instead we are arguing the semantics over whether a man should take responsibilty for his own bigotry or whether the entire global leftist project should bear that burden for him. I’d rather be slurred to my face than have people bullshit me we’re on the same side while talking about us like we’re props; if only the right ideological mutant strain of intersectional communism that you personally advocate for as being inevitable were to triumph, then the callous way we’re discussed will have been justified. You’re sharing the table with a bigot, or at least you’re leaving a chair open with this rhetoric of pragmatic “usefulness to the cause”. I am happy to be proven wrong (for the sake of .ml’s community) but even if I am this line of reasoning you employ just does not work.

I don’t really know the drama around this guy except The Screenshot everybody posts so I’m not going to act as if I care about his personal opinions, but I don’t like what I see as hypocrisy. There can be no allyship with someone who understands our experience purely through the lens of political opportunism. Empathy is the real prerequisite for decency here. There is a lot of talk on this guy and whether he updated his stance after that screenshot but I don’t think it matters unless he signals himself a understanding of lgbt people as human fools trapped in the same exploitation he is. And hell I don’t know, maybe he wrote that post awhile ago, and if he did good for him. But it rather seems like he lets people speak for him on this issue.

Forcing pronoun disclosure is not necessarily helpful to the trans community, especially those questioning. Do you guys have a questioning tag or something? We have a few users bouncing around on Beehaws for instance that don’t concieve of themselves as human. This stuff is complicated.

This is a weird take. Lgbt people shouldn’t need to be a useful pawn for socialism in order to be treated with respect. We deserve rights and respect because we’re as human as the rest of you theoretically. If someone ostensibly left-wing or socialist needs to read theory in order value my life and needs as a proletarian ally then they can necessarily be no ally of mine. More work needs to be done beyond tacit academic acceptance.

What other minority has to be vetted for their use before being welcomed into your so-called revolutionary project?

Godot is WOKE and queerdo indie devs are using it to make WOKE games because they are UNCREATIVE HACKS who can’t into game engine thats why WE FORKED GODOT AND CHANGED ONE LETTER

Oh so its now completely impossible to stop a brigade by shuttering a subreddit for a day or two without begging some pea brain Reddit stooge. That won’t lead to anything putrid happening to small and medium subreddits on a regular basis I hope.

Interesting, thank you for the reply. I am not a hacker nor a gnostic but I have a slight fascination with the latter. But on hacking: while there’s merit to your position that hacker culture is reactionary I have to ask what do you think of hacker collectives like the one that leaked Project 2025 or other noble computer nerd activities? It seems to me like a hacker is exercizing another avenue of power over her world like jumping or singing. Thinking the online world is seperate and intangible from our non-online experience seems to be making the mistake of dualism in upholding one sphere of reality over the other/s.

hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Do you nind elaborating a bit?

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You and what army?

If AI bros were serious about existential risk and problems of alignment instead of attempting to form a cult of technobabble to make themselves superior and scrounge for venture capital… They’d pull the plug.

Altman is selling what he alledges he dreads more than anything: AI that would lie to you without a second (or even first) literal thought.

If you formed this chat clique you have to lead it and not be coy about it. If I were you I would talk privately with Ann and tell her not to spew the negativity. She could possibly have a blog type “quarantine room” for venting. But you should put your best foot forward and present a friendly space. Stick to your guns about that and people who don’t want that will self select out. When Ann is ranting you’ll look chill in comparison and maybe you can talk to her about who you both want to flirt with. You made a colleague chat, you have to, err, chat with your colleagues.

Hang on a second. Orson Scott Card is a homophobic motherfuck. What’d NS do that is so bad?