Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree and I didn’t take notice till the day I learned a woman flying to ZA wrote some quick satire on twitter before departing, when she landed many hours later she learned her tweet was taken straight and was summarily fired with the tireless assistance of the twitter-rage-mob. I agree with Cleese and Chapelle. It’s madness.
I am curious to read about this but googling “woman flight ZA twitter outrage“ is getting me nothing. Could you provide a name?
You can’t prove I meant X
111–120 of 133 posts
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "It's okay to be white" campaign. Are you saying this is reasonable? EDIT: Here come the downvotes. You can't prove I meant X... oh the irony.
Man, that blogpost [0] really did a number on me. Warning, navel-gazing ahead. I have a browser extension [1] that lets me set custom tags on HN users. I'm not unconflicted about using it, since I have some ideological hangups that tell me to let people's words speak for themselves and to not let someone's history muddy the waters of a discussion in the present. That being said, HN isn't anonymous and it's a comparat…
> the amount of context that must be conveyed in order to disambiguate it.
Precisely!
I didn't want to assume what the parent was asking, so I asked for more information.
With a highly-context-sensitive phrase like this it is best to ask them to explain. If it is asked in sincerity a conversation can evolve. If it is asked with an obvious attempt to deliver the subtext, it is quite clear in about 3-4 sentences.
I appreciate your documented thought process. I notice you diligently approach the phrase prima-facie and observe the semantics, but then don't move beyond that. You were super close there with "what did 0xff00ffee mean?", then moved on.
Beyond lexing and yaccing some tokens, there is one very important question, often referred to by historians as part of analysis via the "Period View":
"What is happening culturally (socially and politically) at that time and geography when the phrase was uttered?"
Much like how historical record needs to be digested in context, which is where many of the logical dissections of ideological slogans have a colossal, debilitating blind spot.
Not to say semantic analysis is wrong or irrelevant, it is just half of the process. A necessary half, but only half.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the 88 thing, but not the blood type tatooed 8 inches above the elbow, care to explain?
"SS blood group tattoos (German: Blutgruppentätowierung) were worn by members of the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany during World War II to identify the individual's blood type. [...] It was a small black ink tattoo located on the underside of the left arm, [...] placed roughly 20 cm (8 inches) above the elbow." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo I have no idea whether it's popular with modern neo-nazis.
ah, thank you. That clears that up. Though tattooing your blood type on your skin seems a good idea.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how do you get from this quote to the context of genociding other people? That's a pretty big non-sequitur. The quote is about securing a future, not to "kill all infidels".
In a statistical sense, in an global integrated society, where everyone is freely equally likely to partner with everyone, there eventually won't be any children by the traditional racist definitions of white, ie, with white. no interbreeding with non European ancestry. (The whole concept of white is questionable and mostly racist, fyi.) This is what is generally called white genocide by the far right, even though it…
> there eventually won't be any children by the traditional racist definitions of white, ie, with white. no interbreeding with non European ancestry.
There aren't any of those anyway.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. it takes like 20 minutes to communicate the context and how this isn't so innocuous as it looks. I've had to explain this to my aging boomer parents, and they still don't buy it. It is truly a subversive phrase because it takes control of the argument from a place that requires, IMO, a lot of basics to be explained and/or challenged... which most people don't want to sit through. It's like a self-generating min…
I don't think you can construct "It's okay to be white" as something wrong, because it's just inherently correct. It worries me, that you even try to find something wrong the the slogan.
They're interpreting it as a motte [ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric... ] for the bailey "It's not okay to not be white." and enthusiaticly pursuing the usual argument.
> This means people who know both terms are at constant risk of arguments of the form "You're weak-manning me!" "No, you're motte-and-baileying me!".
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
All this dogwhistling stuff is fun and games until you start to put innocent people under fire for dogwhistling. If more people start reading Nazi propaganda just to avoid dogwhistling, you will have created more enemies as a second order effect of your actions. A better approach would be to fill the whistles with noise, so they lose their use for the people trying to use them to identify allies. There's a reason why…
How many people do you know who aren't white nationalists have gotten a 1488 tattoo? The whole point of these signals is that they seem innocuous, but practically no one is going to signal them in other contexts. So you have the vague auspices of plausible deniability when pushed, but nearly 100% specificity too.
I don't know when, exactly, but I became a lot more aware of this 88 thing in the last 3 years or so, and at times, it's seemed like it's everywhere. I got a prescription filled where the pills had "HH" stamped on them and the price on my receipt ended in 88. I got a loan recently and the account number had 88 and 911 in it.
It is terrifying to me that people who think they are not clinically paranoid can say things like "100% specificity" and be sincere.
Edit: I'm not joking, trolling, or (so I believe) delusional. As far as I know, these are real coincidences that are probably meaningless. The prescription in question is supposed to help with paranoia.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found it to be pretty effective to simply not engage with those who keep taking the worst possible interpretations of your (or others) arguments. It sort of simulates an environment where everyone is charitable. In other words, "Don't feed the trolls"
That's alright sometimes. But there's usually a 100 (or something) readers to 1 posters ratio. If none of the "trolls" are contested that leaves the impression that it's a legitimate opinion. I don't think the option of "don't feed the trolls" really works in such scenarios.
In those cases you are talking to the audience, not to the trolls. It doesn't matter what the trolls meant; it matters what you say.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#118> "this sentence could mean y as well as x so you can’t prove I meant x" It's interesting that a lot of online debate and media commentary uses the opposite technique: > "this sentence could—with varying degrees of plausibility—mean bad thing y as well as good thing x, so you can't prove you didn't really mean to say the bad thing." The principle of anti-charity.
I agree and I didn’t take notice till the day I learned a woman flying to ZA wrote some quick satire on twitter before departing, when she landed many hours later she learned her tweet was taken straight and was summarily fired with the tireless assistance of the twitter-rage-mob. I agree with Cleese and Chapelle. It’s madness.
She was a PR rep who spewed vile racist hatred.
And she got her job back anyway.
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/19/16911074/justine-sacco-iac-mat...
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that wasn't my point at all. I was replying to Kaiyou, who couldn't understand how those words could be considered as being associated with the far right. I explained exactly how they could be considered as saying something within the far right. (That it is associated with the far right is shown by who initially said it.) So, when those words are spoken by the far right , can you see a problem? Could someone in c…
How does saying "What does the saying say to them?" demonstrate that the words could be considered as being associated with the far right? Please be specific.
The piece you are quoting doesn't. I've said a bit more than that, though - in particular, about the origin of the quote. Others on this thread have also said more on the topic. If you want to see it, it's all there in this thread.
If you don't want to see it, then there's not much point talking to you. And in fact, whether you're honestly looking or not, I'm done with this conversation. You can take the last word if you want.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "It's okay to be white" campaign. Are you saying this is reasonable? EDIT: Here come the downvotes. You can't prove I meant X... oh the irony.
Man, that blogpost [0] really did a number on me. Warning, navel-gazing ahead. I have a browser extension [1] that lets me set custom tags on HN users. I'm not unconflicted about using it, since I have some ideological hangups that tell me to let people's words speak for themselves and to not let someone's history muddy the waters of a discussion in the present. That being said, HN isn't anonymous and it's a comparat…
May I recommend the tag: "It's OK for comments to be white", since that's where Kaiyou's comments are all headed thanks to downvoters.