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X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

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Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#311
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like saying you can put pictures of the letters you need in a post to form words. It’s completely impractical in systems that even allow you to upload pictures and impossible for anything based on Unicode only input

Yes but pretty much every single medium where you can use an emoji you can upload a picture. Signal, iMessage, X, FaceBook, etc. This thread is specifically about X so that’s what I mostly am talking about here. But pretty much every communication medium being used allows you to upload pictures. It doesn’t make any sense to me why you’d remove the emoji and not also try to censor all pictures of guns.

Uploading pictures isn’t enough. Placing emojis in sentences in order is required for anything more than a reaction emoji to the whole thing.

You cannot do that on signal, X, Facebook, etc.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#312
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I would agree, but the platforms have also censored the gun emoji with the water gun .

I'm not sure why people call it censorship. Nothing is being censored.

avoiding the terminology for a second, was the change for the better or worse?

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#313
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not the person you were asking, either) In one sentence, wokeness is aggressively pursuing racial (and other identity-based) conflict above everything else, not caring what else you trample on (including even classic civil rights principles). "Microaggressions" is probably the most distinctively woke concept. Censoring gun emojis is not woke in that respect, since it doesn't pursue any particular identity conflict (…

Thanks for taking the time to write this out, I think it helps me understand a bit better. Every definition seems to be sort of different and personalized but I think it's beginning to coalesce into something in my mind, rather than just leaving me confused. Usually when I try to ask this question, I just have angry people being angry with me, and I end up more confused. So it's nice to have some legitimate explanati…

Sure, glad to help. I can give more detail including etymology.

"Woke" originally meant that a person has "awoken" to the true nature of society. They see the thing that others do not see! Unfortunately, it seems that that's also the only thing they see, or the only thing they care about. And that thing is racial / identity-group conflict. As I say, they cheerfully sacrifice principles like freedom of speech, meritocracy, proportionality, hard-fought civil rights ideals, etc., when it's inconvenient for the fight they want to pick in the moment. I think that, to a first approximation, when anyone says "Is this going too far?", they get accused of sympathizing with the oppressors and shamed or cast out, so the group goes farther, and we are seeing the results of iterating this process for decades. A peak moment was tearing down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, apparently in the name of anticolonialism.

That's the woke people themselves, a small, aggressive, highly vocal group with outsized influence. (There's also a larger group of relatively normal people with a surface-level understanding of it who go along with most of it; I think if they understood and believed all the details, most of them would recoil.) (Incidentally, most people instinctively understand that aggressively attacking others is bad, but via concepts like "microaggressions" and "privilege", the woke frequently find reasons to think that someone else attacked first.)

Then there's the legal and corporate environment. Civil rights legislation brought laws against discrimination and creating a hostile environment for identity groups in companies. In the absence of mind-reading, a claim of discrimination is difficult to prove or disprove, and a "hostile environment" could be interpreted in many ways. I think that the "game of telephone" chain from the text of the law, to the interpretation of the law (and evidentiary standards) in courts, to lawyers' understanding, to what company lawyers tell management, to what sticks in management's brain and gets implemented, has yielded essentially "If you offend the woke identity groups, then that puts you at significant legal risk, so best appease them. Also it's good to pay them lip service, host Pride events, etc., because that reduces legal risk." Additionally, some portion of management themselves are woke, and some additional portion earnestly believe in civil rights as a cause and tend to take the woke at their word when they claim their policies are the right and proper next steps. And finally, on a personal level, expressing dissent against a woke-aligned policy is, in many cases, perceived to put one's own career at risk (in some cases the lawyers may say it's a liability to keep a person like that; and, having seen cases of this, many people err on the side of caution, creating a "chilling effect").

So you get a lot of corporate policies meant to appease the woke. Some may be the exact policies the woke asked for. Others may be cynical appeasement, and by design they will be difficult to distinguish from the first type. Some policies are invented by well-intentioned people believing in civil rights principles. Some are the outcome of some kind of compromise.

It's not necessarily clear which of these should be called "woke policies", both in theory and in practice. It doesn't help that, whereas you could identify Democrat or Republican policies by looking at official websites, and probably get reasonable consensus on what are "conservative policies" or "progressive policies" based on prominent self-identified conservative figures and institutions, the woke do not call themselves "woke" (with occasional exceptions like "Woke Kindergarten") and object to anyone else calling them that; it's understood to be a pejorative. The woke will tend to call themselves advocates of civil rights or of specific groups' rights, and try to blur any distinctions between the classic civil rights movement which enjoys majority support (things like non-discrimination and gay marriage) and what they're trying to do (things like discriminating in favor of their identity groups and policing pronouns). This serves to make the case that anyone who disagrees with them is a 1950s Jim Crow racist, and anyone who isn't a 1950s Jim Crow racist must agree with them, which is useful for coercing acquiescence and support. It also makes it harder for the rest of us to notice the patterns and call out the damage that the woke have done and are likely to do. But I think we're getting there.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fresh anonymous accounts?

You lost? You respond to the wrong person?

No. Quoting:

> Some of us

Who is "us"? I said "fresh anonymous accounts" because there's a problem with such on this website. Certain ideas are way more likely with those.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking objectively it’s either dumb or it matters. There’s no reality that exists where it was dumb so you shouldn’t care it was changed but it’s dumb so it shouldn’t be changed back because it’s dumb right so it doesn’t matter what it is… The people who changed it thought it mattered, the people changing it back do too so as dumb as it is, I guess it matters to both these groups, even if it is kinda dumb. These du…

I bet you more people prefer the water gun. Two opinions are not automatically equal. Especially with anything regarding languages, a consensus is to be respected.

> I bet you more people prefer the water gun

Depends where your sample is from, if you just did a worldwide the result would surprise you.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#316
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will keep happening the same way languages gradually change and for exactly the same reasons. Being in flux isn’t a bug, it’s the content of culture. Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.

No, I don't think that applies here. Languages evolve and new terminology enters the lexicon all of the time, but that absolutely does not retrospectively change the rendering of pre-existing expressions of language.

That absolutely happens.

Meanings change, jump from one word to another, words take the opposite meaning all the time. Pronunciations change too, letters that are supposed to sound differently suddenly don’t and other way around too.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#317
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will keep happening the same way languages gradually change and for exactly the same reasons. Being in flux isn’t a bug, it’s the content of culture. Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.

There are different ways how languages can change. A language changes organically, if individual people simply talk differently than their predecessors, out of convenience, without any specific intent or plan behind it. That's the way languages have always changed throughout history and keep changing. Deliberately changing a language and pressuring other people to adopt certain changes in their vocabulary is somethin…

>pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.

Chairman Mao enters the chat

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost? You respond to the wrong person?

No. Quoting: > Some of us Who is "us"? I said "fresh anonymous accounts" because there's a problem with such on this website. Certain ideas are way more likely with those.

>Who is "us"? I said "fresh anonymous accounts"

Nonsensical since my account is not a "fresh anonymous account". Fresh accounts are colored green.

>because there's a problem with such on this website.

What's the problem? Wrongthink?

>Certain ideas are way more likely with those.

"Truth is treason in the empire of lies."

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#319
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else…

The phrase "small group of people" is doing a lot of work, I think. We had the largest technology/media companies in the country making similar changes.

Let's not fool ourselves, these changes are almost exclusively pushed by small but very vocal minority groups and SJWs

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#320
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If emojis are speech then removing a particular one sure looks like censorship. Many people do consider them a form of speech, both socially and legally. For example, a thumbs up emoji can be considered agreeing to a contract.

Does the smiling face emoji look like a real face? No, it's a cartoon representation. Same for the handgun, which was replaced by a handgun that is also a cartoonish toy water gun. If anything it was brought more in-line with the rest of the icon style. It wasn't removed, it was augmented.

That's a wild argument when the vast majority of emojis are designed to look like the real version.
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