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Dog Whistles
(lemmy.world)
Full post here: https://www.tumblr.com/brightlotusmoon/727204642739617792
Posting this to make up for accidentally posting a dog whistle earlier. Oops
This may be controversial, but I think the way to combat dog whistles like this is to overuse them and muddy the waters. Make it so the Nazi's aren sure whether the "pattern noticer" they are interacting with are antisemitic or not.
ISIS went from being an Egyptian goddess and a great band to a poorly translated acronym for a terrorist organization because everyone let the terrorists win on that one. The swastika has been a neat and simple symbol used by a variety of cultures with a variety of meanings ranging from positive to neutral until it was taken by the Nazi's. 88 is a really neat looking number that's done nothing wrong.
Society keeps on ceding cultural ground to assholes and the rest of us have to tiptoe through every piece of communication in fear of being associated with them.
What's next? How long until some fascists start to use the "cool s" that we all doodled in our notebooks in school? Are we going to have to stop using any numbers with less than 3 digits? Will Allah, Jupiter, and Thor join Isis as symbols of fear?
But, the whole point is to have the waters muddied. That's why it's called a dog whistle, because only the dogs (the intended audience) will hear the whistle (recognize the true intent behind the phrase).
So fight mud with mud and make it harder to recognize the true intent.
Or better yet, make it so that the symbols are just way more commonly associated with non-asshole meanings.
It's like the ok sign. It's only a dog whistle when combined with other things. Mudding the water doesn't work when there's layers unless you muddy the layers. But then they just add a layer
Better to let them use it and out themselves