Because when someone uses a symbol while they do something shitty, they are associating that symbol with their shitty behaviors. Human brains are wired to identify paterns and associations for threat identification. That’s why cops all dress differently than EMT’s.
If your ex-girlfriend left you in a nasty break up, you might avoid her favorite restaurant, cry when you hear her favorite songs, or even get upset just seeing a similar car to the one she drove. You cant drown out a dog whistel, all you can do is point it out.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Right but if Nazis just started using the LGBTQ+ flag, that wouldn’t be recognized.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 1 month ago
They tried that in Reddit back in 2019, and it failed. Frenworld tried taking rainbow flags to mean “A seperate place for every race” ahortly before they got banned.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 month ago
It was a hypothetical. Pick anything you want.
And anyways you proved my point, the “society” pushed back, ad discarded it, rather than allow it to be poisoned.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 1 month ago
No, symbols are just hard to change. Once they have a meaning associated to them, you can’t take the meaning away. A pride flag is symbol, so ot means something. An ok hand gesture doesn’t have much beyond “ok” to it, so it can quickly be taken over and poisoned.
A drop of poison in a glass will kill you, but a drop in an lake won’t harm anyone.
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Tbf the fact that it failed kinda proves his point, and the fact that the ok symbol is “now a nazi dogwhistle” (or, like, that whole “swastika” thing. disproves your second point.)
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There was already a large, active movement that had adopted the symbol. None such movement existed for the “OK” hand gesture.