Comment on Stay Mad
SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world 4 months agoBut it is. A symbol can mean different things in different context. For example, this hand gesture 👌 means okay in Western cultures but means something more insulting and offensive in Arab culture. Does that mean one is right and is the one and only representation of the gesture? Of course not. Same here. Swastikas have been around for thousands of years across many different cultures and has many different meanings. It’s just one variation of the symbol that ended up being used by the nazis and is offensive to most people. It’s silly and rather close minded to try to disregard all these disregard all these different context and meanings when many of them have been around for longer than the nazi variation.
sudo@programming.dev 3 months ago
Please remember that this particular groyper meme is a literal copy of a Trump 2016 meme with the word “Trump” replaced with “Biden” and was deployed regularly by the alt-right. Please keep that in context while you give the argument that its in a totally different context. Its like responding to dog whistling accusations with more dog whistling.
SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world 3 months ago
So what? You have to stop doubling down on this idiotic argument because it is getting ridiculous. Guilt by association and purity are heavily frowned upon and criticized throughout history for a reason. Different things have different meanings in different contexts, and you can’t judge people without proper contexts and for things they’re not or didn’t do. This should be obvious, but for some reason it isn’t.
This meme and others like it all originate from 4chan and the other imageboards similar to it, and these boards are responsible for internet’s most famous memes. Just think about what has come out of 4chan for a second:
Wojak and its variations
Pepe and its variations
LOLcats
Pedobear
Anonymous
Rickrolling
The popularization of Chocolate Rain
Greentext
Rage comics
The ungodly origin of “Bronies”
The Shia Labeouf fiasco
The 4chan-Tumblr wars
Pool’s closed
They are quite literally the foundation of internet culture. Everybody who grew up on the internet was used or at least enjoyed any of these. These imageboards are built on the idea that the internet is the wild west, where everybody no matter how tame or extreme, no matter how good or evil, and no matter how pragmatic or delusional can get together and shitpost. And guess what? 4chan and these other imageboards were ALWAYS cesspools filled pedos, Marxists, neo nazis, anarchists, racial supremacists, misogynists/misandrists, and so on, but at the same time, they’re also filled with a lot of normal people. Regardless, if we follow your logic, which is that anybody who has ever used any of these memes is a neo nazi by proxy then anybody who took part in mainstream Internet culture over the past 20 years is a neo nazi… which is obviously ridiculous.
Keep in mind, you’re right the groyper meme did originate from neo nazis but so did many other famous memes. I mean the latest famous variation of wojak, the chud, originated from some Marxist imageboard. Marxists are just as vile as neo nazis, does that mean anybody who used the chudjak meme is a Marxist? No, that’s stupid. The meme was started by Marxists, but it was used by a lot of other people, including those making fun of Marxists.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that memes serve as templates. Templates without content don’t mean anything, they’re just a structured blank document. Just like how symbols have different meanings in different contexts, so do these memes. If OP posted this same meme saying something like “Putin is still a great leader” then OP would be a fascist… but he’s not. His meme is about Biden.
Like seriously, do you honestly believe that OP is some secret neo nazi because he used a cartoon frog meme to make a pro Biden post? Even worse, do you seriously think that I’m also a secret neo nazi by proxy for pointing out that symbols and templates mean different things in different contexts? This is where you start crossing the line from a valid critic into a paranoid schizo or McCarthyist virute signaler.