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Kinkservative
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Flags always eventually get misappropriated. Its part of the core nature of them.
The only way to prevent that from happening is for people to stand up for their true meaning, and to consistently, and publically denounce their misuse. The best way to cure bad speech is to use better speech.
You're right. Ima start rocking a swastika to fight against its appropriation from Zoroastrinism, I'm sure everyone will understand and do it too.
While I understand what you're getting at, I'm not certain that it's necessarily a fair argument in this case. All I'm saying is that we should fight to prevent such misappropriations. The only way for that to happen is for a collective shift, and restoration in understanding to happen. One of the main issues is that people, on average, have little to no understanding of the Gadsden Flag's history, or meaning so when some entity attributes its meaning to something other than what it actually is, people end up thinking that it must be the true original meaning.
People know and react to its current meaning, regardless of knowing its original meaning or not.
Exactly like the swastika. Some people know its true original meaning, some don't. But all know what it means seeing someone today brandishing one.
This statement is missing the point that such thinking requires some prerequisite knowledge of the symbol. Why stop at uncommonly seen, and extremely modern usage, and abandon the well over 200 years of pre-existing knowledge?
Still though, I wouldn't give up on the Gadsden flag so quickly. I firmly believe that as long as the average public can be made aware of how ridiculous the auth-right's using the flag is, and continues to call them out on it, it can be saved. I'm pretty sure that the majority of the auth-right, and other groups haven't considered how contradicting it is to their platform. To me, seeing someone in the auth-right flying the Gadsden flag is just as weird as if, hypothetically, a marxist decided to fly it.
It's not like those who know its original meaning suddenly decided to change it. If enough people who don't know or don't care about the original meaning give it a new meaning, then that does become a "correct" meaning.
Just like language. You can yell at everyone that literally doesn't mean figuratively all you want, but in the end it still ended up updated in all the dictionaries as meaning just that (along with its original meaning, of course).