> it’s more often than not a grid of a lot of the upper staff of media companies like CNN, FOX, and so on. And each one of the people in that grid has a blue Star of David next to their photo.
This particular meme crossed over from conspiracy theory to commentary after the mainstream started doing the same thing, for a different (much less narrow) racial group. Here's the New York Times documenting the "white faces of power"[1], and here's a modified version of one of the photos, highlighting the Jewishness of the same group, created by an honest-to-God white nationalist site[2]. (For those wondering how I found it, the WN site was one of the first results from Googling for the NYT article).
I find both of these equally abhorrent, because I'm one of those old-fashioned anti-racists that think reducing people to footsoldiers for their race is revolting. But it highlights the silliness of all the pearl-clutching about "hate" fora, especially those without an agenda like 4chan. As down in the gutter as NYT has lowered itself, noone is calling for them to be removed from (eg) Twitter due to causing "harm" in the way a 4chan-trained bot is.
Who determined for all of society that the first picture is copacetic enough that it should be published by the paper of record, while the latter is abhorrent enough that we should be aggressively limiting the ability to express it? I'm aware that there's a race-obsessed worldview adopted very recently by a fairly small segment of society that finds the former picture crucial and the latter horrific. But what makes this new, fairly unpopular worldview so important that it should determine what all of society is allowed to communicate, across a myriad of platforms?
In anticipation of the automatic responses of "private cos can do what they want": obviously so. The question here is what private companies _should_ be doing: should we be joining the call for eg Huggingface to be opinionated in its removal of models, or should we be joining the call against?
A cruel favorite of mine is to pull up that faces of power business, with all of where it is from and whatnot, and ask someone, "So, why do you think so many are white?" And they talk about racism, systematic oppression, on and on, what you would expect.
Then I drop the blue star thing, tell them, and ask again. Sudden floundering, cognitive dissonance, and so on. Now, all of the same answers in A should apply, and intensely more so, given the statistical unlikeliness, but instead they all vanish. Merit, networking, talent, all of these explanations suddenly appear.
This particular meme crossed over from conspiracy theory to commentary after the mainstream started doing the same thing, for a different (much less narrow) racial group. Here's the New York Times documenting the "white faces of power"[1], and here's a modified version of one of the photos, highlighting the Jewishness of the same group, created by an honest-to-God white nationalist site[2]. (For those wondering how I found it, the WN site was one of the first results from Googling for the NYT article).
I find both of these equally abhorrent, because I'm one of those old-fashioned anti-racists that think reducing people to footsoldiers for their race is revolting. But it highlights the silliness of all the pearl-clutching about "hate" fora, especially those without an agenda like 4chan. As down in the gutter as NYT has lowered itself, noone is calling for them to be removed from (eg) Twitter due to causing "harm" in the way a 4chan-trained bot is.
Who determined for all of society that the first picture is copacetic enough that it should be published by the paper of record, while the latter is abhorrent enough that we should be aggressively limiting the ability to express it? I'm aware that there's a race-obsessed worldview adopted very recently by a fairly small segment of society that finds the former picture crucial and the latter horrific. But what makes this new, fairly unpopular worldview so important that it should determine what all of society is allowed to communicate, across a myriad of platforms?
In anticipation of the automatic responses of "private cos can do what they want": obviously so. The question here is what private companies _should_ be doing: should we be joining the call for eg Huggingface to be opinionated in its removal of models, or should we be joining the call against?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/09/us/powerful-p...
[2] https://nationalvanguard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Holl...