Another hand gesture you will frequently see in religious art is a figure (usually a Pope or bishop) pointing upwards with their index and middle finger. This is somewhat unnatural since you would generally point with your index finger alone. The use of two fingers represents the divine and human natures of Christ.
If you have played Elden Ring, There is an amazing video on the "two fingers" and "three fingers" by "The Tarnished Archaeologist" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hETam732CvY
> Another hand gesture you will frequently see in religious art is a figure (usually a Pope or bishop) pointing upwards with their index and middle finger. This is somewhat unnatural since you would generally point with your index finger alone. The use of two fingers represents the divine and human natures of Christ.
At Disney employee training they taught me to point with index and middle finger (or my whole hand) too.
That is less about the gesture than it is about avoiding a different gesture. Many cultures do not appreciate pointing with a single finger. So Disney wants their people to use two.
I had thought it was more about pointing at a person with a finger was unwelcome, than pointing at a destination. I suppose in a crowded place such as an amusement park, you could inadvertently point at a person when giving directions?
The pope photo is not him pointing upward, he's doing the blessing. Imagine someone standing right in front of him and he's pointing two fingers at their head, then move to torso, then left shoulder, then right shoulder. Depending on the speed of the camera at that time, he might pose like that for a second just to take the photograph as if he's in the middle of the blessing someone. I've never seen priest doing it with one or three or four fingers.
Tldr: they're not pointing upwards, they're pointing to someone's head (the viewer of the painting/photography most likely)
I bet when they used one finger people were asking "me?" and then looked behind them to see if there is someone else. If priest uses two fingers it's obvious he's not pointing at you or someone behind you. It also helps if he points it little bit higher not just right between your eyes like a gun.
It's literally the hand sign of dual nature of Christ. Blessing or posing.
The Catholic Church has had quite a few years to solidify and formalize their rituals. Nothing a priest does during mass is accidental or coincidental. They go to school for these things.
From the publication: “The speculation that the hand gesture herein presented is a freemasonry’s conveyed code is fascinating, but it is hard to accept.”
This sentence concluded a very short paragraph that apparently aimed to explore whether the hand sign could have a Masonic meaning. But instead of giving any explanation for their conclusion, the authors merely postulate the above without any given reasoning. I’m surprised to find this in what appears to aim to be a scientific analysis. Even more so would it surprise me if any conscious reader found this conclusion satisfactory.
32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of.
However, there were numerous other fraternities and secret societies during that era, although they were typically gender-specific. Seeing both men and women using the same hand signals suggests these were likely common societal practices of the time. And since, presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.
If you're allowed to create a hypothetical question that translates a hierarchy of guards into Boolean logic, then it doesn't matter how many guards there are.
"What would each of the other 49 guards would say the 49 guards other than them would do?" It would be a pain to do the deduction from all of that info, but it seems like it would be enough enough. Maybe it would make more sense to have that guard write down the answer (and throw in a pencil and a few extra sheets of paper)...
"Label the guards, 1 to 50, starting with you as 1, the guard to your left as 2, etc. For each guard, tell me what answer they would give if I asked them if your door was safe".
If all the guards say the same thing, you're talking to the lying guard. Otherwise the liar is simply the one that answers differently.
But what are they actually used for? The only things i heard about freemasonry were from conspiracy theorists. But i never really found out, what they actually do. And the secret handshakes are performed with strangers to tell each other secretly they're unknown brothers?
Probably not, the Freemason Police patrol this internet web site daily, and he'd disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Be sure to follow up on his comment history a month from now, to see whether he's said anything since.
The last time the government found out about the Masonic Police, the leader mysteriously died right before trial and the other charges were swept under the rug. I definitely wouldn’t mess with those guys.
Sorry to break the news to you Jake but there are two orders. Those of "that era" are the actual power breakers, you guys are the peculiar but innocent window dressing.
Having been involved in peer reviewed publishing before, I wonder if this was an afterthought prompted by a peer reviewer's comments on the paper. Perhaps they quickly added this point just to get it to pass review. Sloppy, if so, but I've seen similar (though not as blatant) things happen.
There were enough basic grammatical errors in that article—not to mention a general lack of clarity and specificity—that I initially wondered whether it was a preprint, or maybe somebody's blog. But no.
"According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize crypto-jews each other"
"According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize masonic followers each other"
I have never heard this verbiage before... Did an AI write this? Or, can someone explain to me how "used to recognize followers each other" is grammatically sound?
I think you know an AI didn't generate the sentence because it's ungrammatical.
The publication in question (Acta Biomed) is oriented around "mainly national and international scientific activities from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries", so there's a reasonable chance none of the the authors speak English as a first language. This in no way excuses bad editing—the journal publishes in English, after all.
It's not grammatical. Reading the article parts of it seemed poorly machine-translated to me (and the whole thing seemed mostly a sequence of straw-men).
I recall when young, people were commenting on how most media came from centralized locations. That with newspapers, and then radio, and now TV, pronunciation was moving towards being less regionalized, diverse, yet also that the choice of words to use, the synonyms to use, was changing.
I also recall the same being said for a variety of things, such as spell checkers, and grammar checkers used in wordprocessors. Some grammar was "OK", but other forms were being pushed by (most especially) earlier wordprocessors, with grammatically valid text being marked with that wavy underline.
Now we have AI.
My point?
Kids are going to be raised in a world with AI. If it spends a decade or more spewing blather such as this, an entire slew of people will grow up, from 10 to 20 years old, 15 to 25 years old, learning to cobble together sentences in this sort of way.
Not only will they read it, but "helpful" assistants will change their normal prose, into this gibberish.
So I'm sorry mkl, it sort of will be grammatical. And no, I'm not happy about it.
Indeed. And now imagine an opinionated government controls the AI which helps formulate not only articles, blogs, etc, but even the predictive text software that facilitates writing a language very poorly suited to writing on a phone. And then imagine how much harder it will be to overthrow that government when even your own speech is subtly nudged to support the will of Big Brother. And there you have the fate of the Chinese people.
I mean the whole paper is sloppy here. They kind of are writing to a biomedical journal and then say "well, it's NOT biomedical..." as kind of a little brush-off? And then they go through a couple explanations they have heard and dismiss them without really going through the evidence. (I especially liked the sloppiness of self-contradiction, in one section they're like "well there are no Hebrew letters that work for this" which is wrong, you could make decent arguments for both shin and tsadeh -- but then almost immediately after they're like "well this could be an M or W, W can symbolically be the Hebrew letter Vav...")
And after cursorily dismissing them they just say "therefore, it's an aesthetic meme. This is just what perfect hands look like, sorry."
A hypothesis that was not considered, for example: 'We asked people at school to imagine that they were going to be sitting still for the next three hours on a stool, and to sit on it in a way that was perfectly relaxed. We then prompted them "remember, in old times you'd have had to sit here for three hours, really relax." Finally, we then picked up their left wrist, turned it, and placed it on their chests saying "great, now can you just hold this hand here," and took a photograph. In 30% of these photographs we also see, even without syndactyly, that the two fingers get forced together just by the process of having your wrist twisted by an artist and then the fingers having to conform to the contours of the chest.'
I don't know what that percentage is, but I'd be surprised if it were 0%, right?
I noticed that too. Eventually they drew the conclusion that people just copied each other to look cool. I have no idea whether there's more to the 'hidden meanings' conjectures or not, but if you're going to dig into a topic, dig in properly. Waste of reading time in my view.
Could also be from some defunct offshoot off the freemasons or some other adjacent secret society. The rosicrucians are perhaps most well known, but secret hermetic societies were fairly in-fashion during the renaissance. Given the secrecy involved, it's probably very hard to know what is and is not (and has been) a significant gesture.
I'd also personally not be surprised if hermetic symbolism cropped up around the Medici-adjacent artists in particular, given the Medicis' proximity to Pico della Mirandola who was fairly important in bringing together this new mix of christian, jewish, gnostic and neoplatonist mysticism.
> hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was, because they were the only other visible area of the body
Huh, I had always assumed the reason that they were featured in renaissance art was the trend of depicting subjects with a sort of realism, combined with hands tending to be a more difficult feature for artists to master; so a good depiction of hands showcases the skill of the artist and enhances the work’s merit as a status symbol for its owner.
I guess both could be true. Hands are an important focus of attraction in the modern day tbf.
I am reminded of a short scene in the film Goya's Ghosts, where the artists claims to charge more if the portrait he is painting includes one or two hands.
Is it really unnatural? Interestingly, as a right-handed, the two middle fingers
of my right hand tend to effortlessly group together; this feels noticeably less true on my left hand, but still observable if I try to relax it.
The peculiar "mission tile" (half-cylindrical) flexibility of the palm region, encouraged by writing for example, may foster this grouping.
It's a bit surprising for the article not to address potential anatomical causes.
The ulnar nerve goes to finger 4 and 5, and the median to 2 and 3 plus a branch to 4. For me, 3+4 is the most difficult combination to maintain, and raising 4 is the most difficult, but the effect (as you suggest) is strongest in the non-dominant hand.
So I interpret this position as simply the most difficult hand position to maintain, thus indicating some intention, practice, or awareness -- and thus self-control, which was considered the master virtue classically.
I naturally keep my pinky and ring fingers together on my right hand, and I think this is a result of how I hold my phone. It made me wonder if there is an easily overlooked common activity of that time that would cause people to naturally hold their middle and ring fingers together.
Your example of writing makes sense too. Perhaps because writers were a more exclusive club then, prominently showing your subject’s hand with that finger grouping was a message in itself.
I’d also consider the possibility that artists might use their own hand as a reference when detailing hands in a painting, and their own physiology might be affected by long hours working with a brush. Artists training other artists might reinforce this collective conclusion that this is a natural relaxed hand pose, because when they look at their own hands that’s often what they see.
Yep. If I just naturally lay my hand down on something, my middle and ring fingers do tend to naturally come together.
It takes a tiny bit of intent to splay my fingers out.
Portrait artists constantly study people very closely and are likely attuned to thousands of little nuanced details that go unnoticed by most people. This is probably one.
Now I’m going to start looking at people’s hands to check their finger positions. That might have been a good exercise for the authors of the paper to determine if this is a natural hand position.
I think the claim that it’s an unnatural position definitely needs justifying. A search of a corpus of modern photographs to determine the base rate for hands resting in this pose and a comparison of that to the rate depicted in renaissance art would seem to be the minimal due diligence to determine if there’s even an effect that needs explaining, before delving into the relative likelihood of Masonic symbolism.
As an exercise, pretend you’re a 16th century lord, or just a very theatrical person, and raise your arm with a drooping hand, then gently touch your chest with your fingers splayed and wrist at an angle. Your two fingers in the middle naturally touch first, and stay together once you lay down the whole hand, exactly like in the portraits. It’s not a straining position.
I’m also surprised the paper (?) doesn’t go into simple behavioural explanations for this.
Maybe because you're biased having read the article? I just looked at a picture of me waving at the camera taken 2 weeks ago, and my fingers are splayed apart with even spacing.
When I rotate my hand toward my body the middle fingers come together, when it rotate it away they fan out. I can feel this happening in the tension of my muscles and ligaments during rotation. In contrast, pulling my two middle fingers together on purpose with my hand held out, without also pulling together all my fingers, feels weird. I simply think this is a mechanically likely think to happen due to the design of the forearm, though it may not be the case for everyone depending on tension and strength and anatomy.
Note that "mudras" have significant meanings in Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism. Mudras used in Indian dances convey feelings or elements of story etc. Also used in yoga. And mudras are not just hand gestures but also facial expressions, eye movements and so on.
Though there does not seem to be any connection of mudras with European paintings. There were cultural links between India and the Greco-Roman world in 2nd-1st century BCE around the time of Indo-Greek kingdom (northwest of the current India) but seems unlikely that would have such an influence centuries later.
The only two plausible explanations to me are either that artists conventionally drew hands like this (for religious, artistic or other reasons) or that artists' subjects conventionally posed like this, for a similar variety of reasons, or because the artist told them to.
The article helpfully rules out a third explanation, an "epidemic of syndactyly", but doesn't make a strong decision between the other two. It seems to lean towards this being a quirk of the artists, but it could do with a quantitative study: if artist A painted subject A like this, what happened when artist A portrayed other subjects, or other artists portrayed A?
My thoughts exactly: by bringing two of the five fingers together you achieve a more interesting effect of overall asymmetry among the fingers, and yet because the two joined fingers are each flanked by a "detached" finger, it creates another layer of symmetry within the non-thumb fingers.
The overall effect is quite pleasing to the eye, which may account for it having caught on to the point where it became a trend. I see this as the Occam's Razor of explanations.
i think papers like this reveal the benefits of domain-specific methodologies. a scientific paper is a bad choice for historiography.
art historical texts are usually much more concerned with close reading of artworks to establish syncretic pathways of artistic convention. art writers are usually unconcerned with null hypothesis and burden of proof. the authors here had no real claim about history or any interesting reading of artwork. i couldn't imagine something like this being disseminated in an arts journal or publication-- there just isn't enough time spent with the methods of art history, i.e close readings of the examples presented, primary source inclusion, historiographic narrative, formal analysis, etc.
i wish i could provide a counterexample, but my work is on american conceptual sculpture, not renaissance art. i think the last very good text i read on the renaissance was james hall's book on michelangelo's anatomy published some years ago.
> Finally, there is no letter or religious gesture, Hebrew or otherwise, similar to the splayed hand.
Isn’t there? Not including the thumb, it looks like the letter shin. Of course, the Vulcan salute also famously makes the shin letter (but, includes the thumb).
"During the Renaissance period, hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was, because they were the only other visible area of the body."
[Example painting is a Titian with a naked Mary Magdalene]
I love that there's a section for conflicts of interest.
Would have been interesting to see a disclosure for a pharma company working on syndactyly or a disclosure that the authors belong to some secret society.
> It is an unnatural position of one or both hands in which the third and fourth digits are held tight together, as if almost fused, resembling syndactyly, and the second and fifth fingers are separated from the central ones.
A great deal of hand talking is suprisingly universal | understood quickly enogh on opposite sides of the globe, almost all hunter gatherers have finger talk and share common enough base despite seperate regions.
It's just a matter of style. People copy the styles that they identify themselves with/aspire to. Artist copy each other, black kids copy 50cent, white kids copy jake paul, gay men copy each others feminine affectations. Once you notice it, it's everywhere.
Do you know of research on this? I have two gay friends with feminine speech and both are adamant that they don't choose to have this and would prefer not to. Each has their own theory as to why they have it. One suspects it might be (epi)genetic while another suspects its influenced by being raised by women. I can't buy the latter since many very masculine straight men were raised exclusively by women.
One of my aspirational hobbies is designing Apple Vision Pro games and interfaces that trick people into unwittingly making embarrassing hand gestures in public.
I just wanted to add something I didn't see mentioned in the article or the discussion. In the Christian tradition, figures are often portrayed with their pinky and ring fingers curled up, while the thumb, index, and middle fingers are extended. This is done to symbolize the holy trinity.
And here I'd thought « entre la poire et le fromage » ?
(William the first may have preferred calvados, and the current William is unlikely to be based enough to style himself William the last [ending the monarchy in 2066], but I prefer my Williams in a bottle)
The spread fingers make three points on a fibonacci curve. It is just the most aesthetically pleasant gesture. The artists were always in pursuit of beauty and this is what it is.
Of all the hypotheses they considered, they seem to have missed the obvious one: Cosimo I de' Medici is Eastside and Jesus, God and Mary Magdalene are Westside.
“ It should be considered an artistic device or a symbolic hallmark without any conveyed meaning rather than a true pathologic depiction of syndactyly.”
Well, that was tax money well spent. Is this actually considered science now? Is this what (art) historians actually do? Speculate a bit and then say “well, it probably was something”?
I'm surprised the paper doesn't entertain the notion that some things look cool, artists copy one another, and trends simply start like that naturally.
I mean, it's not like Corinthian style columns have a hidden meaning. They look nice and provide artists with a great default.
My thought as well. The article suggests it's an "M" for Medici, but it could just as easily be a W" for "Westside Connection". This sort of proves a theory of mine, that Ice Cube has a time machine.
(Presumably he developed it in order to travel back to the best day of his life, the day he messed around and got a triple double, and then later used it to travel back to the 16th century and influence the late Renaissance... but here I am speculating)
Even if it started as a fabrication it was pretty quickly adopted by the crowd you’d expect to be using such a hand gesture. IOW “Teehee I’m doing a hand gesture everyone thinks is racist but its not because its an internet joke” isnt the own you think it is.
He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
"He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies."
It's amazing how far racists will contort and bend over backwards not to see racism. It's like they're pretending racism doesn't exist, and has been totally eliminated in the "real world", and all that online stuff doesn't count. Once they paint themselves into a corner by arguing Trump isn't racist because he hasn't actually been convicted of lynching anyone, so all that stuff about Mexicans being rapists and Obama not being American doesn't count, it's pretty hard for anything to pass their definition of racism. (Except Democrats, of course, they are the real racists!)
Fucking goats perpetuates goat fucking, and annoys goats, but it doesn't mean you have to hate the goat and attack it after you fuck it to qualify for being a goat fucker. Either way, love it or hate it, you fucked a goat.
Likewise, trolling racist memes perpetuates racism, and if you perpetuate racism, you're a racist, because of the effects of you behavior on other people, regardless of your purported intent, even if you claim to be only pretending. Either way, you perpetuated racism, which hurts people.
Bravely standing up for goat fuckers and racists and trolls doesn't look good on you. Try standing up for the victims of racism instead of the perpetrators. Your edgelord act is extremely tired and juvenile. Gamegate is over, kiddo. Steve Bannon is reporting to jail on July 1.
How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers:
>In particular, Donovan notes that Steve Bannon saw firsthand the power of Gamergate while running Breitbart News.
>Bannon took notes from the gaming controversy as well as from movements on the left, like Occupy, to develop strategies to apply in mainstream politics in Trump's 2016 campaign and from the White House.
>That expanded the use of online attack methods on a wider range of issues and, more recently, made them a significant part of mainstream right-wing politics.
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon need angry young men. They’re using Gamergate culture to get them:
>Gamergate is a loose collection of disaffected (mostly) men who have used the issue of ethics in gaming journalism as a pretext to harass and attack women and many minority groups. The movement got its start in 2014 when a young man wanted to exact revenge on his ex-girlfriend. What started as a simple blog post became a campaign of harassment spearheaded by anonymous users on platforms like Reddit and 4chan. Gamergate has since used Twitter and other social-media platforms to lob misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic attacks on its critics.
What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right':
>The 2014 online hate-storm presaged the tactics of the Trump-loving far right movement. Prominent critics of the president elect should take note. The similarities between Gamergate and the current so called ‘alt-right’ movement are huge, startling, and in no way a coincidence.
Steve Bannon learned to harness troll army from 'World of Warcraft':
>Before Steve Bannon oversaw the conservative Breitbart News Network and, subsequently, joined then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign, the chief political strategist became a player in Hollywood and ... World of Warcraft.
>"You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump." -Steve Bannon
Steve Bannon ordered to report to prison by July 1 to serve contempt of Congress sentence:
>A federal judge on Thursday ordered Steve Bannon to report to prison by July 1, giving the former Donald Trump adviser a short window to get a higher court’s intervention.
Fuck you and your thought-crime mentality. Im not perpetuating racism. Read my comments again, if you think its appropriate to accuse me of that over the comments I made, than you have truly lost the plot.
My claim was it is not a symbol of white power. And the article you linked provided 0 evidence to support the claim that it is associated with white power. It did associate it with the 3 percenters, who do not seem to be a white supremecist group.
Instead you seem to be claiming that right-wingers use the symbol, ergo it is racist or white power affiliated. That claim is false. Just because someone is a republican, doesnt make them a racist.
Wait but I thought the whole joke of making that hand sign was to trick people into thinking you're a racist? Doesn't the entire premise of the "joke" rest on the assumption that people do in fact associate that hand sign with racists?
That’s literally how high signs work - they’re plausibly deniable, and innocuous or indecipherable to those in the out-group, and/or a shibboleth signifying being part of the in-group.
> The title refers to the secret hand signal used by the film's underworld gang.
Everything is in real life -- it seems like you are a little bit out of date. Why are you in denial and under the delusion that the online world is not the "real world", just like the sad prosecutor in the Pirate Bay trial? [1]
It's not a good look to make excuses and carry the water for white supremacists by denying reality. The online world is quite real, and it has an enormous impact on the offline subset of the world that you naively consider to have a monopoly on "real".
A simple google would inform you about the reality of how that symbol is currently used in the real world, regardless of whether you consider google "real" or not. See the sibling comments and the articles and real-world photographs they link to, who took the effort to google that for you. Your argument that you've never seen any evidence is extremely weak if you refuse to look at the evidence when it's presented to you on a silver platter, and that makes you look like just another troll.
Pirate Bay Trial Watch Day 5: OMG, Is This Happening IRL?
The torrent trial of the century continues, and today, there are some pretty shocking revelations about just how much the prosecution knows. Is that a tinge of remorse I hear from The Pirate Bay dudes?
• The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde (aka brokep) doesn't like copyright! "I like things that are not protected by copyright, this is a non-issue."
• The prosecutor knows the secret code for talking on the internets! "When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?" The judge asks, "IRL?" The prosecutor, being with it, coolly informs the judge it means "in real life," sucka.
• Oh snap, maybe he doesn't! The Pirate Bay's Peter responds, "We do not use the expression IRL." No, everything is in real life. We use AFK—away from keyboard." This makes for a sad prosecutor: "It seems I am a little bit out of date."
Uh, no. It started as a joke, and then was absolutely adopted "as a joke" by white supremacists... which is functionally equivalent to a symbol of white supremacists. Not many people who aren't white supremacists are comfortable being labeled as one, and no one would "throw" this sign without knowledge they'd be labeled as a white supremacist, ergo either you're one of the few who's comfortable being labeled that way despite not being one (in which case yeah, you'll be labeled that way and don't have much to complain about), or you are one.
Note: I do think people are sometimes too ambitious to leap toward accidental/arguable "flashing" of this sign as evidence of this belief system, but there are absolutely people who are consciously, deliberately, and sincerely doing it.
"Not many people who arent white supremecists are comfortable being labeled as one"
Wrong. Thats everyone that uses the hand sign. The joke is that cnn watched dipshits think its some kinda of white supremecist signal, so its funny to do to get under peoples skin. Thats literally all there is to it. Has nothing to do with any white power movement.
Do you know where its current popularity came from? A childrens game called ballgazer.
The harder you desperately argue by throwing every ridiculous and contradictory theory against the wall like bottles of ketchup at Mar-a-Lago, the more Popehat's Law of Goats applies to you.
You're purposely making other people mistake you for a racist... solely for the purpose of upsetting them... and when they get upset and think you're a racist... they're the "dipshits"?
Yeah, everyone knows the origin and they know the cover story. Even and especially in light of those facts, if a grown adult does it, they're either 1) a racist, 2) an asshole, 3) a moron, or 4) a combination of the above. No one is calling out children for playing a children's game. They're calling out adults who are either identifying as racists or pretend identifying as racists in order to be an asshole to other people, otherwise known as "being an asshole."
That's the magic of human beings. Once the joke spreads to the point where the people who are in on it are flashing the symbol for the lolz, it no longer matters how it started or if there is no historical basis for the connection between the symbol and certain beliefs. The association exists now, however ironically.
Oh look, the guy who is racist is flashing the ok symbol. His buddy, who is in the same spaces online is flashing the symbol as a joke. How can we not make certain assumptions about the second person and what they think?
Heres the thing though, these are not self professed racists. These are people that left wing radicals are calling racist. That is a very different sitatuion than the symbol being an indicator of allegience to a "white power" movement.
It more accurately indicates affiliation with irony poisoned youth who get off on making people look stupid online
Calling out racism is not the exclusive behavior of left wing radicals. Or are you admitting that no right wing people ever call out racism, so if you do then you must be a left wing radical?
You're the one jumping to unfounded conclusions about people, instead of taking what they tell you (or hand gesture) about themselves at face value, and your choice of who you logically contort and lie to defend, and who you attack as "radical" merely for calling out racism, paints an extremely sad and revealing picture of the kind of person you truly are.
When somebody tells you they're a racist, believe them. And your intellectually dishonest arguments are telling me just that, so I believe you.
N*gger jokes are jokes, but that doesn't mean it's not racist to make them and call black people n*gger to their face or online, just because you say you're just joking. And doing that online is just as racist as doing it in person.
And your pathetic excuses that it's only teenage boys doing that, and that you know for a fact that all teenage boys who do that are only pretending to be racist because it's impossible for a teenage boy to actually be racist, only reveals that you yourself actually did that when you were a teenage boy, and you still haven't grown up and matured mentally enough to admit that it was wrong.
Your ridiculous "boys will be boys" argument is absolute unmitigated bullshit, trying to justify your own misbehavior and racist beliefs you still haven't grown out of. You certainly sound exactly like a racist goat fucking teenaged boy. What other possible explanation is there for you carrying their water by making such disingenuous untrue arguments, and ignoring the counter arguments?
And you're arguing in bad faith and ignoring the evidence other people are showing you, like the photograph of the Proud Boys who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 and Roger Stone all flashing that White Supremacist symbol fully knowing what it means and intending it to be understood that way, when NONE if them are teenaged boys. Those fully grown men are violent White Supremacists, and Roger Stone is 71 years old, not a teenaged boy.
Roger Stone was convicted of seven felony charges, including witness tampering, lying to congress, and obstruction, in relation to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, and he's a trusted advisor to Donald Trump who had White House access and still hangs out with him at Mar-a-Lago. Not a teenaged boy for 52 years, but definitely a racist hanging out with a bunch of other racists. And here you are defending him.
Dude its fucking WILD that you are all over this thread calling me a racist for defending the "okay" sign, yet you are straight up dropping N bombs in your comments. The fuck is your problem dude?
And? Words and phrases are often adopted by a group to mean things they didn't. The ok hand gesture was a joke then it was embraced by Nazis and here we are.
The hand symbol is a running joke about looking at someone elses testicles. The peoppe that play this game are rowdy adolescent boys. Those boys went online and made ironic racist jokes, as young boys do, and now somehow people think its a symbol of white power. Anyone who knows whats going on is laughing at your foolishness.
So let me get this right: you're only PRETENDING to be wrong and stupid, so you can laugh at us for thinking you're wrong and stupid. Wow, you totally owned us by acting just like a teenage boy! I get it, now that you've admitted that you're just playing a trolling game, and don't actually believe anything you're saying, just like those teenage boys whose behavior you're defending and emulating. So there's no point in continuing making those arguments you don't even believe yourself.
Youre a disinginous cunt, just fyi. You've succesfully riled me up, which was clearly your goal, but youve still failed to make any kind of sense or construct a cohesive argument, so respectfully, you can suck my entire dick.
Your "boys will be boys" argument is obviously self-serving, because you're acting exactly like the worst kind of teenage boy edgelord, living in his mother's basement, trolling on 4chan, participating in Gamergate. You keep making provably false claims and ignoring the evidence, and in spite of your baseless arguments to the contrary, teenage boys certainly can be racist, and teenage boys aren't the only ones using the "ok" symbol with racist intent. How about not trying to defend and justify that behavior, at the same time you're exhibiting a textbook case of that pathological behavior. It totally discredits your baseless arguments.
You're trying to argue that it's only to rile people up, with no racist intent, then you're getting totally riled up yourself, defending intentional racists. So what's wrong with me successfully doing the exact same thing you're trying to defend, back to you? According to your own words, I should be laughing at you. If you don't like being on the receiving end, then perhaps you shouldn't be defending people who dish it out.
Roger Stone is 71 years old, not a teenage boy. He was convicted of seven felony charges, including witness tampering, lying to congress, and obstruction, in relation to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, and he's a trusted advisor to Donald Trump who had White House access and still hangs out with him at Mar-a-Lago. Not a teenaged boy for 52 years, but definitely a racist hanging out with a bunch of other racists. And here you are defending him, with your idiotic "boys will be boys" argument, while acting just like a teenage boy yourself.
You're acting like a child. And you're completely unable to address any of my points, or any of the points other people have raised, you just rant and fume and call people names, while trying to defend reprehensible behavior, as immature as your own. You can dish it out, but you can't take it, just like all of the abusive racist bullies you're trying so hard to defend. So I've made my point, by drawing you out and making you illustrate my point by your own behavior.
You claimed it makes you laugh when you trick people into thinking you're a racist asshole. Well you've convinced me of that quite well with lots of evidence of your own words, so why are you angrily fuming instead of laughing? Now that you've convinced everyone that you're a racist asshole, you should declare victory, laugh, and shut up. Mission accomplished!
Again, you may be yourself, but Roger Stone is not a teenage boy, and neither are the Proud Boys he's sitting with in that photograph, flashing their White Supremacist signs. That destroys your argument. And you are still unable to respond to that, and you just get angrier and angrier and more incoherent every time I point that out. Why aren't you laughing like you said you would?
Cause you arent listening to me, you are accusing me of saying things I never said, you are accusing me of being racist, etc and keep weirdly bringing up donald trump and his associates even tho ive claimed no affiliation at all.
Your just being weird as fuck homie. Flying off the handle for no real reason. And im not laughing cause I am not a troll. Matter of fact, why am I still responding to you? Eat shit.
This reminds me of Korea's progressive feminist hand gesture [0].
For some reason, a video about Korea's gender war [1] ended up in my YouTube recommendation and somehow I decided to watch the 47-minute video (and another 110 minutes for part 2)...
Basically, aggressive feminist groups use a hand gesture as a disrespect against men (or misogynists), but the gesture is so general and anti-feminism is so large in Korea, that a lot of people mistook the otherwise normal picture in anime/games as a hidden attack against men. It caused riots and several people lost their jobs or sometimes the entire projects/companies went down.
I think it's not a good idea to associate a very natural gesture with horrible intentions...
While the usage of the ok sign likely began as a LARP hoax, it has since become adopted as a high sign/shibboleth by actual white supremacists and adjacent fringe groups like Boogaloo Boys, similarly to Hawaiian shirts.
That’s the entire point of these types of signaling behaviors - they’re plausibly deniable, innocuous or not obviously offensive or aggressive, and they’re usually inscrutable or indecipherable to the out-group while being effective as signifiers of the in-group.
It just sounds like a conspiracy theory. The right has tons of theories about "elites" using secret hand signals and gestures meaning all kinds of satanic things.
Both are conspiracy theories for the same reasons.
If people are attacking women and destroying companies because they think they might be associated with women's rights, it's not a hand gesture that's the problem. "Horrible intentions"?
One of the proposed explanations was that lots of people actually had fingers which naturally posed like that, which, if true, would be of interest to people in biomedicine. The paper was published in Acta Biomedica, an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles, reviews, and case reports in the field of biomedical sciences. It then got slurped into various journal indices and online libraries, including the National Library of Medicine at the NIH.
A division of the NIH (NCBI) maintains a repository of open access publications in life sciences called PubMed Central (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubMed_Central) and this article was in a qualifying journal.
A few examples:
https://i2.wp.com/catholicism.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/fil...
https://jimmyakin.com/wp-content/uploads/st-augustine-and-fo...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Urban_VIII#/media/File%...
It shows up in formal photographs of the Pope in the 20th century:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ch3pBw3dBY0/WeG5Oo9_k1I/AAAAAAAAC...
And the TV series The Young Pope even included this gesture as a detail: https://youngpopesart.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...