Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Defamation League and Pepe the Frog's Creator Are Teaming Up To Save Pepe From Hate-Symbol Status (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Matt Furie, the creator of the widely known "Pepe the Frog" meme, is joining forces with the Anti-Defamation League to reclaim the symbol from the alt-right and make it a "force for good," according to a press release. Furie and the ADL plan to start a social-media campaign by creating "a series of positive Pepe memes and messages" and promoting them with the hashtag #SavePepe, according to the release. The ADL declared "Pepe the Frog" to be a hate symbol in late September. "It's completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate," Furie said in a column for Time magazine. While fiercely condemning the "racist and fringe groups" that use Pepe to propagate divisive views, Furie said Pepe was meant to "celebrate peace, togetherness, and fun." The meme, which originated from a 2005 cartoon, has been hijacked by the alt-right movement in the past several months. Members of the movement have used the meme to convey often racist and anti-Semitic messages. The messages prompted the ADL to add Pepe to its "Hate on Display" database, which documents anti-Semitic hate symbols. According to the ADL's press release on the #SavePepe campaign, Furie will speak at its "Never Is Now" summit against anti-Semitism on November 17 in New York City. The panel will focus specifically on online hate campaigns. Furie published a new Pepe cartoon on Monday detailing his "alt-right election nightmare," which depicts a sad Pepe morphing into a frog that resembles Donald Trump and then a monster. Pepe appears trapped in the mouth of the monster. The next panel depicts a nuclear explosion. Pepe then awakes and hides under his mattress.
The TL:DR version of this story was that someone trolled 'The Daily Beast' pretty hard by creating a lot of fake racist Pepe's under a pseudonym of 'Jared Taylor Swift'. To quote the article the Daily Beast ended up publishing was 'more or less a complete troll job,”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/regression-to-the-meme-1473960707
Oh, not that? They are going to try the anti-racist skinhead gambit? What do you mean you've never heard of anti-racist skinheads? Well, crap, I guess there may be a reason for that, and one that doesn't bode well for this nonsense.
They're called SHARPs, Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice. If you haven't heard of them before, that's probably because you live in a severely insulated bubble. If you actually knew some skins or even some punks you'd have heard of SHARPs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> And we have a GOP office being firebombed [cnn.com] just the other day.
Interesting how you ignore the context in which it happened - the same week where almost the entire remaining republican guard abandoned Trump and Trump made several public speeches accusing them of disloyalty, of rigging the election etc. etc. etc.
There is at LEAST even odds that it was a Trump supporter who did it, to punish the GOP establishment for not supporting Trump any more. We won't know for sure until somebody is arrested but considering when it happened - that's still a very likely scenario. More likely, in fact, than that a democrat did it - why would we BOTHER ? Trump's poll numbers are down by double-digits compared to Clinton - right now we're soaring, what could we possibly gain from it ? Trump voters have a lot more to be angry about right now, Clinton supporters are busy celebrating.
I'm not saying that there aren't fascist elements on the left - but to suggest that they are not vastly more prominent on the right is just plain ignorant, the ENTIRE religious-right/moral majority brigade fall in that category and they are all on the right, and fascism literally has no closer ally than neo-NAZIs - Hitler was one of THE proto-fascists, something he learned form it's inventor: his close friend Mussolini.
Generally - if the left doesn't like what you have to say - we will respond by excercising our own own freedom of speech and association - for example with boycotts. It's only in rare cases where real, measurable harm is being done by speech that the left as a whole would support laws against that speech.
The right on the hand have been trying to ban everything with a nipple for 30 years.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
lol, this is like chastising someone for not knowing the difference between a Playstation and a Nintendo
"Mommmm! I'm not a neo-Nazi, I'm a SHARP! And it's not just a phase, it's who I am now!"