The Art Of The Possible [View All]

[meegbear]

I didn't think it was possible, but Pajamas Media has actually gone downhill in the past year. Like all sources of demagoguery, it's only a matter of time until they give in completely to paranoia. It appears that the time is now. On Monday the great repository of truth (the "PJ Tatler", which I believe is supposed to represent "tattler") loudly blared: BIZARRE NEO-SWASTIKA REMINISCENT OF "THE GREAT DICTATOR" USED AS POWER SYMBOL BY O.W.S. LEADERS. The symbol?



It's a pound sign. To anyone under 50 – obviously outside the range of the Pajamas Media writers and authors – it doubles as a hash tag for Twitter, i.e. "Hey, PJ Media is a front for the Viet Cong! #stuffimadeup" Or at least that's what it is to the untrained eye.

Note also how when the "leaders" put the symbol on their sleeves (as in the first and third photos), it is rotated 45 degrees just like the Nazi swastika was. Don't these people see an echo of the swastika in their new power symbol? Don't they realize that the early Nazi Party was (among other things, obviously) also overtly anti-capitalist? …Don't they know that the early Nazis tried to garner sympathy with street rallies and marches?

I…I don't even want to waste the thirty seconds it would take to mock this. It makes its own gravy, so to speak.

Then a funny thing happened. The first commenter pointed out "Hey, it's just a pound sign/hash tag." So the author had to backtrack and revise his "argument":

As a commenter notes, the symbol may have derived originally from the Twitter "hashtag," but that in no way diminishes its creepiness. It may "just" be a rotated hashtag, but that doesn't lessen its significance as a power symbol. The swastika, after all, was "just" a Buddhist good luck marking before the Nazis adopted it and started using it to indicate something else. And how did the Nazis alter it for their purposes? They rotated the Buddhist swastika 45 degrees, to give it a new association. Just as the hashtag sleeve marking has been rotated here. In fact, pointing out that the symbol may have originally had a different association, and then was later rotated to give it a new purpose, only makes it echo the swastika even more.

So in reality, being a clueless dipshit actually makes him more correct. Lucky, that.

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http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/10/18/the-art-of-the-possible/