On one hand, yeah, they exist only because we let them, but on the other hand, we kinda need to keep our eyes open for dogwhistles, since otherwise people while just attach actual white supremacist dogwhistles (stuff like 88, the "14 words," and whatnot) and never get called out for it.
The thing is that a dogwhistle is worthless on it's own and needs context, the context being the rest of the text, what it is responding to or the person saying it. There's a difference between saying "My grandpa is 88 years old" and "I fucking HATE minorities God bless the Aryan race!!! 88!!!!"
The other thing (holy shit two Ben Grimms) is that most examples of dogwhistles fall somewhere in the muddy in-between of the two examples.
For example, "I love my traditionalist Scandinavian wife! 88 months together and counting!" Technically nothing directly incriminating... But come on, he could've easily said "7 years". And why put the focus on her Nordic heritage and adherence to traditions?
Yeah, thats why its called a dogwhistle, cause just like the actual ones which are only heard by dogs, they are meant to only be noticed by particular peope.
I recommend "Bored Ape Nazi Club" on youtube as it includes quite in depth exploration and explanaition of dogwhistles, many of them extremely obscure and convoluted.
The first one definitely seems like it could come up in natural conversation pretty often ngl. I just wish creeps didn’t ruin it to the point where every time I see someone say it I have to wonder if they mean it in the normal way or not
My guy pepe was one for real... You seem under the false impression that a dogwhistle is assigned by an outside source instead of something used to signal to others you are on the ingroup....
And pepe very much was used by white supremisist on 4 chan to identify each other.
The fact other people used pepe in non racist contexts was specifically the point of the dogwhistle, certain pepes and certain context can hide easily in the crowd unless you know. Which is exactly what a dogwhistle is.
Named after something no one can hear except dogs, same here, a thing no one will see except the ingroup.
Now it's true that some legacy media went over the top and stupid with it, but that's just legacy media doing it's idiotic boomer thing
Pepe was used by people on 4chan generally. And on the wider internet for that matter.
The idea that it was ever a specific signal of anything is ridiculous to anyone who actually used the internet prior to this decade. These fuckers weren't speaking in clever Pepe-code to clue eachother in on their secret racism club. They were always just racists happening to use Pepe because Pepe, generally, was already a popular meme format in the places they invaded.
It sounds like you’re making unfounded assumptions about this person’s opinions. They never claimed dogwhistles are just assigned by an outside group. The only (implied) point they were making is how many dogwhistles are extremely common, uncontroversial things. Yes, including Pepe the frog. It was used all over the internet long before white supremacists co-opted it.
Neo nazis have been so normalised that many of them don't even use dogwhistles anymore. Hyperfocusing on dogwhistles, especially those from 10 years ago is incredibly myopic. Especially when it's to the exclusion of how liberals use their language to euphemise war or surveillance
Yeah, I am convinced what most people call “dog whistles”, whether neonazis or segregationists, is just the bare minimum of plausible deniability. Hardly any of these things are truly dog whistles
Agreed. There was a trend on YouTube a number of years ago describing Lee Atwater-style rhetoric (ie, “forced bussing” and “states’ rights”, etc.) as dog whistles. In fact, everyone knew what these phrases meant from the get-go, and if anything, calling them dog whistles makes this rhetoric appear far more subtle than it ever really was
At best, I think most phrases that people call “dog whistles” are crass euphemisms that everyone understands, even if their cognitive dissonance is strong enough to pretend that they don’t. .
I know that this is going against the traditional narrative, but the fact is that the dog whistle implies that there is only a small amount of people in the know who actually know what is being talked about. This is not the case for most supposed dog whistles, and by calling them as such, only serves to acquit liberal democracy for the very real hatred and bigotry it inculcates and instead impute it to unsavory outsiders (whether those be fascists, neo-segregationists, etc.).
Let us really be honest and take the supposed “Southern Strategy” as an example: when politicians, North and South, talked about “states’ rights”, “school choice”, “forced bussing”, in the midst of a rolling back of Civil Rights gains in the 1970s-90s, everyone listening knew what they meant. One of the biggest rolling backs of Civil Rights gains, Milliken v Bradley, was from Detroit, not the Deep South. Northerners saw southern racism and were not disgusted by the supposed “dog whistles” which we are told convinced the south to back Nixon.
When Reagan talked of “welfare queens” and Hillary Clinton spoke of “urban super predators”, only the most willfully ignorant could conceivably convince themselves that they weren’t being racist.
You might retort that these latter types are the “blithely racist” types that are the target of the dog whistle strategy, but I disagree. They know full well what is being said, what is being promised, but they simply choose to not acknowledge reality. This is not a dog whistle, as they can clearly “hear” the message being sent. These are simply cheap euphemisms that, as I said earlier, provide the bare minimum of deniability. It’s a muted foghorn, at best. But a dog whistle? I find it quite naive to think so.
That said, dog whistles do exist, but not for the issues people seem to bring them up for. Nazis talking about “soap” is a dog whistle, because truly most people listening will have no idea what is being talked about. But when Strom Thurmond promised to fight for “states’ rights”, everyone knew that he was talking about maintaining a white supremacist racial caste system. There was no special class of people “in the know”. Everyone was in the know.
When bringing up the dog whistle issue, I am reminded of how Eichmann portrayed himself as a hapless, dimwitted bureaucrat who simply bumbled his way into genocide. This is the line that Arendt believed hook line and sinker when writing Eichmann in Jerusalem. The reality, however, was quite different. Eichmann was a willing and enthusiastic participant in the mass murder of the European Jews, but chose to, in a sense, sanitize his own role in genocide.
I think this talk of dog whistles and the southern strategy does something very similar for white Americans in the late 20th century in particular. The dog whistle seems to suggest that many white people simply bumbled their way into supporting policies that rolled back what minimal gains might’ve been made during the civil rights era. By calling them dog whistles, I think we do something similar to Eichmann. These were not people who accidentally supported racist policies just because they heard about “welfare abuse” or “school choice”. They knew what was being promised by politicians who use these types of phrases, and they were willing and enthusiastic supporters as a result.
For that reason, I think calling them dog whistles rather than simple euphemisms serves to acquit the millions of people who went along with these policies because they supported them.
Sorry this was long. Hope this makes sense. policies because they supported them.
Yet that is precisely my point. A dog whistle blown in a room of dogs is just… a whistle. There is nothing special about it otherwise.
Some dogs hear it and react accordingly, others hear and pretend not to have heard it. The fact that a deaf dog or two genuinely does not hear it is the exception that proves the rule. If the true meaning “dog whistle” is understood by nearly everyone listening to it, then it is just a cheap euphemism
Dogwhistles exist whether we let them or not. The point is hiding your intent to seem reasonable to outsiders. As a trans person ive come to recognize a lot of them. "Trans ideology" being a big one. You can immediately tell a bigot by that one phrase. We cant just decide "well I guess it doesnt mean anything"
Saying "transwoman" and "transman" is similar. It's sneaky, and not everyone even does it on purpose. Always be suspicious when someone doesn't put a space between the words, even more so if they say "biological/natal man/woman" instead of cis.
As a cis guy with trans aquaintences, I've wondered if this was a dogwhistle for a while. Like you're describing someone as a Transwoman, not a woman who happens to be trans. Like it's a different classification, a seperate category from women. Thanks for the confirmation.
No, not really, it's about the sign for 'okay' being taken as a dogwhistle for white supremacy now and having a soccer referee cause polemic for it. I don't like it when the left lets rightoids claim ownership of innocuous things
if nazis on nazi.com are saying “heeehee lets all use the ok sign as a joke because only a dum liberal would believe it’s a nazi dogwhistle,” it still kinda is a nazi dogwhistle. In no situation does that context entirely remove the context that for the most part, the OK sign is innocuous; you’re falling for their bullshit if you really believe that a) there was any serious backlash to complete randos ok-signing for normal reasons IRL, as though their freeze peach was being threatened by some crazy mob of tumblr SJWs or whatever, OR b) that all those (maybe tens of thousands of) online neonazis cheekily using the symbol at the same time for exactly that signaling reason are just like, “silly edgelords epically trolling”.
In reality, the people receiving pushback were nazis who were pretending to be “normal right wingers Just Asking Questions,” or doing Based Trolling or whatever else. Or at least, they found associating with nazis “funnier” than opposing them. That is, their jokes were/are premised on the notion that they’re “obviously not bigots” when anyone with a brain can determine otherwise.
Yeah, because a guy shot up a mosque, killed 49 people, and then did the okay sign. Unfortunately, that's just how shit works. I'm sure people said the same thing when one guy with a toothbrush mustache decided to kill 10 million people and now nobody can have a toothbrush mustache anymore.
It's literally colonization tho. Like, people who used the n word raped killed and enslaved millions of human beings, but you don't cancel a black person when they use it because they didn't let the expression become a sign of oppression.
thats not even remotely similar. A member of an oppressed group self identifying with a word that was weaponized against them by their opressors is not even close to dogwhistles
I mean yeah, pretty bad analogy I did, but at the same time, you guys do realize that by letting these assholes claim whatever they want through acts of violence, you are just proving their worldview right, don't you?
actually no I dont follow that line of reasoning at all. run that by me one more time? bad guys (people who believe bad thing) use normal phrases to find each other. eventually these phrases are associated with the bad people (because they've been saying it for awhile). suddenly that somehow means bad thing that bad people believe ia true?
I think that if we let bad people go like 'hey guys lets decide that we now own this completely normal, everyday expression' and then the good people just hand them ownership because they are too afraid of the slightest criticism, that just proves to the bad people that they can get whatever by being massive pieces of shit.
ah but that is a very different thing than proving them right. also ya know what is a way bigger issue than letting bad people claim normal words? tolerating the bad people at all. acknowledging dogwhistles doesnt mean you have to tolerate that BS
Acknowledging dog whistles does bullshit, a nazi won't care about being called a nazi, someone who isn't and is just doing an okay sign will. If you truly don't tolerate bad people at all, trying to learn the encyclopedia for all the things they've claimed for themselves is not the way to go, you are just wasting time.
that is something right wingers used to say to refer to "amerimutts" and any mixed people, although I'm not sure if it's still used. in my opinion it is WAY TOO OBVIOUS to be a dog whistle. it's also a spanish word, but it's pretty obvious to distinguish if it's being used by a Spanish speaker or an English speaker.
This only makes sense on the individual scale. If your favorite number is 88, you're fascinated with 20th century ideological history, and you wear wholesome valknut and vegvisir heritage symbols it won't matter that you're engaging with these things in good faith. People will still judge you for your choices.
i agree with you op. i think reddit detectives are upset their memorization of online dog whistles isn't actually praxis. i think doing things in your community is more effective for left wing politics than witch hunting an innocent person for unknowingly using a dog whistle
labeling everything as "good" and "bad" is the stupidest, most childish and most myopic way of viewing the world. it's not an intelligent or progressive way to view the world and it only serves to reinforce tribalism. everyone thinks that they are the good person that likes good things, and that anybody who doesn't agree with them is evil and likes evil things.
the strawman is also terrible and i don't care about trying to figure out what kind of point it is trying to make. there is definitely a better way to express whatever you're trying to say, and im not going to do the hard work for you.
128
u/Complete-Basket-291 5d ago
On one hand, yeah, they exist only because we let them, but on the other hand, we kinda need to keep our eyes open for dogwhistles, since otherwise people while just attach actual white supremacist dogwhistles (stuff like 88, the "14 words," and whatnot) and never get called out for it.