yes exactly - don’t use an anti-Semitic trope when criticizing Zionism, lest you be confused for an anti-Semite; this weakens the meme significantly and for no good reason (other than maybe to pick up support from conspiracy nuts and right-wingers by using a dog-whistle while still being palatable to people who don’t see the dog-whistle, but this is a bug rather than a feature in my book)
Uh yeah, so the point of the meme isn’t to make the association of anyone with lizards, it’s to point out the ridiculousness of land claims based on ethnic/religious identity and ancient historical associations. You can’t just preemptively neuter every analogy or metaphor because there’s some conceivable way that somebody could take it wrong.
right, but since representing Jewish people as lizards is an anti-Semitic trope, representing Zionists as lizards in this meme is an obvious blunder, assuming it wasn’t intentionally trying to be anti-Semitic
That’s not the case at all, you can look at my post history if you want to know the things I think.
It’s just you generally want to avoid antisemitic tropes when you’re talking about Zionists because antisemites say Zionist when they mean Jew.
yes exactly - don’t use an anti-Semitic trope when criticizing Zionism, lest you be confused for an anti-Semite; this weakens the meme significantly and for no good reason (other than maybe to pick up support from conspiracy nuts and right-wingers by using a dog-whistle while still being palatable to people who don’t see the dog-whistle, but this is a bug rather than a feature in my book)
Uh yeah, so the point of the meme isn’t to make the association of anyone with lizards, it’s to point out the ridiculousness of land claims based on ethnic/religious identity and ancient historical associations. You can’t just preemptively neuter every analogy or metaphor because there’s some conceivable way that somebody could take it wrong.
right, but since representing Jewish people as lizards is an anti-Semitic trope, representing Zionists as lizards in this meme is an obvious blunder, assuming it wasn’t intentionally trying to be anti-Semitic
Are you saying I can’t use the word Zionist because some Nazi scum uses it too?
No, I’m saying you should be careful in cases where it could be taken as an antisemitic dogwhistle.