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More Olympic culture warring: Olympic Games official has accreditation revoked for...
Honestly, I can't even complete the headline, it feels too much like giving credence to the delusion. Can you guess? Here's a hint: think 2017.
Yes, that's right. The rest of the headline is "‘white supremacy’ hand gesture."
Dictionary.com has a whole entry on the "circle game" which is mostly not about the circle game, but is about the "OK hand gesture" that in almost no context has ever been a genuine signal of white supremacist beliefs. The Telegraph article asserts without evidence that "its use as a far-Right symbol is apparently on the rise." And from Dictionary.com:
Even the ADL's own expert had this to say about the "OK hand gesture" in 2017:
Of course, the ADL has since changed its tune, because, well, if you're not a part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem, I guess. I honestly kinda thought this particular meme had run its course when it got misapplied during the Kavanaugh hearings. It got new life when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in 2019, but that was more than 5 years ago, now--an eternity on 4chan. I don't know--did it actually catch on in Europe? Apparently it caught on in Brazil, kinda--
I hadn't heard the Brazil story before now. "The crime of racism" sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me, but I live in the land of the First Amendment... people do things differently in foreign countries. I'm also a little taken aback by the actions of the Brazilian journalist, who did not report a man saying racist things, or a man harassing people, but a man who might have been positioning himself on camera while making a hand signal that has sometimes been associated with having beliefs outside the Overton window. I already hold journalists in pretty low regard, generally, but this Brazilian displayed all the dignity of a classroom snitch, minus any compelling evidence that there was anything to snitch about.
For whatever it's worth, offensive hand gestures are nothing new for the Olympics--not even for these Olympics. But flipping the bird in each case appears to be pretty context-informed. As far as I can tell from the story, the dude maybe playing the circle game and maybe not doing anything especially deliberate at all was booted without hesitation:
I have never been much of a sports fan, but the Olympics in particular really get me conflicted. I've seen some remarkable displays of athleticism; Olympic gymnastics and figure skating are events I have on several occasions watched on purpose and with some interest. But I simply have no good feelings at all for the IOC. They are intellectual property trolls; they have for example attempted to use their trademark to prevent criticism (fortunately they lost that case, but the First Amendment doesn't reach everywhere). Other, specific cases of corruption are pretty well known. I, personally, would never spend any money in direct support of the Olympics, despite my occasional interest over the years.
Though I've little reason to care too much about one subcontractor getting an unceremonious boot for what, to my eyes, looks like playing a silly game he probably didn't even know had been at the center of a culture war flare-up five years ago--I do have reason to care about a slow, global slouch toward Orwellian big brother/little brother behavior. When people talk about "threats to democracy" and "the rise of fascism" I don't see Nazis goose-stepping down main street; I see progressives enforcing ideological conformity through everyday acts of institutional bullshit. This is "cancel culture," writ small.
A couple weeks ago, when right-wingers got that one Home Depot worker fired for supporting the assassination of a former President, there were reams of articles produced (including one by our own Scott) calling for a cancel culture ceasefire; reams of articles, along with torrents of tweets from left-wingers.
When a random Olympic official then gets cancelled for, in contrast, making an innocuous hand gesture, have any of these same peaceniks continued their call for ceasefire?
What exactly is a "continued call"? Do you think Scott should be posting on every example of cancel culture? He (and many others) have been consistently against it.
Ignoring all of them, except for one aimed in the "wrong direction", tells us very much.
Not that Scott is guilty of that. But "what do you expect me to do, respond to all of these" is the cry of the malicious selective enforcer.
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