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I know it's not a big issue, I know I should have expected it and I shouldn't let it get to me, but dammit. It's just so clearly reminiscent of the larger movements in ideology. Today I was asked whether we come with the entire family of four or with less to an event and I wanted to post the family-of-four emoji back. I'm usually not a big emoji poster, so I searched and searched and couldn't find it. Well, as it turns out, ALL family emojis were removed earlier this year and replaced with what looks like bathroom signs (and appropriately moved to the signs section as opposed to people emojis). The reason? Simple:
The Family Emojis Are Now Equally Useless For Everyone, And That's A Good Thing.
Direct quote from the author, who was on relevant committees, for some time even vice chair, for this decision:
First, I want to note how destructive this thinking is. A healthy attitude, upon seeing a sad and a happy person, would be to say: We should try to make the sad happier, even if they might not become as happy as the other person. It leads to more overall happiness, and also to more equality, an unalloyed on-net improvement. By their explicit, stated reasoning these committees would rather make the happy person's live miserable until they are exactly as sad as the other person.
And secondly, I can't help but notice how much this thinking is obviously directly descendend from communist/marxist economic thinking, just applied to cultural topics - i.e. cultural marxism. My wife was born and all her family lived in the DDR (soviet east germany). This is exactly what they reported about how life was structured - every time someone had something that wasn't attainable for everyone, you generally should try to hide it, lest someone might report you or otherwise try to make your life difficult. Exception were, as usual, only for special people. For example, my wife's grandfather was a reasonably well-connected and quite competent car technician working for the military intelligence, members of which were generally left alone by the much more well-known civilian intelligence, the Stasi. Among other things, he had access to a car cemetery, and through this he managed to build is own Wartburg, which was a more expensive car he normally wouldn't have access to, from parts of multiple destroyed Wartburgs. The only reason why he could do this was precisely because of his affiliations - otherwise simply having a better-than-usual car was so suspicious and dangerous that it's better not to try - a car after all you can't easily hide.
So life in the east was in large parts structured around seeming humble and normal and, from the perspective of the higher-ups, only giving people things which you're sure you can give it to everyone. Just like these bathroom sign families, buildings were often literally bleak and grey, which was considered good by the authorities since the alternative was inequality. It seems to me at least some portion of the people who make decisions concerning all our lives start again to think like this.
Third, this is often likened or even explicitly called "tall-poppy-syndrome", the attitude of cutting down the above-average successful. But it's actually worse than that: We steer towards a culture that uses the very least successful/happy as the reference, and that strives to drag the average down until it is exactly as unsuccessful/sad as them. It was trivial to include a bunch of skin colors to accommodate most cases, but since accommodating all possible variations was unfeasible, they decided against it, independent of how ever-rare these variations might be.
I thought this was a solved problem with the Simpons-style cartoonish yellow skin color that is not within the range of typical human skin tones. Late stage jaundice patients not included.
I take it you missed the dialogue about that solution? If you're wise you'll remain ignorant and stop reading this comment now.
Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you.
Wired tried to explain that although "some white users worry that calling attention to their race by texting a pale high five (or worse, a raised fist) might be construed as celebrating or flaunting it", "The yellow emoji feels almost like claiming, “I don't see race,” that dubious shibboleth of post-racial politics, in which the ostensible desire to transcend racism often conceals a more insidious desire to avoid having to contend with its burdens."
And NPR let you know that, although "some white people may stick with the yellow emoji because they don't want to assert their privilege by adding a light-skinned emoji to a text", "there was a default in society to associate whiteness with being raceless, and the emojis gave white people an option to make their race explicit", so even if you're "just exhausted [from] having to do that. Many people of color have to do that every day and are confronted with race every day" - so is it really fair for you to get to ignore it?
Indeed, "the default yellow is indelibly linked to The Simpsons, which used that tone solely for Caucasian characters (those of other races, like Apu and Dr. Hibbert, were shades of brown)."
(No mention of the other characters who were non-Caucasian and yellow or lighter, for some reason.)
I mean they're clearly wrong. The yellow smiley face came way before The Simpsons and was the basis for emoticons/smileys before they became emojis.
You mean it dates back to the days when the United States was 90% white? Something tells me activists would spot a problem with that almost immediately.
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