Just coincidence, since I’ve never seen the show.
jpinard
5584
You should watch the series. It’s fantastic stuff. That episode was called, “Kill all Others” and was about politics.
I am the Bugman, goo goo g’joob.
So I am already a bit irritated that the innocent “ok” sign has been taken by the racists and I can no longer use it. I worry I might forget and use it anyway since for most of my life it was fine to use.
Now I read somewhere that “kek” is another code word the racists have taken? That’s from WoW. It’s how Alliance see Horde saying “lol.” The funny thing is the writer had no idea where it came from.
I’ve seen a lot of the racism first hand in WoW players. I was in Orgrimmar one day doing various things and in general chat there were a lot of “Naga” jokes. You can guess that naga was a thinly disguised way of saying something worse.
Ex-SWoo
5587
It probably has its origins in Korean - kekeke (or ㅋㅋㅋ) is a common laughter sound in Korean and it makes sense to use it as an alternative to lol given Blizzard’s popularity in Korea.
Nah. As far as I’ve seen, it’s widely used over twitch chat and even in spoken slang by some teens without having any racial connotation. Racists might use it in their speech, but it doesn’t seem to me like the meaning of the word has been corrupted.
As pointed out, it comes from the Korean and is generally used to denote something that’s funny (or which generates schadenfreude).
CraigM
5589
Yeah it just seems to be an offshoot of Reddit/ Chan culture. And that is where it runs into trouble. Not because racists use the word for racist purposes, but because those cultures have become rife with racists.
KevinC
5591
Ladies and gentlemen, your master race!
Yeah keke came into my MMOG community via Starcraft iirc. I think i remember early fps community using it too, Q2 or DOD or something.
Enidigm
5593
Yes, it was i’m pretty sure from the 1990s Korean RTS community and which later spread to MMOs.
keke lol
As we used to say in my younger days.
There’s a bit of a bleedover on that stuff. The flag of made-up country “Kekistan” is definitely an alt-right white supremacist thing. It started from the Pepe thing because Kek is an Egyptian frog god, but bled into the “kekekeke” meme because shitlord gamers suck.
In his defense he’d have been a passable Viking warrior, except for the bit where he gets short of breath after running for 30 seconds.
ShivaX
5597
Pretty much. Kek itself is still pretty non racial in most contexts. Hell, so is Pepe really. It’s all about context, which, to be fair, is probably hard for younger people to parse which I’m sure leads a lot of them down the alt-right/racist rabbit hole.
The difference between FeelsBadMan/monkaS and the Groyper isn’t that subtle, but there is definitely a spectrum and pinpointing exactly where the racism starts might not be super easy. It’s weird and hard to explain to lay people tbh.
Timex
5598
On some level, i feel like a lot of this stuff isn’t even real racism, it’s just loser bullshit.
Like, they’re racists, but the chief motivator is that they are just profoundly weak, worthless people, willing to go along with anything.
“Loser bullshit” is a pretty definitive two word summation of Trumpism.
ShivaX
5600
Pepe, the original character, was an weak idiot, so that they tried to latch onto him backs up that idea.
I think there are even articles about it someplace.
Is it still safe to quote Zero Wing? 'Cause if not, I’m not sure I want to live in this world anymore.
Djscman
5602
I never read the original webcomic, but I was pleased to hear that Hong Kong protesters are also adopting Pepe the Frog as a mascot. Not because of the acclaim from American racists, but simply because he is a little frog from the internet and they like him.
