John Wilkes Booth

once again, the idea that banning the flag will reduce hate is laughable

literally nobody is converted to racism by the confederate flag

it's a symbol that racists rally behind... not the cause of their racism. and banning it only adds to their sense of victimhood, it doesn't make them any less likely to hate or even to use the symbol as a banner for hate.

the same way the swastika is unacceptable in mainstream society yet every stormfronter on the internet still reps it. and the neo-nazi/white nationalist movement in the united states (according to the left wing polemics, the obama administration, and FBI statistics) is a growing trend rather than something that is becoming less prevalent, despite the general mainstream trend towards multiculturalism.

Xurtio

Firstly, I make no claim that banning the flag has a net benefit result. I don't know, but a productive discussion should speak on the merits, and often casual internet discussions float freely away from relevance. I personally don't take a stance, and I think that most who do, are doing so based on ignorance, ideology, and personal preference, and then defending that point of view to the death. The reality is that it's a complex question and would require important statistical and causal relationships to be demonstrated and could very well return an answer that isn't a binary "yes" or "no".

As you said, it's a symbol that racists rally behind. Banning the flag would serve attrition purposes. It's a fight they lost, a sign their actions are not supported, even (perhaps especially) by the land's authorities. The act of banning the flag is, itself, an act of symbolism. If a bunch of white power advocates were to win under freedom of expression, it would lend credence to their cause; underlying the fact that they won a legal battle to display their symbol of racism is the implication that they are in the right as a group.

I don't think people, in general, recognize how powerful arbitrary things like symbols are (not just the flag, the flag is really just a medium anyway, it's the litigation and actions of the participating groups that is the more powerful symbol). We all have an intellectual side to us that says "oh, that shouldn't factor into any decisions, I'm a rational agent!" But humans are far from being rational agents* and symbols are very powerful to us; they're a sophisticated associative memory encoding system.

*I think attentional bias, ingroup bias, bandwagon effect, shared information bias, and moral luck are all relevant biases in this particular discussion.

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