The mere fact that a significant number of people are arguing that the Confederate Flag means racism proves that it does. This is because a symbol can be made up of parts, and those parts can mean different things to different people (what others have been arguing all along). However, it does NOT mean that a symbol loses, or gains, meaning depending who is using it (coincidental convergent symbols aside).
This is the crux of your fallacy. To many people, the star and crescent is a symbol of hatred. That doesn't make it one in any way, shape, or form.
For example, a police shield might stand for pride to someone, but mean fear to another. Whenever a person who associates it with fear sees it, it will evoke emotional responses of fear for them. If they use it, they use it to mean fear. Does that mean it no longer means pride to anyone who associates it with pride? Of course not. This is because the symbol means different things and pride is one of them. This is why a Confederate flag means racism regardless of what meanings the user intends to portray. The people who associate it with racism still see it as racist.
...are you suggesting the government should stop displaying police shields because some wuss out there is afraid of it? If not, you just provided an excellent example for why "some people think X and therefore X holds" is a terrible line of reasoning.
This is also why having people argue that the flag is racist means that it is racist; assuming that they are not a fringe few. This was why the Google search I provided demonstrated that the Confederate Flag is racist. If you were asking "Do people think that 911 was a conspiracy?" then your picture would have demonstrated that. If you were asking "Do people think Homeopathy is legit?" then your picture would have demonstrated that as well. If you were asking "Do people have negative opinions about America?" then your third picture would have shown that yes, yes they do. However, you bizarrely tried to show that having Google results return a statement proved the statement. I asked "Do people think the Confederate Flag is Racist." I typed in "confederate flag" into Google and one of the top few results was "racist". This shows that people think the Confederate Flag is racist. Therefore, racism is one of the meanings that make up the Confederate Flag.
What?
You typed in "confederate flag" and got "racist" (as the 4th suggestion)
I typed in "9/11" and got "conspiracy" (as the 3rd suggestion)
Why should I type in questions while you can type in names of things? Again, if your argument holds, then so does mine. Either we agree that Google's autocomplete feature gives us a good idea of what words mean (it doesn't - a short reading on what a web crawler is and how it works would tell you this much), or we agree that it doesn't (and thus stick to reality).
The problem with your interpretation of "confederate flag racist" is that it provides you with the exact same amount of information as "america israel" - you can
choose to interpret it as "the Confederate flag is racist", and I can
choose to interpret it as "America is Israel"
[1]. We both have exactly as much information backing up our interpretations - none. If we double down on the "Google is facts" fallacy, we could inspect what the actual
results of the search you proposed are. Interestingly, Google's semantic web engine chooses to serve this paragraph on top of the results page:
Dagnabbit, turns out it ain't racist after all. Google says so.
Lets look at this to help demonstrate the point further. Lets pretend we have three people and each person represents a significant portion of the population. Here is what the Confederate Flag means to them:
Person 1:
Southern Pride
Redneck Lifestyle
Heritage
Person 2:
Redneck Lifestyle
History
Discomfort
Person 3:
History
Racism
Bigotry
This is obviously not a definitive list and certainly not 100% accurate, but from this example (and, because again, they are representative of a pretend population) of we can conclude that the Confederate Flag stands for southern pride, heritage, redneck lifestyle, discomfort, history, racism, and bigotry.
No, we can't. What we can conclude is that it means different things to different people. We cannot conclude that it somehow magically means a sum total of all beliefs in some objective sense. This is true of all invented symbols in existence.
It doesn't matter if Person 1 intends to use the symbol differently than how Person 3 will perceive it, Person 3 will still perceive it as racist just as a person who thinks a police shield means pride regardless of the intent of the person who is displaying it.
That is correct. Why should Person 1 or 2 give a fuck? If I choose to interpret the name "Pongo" as "I literally hate Polish people", will you change it? Should I petition Parsifal to bammywham the name "Pongo" because I unilaterally decided that it's offensive? Because I'm pretty sure I'd be told to piss off if I did that.
Furthermore, there are people that overtly use the Confederate Flag to mean racism. Are they using the symbol incorrectly? Does it really mean "redneck pride" when they use it?
No, but I already made the point about punishing everyone for the behaviour of the minority. You responded to that by claiming that since some people think it's racist, it must be racist, full stop. Either stick to that claim or take it back.
Symbolism is messy and tricky. In this case, for many people, the Confederate Flag means racism and that is what they see when they see a bumper sticker of a confederate flag. What if the person with the bumper sticker really means southern pride? Then they are doing a very poor job of communicating and need to pick a new symbol; that particular symbol comes with a lot of baggage and one of which is racism.
Yes, silencing people because someone might interpret their words wrong is a
great idea. I'm sure we'll be banning the USA flag any moment now because it, too, carries negative connotations for some people.
I did not address many of your other points. If you would still like me to, I suppose I could do a point by point, but I would rather not unless you had a particular argument you would like me to speak to.
You did omit many of my counter-points and just restated the points that were being countered, but I think we'd be wasting both of our times if we continued this. Each and every claim you made so far contradicted the previous one, and you've done a much better job at burying your argument than I ever could. I don't really think you can redeem your claims that:
- If somebody thinks that a symbol means a bad thing, they're right. If somebody thinks that a symbol means a good thing, that doesn't matter. What's that? The latter are the majority? Well, screw that, they're clearly wrong!
- If a symbol offends a group of people, it should be banned, but only if it's the Confederate flag. Other symbols are ok because they're not the symbol you picked.
- Google autocomplete gives us a good idea of what's factual, but only if it happens to agree with you. If it doesn't, this profound technique is obviously being misused.
You provided no support for any of these claims other than restating and rephrasing them, and you provided plentiful reasoning for why none of your claims hold.
[1] - Note that this still makes very little sense even with your "Confederate flag means racism to people" sidestep. I'm pretty sure America doesn't mean Israel to many people. They're fairly separate locations.