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Damian Penny's avatar

Good piece, except that dress is clearly white and gold, you weirdo.

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Seth Finkelstein's avatar

I'm reminded of one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books where vampires try to train themselves not to be bothered by a cross, since it's merely a simple shape. They repeatedly remind themselves that different simple shapes have meaning to various religions, and go through many examples. Unfortunately, it eventually backfires on them, since they now associate all sorts of shapes with various religions, so they end up being bothered by almost every simple shape.

There's something of that flavor here, inverted - i.e. not (evil vampire) / (good cross) but (good liberal) / (evil swastika). A good person is supposed to be so attuned to the evil of the symbol, that it showing up anywhere, even by accident, is deemed to cause emotional distress. That does have an internal logic of a sort, with the extreme importance often invested in taboo symbols.

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