9 Responses to 卐

1. jab
   July 10th, 2008 at 9:59 am

   Hehe, and now you’re the sixth google result. Thanks for explaining!

2. Dan tdaxp
   July 10th, 2008 at 10:14 am

   Thanks! SearchEngineLand [1] also noted it, but didn’t bother to do the research to show that it’s a chinese character. That’s your tdaxp-value-add!

   [1] http://searchengineland.com/080710-085902.php

3. Lexington Green
   July 10th, 2008 at 10:41 am

   The Nazis rotated the swastika 45 degrees so it looked more dynamic, suggesting movement and power, something like the Aryan master race warriors driving with their buxom blonde wives and rosy-cheaked children, in their volkswagens, kettenkrads, half-tracks, motorcycles, staff cars and panzers to their new farmsteads on the banks of the Volga, now richly fertilized with the ashes of their previous Slav owners.

   So these unslanted swastiaks are not mean and bad Nazi swastikas, they are friendly and happy Chinese swastikas.

   These details can be very important.

4. Michael
   July 10th, 2008 at 5:13 pm

   Also Jewish, ironically. We’ve actually got an old building in town with old swastikas incorporated into the stonework.

5. Matt
   July 10th, 2008 at 6:43 pm

   Hmm, well if you do a Baidu News search, you’ll find that the clip you’ve got machine-translated there was from a current swastika-related story yesterday in the Chinese press that has gotten widespread coverage over the past week. apparently there was a big mural-type advertisement on a wall somewhere in Xi’an. the mural contained a painting of a long black train with a nazi-inspired swastika painted on the train’s head. judging from the baidu news results, this story was literally reproduced in hundreds of online news outlets. i’d say this story is what inspired all those google searches, and not the simple fact that “good luck is on their minds.”

6. Dan tdaxp
   July 11th, 2008 at 12:32 pm

   More info on the strange story is available at Waching the Media and the Los Angeles Times blog [1,2]. (They link to me!) LA Times followed up on their story [3], revealing that Google’s blaming of 4chan (an anti-scientology group) [4] was speculation (in other words, with as much basis in fact as my assumption). Adding to the weirdness is that the current censorship of the Google Trends result is probably from an Israeli Google team.

   Whatever’s going on, it’s a good example of what happens when power a company has an obscure decision-making process and a tone-deafness to concerns such as radicalism and censorship.

   [1] http://www.watchingthemediaforyou.com/2008/07/did-google-remove-swastika-symbol-from.html
   [2] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/07/swastika-tops-g.html
   [3] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/07/google-apologiz.html
   [4] http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/2984

7. Mel
   July 31st, 2008 at 1:25 pm

   Well, what about the Navy buildings in San Diego that are shaped like swastikas and now they said they will have to remodel them? There is a bridge, too, with swastikas all over it. I think it goes over the Colorado River if I remember correctly. There is also a rest home somewhere that is shaped like a swastika. But what about the half million coffins in Madison, Georgia and also in Ennis, Texas and other places and the FEMA death camps and the strange trains they are going to supposedly use to haul bodies, etc?

8. Dan tdaxp
   August 4th, 2008 at 4:50 am

   the FEMA death camps

   No such camps exist, so I can’t comment other than directing you to 5GW, the fifth gradient of war [1,2].

   [1] http://purpleslog.wordpress.com/2006/05/30/5gw-will-hide-in-the-sea-of-conspiracy-theories-to-avoid-discovery/
   [2] http://www.dreaming5gw.com/2007/04/conspiracy_theories_and_5gw.php

9. Smiley Face
   February 22nd, 2009 at 4:23 am

   Ha I never knew that. I actually wondered why you had a swasticka in the title when I found this entry on google.

   You learn something new everyday!

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