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Comment by robotron | Hacker News Reader

I see how that could be the case but once we start delving into numerology we start to sound like conspiracy theorists.

This is why they use it. It's the perfect dog whistle. Google 1488 tattoos to get an idea of just how serious and prevalent it is.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

[2]. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=1488+tattoos&atb=v209-1&iax...

Sure, but with those tattoos, the 14 & 88 are significant and inescapable. There’s no ambiguity and their presence is not hidden. But once you’re counting the number of words in a tweet, you’re talking about things much more hidden. It doesn’t work well as a dog whistle if the metaphorical dogs can’t hear it, either.

https://imgur.com/Z8AICes

Plenty of ambiguity there. I think you may need to evaluate what your motivation is to need to keep disbelieving that racist dogwhistles can actually be ambiguous, especially considering they are that way by design.

You just linked to a picture of a tattoo of the number 1488... I don’t see any ambiguity. Did you intend to link to a different picture?

A tattoo of just 1488, without any racist symbology, is ambiguous. There is nothing to make it distinctive from any other number.

Help me understand what you think an ambigous tattoo of 1488 should look like?

Well, along the lines of counting the number of words in a tweet, maybe 14 stars? And then chains, where the linked chains look kinda like 8s? Something where the 14 and 88 are present, but not obvious unless you think to look for them.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-an... is a good example of plausible deniability.

Fourteen word headline, starting with "We must secure..."

Was it intentional? No one will likely ever know.

> On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.

Why use 88 rather than 100 to illustrate this statistic?

You still didn't answer the question.

Which question didn’t I answer? You asked what an ambiguous tattoo of 1488 might look like, and I offered a possibility.

14/88 is hardly a conspiracy theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

That is an mechanism which insulates even well-documented conspiracies that use numerical symbols as identification banners, which is probably why certain of them do exactly that.

Yup. It’s a false choice, like convincing someone you’re not paranoid. It’s an interesting trick.

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