"The pigeon meme is part of the rich internet tradition of establishing difference through memes. Think of Hillary Clinton versus Bernie Sanders, or the Krusty Krab/Chum Bucket binary, or of Drake eschewing one thing and pointing approvingly at another. Each of these memes attempt to distinguish between two things.
Importantly, in each of these memes, the distinction is between something “good” and something “bad” — something to be kept and something to be rejected. The pigeon meme, however, expresses a different sort of bias. It is not preferential. It says “these two things are not the same thing,” and little more.
In this sense it is refreshing."
FB: "This particular gesture, the neutral cleaving apart of two conflated but distinct phenomena, feels particularly necessary. Social media has spiraled out into a continuous performance of bad faith. Whataboutism, false equivalency, sea-lioning, concern trolling, and derailing all represent attempts, in various ways, to muddy the waters, to make it difficult to distinguish between right and wrong, to mislabel and misapprehend. The internet is made to link one thing to another. “Is this a pigeon?” is made to reestablish that those things are separate. It is a meme suited for this particular moment, when something good might actually be something bad."
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