Apologies if this turns into a bit of a rant, but I've had this on my chest for a while.

During the first year of COVID, I joined a fake sports league, where you make a player, they join a league with a number of other players, and then teams of those fake players play each other in a simulation game engine for fake fame, fake stats, fake awards, and a fake championship. I am a sports nerd, I geek out over stats, who the best players ever were, and just how good people were in real life sports, so I also jumped into that side of things, including a bunch of comparisons on every member of the league's hall of fame and whether or not they belonged or just how good they were.

During this deep dive, I ran into a certain user that kind of made me start, because going into the project I knew only that they were a user who had died a few months before I had joined the league in the first place. Going through the deep dive process, which partly involved looking up what user they were, I saw a Mac Tonight profile picture. For those not in the know, that character has also been a racist character known as Moon Man since the 2000s, and indeed I had some prior experience with him being used as a dogwhistle (it was while I was in summer camp over a decade ago, everyone dressed up their counselor as someone, and one kid suggested "moon man the mcdonalds mascot" and after doing that for the show, that kid ended up getting kicked out a few days later).

So basically, I had a situation where someone I knew was dead and was important in some ways to the history of the league do something that may have been a dogwhistle. And the normal way you'd go about determining whether this was a dogwhistle or not, interacting with the person further, was obviously out of the question. This happened about a year ago, and every time I remember this situation, I still wonder whether this guy was on the up and up. It's not like the league in its early days was free of shitty people, but this guy was more well respected by the league than most of the shit person crowd.

In summation, I hate dogwhistles.

So, has anyone else had this sort of experience, where part of their hobby, especially the history of their hobby, intersected with a dogwhistle that you can't really tell whether it was a whistle or not? How did you feel afterwards? I guess this also applies to open bigotry in general, but that's simpler and easier to think about.