Deliberate misrepresentation can only be employed if one understands the original intent.
If a malicious person wants to try to convince others “Black Lives Matter” means “only black lives matter”, they may have a pretty clear shot (assuming they’re trying to convince someone Right of Centre).
If it was rebranded to “Black Lives Matter Too”, then they would have a harder time trying to be deceitful.
I’m convinced there are more people in the camp of failing to read between the lines.
In either case, language games are important; playing poorly will lead to catastrophic outcomes. The worst part is this is so easy to correct for - a little bit of imagination will illustrate predictable backlash, or lack thereof.
Fair enough. My conservative family is on the side of purposefully misunderstanding, but I can understand that some may just misunderstand and we should mitigate that when we can.
Deliberate misrepresentation can only be employed if one understands the original intent.
If a malicious person wants to try to convince others “Black Lives Matter” means “only black lives matter”, they may have a pretty clear shot (assuming they’re trying to convince someone Right of Centre).
If it was rebranded to “Black Lives Matter Too”, then they would have a harder time trying to be deceitful.
I’m convinced there are more people in the camp of failing to read between the lines.
In either case, language games are important; playing poorly will lead to catastrophic outcomes. The worst part is this is so easy to correct for - a little bit of imagination will illustrate predictable backlash, or lack thereof.
Fair enough. My conservative family is on the side of purposefully misunderstanding, but I can understand that some may just misunderstand and we should mitigate that when we can.
God damn, I don’t envy you.
Having a family which is consciously malicious must make for some very frustrating conversations.
I, on the other hand, have a right-of-centre family who are mostly just too dull to extrapolate, and spend too much time on FB.
At least in my case I can sometimes dispel misconceptions.
Besides my severe trust issues I am fine, life is better now that I have mostly cut them all off.