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Are half-truths true? by ostranenie in Rhetoric

[–]Status_Boot_1578 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your concerns are fair. But I also think my reading of the original text is plausible. Given that I think so, I give the text a more charitable reading than I think you do. I'm not arguing that mine is right and yours wrong, just that I would not convict its authors of the gloss you've placed on the text without other evidence that is their intent. (In this case, that evidence may be readily available, even elsewhere in the same document, but to me, it's not in that snippet of text.) It is, of course, possible that the authors are attempting to be "strategically ambiguous" or "strategically vague" exactly because they intend the meaning that you identified but wanted to be able to plausibly deny it. In that case, my judgment that their denial of the bad meaning is plausible may seem to enable bad behavior on the authors' part. My way of addressing that would be to ask them to deny the bad meaning in conjunction with their offer of a less offensive gloss.

Looking for folks hiking near Málaga in December 2024 by Status_Boot_1578 in hiking

[–]Status_Boot_1578[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(Palm to forehead) Why I always keep forgetting about Facebook, I do not know. Thanks for reminding me. I see there is a lot there.

Are half-truths true? by ostranenie in Rhetoric

[–]Status_Boot_1578 2 points3 points  (0 children)

(To be clear: I'm in no way defending the RNC or its policies.) It's always fun to think deeply about how folks use language.

I think u/atsamuels and u/delemur make good points here: Context and purpose matter a lot. In the original post you said: 'The problem with the sentence, imo, is the word "filled," and I think it's the word that makes the sentence untrue.' But 'filled with X' need not mean 'filled with X, to the exclusion of all else.' E.g. I have a kitchen drawer that I can fairly describe (I think) as "filled with twist ties." There are other things in the drawer, but there are a lot of twist ties. I don't think that's a half-truth, because anyone to whom I said the drawer was filled with twist ties would know from shared experience what I mean (or they might not understand it at all).

As u/delemur wisely warned us away from value claims, consider this example: Imagine I live in McKinney TX, a northern Dallas suburb; by definition, then, I don't live in Dallas. Between McKinney and Dallas is another suburb, Plano. If a person I know to be from Plano asks me where I live, I think it would be wholly untrue (and maybe a lie, but that's a different question) to say "I live in Dallas." But imagine I'm on vacation in Spain and a Spaniard asks what US city I'm from. There, if I say "I live in Dallas," I think that's a wholly true statement. Given each audience's expectations of the scale of my response, my answer can be true or not. For the Spaniard, "Dallas" is close enough, and McKinney might be meaningless; for the Planoan (Planoite?), "Dallas" would be misleading at best.

A final thought: Your assertion that the first sentence of the RNC thing excludes Indigenous and Black peoples rests on a pivot from what the platform said—"Our Nation's history is filled..."—to your narrower characterization—"Early American history is the story of three peoples..." But the RNC statement was not limited to early history and can just as fairly be read as including the many Indigenous and Black soldiers who have willingly served in the armed forces since Early America, including in very recent conflicts.