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You are right! It can mean these things! But it can also mean other things, and (in my opinion) carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and

You are right! It can mean these things! But it can also mean other things, and (in my opinion) carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used. "Defund the police" can sound extreme, or counterintuitive, or downright confusing. But it seems urgently important (to me) to understand why so many Americans feel so strongly that they use such intense language, propose such radical changes, and demand something that doesn't make sense to me. Clearly, there's something I don't "get". It's infinitely more compelling to me to try to "get it" and understand others' viewpoints, and uninteresting to understand why the words they used don't match a conventional definition.

x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
> carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used. The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.
- michaericalribo 5y ago
  Respectfully, I disagree. There's no onus here at all, on either side—this isn't some intellectual debate with formal rules, this is a struggle to make marginalized voices heard. Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant). The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity. Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.

x3n0ph3n3 5y ago

> carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used. The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.

michaericalribo 5y ago
Respectfully, I disagree. There's no onus here at all, on either side—this isn't some intellectual debate with formal rules, this is a struggle to make marginalized voices heard. Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant). The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity. Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.