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What you are calling direct clarification can instead be deliberate misinformation. Should we consider North Korea to be a democracy because their official nam
by MereInterest 5y ago
What you are calling direct clarification can instead be deliberate misinformation. Should we consider North Korea to be a democracy because their official name includes "democratic"?
- forgingahead 5y agoThe opposite can also be true - if I said I met MereInterest in real life and you were behaving badly (shouting at wait staff and so on), and you claimed you were not, who should be believed? If I wanted to slander someone, believing me, the accuser, over you, the accused, is a good way to break societal trust since nothing can be believed any more.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoWell, besides the well-known fact that all countries with $adjective in the name aren't really $adjective... ... then yes, as a general principle, we should take people at face value on the Internet, unless there's a clear reason to do otherwise - which could be a reason to confront the person about their statements. Quite a lot of dysfunction in Internet (and increasingly, offline too) discourse comes from "they say X, but what they really mean is Y" pattern of thinking.