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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Take the sentence “Police accused John Doe of inciting a lynch mob to attack the alleged rapist“. The police aren’t alleging that the victim was a rapist, they’re saying the rape allegation was part of the context of their own accusation against John Doe.

    If an act is described as an accusation, it’s already implied that everything within the description is an allegation by the accusers. But if something within the description is itself labeled as “alleged”, that nested allegation becomes part of scenario the accusers are reconstructing.




  • As others are pointing out, there are mass protests going on—but I think there’s more to it than that.

    The general message of all protests is “listen to us or else”. In the US for the last fifty years, “or else” has been understood to mean “or else you’ll lose the next election”—but it’s becoming clear that this threat has no leverage with Trump, either because he’s confident he can manipulate elections (through whatever means) or because he intends to accomplish his goals in his current term and doesn’t care what happens after that.

    So protests need to find some other goal and some other message. Right now they’re looking for other weak points (e.g., Tesla dealerships), but once it’s clear they’ve got a strategy Trump is actually afraid of, the numbers will grow.