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Is this just confusion about the Twitter staffer's unclear grammar? The "not" in that sentence refers to the "he's saying" part, not the "voted for him" part. Another way to say it would be "It's pretty clear he's referring to people who voted for him, not the rioters". The Twitter staffer was not denying that the rioters were a subset of the voters, he was claiming they were not the group Trump was referring to, because Trump was referring to the set of all Trump voters.
I think the unnessesary "and" might be adding more ambiguity to an already ambiguous sentence, would it have been clearer if he said "He's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not the terrorists"? Of course it also comes from whatever the grammatical term is for the thing where you omit the verb-phrase in the second half rather than repeating it from the first half, it would have been clear if he said "It's pretty clear he's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not saying the "American Patriots" are the terrorists"). For instance:
https://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/omitting-a-verb-when-it-appears-the-second-time.170698/
And then all the people replying to you are confused because they don't understand that you're interpreting the "not" as meaning "the rioters are not Trump voters" and think you mean that referring to a superset necessarily must be referring to each individual subset.
Now this would be an interesting error on my part, but I don't think I'm misinterpreting the staffer's sentence. For clarity, I'll reproduce it here.
If this person wanted to say that Trump was referring to all his supporters as opposed to only his rioting ones, it would have been clearer to say:
I don't think this is some arcane or less-used way of writing either, and it would make the point clearer to anyone I asked about it, pro or anti-Trump. This is why I think this person, perhaps accidentally, did imply that Trump supporters don't include the rioters. They might not have meant it, but this is why I read it this way.
Of course the sentence could have been clearer. It's sloppy conversational English relying on the reader to fill in part of the sentence which accidentally ended up having a more straightforward meaning that the writer did not intend, something akin to a garden-path sentence. If there was no context your interpretation would have been the more intuitive one. But there is context, and it's very unlikely that a Twitter employee would claim the rioters were all false flaggers rather than Trump voters, or argue it that particular way if he did. And I think that not only does my reading of it match what he meant, it matches how the other Twitter employees in the conversation interpreted it, how the reporters posting the conversation interpreted it, and how the people responding to you in this thread are interpreting it. So while it's a bit interesting that your reading of it is also possible based on the text it doesn't seem particularly significant.
Your interpretation still has the same problem for me. To quote your rephrasing:
This rephrasing still implies that the rioters are not people who voted for him.
I think I've honed in further on our point of disagreement. You think that I'm implying this person intended to exclude the rioters. I can see why you thought that (ironically enough, it's the same issue between me and this staffer - how something is read vs. intentions). I'll edit my post to make this clearer, thanks.
No, it says he is not referring to that set of people. Let us say that someone writes an article saying "email is an insecure medium, since it is transmitted in plain text". Someone writes a headline about it saying "Computer researcher says Yahoo Mail is insecure". Even though Yahoo Mail is a subset of email, he was not referring to it, he was referring to a broader category that it happens to be a subset of.
I'm not sure what our disagreement is over. I would agree that the intention is not to be specifically about Yahoo Mail (analogously, the staffer might not have thought Trump was referring only to the rioting supporters), but a plain-text reading could be interpreted my way.
If it's the significance of my interpretation, then I would agree with your previous point that my interpretation is probably not that important. I just found it odd, that's all.
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He didn't add the word just, so you read it in a way that nobody else - including probably the author - would read it. All so you could paint him as bizarrely pro Trump, because for some reason you are really keen on convincing everyone that half of twitter were Trump loving deplorables.
You must be from another universe's themotte.org, because you're referring to some comment not present in this thread that would suggest my motivation is to paint Twitter's staff as Trump supporters by a large percentage. I invite you to demonstrate what I've said that would in any way support your argument because I can tell for a fact you didn't read any of my comments, and if you did, you assigned maximum uncharitability to them.
As you wish.
Hell he says, an exclamation, because that's how outlandish it is to suggest bias at Twitter.
Accusing Weiss of trying to cast her as a bad faith actor for telling the house that she had struggled for months to get Trump banned, which by necessity implies that she is in fact acting in good faith. Which maybe doesn't make her a Trump loving deplorable, but sure looks like an attempt to paint the woman lying to the house about how dangerous Trump and his supporters are as neutral - shifting the balance away from Twitter leaning left.
At this point I was growing suspicious of your motives. I can see reasonable alternative explanations for every point I've mentioned, in isolation at least.
My charity begins running out here. I am suspecting your goal is to downplay the left lean at Twitter.
I honestly can't figure out what you were trying to do with all of these posts if not obfuscate the level of left wing bias at Twitter. Just rampant contrarianism?
That one's on me. It was about a less-likely interpretation of what that person said that also gave an odd conclusion about how this person was thinking. I don't think this person is a Trump supporter.
This is what I mean by not being charitable. I made a very specific claim about what that point contradicted in a prior TF, I said nothing about what it said about bias overall. I've never argued Twitter isn't biased in general. But you can't use "Someone is biased" to claim "Someone is being biased in this specific case".
Unless you have access to the unfiltered slack/chat logs from Twitter, what Weiss and the others are showing us amounts what they think is relevant proof. It may be that they've honestly captured internal sentiment at Twitter, but we fundamentally cannot know this regardless, and the lack of posting the logs or any ban lists as mentioned in previous Twitter Files means we're forced to evaluate how reliable the reporters are. I don't think they're above letting bias infect their reporting.
Bias is not a substitute for an argument, only an initial evaluation metric.
I'm giving my opinion on the Twitter Files based on my evaluation of them. That my evaluation disagrees with a popular right-wing view of the files is because those people and I see different things. I consider it important to be contrarian even if I agree with someone overall, yes, but you'll find a long history of me supporting the view of major institutions as biased against the right on multiple occasions. Importantly, no one is even disagreeing with most of what I have to say on the Twitter Files, they're trying to argue that I've misunderstood Trump's tweets (and based on the downvotes, I seem to have struck a nerve even when I agree with my opponents).
If I posted an argument that it was absurd to use a specific outcome from interacting with an institution to conclude it was racist against group A, I suspect I'd get lots of upvotes and supporting comments. But if I do the same against the anti-institution narrative, I get downvoted and accused of trying to hide said institution's bias.
It is this behavior that I especially despise because it indicates to me that people are abandoning the importance of being strict and conservative with their claims about something in favor of accepting more pleasing narratives. If I didn't accept that from the left, why would I accept that from the right (or anti-left)?
After my reply to you someone pointed out that Freddie Deboer recently wrote an article on this topic, eloquently saying what I've been stupidly grunting and pointing at for the past few months - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-twitter-files-and-writing-for
To use Freddie's term, it appeared to me like you were writing for the maw. You are right that people aren't arguing with what you say - nobody around here is going to argue against more transparency and more data. But you also surely know nobody is ever going to dump every slack log and email made by twitter staff. So you have an unassailable position - never mind that the Twitter files are infinitely more transparent and accountable than anything Twitter - or any other tentacle - has ever done, it is not perfectly transparent and accountable and that's bad.
Which would by itself not be enough to put me on guard, but it wasn't by itself. It came with what looks like an attempt to downplay the bias, plus an insane bit of pilpul about a tweet nobody but you interpreted as pro Trump. It all combines to look like rank dishonesty (which I suspect is why you have gotten downvotes even when you are agreeing with consensus) and while you might be right about upvotes and downvotes, what I care about is that the vast majority of the discussion about the Twitter files here this week was either confusion over pedantry or buried beneath pages of confusion over pedantry.
That's what got to me - I don't want people abandoning the truth for pleasing narratives either, but most importantly I want to read smart people having conversations about interesting things, not getting bogged down by lunacy they'd dismiss as trolling had it not come from someone with a history of intelligent and insightful comments.
Which is to say I really want to believe you man, because aside from our ideological differences I have always appreciated your opinion, even when I don't agree with it. But I feel like I keep getting burned when I do that. You do deserve the benefit of the doubt though, so I am sorry I accused you of being dishonest.
Yeah, it's cool. I get it. It's not easy to discern whether your opponent is a mistake theorist insisting on strict claim-making or just playing defense.
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