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That's horribly short sighted from a consequentialist perspective, and not particularly rational to indicate that short term gains are worth degrading the value of truth and language. Just because you can't see the immediate negative consequences, or they're obscured, doesn't mean that they're not there. All of this lowering the sanity waterline is to blame for all the horribly contentious political strife going on, and increasing divide. If there's a civil war that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that this sort of sophistry is not an insignificant factor.
Furthermore, I doubt most of the people who actually are promoting this sophistry would actually be okay with other people doing it as well. Saying "it's okay when we do it" isn't exactly a good look, or anything I think people should be aspiring to do.
So I agree that if we lived in a perfectly rational world where no one ever did linguistic maneuvers like this ever and instead all language was maximally precise and informative, because having perfectly accurate information is what let everyone engage in sophisticated and dispassionate object-level debates about the empirical outcomes of different policy proposals to find the utilitarian optimal approach, then the first person to do something like this would be breaking a sacred trust and destroying a public good and committing a grave sin.
But we very, very, very, very, very... ... very, very, very, very much do not live in a world like that.
So given the fallen world we already live in, it's not clear how much marginal damage the 92,252nd instance of that happening does past the marginal damage done by the 92,251st instance.
It would certainly be better if everyone did it less, and I am actually an active proponent of doing it less in many contexts.
But it's not obviously clear that the utilitarian optimal policy is to be an extremist about never doing it ever, when it's already a standard tactic that everyone uses and not using it puts the other things you value at a severe rhetorical disadvantage, and when the marginal damage of one more case is mitigated by all the other case.
It's certainly not right to be a selective extremist about it, where you notice and call out whenever your opponents do it, but turn a blind eye when your side does it ('abortion is murder' much?).
As for 'the people doing it would object to the other side doing it'.... yeah, obviously. That's exactly what an isolated demand for rigor is, people do it all the time to fight their opponents, that's exactly what this instance of calling it out and objecting to it is. That's kind of my point.
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