#maybei — Public Fediverse posts

One interesting phenomenon that I noticed in the weeks after the Hamas attack and the ensuing war in Gaza is how it shifted the global conversational context to make certain things virtually inexpressible without pragmatically implicating very bad things.
It's still true, though to a lesser extent, to discourse on Israel/Palestine today.

By saying
"I condemn Hamas's brutal attacks on innocent Israeli civilians", one was taken to convey endorsement or complicity in the siege of Gaza, and perhaps even a downplaying of the treatment of Gazans by the Israeli government over the past 20 years.

By saying
"I condemn Israel's siege of Gaza and the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza including many women and children", one was taken to convey complicity or downplaying of the Hamas attacks.

Now you might think that one could solve this problem by saying "I condemn both the Hamas attacks and Israel's siege on Gaza in response", but this is/was taken to convey the claim that both sides are equally bad.

What is interesting about this phenomenon is its relationship to what politicians do: Often politicians will implicate without saying something really bigoted, such that they have plausible deniability. (Trump is the master at this, but it is pretty pervasive in political discourse.)

What happened here is that the public discourse was so charged that it made the awful implicatures almost unavoidable - one could cancel the implicatures but only by asserting awkward and convoluted things.

I'm curious about the phenomenon generally and whether people can think of other instances of it.

I'm also curious whether people think the generation of the context with these implicatures was in any way intentional as a way of silencing discourse on the issue. Certainly these implicatures were exploited by, for example, Israeli public diplomacy. But I don't think they invented it as much as exploiting the already existing context of discourse for their political aims. If it was someone intentional, it would be interesting to investigate how such "implicature hacking" is possible and how to stop it.

#academicchatter #philosophy #language #philosophyoflanguage #propaganda #israel #palestine #gaza #MaybeI'llWriteaPaperOnThis?