There is something I've noticed that happens fairly frequently online, in media, and even in family arguments/debates. Someone says something.
Then some other party starts blasting them about something they didn't say.
"I didn't say that!"
Yes, you did it was implied by X,Y, Z...
"I didn't even think about that!"
You're unconsciously espousing it and it was implied.
Wrong!!!
If a person says a thing. Only what they directly said should be assumed. If they say a thing and are winking at you, nudging you, saying "do you get it?" or something like that then they may be trying to tell you to look for hidden meaning. Yet without some overt indication of such nothing should be assumed beyond what is said.
If they are winking and nudging and expecting you to "get" what they are "implying", "hinting at", etc. then it is a big risk because they don't control where your mind goes, what you may know, etc. You could take that guessing into directions they never suspected...
It might be fairly obvious and even then sometimes people miss it.
You could point at some guy standing on top of a giant ice cube and say "He's so cool, get it?" Even something that likely would be obvious like that the person may totally miss it. They may be completely ignoring the ice cube or the fact the ice cube is cold.
These days people are often called racist when they don't even mention race. When it is countered they will be accused of it being implied by some six degrees of separation mental gymnastics that they expect us to believe was somehow obvious. They expect us to believe the person will waste so much effort speaking in "code" to hide meaning and hope that people might understand them.
So wrong!!!
The only thing you know for certain is what a person says. Sometimes when you point it out a person could say "Oh, you are right I didn't mean it that way". These days we tend to see people treated as forever damned. "You said X a decade ago and that makes you a horrible person today!" The person may have admitted that was wrong, changed their mind, learned new things, and even talked about this many times. It doesn't matter that one moment where they said something that can be used as a "gotcha" moment... forever damned.
But hold on there...
This is actually only true if the would be authoritarians don't like the person they can "gotcha" with anything from the past. If it happens to be someone they like then they will apply their mental gymnastics in the opposite direction and misdirect, point at red herrings, and say "he didn't say that!". The person might have killed people. They'll shrug and offer something else to discuss.
With the family...
I've pointed out to family when they go to "but you meant", or "you were implying" that what they are saying I didn't even think of. It happened in their mind not mine.
In fact when it comes to society today those people doing gymnastics to say someone is racist because something they said implies it are truly the ones who are racist. It is their mind that goes off on tangents looking for signs of racism. They are the ones deciding someone is being a white supremacist. When they push things like "working hard" as white supremacy then if you stop and think is it not they who seem to be IMPLYING that working hard is something white people do? Wouldn't that make them the white supremacist? They are somehow seeming to equate working hard as being something white people do. Which is superior working hard, or not working hard?
Really working hard doesn't have anything to do with white supremacy or racism. It is just another example of where people will take it to that are looking for those secret meanings, those microaggressions, etc. Meanwhile they completely miss the actual communication. What the person actually said.
Yesterday...
Yesterday I was joking with coworkers. I talked briefly about being offended and safe spaces. I said I could build a game where you didn't see anything offensive a "safe space". One of them suggested running around in a completely white playing area. Then another said "wait a minute some people might be offended that it is white". I said okay "I'll make it so you can choose the background color". They then said people might get offended by the default setting. I then said okay. "I'll make it so it picks a random color each time you play." They said "okay, now we're getting somewhere". Of course it was a joke we were having about how ridiculous this entire woke cult/religion is.
Part of how we got there was discussing how boring a completely safe, and non-offensive game truly would be. I was telling one of the coworkers how he will remember and talk about the flooding in his basement and the things he is doing about it for the rest of his life. Yet the days that nothing happened out of the ordinary will just blur into the background noise of life and he will not be able to pick any particular day out to talk about. Then I segued into making a game that was completely safe and how it was likely to be really boring. That lead to the above exchange.
Let's make this simple...
- You should only take exactly what a person says. You shouldn't look for hidden or secret meaning unless somehow they indicate they are being sneaky.
- You should allow people to learn, change their mind, and be wrong. We are all wrong. If we can't learn from it then we are all doomed.
- Say what you mean. Don't play word games.