• Lvxferre
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    16 days ago

    wtf does this even mean

    OP is asking two things:

    • the most controversial shit that you say
    • the shit that you say and think “mmh, maybe I’m wrong but I’ll keep saying it”

    …or at least that’s how I interpreted it.

    • @Semjaza
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      216 days ago

      I read it as these two questions:

      1. Which controversial sentence said over public broadcast media do you disagree with the critiques of?
      2. Which controversial broadcast sentence do you come closest to agreeing with, even if you don’t think it true and hate yourself for even contemplating as true

      Don’t know if I’m right or but that reading makes most sense to me after a couple of passes and some thinking.

      • Lvxferre
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        216 days ago

        We’re both interpreting it slightly different ways:

        • you - the utterance is specific, the speaker is unspecified
        • me - “utterance” is a placeholder for “discourse”, the speaker is whoever answers the question

        To be honest this is really cool. Now I’m curious if one of us got it right, or if we’re both reading it wrong.

      • Lvxferre
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        16 days ago

        As you said in the other comment, the sentence is grammatically OK¹. However, it’s still a huge sentence, with a few less common words (e.g. “utterance”), split into two co-ordinated clauses, and both clauses are by themselves complex.

        To add injury there’s quite a few ways to interpret “over the airwaves” (e.g. is this just radio, or does the internet count too?)

        So people are giving up parsing the whole thing.

        I also write like this, in a convoluted way², but I kind of get why people gave up.

        1. I’m not sure if it’s semantically OK due to the word “utterance”.
        2. Except when translating stuff, since I’m forced to roughly follow the “informational layout” of the original. That’s usually a PITA but it helps wonder for clarity!
        • Call me Lenny/Leni
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          116 days ago

          But that just means its issue is it’s verbally unfamiliar, no?

          Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.

          • Lvxferre
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            216 days ago

            [Just to be clear for everyone: I’m describing the issue, not judging anyone. I’m in no position to criticise the OP.]

            The unfamiliar vocab is just the cherry on the cake. The main issue is that it’s hard to track everything; at least, when reading it for the first time. And most people don’t bother reading an excerpt enough times to understand it.

            Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.

            Almost nobody, I believe. And I’d go further: I don’t think that most people read longer texts that would “train” them for this sort of stuff.

            • Call me Lenny/Leni
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              116 days ago

              Welp, there goes anyone’s claims here of being an authentic political theorist/scholar/analyst.

              Perhaps, based on that, the issue is expectations. One expects a certain outcome from how someone is explaining something and is thrown off-guard when it takes a twist. Though that’s not really anyone’s fault. I relate too well to the other perspective, as a non-native speaker who is, in some way, also neurodivergent, as well as a writer immersed in mental exercises. I just have had a kind of faith that one might say it’s a universally trainable skill (think math or jigsaw puzzles) rather than seemingly innate. I may read The Wheel of Time and War and Peace just fine if I don’t establish my own upper limit to complexity. Interactive AI, through their lack of the issue we discuss, implicitly show us that “unintelligible” and “complex” may overlap but don’t necessarily have to.