[anon-3988]

> Imagine if I played this trick the other way round. I take something innocuous that a politician has said and replace random words or phrases with 'National Socialism' and 'Jews'. Suddenly what they're saying seems really controversial

I am not sure this is obvious or even true. Can you provide one example? "Gas all the <X>"...what? capitalists? murderers? rapists? pedophiles? It doesn't even make sense for them, what else is there?

inb4, no you don't want to gas these people, you want to fix them if possible or jail them otherwise.

[foldr]

Sure.

“We must fight against the influence of special interests in American politics.”

“We must fight against the influence of Jews in American politics.”

You may or may not agree with the first statement, but it’s hardly in the same category as the second (which is deplorable). It seems to me trivially easy to construct many more such examples.

The hoax paper replaced references to Jews with references to privilege. It’s hardly surprising that rants against an abstract concept are less offensive than anti-Semitic rants.

[godelski]

> “We must fight against the influence of special interests in American politics.”

> “We must fight against the influence of Jews in American politics.”

To be fair, some people do use the former language to mean the special interests of "Jews." No all, but dog whistling does exist and dog whistling is explicitly about covert language. I don't think the special interest groups reference is a great example because it is a common phrase that is used to mean a lot of different things and isn't uncommon in various groups using covert language.

[foldr]

It's a phrase that pretty much every major American politician has used. Of course there are dog whistlers and conspiracy theorists, but I think the less problematic usages predominate. Not that the phrase really means anything as far as I can tell, but that's a separate issue.

I do see what you mean though. There's something inherently gross about juxtaposing two sentences like that. I'm not doing it to suggest any equivalence between them. The point is exactly the opposite (and I would have thought an uncontroversial one): that switching out the major vocabulary items in a sentence can take it from being innocuous to offensive or vice versa.

[godelski]

> Not that the phrase really means anything as far as I can tell, but that's a separate issue.

Actually I think that's explicitly the issue and a main part of my point. In fact, dog whistling or other type of coded language typically depend on ambiguous language. It's literally because language works like an autoencoder. There's what you have in your head that's encoded into what you say and then decoded. The coded language comes through a learned/tuned decoding.

My point is that such phrasing isn't inherently innocuous. Vague language is always inherently dubious. The juxtaposition just makes it more obvious in this case, but it's always true. It may not always be dog whistling but in the least dubious case it lets people fill in whatever they want. That's why I'm saying it isn't a good example.

[foldr]

Hmm. I think it's a fine example because 'special interests' is very rarely used as a dogwhistle for 'Jews'. Can you even point to an example where it is?

[godelski]

> is very rarely used as a dogwhistle for 'Jews'

I'm not sure why you would be so caught up on "Jews" specifically when there are plenty of other targets that can be used. But yes, that term has been used to refer to Jews the same way one might say "Hollywood types" or "Bankers." I can't think of a specific example, but I think that's a bit high of a bar as I don't have an eidetic memory and it's not like I've been keeping a log of every time some mentions special interest group. Like most people I only remember the broad concepts and general notions. If you're aware of a way to easily Google or search this information, I'd be quite interested to know, because that's a very useful task. In the mean time, I'm sure you could find some if you dug around more around the Ukraine war, with both US right wing and Russian news platforms being the most likely place to find these. There's a lot of anti-semetic conspiracies revolving around Ukraine (with it even being the Russian's main initial propaganda) so that's why I suggest looking there.