[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.

[foldr]

Well, we disagree over the usage of 'special interests', and as you say, it's difficult to gather objective data to support or refute either view. It's obviously a vague phrase that could be (and occasionally has been) used to dogwhistle many things, but that doesn't mean that a sentence attacking "special interests" is inherently as offensive as a sentence attacking a specific ethnic or religious group. That is the only point I'm making here, which I suspect you don't even disagree with. Even in the case of a dogwhistle, the whole point of a dogwhistle is that it is less immediately and unambiguously offensive than a straightforward statement of a prejudiced viewpoint.

By the way I'm not 'caught up' on 'Jews'. It's just that 'Jews' is one of the words that the authors of the hoax article replaced.