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Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2024
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I mean, he could have made immigration law take morality into account but didn't

"I think by his actions he would have sympathized with the position in the misquote" is not an excuse for a misquote.

My argument is that the longer quote doesn’t change the meaning at all. You’re trying to argue the longer quote means something different, that actually Washington would have reservations about poor immigrants. The fact that he pursued the most maximalist open borders immigration policy conceivable is a hint to which interpretation is more likely correct.

That doesn't excuse a misquote. If you leave out the words, you're being deceitful. If you leave out the words and they "don't change the meaning", you're still being deceitful, because the claim that they don't change the meaning is not an objective, undisputed, fact, it's something you have to explicitly argue. You can't just assume it to be true, and edit the quote silently.

because the claim that they don't change the meaning is not an objective, undisputed, fact, it's something you have to explicitly argue

Given that I have been explicitly arguing that, what exactly are you complaining about?

Someone who read your post would have no idea that you removed the end of the quote, let alone that you thought you had good reason for removing it. That's deceiving them as to what the quote actually said. Your readers wouldn't even have known that you cut it off at all if someone else hadn't noticed it and called you on it.

I didn’t remove the end of the quote, that’s how I found it. Since you’re commenting on the tail end of a long conversation of me repeatedly arguing the addendum doesn’t change anything, either semantically or when we look at the actual immigration policy the quoted speaker pursued (or his other quotes on the issue), and you aren’t bothering to try to counter, do you have any point of substance to make? If not, let’s end this.

If you honestly didn't know the quote was cut off, of course you didn't mislead anyone. But the quote itself is still misleading, even if the blame is on the person who provided it to you, and for the same reason: even if he thinks the omission "doesn't change the meaning", he needs to leave the words in and argue that they don't matter, not silently remove them.

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