It's literally no longer about what is factual or not, or what is actually being said, simply what it it assumed that someone is attempting to imply.
It's a terrible situation, and one that has infected a lot of other areas of USian everyday communication: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/
If you're not fluent in euphemism and current-events context, making a plain factual statement can frequently be heard/interpreted by the listener as you saying the opposite, and the listener is usually totally unaware of the fact that they're flipping things around like this.
It's one thing when I'm acting like like the beep boop robot I am, but it's leaked out and over, into just plain speech.
Human communication is so densely laden with nuance and context and subtext that it takes soooo much work and a dose of generosity to have a real conversation that doesn’t spin off into something useless.
In a technical context you can define things clearly, but in a political context it’s just too hard, there are so many things that mean different things to different people.
My attempt in daily life to deal with this is to offer a place where my “side” is wrong to foster generosity then try to tightly circumscribe the thing we’re discussing. I think it sometimes works. But it’s a ton of conversational work with unclear payoffs.
I don’t see how we’re not doomed to usually have largely fruitless conversation in the current climate. I don’t like the approach, but I understand why people move towards a “screw convincing them, let’s rally the base.” Bit of a prisoner’s dilemma there, I think, where the whole country is left impoverished by the individually rational approach to rallying the base
This sounds quite interesting; would you be able to provide an example?