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All three of these are reasonable statements if you remove all contemporary social context. Nobody does that, and the people who use these slogans know that. They're using the difference between abstract context-free understanding and contextual understanding as a gaslighting technique, making obviously political statements and then pretending there is no context and hiding behind "but that's a reasonable statement!"

Consider, alternately, these three statements:

"The social contract applies equally to all instances of human life."

"We should eliminate shame in connection with anyone's race, heritage, or other aspects of their origin over which they have no control."

"There is nothing inherent in markets that perpetuates racial prejudice."

These mean about the same thing but are formulated in a way that avoids this kind of gaslighting doublespeak. It's not hard to do. I doubt those statements would offend anyone.

I assume anyone saying "all lives matter" is racist precisely because it is so damn easy to say the same thing neutrally.




This game is fun:

> "The social contract applies equally to all instances of human life."

Clearly you're making an argument against abortion.

> "We should eliminate shame in connection with anyone's race, heritage, or other aspects of their origin over which they have no control."

Pedophiles make this argument to justify their urges.

> "There is nothing inherent in markets that perpetuates racial prejudice."

This one might as well be All Lives Matter. It's the common retort against claims of algorithmic racial bias and was used historically in the South to oppose government-mandated desegregation.

These are the claims you're using as examples of neutrality, until somebody puts them in a frame where they're not.

You can do that with everything because even an actually neutral claim is an opposition to a non-neutral claim by someone else, and therefore has political implications.




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