Comment by Consultant32452
5 years ago
Part of the issue is if you're hostile to the speaker, you can interpret a call for peace to mean a call for violence. Try to imagine for a moment, that this comment was not made by an evil racist orange man, but someone you like... maybe Ghandi. If Ghandi said: "Looting leads to shooting." Which interpretation would you more likely choose?
1. Please don't loot, it escalates violence and people will get killed
2. Let's kill all the looters
Whether it's Trump or Ghandi, we're imagining we know something about the internal state of the speaker's mind that we don't know.
This seems like attempting to weasel-word. If Ghandi said "We have a lot of guns, and looting leads to shooting", it's a lot more clear that the meaning is (2). Trumps tweet didn't just say that one sentence, it said, in order:
* "the Military is with [the governor]"
* "any difficulty and we will assume control"
* "when the looting starts, the shooting starts"
There's a clear causal relationship between these three statements, this is not a plea for peace, it is a threat of violence.
A threat of violence and a call for peace are not mutually exclusive.
Regardless, all that's in evidence is the federal government is going to back the state and if this keeps going people are going to die. Anything else is something you've imagined/projected into someone else's mind.