The truth is...

No cameras were allowed in the State House when the Declaration of Independence was signed, so there are no pics or videos of the event.

(I first published this toot on Oct 25, 2019)
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= A statement that is logically or literally true (or mostly true), but seems to imply something that isn't true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies... or just for fun)

This one is 100% true, sort of...

By saying, “No cameras were allowed in the State House...”, it implies that there was a specific prohibition of them, like “No cameras allowed”. But a literal interpretation of the phrase simply means that there was no explicit statement saying that they were allowed, which of course there wasn’t, so that statement is true. There was no such thing as a camera in 1776, so they wouldn’t even know what one was and therefore wouldn’t issue any statement about them at all.

The phrase, “...so there are no pics or videos of the event”, is also true in that there are no photographs or videos of the event. However, the word “so” implies that the reason why there are no photos/videos is because of a prohibition on cameras, but the actual reason is just because cameras hadn’t been invented yet.

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I do these toots to demonstrate how the phrasing of words can be literally true, but imply something that is not true. It’s important to understand how this works to help improve critical reasoning skills and to be able to spot statements that are misleading.

(I also sometimes just do them for fun 😄)

... and I'm doing these Patsplaining toots about them because nobody ever responds to the toots, so I assume people just don't understand them. (Maybe you folks do understand but just don't give a shit. But I'll keep explaining them anyway in case some folks don't understand.)

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And the whole reason why I'm doing any of this is because here in US we almost loss our democracy because half of the Republican party were too ignorant to understand that they were being taken in by a con artist.

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@trinsec

Did you learn anything from my Patsplaining, or did you already understand the original toot?

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