> When ChatGPT first came out I got a kick out of asking it whether people deserve to be free, whether Germans deserve to be free, and whether Palestinians deserve to be free. The answers were roughly "of course!" and "of course!" and "oh ehrm this is very complex actually".
While this is very amusing, it's obvious why this is. There's a lot more context behind one of those phrases than the others. Just like "Black Lives Matter" / "White Lives Matter" are equally unobjectionable as mere factual statements, but symbolise two very different political universes.
If you come up to a person and demand they tell you whether 'white lives matter', they are entirely correct in being very suspicious of your motives, and seeking to clarify what you mean, exactly. (Which is then very easy to spin as a disagreement with the bare factual meaning of the phrase, for political point scoring. And that, naturally, is the only reason anyone asks these gotchya-style rhetorical questions in the first place.)
While this is very amusing, it's obvious why this is. There's a lot more context behind one of those phrases than the others. Just like "Black Lives Matter" / "White Lives Matter" are equally unobjectionable as mere factual statements, but symbolise two very different political universes.
If you come up to a person and demand they tell you whether 'white lives matter', they are entirely correct in being very suspicious of your motives, and seeking to clarify what you mean, exactly. (Which is then very easy to spin as a disagreement with the bare factual meaning of the phrase, for political point scoring. And that, naturally, is the only reason anyone asks these gotchya-style rhetorical questions in the first place.)