I'm being taken out of context!
The phrase, "I'm being taken out of context!" is a refuge for villains and scoundrels. That's not to say that everyone who says their quotes have been taken out of context is a villain or a scoundrel. Indeed, the fact that many have legitimately been taken out of context, and because of that been severely slurred, is what makes it so dangerous when the scoundrel says the same thing.
How many times have you heard someone say, "I was taken out of context," and gone on to read what they said and found that they were taken out of context. Personally I'm sure that I've seen that hundreds of times. (And I'm not even going to start on Dowdification.) After you've seen it happen enough times, you start to become dubious of any accusation if the accused claims to have been taken out of context; after all, you've seen it happen so often that it's natural to start giving credence to that defense every time you hear it.
It's become so prevalent that the immediate reaction anytime someone sees themselves quoted in public in an unfriendly light is to claim that they were taken out of context. However, it's not always true. Some times the falseness of such a claim is easier to spot than others. For instance:
UT student Sukhmani Singh Khalsa complained in an editorial that the students’ Issues Committee, which brings speakers to campus, was devoid of ideological diversity. "I don't think that a lot of parents would be happy if they knew they were paying this group $90,000 to have their country slandered and their values dragged through the mud," he wrote.Following the appearance of the article, Justin Rubenstein, a member of the Issues Committee, told fellow members of the panel in an e-mail that if they "see one of those ragheads, shoot him right in the [expletive] face."
I'm having trouble conjuring up a context that justifies calling for the murder of someone who criticized (or anyone who looks like him) your choices of campus speakers.
The next time you hear someone use the out-of-context defense, remember that sometimes the context just doesn't matter at all. Sometimes people are just mean, vicious, or predjudiced (or all of the above) and have to be called on it.
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