The vast majority of utterances do indeed have specific meaning. It's why we bother to write and why human society works. Ironically, anyone convinced that utterances have no exact meaning had to be so convinced using language.

So to the same degree the contrived "pretty little girl school" is ambiguous, the real phrase "clean the gene-pool of crazies" has a single unambiguous meaning that the author intended and I know enough English and context to understand as does almost every English speaker.

It would be one thing if there were even one plausible counter example of some alternative meaning, but just claiming "no one can know exactly what is meant" is clearly incorrect and just obfuscates the more important topic.

It is not a surprise that obfuscation should surround this topic and individual. The intentional obfuscation of language by the autocratically minded has been well know so long that Orwell wrote a book about it. Pseudo intellectuals like De Gobineau have been doing it for generations to cover absurd ideas they want to believe. Molyneux is just another clone among other Youtubers turning a quick buck. Which reminds us that charlatans and scientology-like cultist also do it: A person no one would have heard of can shoot to fame, influence and extra cash when done right.

What's remarkable is that people still fall for it. When a face on youtube with the right look and right words gives a facile world theory that claims the listener's problems are someone else's fault and they are better than everyone else, it's accepted by many with cult like zeal.

It's amazing the lack of suspicion that an easy solution to the world's problems should come from a few minute stream-of-consciousness diatribe into a web cam, with ludicrous, poorly understood citations if any. I suspect the followers tend to be isolated people of underwhelming accomplishment and without life direction. Historically anyway, this has been the group that gets targeted.

>Here you have completely manufactured reality

This assumes not only that the phrase might possibly mean something else but now that in in fact definitely means something else. It does not. And indeed the Wikipedia article makes no reference to Molyneux. But Molyneux is certainly referring to the events in the article. Thus the utterance and it's implications are correctly linked.

>What's interesting to me is that on a programming focused website, frequented predominantly by people who are well above average not just in general intelligence but specifically logical thinking, when the topic of discussion touches on certain things, it is almost as if the logical reasoning part of the brain is downgraded, and the emotional reasoning part takes over. And not only that, but all indications are that the individual is not only not aware of this, it almost seems like they cannot be made aware of it.

I too find this interesting. Possibly they are not all the same people. Possibly only a narrow slice of software requires clarity. There's an API for hackernews one could query and maybe analyze a bit.

Possibly some have focused so narrowly on their field they know nothing outside. If everything before 1990 is a blur known only from reruns, high-school history and the very occasional Wikipedia snip-it, it would explain the equanimity with which phrases like "enemy of the people" and "America first" are taken. Why the chant to lock up politic opponents doesn't cause alarm. And why a self made holocaust survivor who aids pro-democracy movements worldwide can be turned into an omnipresent boogie man.

Also remarkable are the ever present comments of those who believe a guy in his den with a web cam has the secret truth while all the real journalists in the world have coordinated a left wing conspiracy. The process leading to that mental state must be remarkable. It's nice the Times is drawing attention to it.

At any rate, today's blinding emotions are not too surprising given the extremism sown by wanna be autocrats, commentators maximizing an audience and foreign dictatorships seeking to disrupt democracies with divisions.

That topics beyond software are posted is entirely good. Software is made for a purpose, often altruistic, usually by bright people. No doubt this why the most progressive part of the county is the center of it; a place attracting experimentation since before the summer of love. Since, to the thoughtful, software is a tool not an end and, since this site uniquely still embraces that idea, it covers a broad range of reality based issues and problems from business opportunities to social ones like radicalization. I regret, like most of the web with unlimited user contribution, that it is so trivially vandalized.

>I'm very curious to know if you are able to believe anything else is happening here.

I can not speak to the intent of posting, I assume for entertainment. But maybe practice for rhetoric class, maybe a Molyneux acolyte. It's not really relevant, only what is written matters.
But as an aside, it does strongly resemble an argument between college students with an emphasis, even over application, of a particular epistemic theory rather than more substantive concrete analysis. Which is fun of course.