I apologise beforehand for the wall of text. To be frank I’m enjoying this discussion.

You know, I don’t think the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” thing is true anymore. […]

I still notice a fair bit of that “we’re the best Nation! Gott mit uns [sorry, wrong Nazi country] God Bless Amurrrca! Everyone else is a bloody shitskin living in a mud hut” discourse when interacting with United-Statians online. Perhaps it isn’t as strong as before, like You said, but I don’t think it’s gone.

Then again I’ve lived in a homeless shelter and surround Myself with antirealists, so what do I know about the consciousness of white suburbia?

I live in a mostly-white suburbia but it’s in Latin America, so… take what I say about USA’s youth with a grain of salt. As in, I’m throwing in what I think, but I’m fully aware it might be wrong. Still worth saying IMO, though.

“you” as the pronoun for hypothetical people […]

Got it. I’ll do as You said and use “one”. (To be frank I used “one” for some time, mostly to distinguish between the personal and indeterminate, but plenty native speakers screeched at it, so… I kind of gave up. But it’s good to know I can use it with You, and potentially with other people who capitalise pronouns.)

I confess I don’t fully understand how increased assumptiveness should lead to an increased value placed on intentions as excuses for wrongdoing.

Let’s say intentions exist as an abstraction for a bunch of mental processes, related to planning and the predictions of the outcome of one’s own actions. For example, when someone plans to do something, the person has the “intention” of doing it. Or (reusing the example from Your blog), “author intent” as the set of experiences, thoughts, emotions etc. the author is trying to provoke on the reader. In practice that’s really close to what most use the word “intention” for.

But that’s all internal to someone’s mind. Only the person themself sometimes know their own intentions; nobody else does. At most others can guess it, based on what the person’s words or actions.

So, for one to act based on someone else’s actions, or to say something about them, one needs to either

• create multiple, mutually exclusive guesses about the other’s intentions, and carefully weight the odds of each being true; or
• act as if they knew the other’s intentions.

Your typical person won’t do the former. But they’ll do the later — and the later is what we call “to assume”, it’s to take what one doesn’t know as if one did.

So there’s where assumptiveness kicks in; for most people, it’s what even enables them to talk about intentions. Without assumptiveness, the value of intentions is the same of a ghost, it’s zero.

Granted, someone’s guesses might be more or less accurate depending on how much the person guessing knows the person they’re guessing the intentions off. But when you’re dealing with vulture capitalists across the globe, one knows as much about the person as one knows future lotteries, practically nothing. They’re a stranger, but they’re still talking carefully crafted words about their own intentions, and what they talk about their intentions is the only actual piece of info you have to guide your guess them. With the wrongdoings becoming more of a “no, I didn’t have the intention! My intentions was another!”

The result is that you have a bunch of bourgeois people likely bullshitting about their intentions, and people eating it for breakfast.