You are responding as if I said “all people who wanted to preserve an easy exit as an abuse avoidance measure were Chicken Littles.”
I did not. I said “Some of the Chicken Littles were clamoring for an easy exit as an abuse avoidance measure.”
English sentences like the latter can have something like the former as a possible meaning. (I want to say “implicature” but I’m not totally sure that’s the correct technical term.) So I think even putting aside politics and coalitions, the sentence is ambiguous as a matter of linguistics.
Consider this example:
Some nice people helped me look for my dog yesterday.
It seems clear that the meaning of this sentence is closer to “Some people helped look for my dog yesterday, and they were all nice people.” or “Some people helped look for my dog yesterday, and that makes me think they are nice.” than “The intersection of sets [nice people] and [people who helped me look for my dog yesterday] is non-empty.”
Or this example:
Some of the undisciplined children in his class couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds at a time.
This one is more ambiguous than the one above. I can make my brain flip between perceiving two different meanings, one where there’s a pre-identified group of undisciplined children, and the speaker observed some of them not being able to sit still, and another one where the speaker thinks that not being able to sit still is prima facie evidence for a child being insufficiently disciplined.
English sentences like the latter can have something like the former as a possible meaning. (I want to say “implicature” but I’m not totally sure that’s the correct technical term.) So I think even putting aside politics and coalitions, the sentence is ambiguous as a matter of linguistics.
Consider this example:
Some nice people helped me look for my dog yesterday.
It seems clear that the meaning of this sentence is closer to “Some people helped look for my dog yesterday, and they were all nice people.” or “Some people helped look for my dog yesterday, and that makes me think they are nice.” than “The intersection of sets [nice people] and [people who helped me look for my dog yesterday] is non-empty.”
Or this example:
Some of the undisciplined children in his class couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds at a time.
This one is more ambiguous than the one above. I can make my brain flip between perceiving two different meanings, one where there’s a pre-identified group of undisciplined children, and the speaker observed some of them not being able to sit still, and another one where the speaker thinks that not being able to sit still is prima facie evidence for a child being insufficiently disciplined.