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You can’t prove I meant X
- Etheryte 7y agoJust as a heads up, if you have cookies disabled for unknown domains, this page gives you an endless redirect loop.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoI really wish sites would stop doing this.
- MaxBarraclough 7y agohttps://outline.com/Cu4sHx https://outline.com/Cu4sHx
- commandlinefan 7y agoThere's an interpretation of the biblical book of Revelation that it was written as a "disguised" attack on the Roman empire: https://www.educationalcoin.com/blog/the-mystery-of-the-book-of-revelation-which-roman-emperor-is-the-antichrist/ https://www.educationalcoin.com/blog/the-mystery-of-the-book...
- asveikau 7y agoVery interesting that this page talks about serious stuff like which emporer slaughtered whom and then says you can buy those coins, the very mark of the beast!
- commandlinefan 7y agoHa - I just googled it and didn't realize this was a "commercial" site. I can't remember where I first read it, but I see a lot of other references.
- Robotbeat 7y agoPretty common understanding among biblical scholars. Christian scholars often understand it as dual prophecy, referring both to contemporary (i.e. Roman power structures) and later eschatological ones.
- Veen 7y ago> "this sentence could mean y as well as x so you can’t prove I meant x" It's interesting that a lot of online debate and media commentary uses the opposite technique: > "this sentence could—with varying degrees of plausibility—mean bad thing y as well as good thing x, so you can't prove you didn't really mean to say the bad thing." The principle of anti-charity.
- ebg13 7y agoI think that the problem with this as a steering wheel for discussion is that sometimes what you just said is extremely accurate but also sometimes both happen at the same time, for and against some figure by their defenders vs their offendees, and also often the sentence is part of a long pattern of behavior that has implication tendrils. No sentence exists in a vacuum, but different people have differing desires to reach further in different moments, some based on whether they like the person's face, but also occasionally by guiding principle.
- yboris 7y agoReminds me of the "motte and bailey doctrine" [1]. You make a claim; when attacked you retreat to an easy-to-hold position; when attackers leave you make the claim again. Example: "God exist" is attacked; speaker retreats to "but God is just another name for beauty in the universe, do you disagree with that?" [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...
- dkarl 7y agoAnd of course whether charity is applied or not is all about the presumed social fault lines in the situation. For example, in the U.S. right now, if you say, "The expert predictions about the coronavirus are all over the place and changing every day," it's an uncontroversial statement when everyone's politics are assumed to be the same. Among liberals, it will be interpreted as meaning that the coronavirus is extremely dangerous and not fully understood and we need to play it safe. Among conservatives, it will be interpreted as undermining expert authority and casting doubt on social distancing. In a mixed group, though, the important aspect will not be the meaning, which nobody will bother thinking too hard about; the only thing that matters will be the presumed intent to precipitate an argument.
- 1996 7y agoThis is a long yet fascinating read on how poets hacked libel laws to push their ideas. For example: But now, go search all Europe round Among the savage monsters crown’d, With vice polluting every throne (I mean all kings except our own). Thanks to the last line, the poet could claim plausible deniability. Even better: due to semantic evolutions, the mere "imagining" that before meant plotting made thought crimes an attack on monarchy. Therefore, by saying the poet was attacking the king, the prosecutors would be guilty themselves of such "imagining".
- pjc50 7y agoTwo modern equivalents of this kind of thing are the use of euphemisms to bypass Chinese censorship: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Main_Page https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Main_Page and the ever-mutating set of "dog whistles" used by the far right ("fourteen words" etc.) The historical background of the 1700s I'm a bit vague on, but it was crucial for the development of Parliamentary government in the UK through a long series of succession crises from the civil war onwards that only really ended with the childless death of the younger Charles Stuart in 1788. Essentially there were two incompatible criteria for English monarchs to be publicly accepted: "not Catholic" and "not foreign".
- Kaiyou 7y agoEver since I've looked up what the fourteen words are, I'm both struggling to understand why they are controversial and associated with the far right. They seem pretty reasonable and on par with the "It's okay to be white" campaign.
- 1996 7y agoIt doesn't matter much what is said - consider that as keywords. The accumulation of keywords that creates a clearer and clearer signal. If you see someone with a celtic cross and 1488 written below, do you really think that person is "pretty reasonable"?
- 0xff00ffee 7y agoThis is a fairly dense article, but it is a really profound intersection of "hacking", "reason", and "context". Hacking a language to sound reasonable while delivering a side-channel message through an established context. I guess I never really thought of poets and writers as hackers, but now it clicked into focus.
- mnw21cam 7y ago"Please enable Javascript to read the full article". How about no.
- rendaw 7y ago> We notice you're using an Ad blocker No, I'm using a Javascript blocker.
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/Kmhr1 https://archive.md/Kmhr1