You can’t prove I meant X
lrb.co.uk
You can’t prove I meant X
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Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#2Just as a heads up, if you have cookies disabled for unknown domains, this page gives you an endless redirect loop.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#3There'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...
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#4> "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.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#5Just as a heads up, if you have cookies disabled for unknown domains, this page gives you an endless redirect loop.
I really wish sites would stop doing this.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#6This 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".
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#7Two modern equivalents of this kind of thing are the use of euphemisms to bypass Chinese censorship: 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".
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#8Just as a heads up, if you have cookies disabled for unknown domains, this page gives you an endless redirect loop.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#9Two modern equivalents of this kind of thing are the use of euphemisms to bypass Chinese censorship: 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…
Ever 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.
Re: You can’t prove I meant X
#10Two modern equivalents of this kind of thing are the use of euphemisms to bypass Chinese censorship: 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…
> ("fourteen words" etc.)
This is signaling through lingo (keywords), very different from this article, yet also worth studying during this lockdown.
If I simply replied "88 bro", the average reader may not click, and think I was just saying I was born in 1988, like you, and we are maybe "birth year brothers".
Yet to the initiated, it would signal that I have some very special political ideas! Once you have started learning that, you will see custom license plates very differently!
As hackers, we should learn to decode such telltales, to know who may mean us harm.
Here's another one that may look totally innocent: blood type tatooed 8 inches above the elbow.