I Disapprove of What You Say, but Will Defend Your Right to Say It (2015) | Hacker News Reader

I Disapprove of What You Say, but Will Defend Your Right to Say It (2015)

quoteinvestigator.com

16 pointsjawns10 comments

I wonder what Monsieur l'Abbé said that was so detestable.

Whatever it was, Ignazio Silone didn't like that the Reverend had said it. I can't find out who the Reverend was or what Silone disliked in his 1950 speech with my meager Google-fu.

I'm curious because I suspect it just wasn't all that horrific.

The quote is often used to defend any speech at all, and I wonder what its author would think of some of the applications it has been put to.

As the article mentions, the original phrase was written by Elizabeth Beatrice Hall in 1906.

Wow this is a fascinating website and it will become my obsession in the coming weeks like chatGPT was for a moment there lol

Sad that this is from 2015.

Only until what you say is an explicit or implicit threat to my life.

So the fatal flaw with this is that "feeling threatened" is subjective. A fragile person with zero resilience will feel threatened by you, even if everything you do is harmless.

This makes it unusable as a scale for what is acceptable speech and what is not.

On the other hand, "Everyone should go kill that person" is pretty much universally seen as unacceptable. So you can't get out of the ambiguity by declaring all speech defensible.

The law lives with ambiguities all the time, and has various means of resolving them. They are imperfect, but absolute clarity is not something you can achieve from the law, and it is sometimes counterproductive to try.

regardless of your views on the titular quote, that discussion isn't really germane to the article which is simply investigating the origin of the quote.

so if I have any power as a random commentator to shape this discussion, perhaps we could talk about how the distortion occurred because of the placement/presence of quotation marks

and how similar popular misconceptions might have formed through punctuation.

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