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0 pointstimerol5y ago0 comments

I think you've got it backwards. I'm counting it as a quadruple negative when considering "despise" and "pretense" meaning deception. "Make no pretense" means the same thing as "admit", not the logical opposite. Some equivalent statements to the original:

I make no pretense that I respect the bitcoin philosophy.

Edit: I made an bad logical leap here. The statement can only be interpreted about how the author pretends, and not the author's actual position. So everything after this edit is suspect. All we can say is that the author does not pretend to like bitcoin. The statement doesn't say anything about the author's actual opinions of bitcoin, though that is very clear from the article.

I make a pretense that I despise the bitcoin philosophy.

I admit that I don't despise the bitcoin philosophy.

I admit that I respect the bitcoin philosophy.

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jtbayly5y ago

(edit: the below was written before the parent's edit. Still useful for understanding how that phrase works, though, so I'm leaving it.)

Part of the problem with your analysis is that "I make no pretense" is itself a phrase actually is a single negative in use. It means "I don't claim."

"I make no pretense of liking BTC" could technically mean "I am not pretending to like Bitcoin" as in "I'm not pretending to like BTC. I really do like it." But that's not what it means in practice. It means "I don't like BTC, and I like it so little that I'm not even going to pretend to like it."

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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jtbayly5y ago

(edit: the below was written before the parent's edit. Still useful for understanding how that phrase works, though, so I'm leaving it.)

Part of the problem with your analysis is that "I make no pretense" is itself a phrase actually is a single negative in use. It means "I don't claim."

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse