Dread & Breakfast

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

I refer, of course, to the time Buzz Aldrin (age 72 at the time) cold-cocked a moon landing conspiracy theorist straight in his smug face after being accused of being a coward, liar, and thief.

Yes, someone was indeed dumb enough to tell a man so unafraid of death that he was willing to go into the void on a fragile explosive rocket, a coward.

Said dumbass was filming this confrontation as some sort of proof of moon fraud, but has instead captured this glorious moment of near-cosmic justice for us to loop for all time.

You might have reasons! As I said, I don't hate litotes myself! But you are taking twice as long to communicate the information, and sometimes the immediate response to "It's not X" is "Did you really think I would think it would be X? Why are we talking about X when X isn't the case?"

I hope you don’t mind the piggybacking, but now I’m wondering about things like…

So in science/statistics, you can disprove something you set up to be disproven, but you can never prove something. Reductively, you can say “there is not enough evidence to conclude that x is wrong” but you can’t correctly say “x is right”. I’m wondering how that reads in casual dialogue 🤔

I know the “Well, you’re not wrong…” can read as “I don’t want to agree with you but I can’t honestly disagree” or “technically correct but not at all what I meant!” Kind of curious about how things like “I don’t disagree.” Or “This isn’t bad… I might even say that it’s good.” make a character come across, though.

I can see the second one in a series of escalations 🤔 “This isn’t bad. I might even say it’s objectively good. But it makes me want to set you on fire. Never do it again.”

I don’t think that’s a litote, though, because the point isn’t whether it’s good, it’s just acknowledging “this criticism isn’t about whether it’s bad or not”. Or maybe that still counts?

Also curious now what some actually good litote + statement would look like.

But that negation structure can also be used for precision: "It's not illegal (just very ill-advised)."

Or even reluctance: "I don't hate it" when you're enduring something for the greater good, consoling yourself with the thought it could be worse. Whether you're seen as literally enduring or speaking with understatement often depends on context or tone of voice, unfortunately. "I didn't hate my sister's wedding" depends a ton on my relationship to my sister, to wedding traditions, to the concept of marriage, to what else I have going on that weekend.

Kind of like how "You're not wrong" can be reluctant agreement/not disagreement (like the "I guess!" comic) or cheerful understatement when someone has a clever insight ("Einstein wasn't wrong about the theory of general relativity.")

Then there's negative parallelism: "You're not wrong - you're correct." Which has become an AI calling card, but it's very much a thing humans do too! And it's not evil, just prone to overuse.

Incidentally, “This isn’t bad. I might even say it’s objectively good. But it makes me want to set you on fire. Never do it again” is a pleasure to read - and fun because of the subversion of expectations. Notably, it's a 4-sentence series and not fully parallel, while common-or-garden negative parallelism tends to go in twos or threes, IME, and to have less variety in sentence structure (because parallelism): "It's not bad. It's objectively good." or "It's not bad. It's not awful. It's objectively good." Or "It's not bad. It's good. It's great."

I'm a fan of parallel structure in many places (e.g. bullet points) but often this kind of parallelism lands as overly parallel to me, a bit padded and clunky. (The Perfect Marriage has its share of it.) You'll notice my own negation a paragraph up - "it's not evil, just prone to overuse" - isn't exactly parallel. "It's not evil; it's just prone to overuse" has 1 word more than necessary and sounds stiffer IMHO.

Your examples in the last paragraph aren't litotes, since they're intensifying rather than understating, but do read as acceptable to me. (I probably would like them more if I took a break from musing on the risks of the structure!) Like, clearly the writer said this to convey something to the reader that merely "It's agony" or "It's grey" wouldn't convey.

I think the more Y is the obvious opposite of X, the more insulting negative parallelism is. Also the more generic either X or Y are. "It's not happy. It's sad." WOW, GROUNDBREAKING. But if either X or Y is askew of expectations, things get a LOT more interesting.

"The funeral wasn't tragic - it was a carnival" is inferior, in my mind, to "The funeral was a carnival," but still a functional sentence!

"The funeral wasn't a carnival - it was tragic" informs the reader that the narrator expected us to expect the funeral to be a carnival, which is incredibly interesting. However, it's also convoluted, so I'd advise writers do this sparingly so readers don't get utterly disoriented. Frankly, one line like that in an entire story could be sufficient.

But sometimes a negative parallelism isn't an opposite and it's very confusing. "This wasn't love. It was a requiem mass." Um...okay? Except a requiem mass for someone I love would be loving, right? Or to use a Lewis Carroll example: "This wasn't a raven. It was a writing desk." I don't know what the author is trying to communicate to me.