No, believe the victim actually, literally, does mean exactly the same thing in spirit as trust but verify. In the two different contexts they both mean:
People can lie
But with these people, we will act trusting toward them
But not abandon our process that checks their claims
In one case it’s a cultural policy around sexual assault claims, and in the other it’s a NKVD policy around receiving agent field reports, but it is literally (yes I know what the word means) the same policy applied to two different contexts.
Belief is attached to faith in something, despite lack of verification, evidence, or knowledge. To “believe the victim” is to accept their side of the story by filling any unverified gaps with good faith. “Trust and verify” is literally not this as it is to trust that they are telling the truth and so seek to verify it. If it cannot be verified, it cannot be verified, there is no plugging it with good faith.
You don’t have to trust an entire person to trust them with some things. You can trust someone to wash your car but not trust them with your credit card number.
But if you trust someone to wash your car, you don’t do it in degrees. You don’t 80% trust someone to wash your car. It’s binary. You either trust them to and allow them to, or you don’t trust them to and don’t allow them to.
I trust literally everyone when they say they’ve been raped. I believe them. But the world is complicated, people makes mistakes, and other people have rights. So you don’t just chuck someone in prison because you believe the victim. You verify. You have a trial. And if the victim was lying, then my trust and belief were misplaced. But I start out from a place of trust and belief. Because that’s what you do when someone has been hurt, and I’m not omnipotent to know what happened.
If you trust someone to tell you the truth on a topic, but don’t fully believe them, then you don’t trust them on that topic.
You actually almost got it, except that last bit kind of falls off what was being said again.
The car wash analogy is good.
If I believe someone can wash my car, they get to do it. Every time. I’m impartial to the quality of it.
If I trust someone to wash my car, they get to do it. But if I verify they sucked at it, they won’t do it again since I no longer trust they can wash my car and certainly don’t believe they can.
Claims can be so outlandish, like “Blue gnomes burst from the earth and made me rape her!” It’s unbelievable, it’s dismissable. But if it’s said by someone that’s never known to lie in their life, there’s an element of trust where the claim’s worth verifying, despite how unbelievable it is.
This links to the premise of “innocent until proven guilty” and loops us back to the article and the original comment @smotherlove left.
It shouldn’t need to be explained this much. I don’t care much for up and down votes, but in this case, I think they may be a useful indicator, at best, that you’re not grasping something commonly understood—except that last one where I said you’ve almost got it. Maybe it’s just simple misunderstanding. Regardless, in such cases, it’s better to reassess, reflect, and attempt to understand rather than distribute 100% of capacity into opposing, which obviously won’t ever conclude as much as you would like it to.
Saying to believe all victims has the added benefit of encouraging rape victims, who historically would stay quiet out of fear and shame, to speak up. This benefit drastically outweighs the “occasionally sometimes people make shit up” scenario. This is why we do not caveat the phrase. If we said, “believe all rape victims, but sometimes y’all are liars and you’re going to have to seriously prove this shit”, then we would go back to silencing real victims.
Of course some are going to lie, and you shouldn’t have trusted them, and you’ll know that retrospectively. But I’d rather be burned by a couple liars and help many victims.
Well, that’s why trust and verify is the concept. To not see anyone burned by lies. Victims will also exaggerate or lie to get a more vengeful outcome for what happened to them. Defaulting to believing what they say, simply because we know they’ve been wronged, can easily result in unjust consequence.
Used as an intensive before a figurative expression.
this definition only applies to “literally”, not" literal" though
I think i remember some news about it being added to some small acclaim, but even leaving that aside, authors with a grasp of the language far better than you or me ever will have used ‘literally’ this way since before we were born. I think the earliest use was in the 18th century?
So now you know!
EDIT:
The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”
We (and all the other “craven dictionary editors”) have included this definition for a very simple reason: a lot of people use it this way, and our entries are based on evidence of use.
Furthermore, the fact that so many people are writing angry letters serves as a sort of secondhand evidence, as they would hardly be complaining about this usage if it had not become common.
An actual dictionary definition. Not the dictionary definition. And it’s because the dictionary is wrong in this one. Not factually incorrect, unfortunately; their goal here is to be objectively descriptivist, cataloguing use, and they are doing that. But this use is linguistically wrong on a fundamental level.
I’ve abandoned a great deal of the prescriptivist proclivities of my youth. I get it, language evolves. But I draw the line here. “Literally” means, specifically, in the literal sense. The whole point of the word is to make an explicit distinction from non-literal use. If you can use it to denote hyperbolic or figurative use, then the word literally loses all semantic purpose, it’s just a sound with no actual meaning. Sure, you can use words to mean their opposites sarcastically, but that requires an obvious tonal or contextual cues. The figurative use of “literally” is tonally the same as the literal use, all it does is add uncertainty.
It’s not even an effective intensifier, since that usage is less intense than the literal use. “I’m literally starving” is immediately less intense once it’s clear that it’s being used as an intensifier. It’s post-meaning gobbledygook.
It’s out of context. They have not understood where the word “literally” is being applied. Even if they did, the fourth definition they pulled does not apply. Which is a shame, considering all that effort.
My guess is because they’ve been feeling super-smart all these years laughing at people who use “literally” figuratively, and also i made no attempt to not sound like a prick.
But I don’t consider downvotes a bad thing here since they don’t hide the comment. I consider them engagement points.
It’s literally not what it literally means
English speakers broke the word literally anyway.
Literally!!
No, believe the victim actually, literally, does mean exactly the same thing in spirit as trust but verify. In the two different contexts they both mean:
In one case it’s a cultural policy around sexual assault claims, and in the other it’s a NKVD policy around receiving agent field reports, but it is literally (yes I know what the word means) the same policy applied to two different contexts.
God I hate people who say this. So cringe
I didn’t say that’s literally what it says. I said it’s literally what it means.
Like if I say “eat my ass”, I didn’t literally invite you to nom on my bussy, I literally meant to insult you.
I don’t think you know what literally means.
Belief is attached to faith in something, despite lack of verification, evidence, or knowledge. To “believe the victim” is to accept their side of the story by filling any unverified gaps with good faith. “Trust and verify” is literally not this as it is to trust that they are telling the truth and so seek to verify it. If it cannot be verified, it cannot be verified, there is no plugging it with good faith.
You trust people you don’t believe?
If you trust but verify, the trust part is already belief. Or you’re lying about trust.
Oh, dear. This has gone quite far over your head.
“Trust and verify”… Trust enough to… Anyone?.. Anyone?.. Anyone? Verify what they’re saying.
“Believe the victim” Believe… Anyone?..Anyone?..Anyone. What they’re saying without verifying.
You can’t exactly believe and verify.
You got to look at all the word people are saying, else you’ll end up stuck on some quite unrelated fallacy like…
The fuck’s that got to do with what’s being said? lol
This is nuanced so please bear with me.
You don’t have to trust an entire person to trust them with some things. You can trust someone to wash your car but not trust them with your credit card number.
But if you trust someone to wash your car, you don’t do it in degrees. You don’t 80% trust someone to wash your car. It’s binary. You either trust them to and allow them to, or you don’t trust them to and don’t allow them to.
I trust literally everyone when they say they’ve been raped. I believe them. But the world is complicated, people makes mistakes, and other people have rights. So you don’t just chuck someone in prison because you believe the victim. You verify. You have a trial. And if the victim was lying, then my trust and belief were misplaced. But I start out from a place of trust and belief. Because that’s what you do when someone has been hurt, and I’m not omnipotent to know what happened.
If you trust someone to tell you the truth on a topic, but don’t fully believe them, then you don’t trust them on that topic.
You actually almost got it, except that last bit kind of falls off what was being said again.
The car wash analogy is good.
If I believe someone can wash my car, they get to do it. Every time. I’m impartial to the quality of it.
If I trust someone to wash my car, they get to do it. But if I verify they sucked at it, they won’t do it again since I no longer trust they can wash my car and certainly don’t believe they can.
Claims can be so outlandish, like “Blue gnomes burst from the earth and made me rape her!” It’s unbelievable, it’s dismissable. But if it’s said by someone that’s never known to lie in their life, there’s an element of trust where the claim’s worth verifying, despite how unbelievable it is.
This links to the premise of “innocent until proven guilty” and loops us back to the article and the original comment @smotherlove left.
It shouldn’t need to be explained this much. I don’t care much for up and down votes, but in this case, I think they may be a useful indicator, at best, that you’re not grasping something commonly understood—except that last one where I said you’ve almost got it. Maybe it’s just simple misunderstanding. Regardless, in such cases, it’s better to reassess, reflect, and attempt to understand rather than distribute 100% of capacity into opposing, which obviously won’t ever conclude as much as you would like it to.
Saying to believe all victims has the added benefit of encouraging rape victims, who historically would stay quiet out of fear and shame, to speak up. This benefit drastically outweighs the “occasionally sometimes people make shit up” scenario. This is why we do not caveat the phrase. If we said, “believe all rape victims, but sometimes y’all are liars and you’re going to have to seriously prove this shit”, then we would go back to silencing real victims.
Of course some are going to lie, and you shouldn’t have trusted them, and you’ll know that retrospectively. But I’d rather be burned by a couple liars and help many victims.
Well, that’s why trust and verify is the concept. To not see anyone burned by lies. Victims will also exaggerate or lie to get a more vengeful outcome for what happened to them. Defaulting to believing what they say, simply because we know they’ve been wronged, can easily result in unjust consequence.
I’m confident you don’t. :)
this definition only applies to “literally”, not" literal" though
I think i remember some news about it being added to some small acclaim, but even leaving that aside, authors with a grasp of the language far better than you or me ever will have used ‘literally’ this way since before we were born. I think the earliest use was in the 18th century?
So now you know!
EDIT:
From merriam-webster’s site
Give it a read, they’re more entertaining than i am
Why all the downvotes for the first to bring up the actual dictionary definition?
An actual dictionary definition. Not the dictionary definition. And it’s because the dictionary is wrong in this one. Not factually incorrect, unfortunately; their goal here is to be objectively descriptivist, cataloguing use, and they are doing that. But this use is linguistically wrong on a fundamental level.
I’ve abandoned a great deal of the prescriptivist proclivities of my youth. I get it, language evolves. But I draw the line here. “Literally” means, specifically, in the literal sense. The whole point of the word is to make an explicit distinction from non-literal use. If you can use it to denote hyperbolic or figurative use, then the word literally loses all semantic purpose, it’s just a sound with no actual meaning. Sure, you can use words to mean their opposites sarcastically, but that requires an obvious tonal or contextual cues. The figurative use of “literally” is tonally the same as the literal use, all it does is add uncertainty.
It’s not even an effective intensifier, since that usage is less intense than the literal use. “I’m literally starving” is immediately less intense once it’s clear that it’s being used as an intensifier. It’s post-meaning gobbledygook.
Because it is disingenuous.
It’s out of context. They have not understood where the word “literally” is being applied. Even if they did, the fourth definition they pulled does not apply. Which is a shame, considering all that effort.
My guess is because they’ve been feeling super-smart all these years laughing at people who use “literally” figuratively, and also i made no attempt to not sound like a prick.
But I don’t consider downvotes a bad thing here since they don’t hide the comment. I consider them engagement points.
That’s not literally what “believe the victim” means, it’s colloquially what it means.