I support your right to your opnion, but have we actually arrived at the point where taking 6,000 lumens for a walk results in ” The light from the TN36, I’d have to say, was unusable for me. It does a decent job at lighting things up extremely bright about 20 feet in front of you but it’s not good for seeing what may be lurking in the shadows.” Really not good for seeing into shadows?… well ok if you say so. In my ignorance I would think more would hide in the shadows of a thrower then a flooder?
For tangentially related edification.
Remember, That Famous Voltaire “Quote” About Free Speech Was Written By a Woman
While the “defend to the death” quote properly summarizes the political beliefs of the French enlightenment thinker and 18th century writer to which they are so often misattributed, the words themselves were never said by him—they were said about him, in a 1906 biography called The Friends of Voltaire. English writer Beatrice Evelyn Hall published the book under a pseudonym, S. G. Tallentyre, and intended for the line to be a reflection of Voltaire’s attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius, another French philosopher:
“What the book could never have done for itself, or for its author, persecution did for them both. _‘On the Mind’ _became not the success of a season, but one of the most famous books of the century. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. ‘What a fuss about an omelette!’ he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ was his attitude now.
But because she wrote this line in first person, people mistook it for something Voltaire said himself, because despite how much we complain about the Internet, humanity as a species has always been surprisingly terrible at reading comprehension. (The fact that the earlier omelette line had been attributed to Voltaire in an earlier 1881 book by James Parton, The Life of Voltaire, probably didn’t help matters.)
So the next time you see someone using that particular quote, kindly remind them Voltaire wrote a great many influential things, but definitely not that. And if you want to quote Voltaire on free speech, here’s something that he did write once, in his 1763 Treatise on Toleration:
“The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.”
That’s something probably everybody on the Internet could stand to think about, ourselves included.
http://www.themarysue.com/voltaire-beatrice-evelyn-hall/
