I had all that context when I read it, and the reading you’re giving here still didn’t occur to me. To me it says, unambigiously, two contradictory things. When I read something like that I try to find a perspective where the two things don’t actually conflict. What I landed on here was “they won’t sue Ben so long as he removes the parts they consider false and libelous, even if what’s left is still pretty harsh”. “Nonlinear won’t sue so long as Ben reads the evidence, no matter what he does with it” isn’t quite ruled out by the text, but leaves a lot of it unexplained: there’s a lot of focus on publishing false information in that email, much more than just that one line. It doesn’t really seem to make logical sense either: if some of Ben’s post is libelous, why would his looking at contradictory evidence and deciding not to rewrite anything make it better?
Anyway, that’s my thought process on it; if I’d got that email—again, knowing nothing about you folks except what you wrote in the rebuttal post, and I guess that one subthread about nondisparagement agreements from the original—then I’d certainly have taken it as a threat, contingent on publishing without changes. I hope it helps illustrate how Lightcone could take it the same way.
(searching for “libel” in the original thread also gives me this comment, making the same point three months ago, so I guess I am not adding anything new to the discourse after all. Oh well, there are probably some other people who read this thread but not that one).
Why not? According to Nonlinear, they had already told Ben they had evidence, and he’d decided to publish anyway: “He insists on going ahead and publishing this with false information intact, and is refusing to give us time to provide receipts/time stamps/text messages and other evidence”. Ben already wasn’t doing what Nonlinear wanted; the idea that he might continue shouldn’t have been beyond their imagination. Since that’s unlikely, it follows that Lightcone shouldn’t have believed it, and should instead have expected that Nonlinear’s threat was meant the way it was written.
More broadly, I think for any kind of claim of the form “your interpretation of what I said was clearly wrong and maybe bad faith, it should have been obvious what I really meant”, any kind of thoughtful response is going to look pedantic, because it’s going to involve parsing through what specifically was said, what they knew when they said it, and what their audience knew when they heard it. In this kind of discussion I think your pedantry threshold has to be set much higher than usual, or you won’t be able to make progress.