Put up or shut up?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Put up or shut up?

The other boxer, on the other hand, begins to complain, saying how it is wrong and unsportsmanlike for someone to call another person those names and so forth.

He keeps whining. Eventually everyone gets tired of hearing any more of it and they say to him: Put up or shut up – accept his challenge and settle it in the ring or quit whining about getting hurt by those taunts.

In other words, prove your worth with action or swallow the hurt and never complain.

See?

All right, here are media examples of people who should or are asked to “put up or shut up”:

1. FBI Director James Comey is on quite a media blitz. In the month since the iPhone 6 launch, he's appeared on television and radio over and over again, talking up the supposed dangers of Apple’s new encryption standards. After a televised press conference in September, he’s appeared in countless articles criticizing Apple’s new measures, which would automatically encrypt data held on the iPhone, and prevent Apple from decrypting it for law enforcement. Last night, Comey showed up on 60 Minutes to do it again. It’s enough for the AFP to dub it Crypto Wars 2.0, a rehash of the struggle for legal cryptography that played out in the ’90s.

One important thing to notice: Comey never does more than talk. The battles over encryption in the ’90s played out with arrests and court battles. Anyone offering end-to-end encryption, which doesn't let carriers hold the decryption keys, was under real legal threat. In the most alarming example, Phil Zimmermann spent years battling federal arms exporting charges over his PGP encryption suite. The threat of force was real, and resisting it took real sacrifice. Director Comey, on the other hand, hasn’t offered anything more than vague concerns. If he’s serious about the dangers of encryption, there’s plenty Comey could do — whether in court cases or in Congress itself — but without some real proposal, he’s just rehashing decades-old arguments about warrants and software freedom. After three weeks of talk, it’s time for Comey to put up or shut up.