[JohnHaugeland]

> It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument.

It's like when vegans try to stop you in the grocery store for eating meat, which they say is murder.

It's actually not murder. That's just an emotional value they choose to assign, and I'm not going to jail for my hamburger.

They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is.

The comment made claims that something that's illegal should be legal because some people using it understand things through it.

That doesn't really make sense to me. Pick any gross crime, then claim the criminal is using that crime to understand things. It's pretty easy to do this through burglary stories about assembling evidence, or vigilantism stories.

Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally.

The law also doesn't.

Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?"

It's actually not very hard to answer that, and the rest falls neatly into place from there.

[Kamq]

> They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is.

The difference here is that this is a category argument, that is to say it's an argument about what is, whereas the argument about legality is about what should be. Arguments about what is vs arguments about what ought to be are very different things.

Additionally, murder generally has a component of crime associated with it, this is why other forms of killing that are government sanctioned also generally don't fall into this category (e.g. killing during war and government sanctioned executions are generally not murder). The legal status is a fairly decent argument that it belongs in a different category, unless you want to invoke natural law.

But, we should note, that the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal. The current legal status of something is immaterial to an argument about what it should be. If it were a good counter argument, we'd never be able to criminalize anything and we'd never be able to legalize anything that was currently illegal. This is, I suppose, fine if you consider every law to be timelessly perfect, and the system of laws to be complete and never need changing. However, I've never met anyone who believes such a thing.

> Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally.

You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. That's fine, and a perfectly legitimate position to take. I also assume it's the majority position within society. But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be.

[JohnHaugeland]

> The difference here is that this is a category argument

Yes, that is the nature of legality, and not actually a problem in any way.

Let's try to simplify this without hiding behind any half-correctly used thesaurus words, shall we?

1) It's illegal for a reason

2) Things don't stop being illegal just because someone wants them

.

> the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal

You seem to spend a lot of time presuming that someone needs a counterargument.

You haven't made a successful argument yet, and even if you did, it doesn't hold any kind of weight.

When someone explains to you why they aren't very interested in what you said, and your response is "that isn't a valid counter-argument," the net result is that they still won't be very interested in what you said, and the illegal thing remains illegal.

If you want to talk about category arguments, start here: why do you feel that commentary on social media is inherently deserving of weight, and at what point does your failure to garner interest take precedence over whatever your position may be?

.

> You find the argument, personally, unconvincing.

Literally all of society does. This gets discovered every day by someone who really, really wants to explain why the law shouldn't apply to them.

Tassles on the admiralty flag, and all of that.

.

> But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be.

I'm not sure why you believe your statements on your opinions of what "ought" to be should bear weight on what is nationally legal.

[Kamq]

> You seem to spend a lot of time presuming that someone needs a counterargument.

Nope. I even said explicitly that just finding an argument unconvincing was enough.

> When someone explains to you why they aren't very interested in what you said, and your response is "that isn't a valid counter-argument," the net result is that they still won't be very interested in what you said, and the illegal thing remains illegal.

Ahh, I see the misunderstanding here. You think I want betting on political events to be legal. I don't particularly care that much about that issue. Though I do tend to lean towards legal by default (pretty sure this is standard liberal policy), you can have this one if you feel particularly strong about it. I want weird internet nerds (decent percentage on this site) to have higher quality arguments.

> why do you feel that commentary on social media is inherently deserving of weight

I don't. Arguing with people on the internet is an entertaining pass-time.

> I'm not sure why you believe your statements on your opinions of what "ought" to be should bear weight on what is nationally legal.

I haven't made any arguments about what should or should not be legal yet. Also the is/ought divide isn't a thing I'm inventing here, it's an old problem defined by Hume (convenience link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem )

[JohnHaugeland]

> Ahh, I see the misunderstanding here. You think

No.

.

> Arguing with people on the internet is an entertaining pass-time.

Not for me.

[Kamq]

> Not for me.

Then why do it? Do you feel that commentary on social media has some sort of weight?

[JohnHaugeland]

> Then why do it?

As you should have realized from the previous reply, that was me declining to interact with you further (politely) once I realized you were just having fun arguing, rather than having a good faith discussion.

[JoshCole]

> I'm not sure why you believe your statements on your opinions of what "ought" to be should bear weight on what is nationally legal.

Do you not live in the US? I'm not sure why you would be confused about this. It seems like a silly thing to be confused by.

> Literally all of society does.

This is false.

> why do you feel that commentary on social media is inherently deserving of weight, and at what point does your failure to garner interest take precedence over whatever your position may be?

It was made by humans who have inherent worth which I take to be self-evident? And it did garner the interest I was hoping for - I got answers from kinder people than you who explained things to me in easily understood sentences that I found no flaw with. Ctrl+F "thank". Actually even the idea of garnering interest as the important thing seems kind of suspect to me. That small interaction got the least interest out of all that I've said - yet is the one I'm most glad to have made. I would not be greatly saddened if the only interaction I had was with that single post.

[JohnHaugeland]

You seem to be mass replying to everything I've said

I would like to stop interacting with you, because you announced to a third party that I thought they were subhuman over a lower case letter, and won't stop telling me about your religion

Please stop canvassing me now

[JoshCole]

It isn't canvassing for me to engage with you in the sub-thread. Do not forget - originally you were talking to me. Now you might be thinking, well, that doesn't mean you should talk to me in another thread, but recall: You were so rude to me in other replies that your post was killed - I didn't do that, others felt you were that rude. I can't talk to you in the original context.

In other contexts - much like those who found you to be rude, I also found you to be rude to others and not just to me. I commented about it, but I commented about it knowing that if someone just tried to tell you that they were being rude you would find it to be a personal attack rather than a cause for reflection, because you took it that way when someone told you as much in the subthread where you had been talking to me. So instead of stating it generally, I was highly specific. I explained exactly why I found you to be rude rather than leaving you with a mystery as to why your posts keep dying.

If no one tells you why then you'll just end up getting banned eventually. I liked your points, when I moved past the surface of them to what I saw you trying to talk about. I engage with you, because you have a perspective that I find valuable. I am trying to set you up to not be banned by prompting awareness of how you come across.

If you still find me vexing - you've literally been talking with other people about my posts; that you think it inappropriate that I talk with others about your posts is hypocritical.

[JohnHaugeland]

You seem to be mass replying to everything I've said

I would like to stop interacting with you, because you announced to a third party that I thought they were subhuman over a lower case letter, and won't stop telling me about your religion

Please stop canvassing me now

[JoshCole]

Appeal to grossness is fallacious. Describing a different situation and claiming it is the same while not having congruent properties is an abuse of abstraction. The substitution method for logically reasoning by analogy is only as strong as the similarity between the situations. This is why I consider the argument refuted when I show that there isn't alignment between Theft - a gross crime - and participation in a betting market, something that people enter into by mutual consent and with hope. The lack of congruence makes the argument fundamentally lacking in validity.

For more on why this I find this to be bad reasoning by analogy see things of this nature:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/#ForCri...

When the argument moves to the appeal to the law it is also fallacious, for there is not one law, but many. That law is different in different places: in this case in particular it is not the case that the law is universally against betting markets. There are places where it is legal. Moreover the law changes over time. Even in our locational context when you vary time you will find that there were periods in which betting markets were not illegal.

Even beyond that the law regularly allows nuance when it encounters interaction with political concerns: to kill for your country in war is legal, but to do the same outside that political contest is not. To enforce justice in the context of law enforcement is not legal except by those who are appointed. Yet to do so unappointed is not. In democracies since every person is appointed to be a part of the political body such that they vote to influence policies they all have a mandate that allows them to engage in politics - this supersedes the usual laws for much the same reason that a policeman because he has a mandate as a policeman has the right to do things that would be illegal for non-policeman to do.

I want to point out something that seems worthy of attention to me to hopefully reduce your confidence in the strength of the argument. When the argument you advanced says things like this:

> Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?"

The argument did not build up to them. It is not justifying them. They are non-sequiturs. It reads as if it thinks the reasoning is very strong and obviously correct such that it comes across as quite dismissive, but just because an argument contains a word like convincing doesn't mean the structure has the property of being convincing.

To stress how tortured the arguments analogy is - there are gross crimes for which it is legal on the basis that they are used to understand things. What is called homocide when it kills someone outside medical research and what is called the crime of animal cruelty when it is done outside medical research is not equivalent when it is done in the context of medical research.

Admittedly this is not an argument against regulation, but then - I never said it should be unregulated - I asked why we allow the oppression of political discussion in this circumstance.

That the argument includes things like "nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles" and asked obvious questions does not convince me of the position that the argument asks me to take on. It convinces me that people ought to ask those questions instead of assuming the answers. Except - it doesn't truly do even that, because I consider the claim that no one has ever asked the obvious questions to be a false premise.

[JohnHaugeland]

> Appeal to grossness is fallacious.

I've already said this once in this thread. Stephen Bond says it better than I can: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/bdksucks.html

[JoshCole]

To try and help you understand by analogy, since you've shown you like them: I'm telling you that I find you to be comparing King Heart and Queen Heart to Two Spade and Three Clubs. I'm telling you that the analogy doesn't hold because the properties aren't the same. If you disagree that your analogy is sound you need to share more of your analogy construction so that I can see how you arrived at it. For example if you have the cards King Heart and Queen Heart you can reason by analogy about King Heart and Queen Heart when working with King Diamond and Queen Diamond because the transitional structure for outcomes is the same as you move between each suit. Or in the case of tic tac toe, if you rotate the board, you can argue that the transitional structure terminates in the same outcomes and so the board under the rotation is the same as the board not under rotation. What you are doing in your defense is like saying "KH and QH are the same as 2S and 3S because Elieizer Yudowsky once said that many people didn't think rationally." Perhaps he did, but that doesn't mean you are right and it certainty doesn't convince me you are right.

When you quoted someone else you replaced their words with words they did not say, but intentionally lower-cased an "I" as if to imply they were both stupid and also subhuman. I found this really disgusting. Why did you do that? And why did you laugh at them for words they didn't speak? I call this to your attention, because you in other places comment about how polite you are being. The level of politeness you have shown is not very high. I generally expect young children to exceed it and would be disappointed with them if they failed to do so.

[JohnHaugeland]

You seem to be mass replying to everything I've said

I would like to stop interacting with you, because you announced to a third party that I thought they were subhuman over a lower case letter, and won't stop telling me about your religion

Please stop canvassing me now