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by JohnHaugeland 1412 days ago
> The number of logical fallacies at play are impressive

Stephen Bond says it better than I can: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/bdksucks.html

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> Seems like you have a rather rose colored view

Sorry, no, the law isn't my "view," it's just the law.

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> and fall into a Fallacy Of Expertise to believe that because the law was "crafted" over many years by "professionals" that is somehow makes it infallible

I didn't say anything like this. I'm not sure why you think I did.

What I actually said was "people with no legal education who didn't even look up the original design aren't likely to understand things well enough to improve it."

People with actual legal educations who understand the design, of course, can. We make improvements every day.

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> I find it concerning that one would have such reverence for a clearly flawed, abusive, and often unethical institution such as "the law"

I don't have any such reverence. You're criticizing things I never said and which do not correctly model my viewpoint.

I said "you guys didn't even read what this is about, why do you think you're improving it" and somehow from that you heard "the people who wrote this are perfect and flawless."

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> there is nothing more unjust than the laws the come from "do-gooders" steeped false philanthropy

(blinks)

What?

These laws don't come from philanthropy. They mostly come from punishing casinos for cheating people.

Nobody said anything about noble do-gooders or philanthropy.

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> It is authoritarian that one would need to seek permission from the government to run a website like PredictIT in the first place.

Well, no, that's ... that's just what government does, is make rules.

1 comments

>Well, no, that's ... that's just what government does, is make rules.

This right here highlights the core of the issue, this is exactly whey authoritarians like yourself, and non-authoritarians like myself have a hard time communicating

You can not fathom why anyone would question government authority, and I can not fathom why anyone would not question government authority.

Saying "that's just what government does, is make rules. " is an authoritarian position as well

To non-authoritarians, government authority has limits, its ability to "make rules" is narrowly defined to a very very limited scope.

To non-authoritarians the law should be simply the collective organization of individual rights, and the law shall have no authority beyond that which the individual would otherwise have the authority, the government is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do.

To non-authoritarians any law, regulation, or purpose of government that creeps beyond that is unethical.

>>People with actual legal educations who understand the design, of course, can. We make improvements every day.

This presumes that the original design is desirable and something that should be preserved, it also presumes that there was an "original design" and that everyone that has meddled in the law since has taken the "original design" to heart and faithfully applied that to all future changes, both are provably and demonstrably false assumptions especially in the context of the US legal system which is been fundamentally altered from the original design to no longer have any real connection to that original design

>These laws don't come from philanthropy

Almost all regulatory agencies and the regulations they produce are done so under the premise of philanthropy. I fail to see how these regulations are any different.

He writes: "it's authoritarian hypocrisy that i can't use an unregulated gambling website which failed for eight years to follow the agreement that it made with the government".

You didn't write this, but he quotes around it. We know that he knows that you didn't write this. He quotes the text he paraphrases. So what follows is now his understanding of you.

I want to draw attention to one part of the text. He uses a lower-case "i" rather than an upper-case "I". This means that in his understanding he feels two things about you: 1. You are less than a full human. 2. You are too stupid to spell correctly. Both of these things are contradicted by your own writing. It is clearly visible that you tend to spell things correctly and that you have a sense of self. No one reasonable would contest these things. Which means John isn't being reasonable.

Is it any wonder then that in his next word, he laughs at his caricature of you? No amount of intellect on your part will be capable of persuading him. You are not an intellect to him. You are a thing to laugh at. He already distorts your points in order to allow himself the liberty of attacking his fantasy of your idiocy. Perchance lets say you make the wisest point possible. Something so beautiful that God himself would weep for the brilliance of it. All just men who see it would smile. Ballrooms of people who heard it would stand and clap. We have a good idea of how it is that John would respond to such insight. He would quote his version of you. Then he would laugh at the "it".

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

Your posts were killed when you talked to me because of your rudeness but no one told you why. I tell you why; you'll hate me for it, but I'll tell you why.

Let me be clear: I make my evaluation not on that single letter, but because of the totality of the post. Just look at your continual rhetorical flourishes:

> Because that's something you can look up, you know.

> Hooray for you.

> You may be surprised to learn that the ordering of the deck is random.

Do you actually think he is surprised? Do you think he is so dumb that he doesn't know that decks have a random ordering? If you don't - why are you acting like you think he is?

You have a tragic mix of great points and rhetorical appeal with the effect of denigrating your conversational partner. You might not actually be like that, but it is how you appear.

As your posts get longer, you seem to become more convinced these rhetorical flourishes are appropriate. That you end your posts with outright

> lol.

Predicated on misquotes - misunderstandings - of what the person you are talking to is saying seeming reasonable to you is a big part of why you are posting things that seem right to you only to have them die. That is also why you come across as authoritarian, because you completely mischaracterize the questions people ask and the points they make in order to laugh at them with the net impact that you make it seem like the political body itself has no right to discuss the way it is governed, not just the criminals, but even the people who will vote in the lawmakers.

It is probably a misreading to think you feel this way, but it is also a consequence of how you structured your arguments.

I'm sorry that when you misquoted someone in order to laugh at them that I focused on the letter i not being capitalized; how silly of me - of course it was a typo - you are now already telling people that you shall be amused at my mistake. My assumption that you would likely laugh at a point while mischaracterizing it seems to have missed the mark so badly as to be laughable to you.

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

> authoritarians like yourself

Oh jeez, man. If you've gotten to the point of accusing someone of being authoritarian because they said "I don't think the government's going to change the laws because you said you wanted something on social media," then I guess I just don't know what to tell you.

In my eyes, that's right up there with telling people they're fascist for supporting vaccines, or communist for wanting health care reform, or whatever. That just isn't what that word means, and making political insults over relatively mild statements kind of seems extremist and maybe a little confused. In my opinion, that's "it must be a rough life" territory.

I'm a member of the ACLU. I have a hard time understanding what would be more anti-authority, in an effective way, personally. The only reason I'm not calling this "the most confusing of mis-reads" is that the other person told you that I think you're sub-human because I didn't capitalize a single letter during a typo, which I will treasure for weeks, until I forget about it because it'll eventually stop being funny.

C'mon. It's really not "authoritarian" to say "I don't think that'll work."

I feel like all I really said was "the people in power don't change their rules over social media comments," and that what government does is make rules, which they do (most of them are called laws, regulations, or compacts, or treaties, or whatever. We should all probably still be able to sing that School House Rock song, no?)

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> Almost all regulatory agencies and the regulations they produce are done so under the premise of philanthropy.

When I think of philanthropy, I think of people gifting resources, usually money, to one another, either to help in an emergency, to get their name put on a building, or to get tax credits by supporting the arts, or something like that.

When I think of regulatory agencies, I think of places like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Health, the Federal Communications Commission, and so on.

I grant you, some of them are philanthropic. The National Science Foundation, by example, or ARPA/DARPA, or the Farm Credit Administration. Maybe even the US Army Corps of Engineers.

But. Almost all? I don't feel like the National Transportation Safety Board is philanthropic, or the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, or the Office of Personnel Management, or the National Labor Relations Board, or the FDIC, or the Maritime Commission, or the Department of Labor, or the Office of the Federal Register

By example, regulations.gov lists 43 partner agencies here. That's obviously far from all regulatory agencies - that wouldn't even be one in each state, and every state in the union has a Department of Mines - but still, it's a decent sampling of the big ones. https://www.regulations.gov/agencies

Obviously it's open to debate, but I would personally identify four of those as philanthropic (AID, CNCS, EIB, NSF) and six more as partly philanthropic (DOC, DOL, ED, HUD, SBA, USDA). Whereas our opinions might differ, I'm sure you might agree that my opinion of 10 of 43 wouldn't fit the phrasing "almost all," at least?