It begins by saying that hiding your beliefs “is lying”. I’m pretty confident that the sort of belif-hiding being discussed in the post is not something most people would label “lying”
Hiding your beliefs in ways that predictably leads people to believe false things is lying.
What’s the moral weight of video game characters? Or electrons? Especially if you’re going to count bees so much.
Never mind having to prioritize bees or ants, we should prioritize the welfare of video game characters by this standard.
Of course, the problem is that putting numbers like 14 on bees is just an attempt to make things seem falsely precise.
Then surely you can twist some part of the constitution to find some relevance to land value taxes as I’ve proposed them.
It’s not hard. “Reducing the value of the land is illegal as an uncompensated taking” or “this tax is unconstitutional because it violates the rule about direct taxes” (twisting the definition of direct tax so they can include it, of course) or even just due process because if the tax is instituted, the owner has no way to contest it.
You could say “those arguments are obviously wrong, so they don’t count”. You could say “they don’t apply those arguments in other situations—that’s special pleading and sophistry”. But it doesn’t matter how good or bad the Constitutional arguments are, only that a court would make them. And of course from our point of view 50 years in the past, they are obviously bad arguments to everyone, but 50 years in the past, Constitutional arguments about gay marriage were obviously bad too.
Also, do you concede you were wrong about the U.S. not taking on $1T of debt?
No. The national debt is 33T total, so 1T is a substantial portion of it. Nothing like that can, in practice, be put into place without a complete political realignment.
I explicitly asked for “legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution”, because that’s what’s actually relevant here. Then you bring up legislation that was struck down based off the 14th amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses.
One prominent method by which the courts overturn things is by stretching and twisting the Constitution to cover the thing they want to overturn. It’s going to “have something to do with the Constitution” after the fact, even if it didn’t before.
I’m pretty sure that if you had described the Defense of Marriage Act 50 years before the fact to just about any judge or lawyer, they’d have said it had nothing to do with the Constitution, just like a land tax.
The Defense of Marriage act was legislation.
Yes, this is something that the court can do to any policy. If you’ll notice, high profile Supreme Court decisions are supposedly decided based on the Constitution, but actually depend on the political affiliations of the judges. It’s already happening.
That doesn’t mean that the system is completely screwed up, that means that the system is screwed up for any politically significant policy that the court wants to overthrow. You shouldn’t ask yourself if the policy violates the Constitution; you should ask yourself if the policy is politically significant. If it is, whether the court lets it through depends on politics, not on the Constitution.
In the specific case of decisions many years in the future, the fact that the political landscape changes after so many years makes it more likely that the court’s decision will be screwed up than if you just went to court today.
The way you’ve “misclassified” it is that the court can say anything they want, and anything you say that disagrees with the court is, by the standards “who has the guns and enforces the rules”, misclassification.
You’re not debating the court in a truth-seeking process where you get to win if you can show flaws in their arguments. It doesn’t matter exactly what the court’s reasoning is, since they are a court and you’re not, and what they say goes. They just say it’s unconstitutional, post some decision that I’m sure you’ll disagree with, and voila, it’s unconstitutional.
I am not advocating for unconstitutional policies, so judges can’t overturn it.
That’s exactly what someone advocating for a 50 year delayed rule to make sure gay marriage is prohibited would have said, 50 years ago. It turns out that according to the only people who matter, yes he would have been advocating for unconstitutional policies.
It is not possible for the debt to be anywhere near 1T because the government is going to refuse to get into debts that high, not because the number is not mathematically possible.
The problem with your proposal is that a sufficiently motivated legal system will just abrogate it. In order to have a scenario where the system is sufficiently motivated, it would have to be something like gay marriage. There will be things that people 50 years in the future will treat like they treat gay marriage now.
Of course your proposal will work for some policy that nobody cares about. The test is how it works on policies that people do care about.
On the first point, if they renege on the policy, the debt is worth $1T if they don’t default (assuming the same discount rate as it was upon issuance).
It’s not possible for the debt to be anywhere near 1T. More generally, it’s not possible for the debt to be anything that the government wouldn’t be willing to pay as a normal expenditure. “$1T to make sure gays won’t get married 50 years from now when it’s only weirdoes who think something that absurd would ever happen” won’t fly.
What possible constitutional reason could the courts use to overturn the validity of this debt, i.e. specifically the debt I’ve proposed?
Void for being against public policy. You can’t have a debt which disappears only if gay marriage is illegal, if the courts say that there’s a right to gay marriage. The intent of the debt is to encourage unconstitutional actions on the part of the government, which is against public policy.
And why would the courts have waited 50 years instead of acting before the debt is issued?
Because the whole point of this scheme is to insure against social changes that prevent the government from following through on the 50 year commitment. Obviously those changes would be more likely to show up near the end of the period, not the beginning.
Remember that the government is “defaulting” on debt that the owners of the debt are supposed to expect might go away anyway if the policy is passed. So nobody should be able to rely on the debt anyway.
And it absolutely does matter that the courts declared the debt invalid, because 1) the courts are supposed to decide based on the law, not based on how it changes the government’s reputation and 2) the investor can see the court decision and understand that it’s made for reasons that apply to weird debts and not to normal debts, reducing the hit in reputation.
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that all debts are the same and that therefore when the US fails to make good on this debt, that extends to the US’s credibility for debts in general. You gloss over this point by asking “how much” while ignoring that “how much” includes “not really anything significant”. You can’t just assume it’s significant.
This also ignores the possibility that the decision to discard the debt is made by a branch of the government that doesn’t care about the US’s reputation. For instance, the courts might declare the debt to be against public policy, or even unconstitutional.
The behavior I was referring to, specifically, is not rudeness (or else I’d have quoted Alice’s first comment, not her second one), but rather Alice taking as given the assumption that she has some sort of claim on Bob’s reasons for his actions
How does that apply if Alice and Bob are a metaphor for trying to decide between Alice-type and Bob-type things inside your head? Surely you have a claim on your own reasons for your actions.
Show me a rewritten version of this dialogue which supports your suggestion, and we’ll talk.
“Should I do (list of things said by Alice in the post)? Or should I do (list of things said by Bob in the original post)?”
Whether it’s considered serious to default on an ordinary debt need not have much to do with whether it’s considered serious to default on an unusual type of debt like this.
Smiling is communication. The information content of a message is inversely proportional to its probability. If you smile at strangers in places or situations where that’s very unusual, you’re communicating pretty strongly, and not necessarily what you intend to communicate.
This is of course correct.
The initial post seems like a geek fallacy: that you can just logically analyze social skills and come up with the optimum way to do social things as a workaround to not understanding social skills the normal way. This pretty much always fails, because analyzing social skills to enough level of detail that you can actually do that is really difficult. Couple with the tendency of “rationalists” to take one idea and follow it as far as they can without sanity-checking it or applying Chesterton’s fence, and you get disaster.
I think you lack imagination if you think that Alice can’t express those ideas without being rude. For instance, “Alice” and “Bob” could be a metaphor for conflicting impulses and motives inside your own head. Trying to decide between Alice-type ideas and Bob-type ideas doesn’t mean that you’re being rude to yourself.
The point of the post is to be about ideas. Alice is only there as a framework for presenting the post’s ideas.
If Alice is expressing the ideas rudely, that’s just a deficiency in how the post presents them. Saying “I’d ignore Alice because she’s rude” is missing the point; it’s as if the post had Alice be an angel and you replied “I’d ignore Alice because angels don’t exist”.
The proper reaction is “the post is flawed in that it attributes the ideas to a rude character, but in order to engage with the thesis of the post I should ignore this flaw and address the ideas anyway”.
Deletionism and inclusionism, and a lot of problems with Wikipedia in general, are related to people with OCD editing Wikipedia. People with OCD are going to be very reluctant to not apply a rule 100% of the time even if the rule itself describes subcases where you’re not supposed to apply it 100% of the time.
This is on top of problems with people using deletionism or inclusionism as excuses (because it’s a lot easier to get your way if you can point to a rule). And the political bias, which is real to the point where you should not trust anything on Wikipedia that is a live political topic on the Internet, because there will also be such people on the Internet editing the Wikipedia article and it’s a tossup as to who wins.