The Glade 4.0

I have to give you credit as well. You've consistently misrepresented my position for years.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There's also the fact that when you buy someone's silence, you don't magically make their knowledge of it go away, and they still have the ability to release the information whenever they want.

In point of fact, you did:



"As" clearly indicates a comparison.



No, you are correct. Me not liking him does not make him a fool. He is a fool because he uses disgust at humanity in general as a way to "provoke thought" when in fact, being disgusted at one's fellow humans in general is simply a sign of arrogance. This is compounded by the fact that a comedy routine necessarily oversimplifies issues that are far more complex than they appear in the routine, and



That's nice. However, practically anything can "provoke thought". Being able to "provoke thought" is faint praise indeed.



Doing provocative things is not indicitive of anything other than the ability to go outside customary social niceties. I dismiss it because it attempts to masquerade as social commentary when it's really just question-begging disguised with ridicule. I dislike George Carlin because of that. You have it backwards. I don't dismiss what he says becuase I don't like him. I think what he has to say is for the most part vapid, foolish and overly simplistic, and I disliek him because he pretends to look down on people in general from that extremely low pedastal.



I can. I also see that it's precisely the same argument a highschooler might use on his social studies teacher in favor of legalized prostitution. If the teacher would respond with a carefully-thought-out response, the high-schooler would no doubt simply dismiss the nuances and complexities because he really just wants to **** hookers, who in his mind, are fun, sexy, and attractive.

Carlin does much the same thing, except that because he's a comedian, no one responds to him at all. Instead, people quote him on the internet rather than make their own argument in favor of looser prostitution regulations. In that regard, he's provoked little thought.



I'm sorry, do I hold too low an opinion of a popular entertainer? I don't really care about whether I'm doing a disservice to his material or not. In point of fact, you've given me no reason whatsoever to think of Carlin as any more than an overgrown high school kid. All you really said was that he's trying to "provoke thought" and that high school kids hear it and think "Yeah! Hookers!"



Or perhaps you ought not to engage in your typical tactics of making baiting comments and playing semantic pedant in order to start an argument. Did I direct any personal comments at you? No? Then perhaps you ought not to be lecturing me for the horrible crime of insulting a comedian.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Where in the Constitution does it state that the government needs to justify any regulations or laws? To whom exactly does it need to justify them? You seem to think that the government must do so, and if it doesn't that's "tyrannical" regardless of public approval, so by what exact mechanism is this done?

The means for the government to justify its actions is elections. If a law is uncontroversial, that means it is justified. If it is controversial, the public needs to make its displeasure known so that the government can correct it to their pleasure. We have certain freedoms to facilitate this. If the government fails to do so, then other office-seekers can make an election issue of it. If the law is controversial in terms of Constitutionality, there is the avenue of courts.



Who exactly is getting pissy here, besides Shuyung making a big stink at me saying negative things about George Carlin who is A) dead and B) didn't post here when he was alive?

I don't have any particular obligation to justify my approval of the governments laws to you, any more than you need to justify your displeasure with any of them to me. I am not particularly interested in speaking for the government in regards to prostitution, child trafficking, or blackmail. I think the laws in these regards are fine. If you want to discuss why any of them ought to be changed, by all means, go ahead. If not, then don't. Me saying "I don't want to take the time to argue the governments case for it" is neither getting pissy nor is it a reason for you to ask for concessions. We're all just citizens here. I don't represent the government. People who support any particular law or governmental action do not need to justify themselves to those that oppose it any more than the reverse.



No. My argument is that if the public feels it is unjust, inadviseable, or whatever it is the job of the public to make its opinion (or rather, the prevailing opinion, since the public will never be unified) known either by petition, free speech, election, or if necessary, judicial action. Those are the methods of justification. There is no obligation on the part of the governemnt to go out and proactively campaign for and justify laws it has already passed in accordance with its granted powers. If we're going to do that, we may as well just have direct democracy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Or, "as do" clearly indicates an additive.

I don't know, how often do you "provoke thought"?

(See, that was an insult)
This does raise one question, what, if any, comedians do you enjoy?

Sure, except for the millions of letters-to-the-editor, reviews, editorials, commentary, etc.

Again, I haven't made any baiting comments, except for the one earlier in this post. I realize you have a hard time understanding that, because you need to make everything into some offense against you (oh, there was another one). My original purpose in joining the thread was to figure out how you could lead off a response on the complexities of blackmail with "I think the answer is quite simple". Instead, you've turned it into some rant on George Carlin, which I realize I got sucked into responding to, but in my defense I thought you were going to show some bearing on the original topic. I should have known better. (That was another dig).

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Diamondeye, we get it. You don't think laws need to exist in a logically consistent framework to be justified. We could have a law stating that it's illegal to walk backwards more than 23 steps while wearing a purple hat on the second tuesday of the month, and you'd think it's fine as long as no one disagreed with it.

However, this entire thread is based on a discussion between people who do not share this view. They think laws should be consistent and justified by reason. This is a pretty widely held belief by those in our justice system, including most lawyers, supreme court justices, legal scholars, the founding fathers, etc. So maybe you could just let these people discuss the issue in this framework?

It reminds me of back in the day when any sort of moral conundrum would come up in a thread and Taly would chime in with her "All morality is relative and thus this discussion is meaningless" stance. Great, we get it. Can we please move on?

(No offense Taly, it wasn't that bad and I had lots of interesting discussions with you. Just an example...)

An additive comparison. I'm glad we agree.



That's a silly question. How would one go about determining this?



So you really have no interest whatsoever in civil discourse. I didn't think so, but thanks for confirming it.



That's an even sillier question. What has it got to do with anything?



And how many of those did anything other than just quote Carlin, as if his agreement somehow lent support to what they were saying? Appealing to Carlin's authority is not thinking. It's quite common for people to simply quote a known figure as if the fact that someone famous made a comment of some sort is some unassailable argument.



Yes yes, you're very good at playing coy.



I realize you're very good at making the debate about your opponent instead of any sort of issue. It is, however, hilarious that you can make a comparison of me to a high school student, engage in pedantic semantic obfuscation to pretend you didn't, then claim I need to "make it into an offense against me" when the comment was directed at me in the first place, and then make a vague allusion to how I make "everything" about me.



That's nice. Especially when you admit that you got your panties all in a twist over my questioning of the quality of George Carlin's work. Thanks for conceding the point, however. Nothing I said about Carlin was intended to get you, or anyone else in an uproar. I simply found his silly attempts to "provoke thought" on prostitution similar to the question posed in the OP; the difference being that the OP seems to be actually about exploring the legal issues of meshing freedom of speech with a prohibition on blackmail, whereas Carlin is simply asking a stupid rhetorical question.

It is, however, telling that you decided to straight-up admit to making baiting comments in this post for no better reason than that I dislike George Carlin without first seeking your permission. You should really re-think what your priorities are on the issues you want to address.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yes, yes, you're a victim, I'm a meanie, how do I sleep with myself, blah blah blah.

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Amanar, we get it. It's much easier to simply dismiss my positions via strawman than it is to actually deal with them. Then you can get on about the important business of complaining that imaginary jurisprudence and Constitutional theory that exists nowhere besides the opinions of certain people is not being followed by "government".

The "logically consistent framework" is the system of electing leaders to determine what the laws will be, having elections, free speech, press, and petition, and the possibility of judicial challenge to laws.



If no one disagreed with it, what exactly would be the problem? You seem to ignore the fact that such a ridiculously inconvenient law that served absolutely no purpose and imposed considerable



Nowhere in our history of jurisprudence does anyone suggest that law must be "justified" outside the established procedures for creating, challenging, and changing it. No, I'm not just going to leave the thread and "just let people discuss it". Get over it. Nothing in our legal system establishes any procedure by which laws are reviewed for "consistency" or "justification by reason". The only "justification by reason" that's demanded is that if a law is challenged, the government must demonstrate to the court that the law reasonably adheres to the dictates of the Constitution, as well as the Constitution of the particular state if it's state law. If a law is displeasing to the public, they can demand it be changed or they can vote in new leaders who promise to change it.

That is the framework of consistency and justification referred to by the "lawyers, supreme court justices, legal scholars, the founding fathers, " to whose authority you are appealing.



In other words, I should just shut up because I'm saying things you don't like. No, sorry.

How do we know when laws are "justified"? What is a "just law"? To whom are these laws supposed to be "justified"? How is it, exactly, that a law that is uncontroversial to the public is established to be "unjustified"?

Those things are determined by the mechanisms I've described. Are you suggesting there is some other, objective criteria of justification to which laws are subject? If so, where is this found, and what exactly is the source of its authority?

The fact that certain individuals may think a law is "unjustified" or "inconsistent" or even "tyrannical" since that word is so fashionable, doesn't really matter much except insofar as those individuals are as welcome as anyone else to demand it be changed and try to convince their fellow citizens to agree.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yes, clearly pointing out that you came in to **** up the thread by starting a pointless argument over me not liking the preaching of Brother George is being a victim.

Next time, stick to the issue. Then you won't have to make pointless one-liners trying to save face.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You've got to be kidding me. You've vomited over every thread in here, and rapidly devolve into exceedingly tangential arguments, and you're going to tell me to stick to the issue? Mr. Kettle, call for you on line one, it's Mr. Pot. You've still not managed to circle back around to coming up with anything to address the initial topic of the intricacies of blackmail. In fact, you've spent thousands of words trying to get away from it. What exactly was your purpose in this thread?

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Guess what? It's not my obligation to explain myself to you.

The OP is a snippet of a post that alleges that because publishing derogatory information about a person and asking a person for money are independently legal, that some conundrum must exist in making the combination of those activities illegal as blackmail. I pointed out that there are similar situations involving selling sex, and selling porn. You correctly pointed out that selling children int he context of surrogate motherhood is legal. I agreed with that because, as I originally said, the illegality is dependent on the circumstances created when the two activities combine. In some cases, those circumstances are created, in others (such as surrogate motehrhood) they are not.

At that point, you then demanded I explain the circumstances surrounding blackmail. I told you no, I don't plan on doing that because I am not the ont making the law. The only thing I was pointing out is that combining two legal activities does not automatically create some contradiction or conundrum to be solved when deciding whether or not to legislate the combined activity.

My point was already made, by then, and I had nothing else to say. You said "but you said it's simple" I clarified that it's simple to understand that the whole (2 combined activities) is not necessarily the same as the sum of the parts. I referred to Carlin once again, simply because I'd used him as an example earlier, and because I object to the implication that just because 2 independently legal activities are combined and form an activity that is banned that there is some sort of problem that demands explanation.

To put it another way, this would be like arguing that because carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are all legal, that there's something inherently problematic in banning Sarin nerve gas.

At this point, you wanted to go off on this tangent about George Carlin's purpose with the totally unwarranted comparison to a high school student, at which point I expressed my opinion of Carlin in stronger terms. You also asked if I thought blackmail was complex. It is, but not for the simple reason of "revealing bad information is legal and asking for money is legal, why isn't blackmail?" The link in the OP explores these complexities, if you bothered to click it, so I see no need to rehash them

The only reason I can see that you continued on with the tangent about Carlin is that you probably happen to like Carlin and see my characterization of him as some sort of veiled attack on people that like him. It is positively amazing that you decided to go off on a tangent lecturing me about Carlin's "purpose" and demanding to know what comedians I like, then try to pretend I'm the one in the habit of taking threads on tangents. Did you have any purpose in this thread, or was it just a good day for you to pick a fight over nothing? In case it wasn't abundantly clear already, I didn't take any shots at you whatsoever, nor was that Carlin comment intended as a shot at anyone here. Once again, Carlin is dead, and didn't post here when he was living.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I did read the link, and my takeaway is this: It goes into how functionally-identical appearing circumstances can, in some cases, be blackmail and, in others, not. All you've managed to do is regurgitate that as, to paraphrase,'well, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't'. Which ... yeah? The topic isn't "why is blackmail illegal?", it's "what's blackmail?". A more apt comparison would be, in prostitution, if one hooker and client were legally having sex in exchange for money, and another hooker and client were illegally having sex in exchange for money. What is the material difference (leaving aside Nevada)? We can see a material difference between legal porn and illegal prostitution. Likewise, we can see a material difference between legal surrogacy and illegal child trafficking. Now, what's the difference between illegal child trafficking and legal adoption, though? For instance, does the presence of an escrow/middleman government agency matter that much?

I don't care what you think about Carlin and his routines. What I do see you doing, though, is the same thing you accuse Carlin of doing; oversimplifying for effect when the key is the nuance.

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Homer Plessy must be rolling over in his grave right now.

I'd explain why what you just said is stupid and dangerous, but I'm not obligated to explain myself to you.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I'm sorry to hear that.



No, you're not. However, since there's nothing either stupid or dangerous about it, there's nothing to worry about. I'm absolutely dying to know what this method of justification is other than the courts and the will of the public, that is so essential to constitutional government is, but that isn't actually mentioned in the Constitution. I'm sure, however, that since you're not obligated to explain what it is, you won't.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yes, you're correct. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. That was my entire point. When asking "what is blackmail?" we cannot assume that there has to be an absolute, that because it is okay under some circumstances to reveal damaging information about someone it therefore necessarily has to be under all circumstances or there's some problem with the law.



That's because I'm addressing the "sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't" thing. That part actually is simple. Carlin is oversimplifying for a different reason; he's trying to create a problem. His words imply there's a problem in that "selling **** is illegal" but don't exactly explain why.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."