Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a very anti-intellectual approach to dialog. It explicitly ignores the logic of the argument being made. It disqualifies any language containing words that are allegedly associated with some ideological perspective from even being considered. It creates an ideological echo chamber, as it is completely intolerant to any view that even hints at falling outside of it. If you do utilize such heuristics, at least don…
I encourage you to spend time in actual academic fora, where language choice absolutely will get you disqualified from a conversation. Nobody is obligated to listen to anybody.
IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
251–260 of 278 posts
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
No surprise that in both Great Britain and the US, the income tax was first instituted during a time of war. Only during a war, with the demands it places on the public conscience to make sacrifices, would the population acquiesce to an institution so contrary to natural rights and so pernicious to liberty.
Most new taxes come about at times when the locality creating them is under financial stress. Wars are financially stressful. Thus you'd expect that any given new modality of taxation would be created, with some relatively high probability, in proximity to a war.
A tax does not relieve financial stress in any general way. If it did, we would constantly raise taxes.
What a tax does is enforce a collective use of financial resources. The demand for such enforced collectivism increases when a threat emerges that can only be adequately dealt with using such collective action.
A foreign nation, engaged in organized violence, aka war, against a nation, is the most extreme example of a situation where enforcing collective action provides a benefit to the majority, and thus that's when people are most likely to sacrifice their liberty and accept a new tax.
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is called ad hominem. No matter how tempting it is, it's better to refrain from it. Focusing on superficial and peripheral qualities like use of particular words, instead of the claim being made, is fundamentally anti-intellectual.
It’s just experience in dealing with people online. I apply the same filter to “cuck,” “Overton window” and “Hegelian dialectic” for example. Offline it’s much easier to ascertain intentions and attitudes, and there aren’t millions of people all screaming at once. Online you have to filter, and alt-right buzzwords are excellent components of a healthy filter.
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's got to be a better term than "reverse virtue signaling" to describe how the use of specific terminology (outside of a legal setting) like "pernicious", "females", or "virtue signaling" instantly means that someone can be safely dismissed.
Does "pernicious" have some kind of political connotation now?
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering that your comment at issue didn't actually contain a gratuitous use of "female", you perhaps shouldn't focus too much of your argument on that bit and instead defend yourself only in regards to what you're actually being accused of. You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious infringement on th…
>>You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious infringement on those rights. I would be happy to debate my use of the term natural rights, but you're moving the goalposts. Let's reach a resolution on the previously discussed point before moving to another. The previous point was that dismissing a person, an…
I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. But when your comment has multiple red flags and little substance, the scales don't tip in your favor. There is absolutely no goalpost-moving involved in expecting your comment to have sufficient substance to balance out the rhetoric.
In a discussion about details of tax policy, I consider it a red flag when someone starts ranting about "natural rights"; they're clearly trying to drag things off-topic, and probably not in a particularly enlightening direction. When the comment goes downhill from there, I'm quite justified in rendering a judgement. There's nothing anti-intellectual about this. It's just a logical reaction to your inability to stay on-topic and level-headed for two whole sentences.
It would be anti-intellectual or at least inadvisably closed-minded to filter out your comments with a blind grep-like process for merely mentioning certain words. But the Bayesian process of reading until I understand what you're trying to say is the only sane way to interact with an Internet that contains an effectively limitless supply of crackpot ideas.
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's got to be a better term than "reverse virtue signaling" to describe how the use of specific terminology (outside of a legal setting) like "pernicious", "females", or "virtue signaling" instantly means that someone can be safely dismissed.
Does "pernicious" have some kind of political connotation now?
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does "pernicious" have some kind of political connotation now?
The word "pernicious" is very rare outside of a medical context, but the top Google result for "pernicious to liberty" is an anti-income tax screed.
That's hardly surprising. You chose a search term that was very likely going to get hits with anti-tax types.
If you simply searched "pernicious" you would find it being used in many, ideologically diverse, contexts.
Your real problem is with the position espoused (that the income tax is anti-liberty). The use of the term "pernicious" is incidental to that.
EDIT:
The top results I'm getting for "pernicious to liberty" aren't even dominated by tax-related articles:
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious infringement on those rights. I would be happy to debate my use of the term natural rights, but you're moving the goalposts. Let's reach a resolution on the previously discussed point before moving to another. The previous point was that dismissing a person, an…
> Again, moving the goalposts. I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. But when your comment has multiple red flags and little substance, the scales don't tip in your favor. There is absolutely no goalpost-moving involved in expecting your comment to have sufficient substance to balance out the rhetoric. In a discussion about details of tax polic…
Discussions of a social and economic nature are already hard enough to navigate constructively as it is.
I don't feel like dealing with shifts of goalposts on top of it. It just gets far too tedious.
So with all due respect, given your admission that you are changing the subject, I'm going to end our discussion. Not even because what you're doing is necessarily unreasonable. It's just too time-consuming for me to deal with.
Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#259Re: IRS reminds taxpayers to report virtual currency transactions
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course you need to report them. If you used AMZN stock to buy bubble gum or shoes, you'd have to report it too. Just because it is named crypto "currency" doesn't actually make it a currency...
You can’t possibly buy bubblegum using stock. Having the properties of a currency makes them currencies!