71–80 of 102 posts
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Do you think that for the same reasons 1 and 2 it should also be illegal in other cases to offer not to do something in exchange for money?
Can you give a specific example?
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You missed the entire part about context. Threatening with legal action does not make a victim, while threatening with something illegal like blackmail does. In your example you aren't asking for money not to hurt them, like with blackmail. You are asking for money to give up your legal right to do something. Intent also counts in law.
Blackmail isn't threatening with something illegal. You have a legal right to reveal embarrassing information about someone.
Yes, but you don't have the right to threaten to do it for extortion. Again, context matters. If you still don't get it I give up.
Sounds like that Simpsons episode ( https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Bob_Next_Door ): Bob arrives at The Five Corners and has himself and Bart (with his hands and feet bound with duct tape) stand in two of the states at the meeting point. He then tells Bart of his plan to murder him: Bob will stand in one state; reach into a second state and shoot his gun; have the bullet travel through a third state; hit Bart in…
I find the argument quite ridiculous, but worse, the premise seems flawed. Contrary to the authors claim, publishing humiliating information would probably fall under defamation, which is illegal. At least in my country.
Though not stated in the abstract, I assume that the information to be published is true. In the US, truth of a statement is an absolute defense against defamation. That is, regardless of how humiliating the information is, no matter the personal embarrassment from its release, no matter my intentions in releasing it, it cannot be defamation if the information is true.
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Can you give a specific example?
You gave a nice view from your house. I own the land next to your house and tell you I will build a new house blocking your view unless you pay me not to do that.
It depends a bit on intent though - if the purpose of building the house is just to extort the other landowner of money, and it would make a meaningful difference to their house value, it starts to get a lot more grey to me.
There are a whole string of scenarios between “not blackmail”, to “probably not blackmail” to “definitely blackmail” depending on the scenario. A bit like how with assault if you poked someone that is probably fine, but that doesn’t make punching someone in the face ok (but what is a punch if not a bigger poke?).
What a pathetic straw man of a paper. It’s transparently obvious that blackmail is not a victimless crime given it’s not hard to identify who the victim is in a case of blackmail. Secondly their argument (blackmail comprises two parts each of which is legal on its own and therefore should be legal when done together) is both untrue on its face and fails given there are lots of things which are legal in isolation that…
Using 36” gas chainsaw is legal, and performing surgery is legal. Yet I am prosecuted for gross malpractice — how can this be? /s
It's like saying the concept of Spaghetti Carbonara is a Paradox because I don't like eating plain spaghetti, and I don't like eating Bechamel Sauce, but I DO like eating those two things combined. Paradox!
Is this what passes for "insight" in economics nowadays? Can't wait to hear this author use the same logic elsewhere. "It's legal to wish for someone's death, and legal to hand over briefcases full of cash. In this paper I will demonstrate how hiring a hitman is, in fact, ..." or "It's well-known that hydrogen is an explosive gas, and oxygen is an explosive gas, Q.E.D., the author maintains that the chemical H2O shou…
It's someone with a passing knowledge of logic and expecting justice to work like boolean logic (a && b = true but the current legal system says it's false!)
It basically says "In this essay we will use the economic theories of Adam Smith to show why something should be ethically ok from a philosophy of law perspective".
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Using 36” gas chainsaw is legal, and performing surgery is legal. Yet I am prosecuted for gross malpractice — how can this be? /s
It's a very thin definition of the word "paradox". It's like saying the concept of Spaghetti Carbonara is a Paradox because I don't like eating plain spaghetti, and I don't like eating Bechamel Sauce, but I DO like eating those two things combined. Paradox!
Writing nonsense is not a crime. Being a paid academic is not a crime. Writing nonsense as a paid academic should be a crime.
https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Case%20for%20Discrimination%20Wa...
A few soundbites from that book which show that this guy is pretty disgusting:
> When women enter in the military in any great numbers, it will be a threat to the entire human race.
> Today, we consider the silver lining involved in term limits: it reduces the percentage of female politicians.
> It is eminently reasonable to bet that some black kid can dunk the basketball and some Oriental kid with thick glasses can solve the quadratic equation. If this be racism, well, so much the worse for me; it is just common sense applied to a sensitive issue. Here is another example Walter Williams offers. Suppose you go into a room and you see a tiger sitting on a couch. What do you do? You have two courses of action. One, you could be prejudiced against tigers and close the door (laughter) and sort of hold the door there and call the cops or the animal control people. Or you can be unprejudiced, don’t pre-judge tigers, don’t profile this tiger on the basis of previous tiger behavior. Here, you go up to the tiger, and say “Hey, what’s happenin’ tiger?” (laughter) “How’s it shakin’?” and you try to give him a high-five. Or, you ask him “Are you vicious?” You are open-minded: just because every other tiger you’ve ever met will bite, you stay open to the possibility that maybe this tiger won’t. If this is racism (or species-ism), make the most of it. This sort of thinking is just behaving on the basis of empirical evidence. Or, to get back to what I was talking about, the same applies to making the claim that blacks have a lower productivity than whites, on average. There are various theories as to why this should be. People on the left say, This is due to racism, or a vestige of slavery. In the view of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, it is based on IQ. But I am not interested in why this is the case. I am only interested in the conclusion: on average, blacks have lower productivity. That’s why they have lower wages, not because of prejudice and discrimination
Yeah, I think I will get my ethical views from someone else.