Decline a side bet that’s 50% of the main bet on an issue that’s tangential.
Accept bet in principle. How long do you anticipate before agreeing the issue is resolved? By that I mean, obviously a week from now is meaningless. At the same time, ten years is absurd: if the law were going to be overturned, it would happen well before ten years.
Absurd? Planned Parenthood v. Casey took a decade, and the issues had some commonality.
I’m not in a hurry. If you win, you’ll get my two bucks and my pity for what’s happening to your country, self-inflicted though it is.
Well, I’ve been here on this message board for nearly fourteen years. So, OK, ten years works for me, as long as you agree that if it’s decided by a lower court and the Supreme Court denies cert, that’s the end of it. In other words, we don’t automatically wait ten years – ten years is the upper limit.
Fine, whatever. I fail to see why this should be a matter of concern, given the low stake. Anything else you want to negotiate, like the colour of the envelope used to send the two dollars?
I’m leaning toward… white.
It’s not the money. It’s the ability to say, “Look, you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to unconstitutional laws.”
You suggestion of two dollars has already clarified how confident you are about your ability.
No, it is not acceptable. But neither is it involuntary. If abortion is a choice, so is everything you have to do to get one.
Well if we’re going to be mandating medically unnecessary procedures as pre-requisites why stop there? Why not require each applicant to complete a half-marathon in under 3 hours as well? It’s their choice to do it or not right?
Heck, you can say that now. You can also say you’re the King of France, if the mood strikes you. I could say it about you, were I so inclined. Hooray for freedom of expression.
If “it’s not the money”, as you say, the quantity is irrelevant. Feel free to get as much “neener neener” mileage out of the $2 figure as you can. The low suggested stake was more my way of expressing how silly the idea of betting on such a thing is. My proposed side bet should indicate clearly enough that I expect this issue to come down to the personal feelings of at least some of the SCOTUS Justices, i.e. I predict Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts support the ultrasound requirement, while Kagen, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor oppose, and Kennedy being the wildcard. If it was really a matter of pure and precise distillation of constitutional laws, free of all emotional and political influences, then I’d be far less confident of that prediction.
Anyway, since it may very well the better part of a decade before we see a decision (and one or more of the Justices may be replaced in the interim), I guess for now the wager issue is effectively moot.
Why, gosh, no, it’s obviously a measure of your insecurity in the issue! If you really believed it, you’d have bet your entire retirement account! Obviously! The low amount also indicates how little you care about the issue. If you felt it was of significant harm to the laws’ victims, you’d have borrowed to the hilt to declare a meaningful bet. Again, it’s just obvious!
I wonder about Bricker some days. He can’t even get in on a bar bet without trying to make partisan shit out of it. I do not believe I have ever known anyone more dishonest.
Two bucks is my entire retirement account.
Yeah, sorry to join the pile on here Bryan, but if you were really serious about this you should have offered to bet the same amount that Bricker did on his prediction that, after one year, the information provided by a pre-abortion ultrasound will have caused at least 30% of women seeking abortions in Wisconsin to change their minds about going through with the procedure.
It is a tempting “gotcha”, to ask for a bet. Any dollar amount suggested, X, invites “What, you’re too chicken to bet X+1? I guess you don’t have the courage of your convictions! The horse is on the other foot! I call neener on you!”
Of course, Bricker did say “It’s not the money”, just two sentences before saying the amount of money “clarified” things for him, so I guess the money matters when he wants it to.
Anyway, if he wins, I’ll send him a nice shiny toonie taped to the inside of the sappiest sympathy card I can find at the dollar store.
Is that an offer?
Sorry, but I disagree with this approach.
On this message board, a common tactic is to make all sorts of claims you don’t seriously believe, simply because they support your desired outcomes, and because there’s virtually no cost to being wrong.
When Virginia was contemplating a state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, a couple of posters argued against the move, claiming it would make prosecuting domestic violence complaints among persons living together very difficult. Now, of course there were many reasons to oppose this amendment, but that one was, quite simply, bullshit. Still the main proponent insisted this ill awaited Virginia.
So after Virginia had passed the amendment, and enough time had passed, I brought up the prediction – since, to no one’s great shock, the claimed epidemic of unprosecutable domestic violence cases failed to materialize.
And what was the reaction? “Bricker, get a life!” “Bricker, have you been keeping track of that all this time?” “Bricker, that was the past; forget about it!”
Because the bullshit was rewarded, you see. It was perfectly fine to spout it but heaven forfend someone get called on it.
That’s the game that’s being played now, right?
Game, shmame. You said “wanna bet?”, I said “okay, two bucks” and you were all “two bucks, what are you, chicken? bwock-bwock-bwock.”
I am fully prepared to pay you two bucks if SCOTUS either upholds the ultrasound requirement, or if a lower court does and SCOTUS chooses not to intervene. If you feel the “cost” isn’t high enough, too bad. My e-mail is in my profile so if one or both of us is no longer on this message board five to ten years from now when SCOTUS might address the issue, you should make a note of it now and contact me then.
Otherwise, you can drop the bet crap and I’ll be classy and do the same.
By the way, if you don’t and I win, I’d like an American two-dollar bill.
So if there were a proposed law mandating that an umarried woman choosing NOT to have an abortion would first have to sit through a 6 hour presentation about the difficulties and tragedies of single motherhood, overpopulation, how having a baby will probably severely decrease her future earnings, etc.; and we were debating the constitutionality and morality of this law, do you think you would care one way or the other whether 30% of prospective mothers would have their minds changed by it?
There are lots of decisions that people make in their lives, many of them quite grave (should I go to college? should I quit smoking? should I join the army?), and I can’t think of a single one of them in which people are freely allowed to make either choice, EXCEPT that in order to make one of them they must first be given a piece of information which, while technically true, is specifically designed to be as slanted as possible towards making them choose one specific way. Not to mention a piece of information which might cost money, not be easily or locally available, and involves a potentially humiliating medical procedure.
You mentioned smoking – how about the requirement forcing tobacco companies to use visual images that include horrifying images of smoking-associated medical problems?
Yeah… pregnant women, corporations… it’s all the same.
I’ve already matched the bet you placed on that particular claim. I’m not a gambling woman, but when I saw that you’d bet nothing then I could hardly resist betting nothing too.
I’d bet $20 Walker loses his next election, whether it is for Governor, POTUS, Congress, you name it.