I’ve put up a wager of two bucks. You’ve put up nothing. Despite my I-hope-obvious contempt for the idea of a wager in the first place, and my announced intent to mock you even if you won, the two dollars will be real money.
Well, it’s Canadian money. You’re free to view it as you wish.
Good, you agree it’s a good cause. Thread’s over, I guess.
Ah, Bricker Bricker Bricker… I never had any respect for you. Frankly, that some people on this board are impressed by you is astonishing to me, and that some people praise you for occasionally dialing back your crazy from extreme to moderately extreme is baffling.
I’ve got two dollars worth of confidence. So far you have nothing worth of nothing. I asked for your idea of a worthy stake and got “a bit of money”. My request for specificity went ignored. I provisionally declare your offer of a wager to be fraudulent - your real purpose was to create a fiction from which you could try to argue that you were winning on some tenuous moral basis.
When? I must have missed your acceptance among all the sneering about fake confidence and whatnot.
Nah, $2 will be fine. If SCOTUS sustains the ultrasound requirement, I’ll send you a Canadian two-collar coin. If they strike it down, I expect an American two-dollar bill. If they decline the case, then whatever the last lower court said determines the winner.
The reason not to take that bet doesn’t lie in one’s lack of confidence in the Supreme Court’s decision, but in one’s lack of confidence in you actually paying.
Oh, I’m confident Bricker will cough up two bucks but, yes, I expect a SCOTUS decision to be a near 50/50 kinda thing, as the court now stands.
If Scalia/Thomas/Roberts/Alito (or some subset thereof) leaves the court in the near future, letting Obama replace them, I daresay the odds improve for me. If Republicans recapture the Senate and the White House in 2016 and Kennedy/Breyer/Ginsburg leave the court afterward (not an unlikely event; the youngest of them is now 74) allowing a Republican to replace them, the odds shift to Bricker.
I’ve got a perfect track record. I’ve won and lost many wagers here in the more than thirteen years I’ve been a member of this board, and I have never once refused to pay.
You could both send your money to someone of spotless integrity to hold in a crow. A Texan would be ideal, given their reputation for straightforward candor.
How should I know, i’m not a lawyer. Considered it, once, but my grandmother begged me not to besmirch the family heritage of bootleggers and horse thieves.
So now an overconfident prediction needs some kind of consequence? Because … ? It’s so awful when someone on the internet is overconfident?
It might be because they are misinformed, or because they are being hyperbolic, or because they are grandstanding for rhetorical purposes, or misdirecting for propaganda purposes, or it might be just because whatever authority came down with a decision was wrong. It happens.
In any of these cases, what is the need for some kind of deterrent sanction? Is this really a monstrous evil, especially when there are people on this board who don’t engage in this kind of behavior?
I mean, come on, Bricker. You are often smart, you are often right, you are always rhetorically precise, but sometimes you go off the rails, by misunderstanding (purposely?) the subject of an argument (is it legal or is it right?). It’s almost Aspergerish.
