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No honest person construes disagreement between anonymous strangers on a message board as "quashing dissent." I am stating this first as a warning, since resor

No honest person construes disagreement between anonymous strangers on a message board as "quashing dissent." I am stating this first as a warning, since resorting to such devices will terminate my patience in short order. The statement "X is Y" is a universal assertion. There is a way to reason about disagreement regarding universal assertions. It is to state "X believes that Y is Z." In more colloquial terms, one says "I believe that Y is Z" if one is explaining one's reasoning rather than directly advancing an argument of fact. You yourself have appealed frequently to universal truths regarding constitutionality. If you had originally said "just because the Supreme Court ruled something as constitutional, it doesn't mean that I believe it is constitutional," then no-one would have batted an eye. You are doing it again when you assert that I am conflating legality and morality. 'Legality' is a set of truths that arise contingent on an arbitrary set of premises. 'Morality' is an appeal to universality. You are not saying to me: "you are equating legality with the moral code of my Hassidic faith," or whatever. You are introducing the notion of a universal morality that I am confusing with legality. Were you forced to refer to a moral text, you would be confounded by the fact that the Constitution is, in fact, explicitly a legal rather than a moral text. The Constitution cares not a whit for the Bible nor the Koran in its functioning. It does not rule the good differently than the evil. It is a foundation of law, and solely of law. So which do you chose? I do not care at all about your opinion regarding the constitutionality of how the Supreme Court rules. I do care about your assertion that there is a universal constitutionality (or lack thereof) to laws that the Supreme Court has not correctly discerned, and that we should thus somehow discard the Constitution in order to save it.

mindslight 8y ago
As you said, it is a message board. Basically everything is prefaced with an implicit "I believe", "in my experience", or "in my context". For example, "it is dark outside". The phrasing of my original statement itself made it quite clear that I was invoking a definition of constitutional different from the simplistic what the Supreme Court decided. The reason I have characterized it as "quashing dissent" is that you are attempting to rule out what I have said categorically, by choosing definitions and then arguing that my statement is nonsensical with your definitions. > You are doing it again when you assert that I am conflating legality and morality I said it was akin. If one thinks marijuana is bad, then it's awfully convenient to counter an argument advocating its benefits with a simple statement that it is illegal. This removes the argument from the context of debating the substance on its own merits, and causes the proponent to fight an uphill battle to get back there.

mindslight 8y ago

As you said, it is a message board. Basically everything is prefaced with an implicit "I believe", "in my experience", or "in my context". For example, "it is dark outside". The phrasing of my original statement itself made it quite clear that I was invoking a definition of constitutional different from the simplistic what the Supreme Court decided. The reason I have characterized it as "quashing dissent" is that you are attempting to rule out what I have said categorically, by choosing definitions and then arguing that my statement is nonsensical with your definitions. > You are doing it again when you assert that I am conflating legality and morality I said it was akin. If one thinks marijuana is bad, then it's awfully convenient to counter an argument advocating its benefits with a simple statement that it is illegal. This removes the argument from the context of debating the substance on its own merits, and causes the proponent to fight an uphill battle to get back there.