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I argued with Ben Shapiro about his "Jews in Name Only" remarks, for instance. One can always hide behind vague phrases like that – what Wikipedia calls "weasel
by EGreg 3y ago
I argued with Ben Shapiro about his "Jews in Name Only" remarks, for instance. One can always hide behind vague phrases like that – what Wikipedia calls "weasel words" – and keep changing them.
Look through my comment history -- do I strike you as someone who dances around a point, or minces words? I am telling you how it is: you seem to be uninformed on how the US legal system works. Courts can't be used as "test suites" that you can just spin up, and legal jargon isn't the same as plain english, nor is it like code that you can just test for a binary outcome.
What you're suggesting is that I waste my time petitioning the SEC to look into Yu Gi Oh or Pokemon, which operated unregistered securities schemes 20 years ago, and they had ample opportunity to look at. I would be one of hundreds of thousands of such petitioners. They would they consult their own appetite for going after them in courts, which they clearly have none for. They care about crypto, they don't care about trading cards and children's shows, pure and simple. They are exercising their discretion in who they go after.
And by the way, the actual definition that was posted above, from their official site, is what you'd call vague:
The Commission, on the other hand, does not require vertical or horizontal commonality per se, nor does it view a "common enterprise" as a distinct element of the term "investment contract."
You could see why, in the face of such vague and amorphous language, a ton of things could be considered "a common enterprise", so the assertion "Yu Gi Oh definitely doesn't have a common enterprise" is laughable. If the SEC wanted to, they'd argue that it does. The definition is extremely vague.
The pseudo-intellectual bullshit is actually when you refuse to have consistent definitions, and just drone on about various things. New-Age practitioners or post-modern feminist or other movements have done this. Requiring people to be clear and define terms that sound vague is a basic requirement in math, science, and general rational discourse.