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Idk for certain, but it feels like very bad decision on polymarket’s side. If they start engage in such technicalities, eventually it would mean that typical b

• jjmarr 9mo ago
  Standard Polymarket legalese for invasions requires the goal of indefinite "control of territory" for this reason. Raids don't qualify. This issue already happened with the war in the Middle East when Israel engaged in cross border raids that weren't intended to establish permanent control.
  • lukev 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Aloisius 9mo ago
      Why would speech count as action? Am I running if I say "I'm running now" while I sit in my chair?
      • toss1 9mo ago
        It does in situations where the speech is itself an action. E.g., "I declare the meeting open", or "The race starts when I say 'Go'... Take your marks, Set, Go!", etc.
      • shimman 9mo ago
        Well the difference is you're a random commentator and the other is the sitting US President. One person's words matter more than the others, at least globally, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure it out.
        • Aloisius 9mo ago
          Speech is not action regardless of speaker. I don't care if the almighty comes down, waves their tentacle and says "let there be light" - if it's still dark after their pronouncement, then anyone who bet a light would appear should lose the bet.
          • thaumasiotes 9mo ago
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance Trump's declaration that he is taking over Venezuela fits pretty comfortably within this category. In your terms, a light did appear. You're right that the light is not directly connected to the utterance. But since the argument above that there was no invasion is premised on a lack of intent to invade rather than on the invasion not having happened, the utterance disproves that.
      • burkaman 9mo ago
        The language says "if the United States commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela". Emphasis on "intended to". Speech does count as intention, even if you haven't successfully achieved whatever you say you're doing. If the President says the US intends to control Venezuela, then the Polymarket statement is true.
        • jjmarr 9mo ago
          The military has to intend to control territory in the occupation sense. That means controlling the land, not the government. "Venezuela" refers to the land not the state. All the Israel markets have clearly established this interpretation. Israel has done many raids intended to influence foreign governments, but not to control territory, and those markets didn't count as invasion. There are other markets if you wanted to speculate on regime change or any kind of military action, but "invade" has a specific meaning. This happens every single market and it's free money for people that understand the rules.
          • burkaman 9mo ago
            I don't use Polymarket so if this is the established precedent then that's fine, but I will maintain that it's a crazy interpretation of the word. One country's military violently ___ing another country and taking prisoners with the explicit goal of controlling that country is clearly an invasion. I'm struggling to think of another verb that could work in that sentence. Edit: I guess "raiding" as you say, but that's a tactic used during a war, and apparently we aren't at war. If Israel had announced after a raid that their intent was to control the target country, then I would say their raid was actually an invasion.
            • jjmarr 9mo ago
              From watching Polymarket, every war ends up being in some weird grey area that screws up the market. It's really hard to write unambiguous rules when there's money on the line. My favourite invasion market was the Syria one, where Israel took the peak of a mountain on the border of the Golan Heights and the rest of Syria, and there was a huge dispute over whether the peak itself counted as Syria proper. https://polymarket.com/event/will-israel-invade-syria-in-2024 https://polymarket.com/event/will-israel-invade-syria-in-202...
      • mattkrause 9mo ago
        Speech can certainly be an action. "I'm running now" doesn't make you jog if you're sitting down, but it certainly kicks off a campaign if you were considering elected office. JL Austin called these sort of statements "performative utterances" and there's a lot of linguistic debate about them. Nevertheless, "I declare war", uttered by someone with the power to do so, is pretty unambiguously an example of one.
    • gvedem 9mo ago
      head of state or not, how much worth would you accord that man's word on anything?
      • Y-bar 9mo ago
        I would trust Trump to deliver on political promises just as much as I trust Musk to deliver on industry ones.
        • lenerdenator 9mo ago
          Which promises, the benevolent ones, or the malevolent ones? Because those should earn two very different amounts of trust.
    • notahacker 9mo ago
      Trump also said he won the 2020 election. (A relevant point is that people were still betting on Trump winning the 2020 election even after the results were out in part because it was possible that Polymarket would side with his opinion, but it's probably for the best they didn't...)
      • ElectronCharge 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        • jaapbadlands 9mo ago
          Alright, let's see the proof.
    • elfly 9mo ago
      Yeah but that's still not an invasion. Does your boss invade your home every day you work at home? Boots on the ground, baby.
      • burkaman 9mo ago
        There were literally boots on the ground. They left, because that's what happens when an invasion ends. It doesn't mean the invasion retroactively never happened.
        • kasey_junk 9mo ago
          Yeah we have a word for the other thing. An occupation.
    • jkaplowitz 9mo ago
      If the requirement was for the goal of indefinite control of territory, this declaration doesn’t match the requirement even if such declarations do count: he said the US will be running Venezuela during this transition (or “for now” in the particular version you quoted - of course his exact words do vary from moment to moment), not indefinitely.
      • whycome 9mo ago
        how long is now?
        • jkaplowitz 9mo ago
          Depends, but some things it could mean include clear intent to end the situation within the foreseeable future, taking it outside some but not all definitions of indefinite.
      • dragonwriter 9mo ago
        > If the requirement was for the goal of indefinite control of territory, this declaration doesn’t match the requirement Yes, it does. “For now” has no definite endpoint and thus states that the mission targets indefinite control of territory. (“Until <clear objective endpoint>” is not, on the surface, indefinite, though if the endpoint is a fixed point in time but one of conditions that may or may not ever be met, it might still be indefinite if the criteria is temporal definition, but “for now” is indefinite by any standard.) It does not target permanent control, but permanent is distinct from indefinite.
        • jkaplowitz 9mo ago
          I’ve definitely seen media reports using language similar to what I said outside of my parenthetical, which I don’t view as indefinite. I also don’t find “for now” to be clearly indefinite, but I agree it depends on which of multiple definitions of “indefinite” you use, and it does fit some definitions. (Similarly, “permanent” also has multiple definitions, some of which overlap with some meanings of “indefinite”.)
    • Alex2037 9mo ago
      [dead]
  • Supermancho 9mo ago
    The US didn't kill all Iraqis, so it was just a "limited" military action or "raid" also? The intent was a nation removing the head of another nation to cede control of the nation to the invading nation. If you kill 1 or 100,000, it's still an invasion. If a nation assassinates a leader, then leave the country to their own devices (which may include a more friendly replacement), I could see the ground on this logic. NEITHER of these events (killing nor elected replacement) has happened. The US has asserted control.
    • notahacker 9mo ago
      The US has asserted control with words and threats, not with sustained military presence or a successor not approved by the previous Venezuelan administration. The Venezuelan military has full control of its territory, and leadership has passed to the next in line to the Venezuelan presidency who even Trump acknowledges needs to be negotiated with to get the oil he wants, and is busy telling her own domestic audience Maduro is still her president. It's obviously far closer to assassinating a leader and leaving the country to its own devices than the complete destruction of the Iraqi army as a viable fighting force, installation of an entirely new government and extended military occupation, or even something like Russia's ultimately unsuccessful annexation of Kherson.
      • tuwtuwtuwtuw 9mo ago
        So if you enter a country using a military force and arrest the president quickly enough, it's not an invasion? How slowly would it need to be done to be counted as an invasion? A day? A month?
        • Reason077 9mo ago
          Intent is important here. It’s an invasion if the objective is to establish sustained military control over some portion of the country’s territory. But if the intention is some other military objective: blow up a military base, kidnap a president, etc, and get out quickly, then I don’t think the word “invasion” applies.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • yorwba 9mo ago
    Where do I find that standard legalese on Polymarket? https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-us-invade-venezuela-in-2025 https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-us-invade-venezuela-in... only shows some "additional context" added after the fact. Edit: I see now that you have to select one of the possible dates, scroll down to the rules section, and then expand it.
  • NickC25 9mo ago
    yeah but the difference is with Israel, they didn't literally take a foreign country's leader hostage and extract him out of the country.
• bigyabai 9mo ago
  Polymarket users will remain foolishly optimistic for longer than it takes for Polymarket's reputation to collapse, unfortunately. Predictions and betslop are a scourge on this poor and fiscally irresponsible nation.
• bostik 9mo ago
  This has already been the case for political and/or social impact events for years in the UK's betting exchanges. The settlement rules for any potentially hairy real-world event have to be explicitly clear and account for all possible outcomes that might affect the resolution. When there's money on the line, I have years of hard evidence that arm-chair lawyers (ie. betting exchange clients) will do absolutely anything to find potential loopholes in settlement rules and argue that their bets should have paid off.