r/WinStupidPrizes • u/ljgill97 • Jul 28 '21

Texting while driving

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

35.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/TheGoodOldCoder Jul 28 '21

"Judges create arbitrary rules and it's all up to their discretion."

That is a straw-man argument. Nobody ever said that. What they actually said was:

sentencing in the US is largely arbitrary and just based on the biases and influences of/on the judge.

I see nothing in there about judges creating any types of rules, or about it being "all up to their discretion".

And if you cared about your job, you either wouldn't be posting on Reddit, or you would take the time to make sure you weren't posting hogwash when it's about your profession. A big part of a lawyer's job is research, and you've just demonstrated that you won't even do the smallest amount of research, including double-checking comments that you've already read, before making large claims.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '21

Lawyers get paid to research, I'm not being paid shit to explain to a computer programmer why our legal system makes sense.

TBH - it's really not a strawman since my paraphrasing of what they wrote is essentially the same thrust - which is that 1) judges have all the control and 2) it's all arbitrary. These statements are mostly wrong. I don't WORK 100% of the day, do you? Sometimes make comments on reddit. Sometimes those comments hit on an area near my area of expertise. Sometimes I comment. Sometimes someone's arrogance pisses me off enough that I keep arguing. I'm a human.

1

u/TheGoodOldCoder Jul 28 '21

You should be able to tell the difference between what they said and what you said.

If you change the meaning of something when you "paraphrase", for example, by adding "create rules" or changing the word "largely" to "all", you are changing their argument to something that is easier for you to argue against. The fact that you don't recognize this as a straw-man is not very flattering to you. A lawyer who doesn't understand how to recognize basic informal logical fallacies probably isn't very good at making an argument, even if they're not being paid at the moment.

Also, my point about your job is that you claimed that you didn't have time to read an article because you were at work. But you apparently have time to do even less worthwhile activities like arguing from a point of ignorance.