Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
I could make almost any proposition look wrong and inconsistent using the Socratic method. But so what? It's a useful exercise in some contexts and can be fun (not in the first year of law school when you're on the receiving end, perhaps), but at the end of the day it has significant limitations. These "gotcha" posts don't establish anything about the specific ML situation IMO. Life is complex, everything doesn't reduce to clean lines, deal with it.
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Exactly. My hypothetical examples were meant to expand on the notion (which I inferred from your posts) that if nobody suffers measurable damages, there is no real problem.
The point I was clumsily trying to make with the comparison to the shill bidding thread of years gone by is that, at that time, the "damages" were the phony sales that were left hanging out there. Whether the bidder can't (or won't) honor the bid, or the AH won't (or in this case can't) complete the sale, the end result is non-sales looking like sales.
I was NOT in any way comparing what ML did, to the act of shill bidding and I'm sorry if that impression was given. I was aiming at the similarity of a party knowingly advancing the impression a sale was actually happening, when it was not. And, that in the previous discussion, this was seen as a decidedly damaging impact on the hobby.
Hopefully ML has retroactively removed those phantom lots from their auction results.
In short I was trying to establish whether deceit and phantom sales were ok, generally, if a lawyer couldn't bring suit (nobody hurt, no damages.) My journey down the slippery slope produced nothing conclusive.
My mind is big enough to recognize ML had to choose between a few bad options.