On Thu, 2016-09-22 at 10:40 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > On Wed, 21 Sep 2016, Aris Merchant wrote: > > Um. New guy here. Sorry, but I'm a bit confused. If I'm getting this right > > you're objecting... > > To something you proposed? That doesn't sound right. I think I'm getting > > confused? > > Or what are you doing? And what doses the "do so mean"? I'm sorry, I'm > > probably making > > some error here. > > -Aris > > Saying "I do so" when quoting a previous intent generally means "now that the > waiting > period has passed, I do what I wrote above". > > But I *think* ais523 is just being silly. I pointed out earlier that I had > in fact > ratified the report so e didn't need to, so ais523 objects to eir own intent > (so it will fail) and then claims to do it - which does nothing since there is > an objection. If I'm wrong, maybe ais523 will enlighten us...
Right, I suspect that it fails. "I support and do so" used to be pretty common and was widely treated as working, even if the support earlier in the sentence was required for the dependent action later in the sentence to work correctly. Therefore, by analogy, we should expect "I oppose and do so" to fail even though the action was possible at the start of the sentence. However, the situation here is a bit more complex. In the case of "I support and do so" both actions are possible, so it doesn't matter whether this is one combined action, or whether they're two separate actions with neither conditional or the other. With "I oppose and do so", I can see a reasonable argument that the entire sentence fails to accomplish anything because there's no way to both oppose /and/ perform the ratification. Alternatively, you can argue that the ratification succeeded, on the basis that you can successfully both oppose the action and perform the action if the performance of the action comes first! This requires "I X and Y" to not be equivalent to "I X, then Y", but the two have a different meaning in logic, and possibly a different meaning in standard English. (Note that in "I support and do so", the support definitely has to come first, so the problem doesn't arise.) Mostly, though, this is a case where the ratification doesn't actually do anything useful even if it succeeds, but nobody had objected to it, so I got to try out a little logical snarl-up just for fun. I'm not entirely sure it merits a CFJ, especially as it seems to have no gameplay effect (there's no longer a requirement for offices to report on when their reports were last ratified; maybe we should add it back, because it was useful). -- ais523
