I’m gonna disagree with this. Shodan is actually a pretty decent person when he isn’t talking politics. Away from left v. right, he ceases viewing the world in black and white, and becomes an interesting human being. But once back in a political conversation, his knee reliably jerks, and there ceases to be any nuance to him.
It feels like this observation has been made many times. I don’t remember if they have all been posted by the same person, but they’ve all been silly – and far more annoying than Shodan’s sign-off line.
Other words and expressions that can (depending on context) mean “fuck off”:
nice, charming, sweet, friend, fugoff, idiot, goodbye, good day sir, happy for you, get well soon, later, this, that, and and.
I hope we can all stop using those words outside the Pit.
Bless your heart.
May your hemorrhoids shrink without surgery,
Shodan
Gotta have context, after all. 
Even better!
Oh, you’re a special kind of stupid, aren’t you? Since you seem to be having trouble with reading comprehension and projecting that onto me - I understand every word he wrote. And I also know there was no trial on Anita’s accusations, so the admissibility of the polygraph is irrelevant. It is suggestive that she passed a polygraph and would-be Justice Thomas declined to take one, however, so anyone calling her a liar had better produce a goddamn cite, or blow it out their ass.
You’re welcome to disagree. I have been hanging around this place for 15 years and haven’t seen any evidence of what you say, but perhaps I’m just hanging out in the wrong sub-forums.
I don’t recall seeing him state that, but then again I don’t read every post on SDMB.
Judging from his replies in this thread, I’m sure his tongue was planted firmly in cheek. It’s remarkable how powerful that phrase turned out to be.
I think this falls under the category “choose to be offended.”
I don’t often see him outside of political threads, but I agree that he comes across as a decent person outside of politics. Too bad that his politics are so nasty and stupid.
My own theory of what best fits all the known facts is somewhere in between.
I don’t think AH was consciously lying, and I think it’s most likely that CT did say some inappropriate stuff to her. But the thing about sexual harassment is that it’s not either/or, where either it’s egregious harassment and the victim is horribly wounded for life or it’s completely above-board. Sometimes it’s just minor league stuff that’s annoying but not more annoying than all sorts of other things that people routinely put up with.
So I think what happened was something along those lines, and because of whatever else CT had going for him, it was worthwhile for AH to put up with it and follow him from job to job, and keep up with him thereafter. And over the years she didn’t remember the specific details of exactly what CT had said, and these became intermingled in her mind with other things she remembered from other sources.
But what happened then is that Democratic operatives got wind of it. And, looking for material with which to fight the CT nomination, they contacted her and asked if she would go public with her story. And once she agreed, she was swept along by the momentum. She might have had somewhat vague but definite memories of CT saying unpleasant things to her. But that wouldn’t suffice at this time. In the position she now was in, going public and saying “well, I don’t remember exactly, and it wasn’t really all that terrible but he did do some unpleasant and inappropriate things …” wouldn’t cut it. At this point she needed to pinpoint exactly what she remembered, and she needed to emphasize that what happened to her was very significant, in order to justify her new position as focus of the anti-CT campaign.
So it’s not as if anyone pressured her to lie, or even that she herself was lying, but that her being used by a political campaign created a dynamic in which she was pressured to exaggerate somewhat and overstate the accuracy of her detail recollection.
Once that happened, neither side of the CT fight had any incentive to suggest the scenario that I think happened. The Democrats were incented to maximize the evils of CT so they weren’t going to play it down. The Republicans, for their part, seized on the inconsistency of AH having had friendly relations with CT for many years after the incidents she was alleging, including but not limited to following him from job to job, and the fact that there was reason to question the specific details she was alleging. So everyone was focused on the more extreme version of CT’s alleged crimes, and no one had any incentive to suggest that perhaps the allegations were partially true.
But that’s what I think most likely happened, anyway. Hard to know for sure, or course.
Thanks for the kind remarks.
Up yours,
Shodan
Shodan is all right. I often agree with him on non-political topics. I do think he is prone to yoursidedoesittooism, and of course he is a rabid partisan as am I. But he certainly is capable of making and acknowledging good points.
Bricker isn’t my cup of tea, but he’s smart when he wants to be and feigns ignorance when he doesn’t. I’ll give him credit for evolving on SSM. He does seem to see everything through a legalistic lens, often he will focus on the legality of something regardless of the morality. Like Shodan, he can make good points and acknowledge the same. Also a partisan, but he at least had the sense not to vote for Hillary’s opponent.
I couldn’t find it from your quoted summaries, but which of those provided any evidence that she lied?
for historical reference -
(post shortened)
Hahahaha. You chose to pit someone based on this quote -
“That was a feature of the Thomas confirmation hearings, as I see it.”
Your delusional response was that Bricker was explicitly confirming that Hill was lying, and a pawn. Something he did not do. Were you projecting your thoughts, or wishful thinking?
You are also the one who introduced the term, “a passed polygraph” to this thread. A test you consider to be irrelevant. Thanks for sharing?
IIRC, they dealt with many issues during the Thomas hearing. Were there any other features of the Thomas confirmation hearings that might cause you to act out in such an irrational manner?
Anyone who claims that polygraphs mean anything is woefully misinformed.
From the American Psychological Association:
Link.
and
Link.
Slee
I understand that their analytic value isn’t what many people seem to think it is. However, when you’ve got a situation where only two people know the truth, and one of them volunteers to take a polygraph and actually follows through on that, and the other refuses to take a polygraph at all - any reasonably intelligent person would have to conclude that the one refusing to take the polygraph is concerned about what it might show and their account should be considered suspect, relative to the first person’s.
In simpler terms, because I know how tired reading makes you, Anita Hill put her money where her mouth is. Clarence Thomas did not. It doesn’t matter how accurate or inaccurate polygraph tests are.
Anyone choosing to believe Thomas’s account over Hill’s has no substantive reason to do so. Just bias. Hill’s account actually has circumstantial evidence.
I’m not completely dismissing this point.
But one thing that mitigates it considerably is that Anita Hill did not publically announce that she was taking a lie detector test and face the prospect of being exposed as a liar, only to pass the test. If you look at the contemporary reporting (e.g. here et al), the taking of the test and the passing were reported simultaneously. So she wasn’t “volunteer[ing] to take a polygraph and actually follow[ing] through on that”, and had she failed the test she probably wouldn’t have had to publicize that she had taken it altogether.
It’s also worth noting that Thomas had much more at stake than Hill did, at that point.
All that said, I’m still not completely dismissing the import of this point. Just that there’s a lot less to it than meets the eye, as above. (In any event, as previous, I think Hill believed she was saying the truth, and probably was to some extent.)
(post shortened)
You talk about “circumstantial evidence”. Refusing to submit to a polygraph can have several possible meanings besides the one you hold so dear. If the polygraph test is inadmissible in court, if psychologists say that there is little or no evidence of the validity of polygraph tests, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to take a polygraph test. Regardless of the outcome, the results WILL BE QUESTIONED, and no opinions will be changed based on the value of the polygraph results alone.