The Fake Marine in full uniform at his High School reunion is found out by classmate & arrested With pic took on a hijack, and rather than paste a lengthly reply there I thought it more appropriate to spin it off here. It’s not a pitting per se (it was originally written for GD), but I believe this is the right forum to directly address other posters.
My apologies that this is a biased and ill-written summary — corrections are welcome:
The OP was about a civilian who was arrested and charged with impersonating a soldier. The law covers impersonating a soldier, claiming to have been a soldier, and claiming to have won a medal (all false claims). Aside from universally calling the person a douchebag (I believe it actually started in IMHO), a debate evolved over the relation between the law and the First Amendment.
Then the genesis for this thread occurred (again, corrections welcome). In a familiar move, Bricker started playing law professor to correct a poster with a semantic argument generally irrelevant to the specific topic being discussed.
Which set off the hijack. I got dragged into it, and there was a lot of back-and-forth among myself, Bricker and other posters. Here is where my reply originally written for GD began (again, my apologies if I cast this unfairly, as I said I originally wrote this as part of that thread and wasn’t thinking I’d be synopsizing it.):
Mock him/her all you want, Bricker but the thing is your shenanigans are that much more apparent to those of us with legal training. We’ve been 1Ls, where demands for exactitude have a pedagogical reason — definitionally, practically, and conceptually. But there was a difference between questions in class or office hours and relatively casual conversations over dinner or elsewhere. Professors weren’t there to feed their egos. And we’ve been 2Ls, 3Ls, and practitioners, and shifted focus, reframed parameters, and a host of other manoeuvres for practical and good ends. It’s the nature of the adversarial system.
But during that time we also learned to manage our social lives, and recognize the difference between situations. We learned, for example, to recognize that hyper-specificity is very important in contractual settings and disputes, but not in disputes about who does more housework on the weekend. We learned to understand what someone is saying, despite knowing that there are several other interpretations, and learned not to jump on one that is least favorable.
It’s a silly little game and hiding behind a slogan. There is ample ground for extreme specificity — a thread parsing out what how the Second Amendment relates to militias, or whether torture is punishment, for example. But reflexively hijacking threads just to play law professor is a transparent sop to your ego, not fighting ignorance.
But this isn’t GQ and the should/does distinction was not germane until you put on your professor costume and started the hijack. You’re **not **a scientist correcting terminology. You’re not popping in to say “Molecules are not atoms,” and then continuing the discussion. Rather, it’s like derailing discussions with arguments about Leibniz and proper credit in a discussion of orbital mechanics.
What’s really funny is that you also claimed that this derailment — this derailment that has you championing specificity — started with you answering a question about who made a “should” or “does” argument and then dragging me in for some schooling. But consider the exchange:
This really reveals the extreme bullshit of casting this as a case of Bricker innocently fighting ignorance. Notice that the post you quoted ended with a question about whether the law passed an Appellate Court.
Which is why I poked fun at you in my response. Playing the coulda woulda shoulda game just means that no one can say that the Constitution permits or denies anything, because the Court changes, because no two fact patterns are identical, etc. It’s fun to learn about law and language, but tedious when used to shit in a thread.
So I was snowed.)