It’s not that they “just lie” under torture because they can resist it. It’s that they says whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop. That’s not a very reliable way of getting truthful information.
Typical Bricker dishonesty. Who says this is “the best ‘cite’ I have?” And nice use of scare quotes. Nice slur on “dancing.” Beats the shit out of your distortion of words, reliance on second definitions, reliance of re-stating others’ words, and many other forms of typical “legalistic” crap.
You are the most dishonest person the SDMB has ever known.
Google “Scalia Hypocrite” and you’ll find tons. I’ll just “cite” those. There’s no point whatever in playing your game; you’ll just dismiss the source.
I notice you have made zero effort to dispute the content of my claims, specifically that Scalia used “legislative intent” both pro and con, as it served him. As far as anything you have actually bothered to say here goes, you might well agree that this is true. You’ve never actually said, “No, he didn’t.” You’ve just played “Cite?” games.
Dishonest, Bricker, and everyone here knows it.
And we have plenty of evidence for people saying exactly what law enforcement wants to hear, not even requiring physical torment, in American jurisprudence. Look at false confessions, from witch trials to today. There are a ton of people who need very little done to them, only threats and anger, in order to start telling questioners what they want to hear. Even when the confession can lead to horrible outcomes like imprisonment for themselves or loved ones. Throw in physical torment, and very few people will resist.
Are we so incapable of letting history teach us anything?
If I may weigh in on Scalia the man, and the question of whether he was admired by people like Kagan and Ginsburg.
I met Scalia once, long ago, before his tenure as a judge. I would have been in high school. He and my father worked at the same institution, knew each other, and were friendly. Soon after the family moved to town, my parents had Scalia and his wife over for dinner. He seemed perfectly nice.
Dad was by no means politically in the same place as Scalia–not hugely progressive, but certainly no conservative. He was simultaneously pleased and alarmed when Scalia was chosen SC Justice, and was simultaneously impressed and dismayed by Scalia’s opinions. Dad’s not around any more, but I did recently have occasion to ask my mom (no Scalia fan she) what Dad thought about his former colleague. “Oh, he thought Scalia was brilliant,” she replied, “but sometimes…intellectually dishonest.”
All of which is to say that you can admire someone and be faintly appalled by them at the same time. Not knowing either Ginsburg or Kagan, it would not surprise me if their opinion of Scalia was much like my dad’s: what a brilliant guy, what an incisive mind, wish he’d been less ideological/more flexible/less certain that he was always right. It’s perfectly possible to hold both positive and negative views of a person at the same time.
Ummmm, I’m actually on your side here (in the sense that I’m really hoping your assessment can be shown to be accurate), but you did, kinda sorta…
No link to the article in Terra? Was it a recent issue (the case was decided in 1987, so there’s a long window of opportunity for the article to have been written)?
Missed the edit window:
Who knows? I might get ambitious over the weekend and head to the library for a look at the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.
Yeah, it was quite some time ago. I could have dug up the issue (I have the physical copy somewhere) but I didn’t really care that much, and, besides, I knew exactly what Bricker was going to do. He simply dismissed it, and exaggerated the paucity of the cite itself.
(Some years ago, someone denied that homeless people use shopping carts. I replied, “I see people living from shopping carts every day on my drive to work.” They responded, “Trinopus doesn’t know anything more about homelessness than what he sees through his windshield.” You can see, I hope, the exceptional dishonesty in this. But it is almost exactly what Bricker just did. He stretched “Best I’ve got” to “Best you can do.” The latter does not follow from the former. It’s doubly ironic for Bricker to accuse someone else of “dancing.”)
I have lived a good long life, and never met anyone more dishonest than he is.
For what it may be worth, here’s a nice opinion piece about Scalia. And here’s a short excerpt.
I think a lot of useful info has been gleaned through torture. Of course, that does not make it right. Outside of ticking time-bomb scenarios anyway.
Again, the evidence I have seen is that it is useful, but mostly for the powerful that has an interest on showing their [del]subjects[/del] citizens how “good” they are at stamping out rebellion or criminals in our midst.
Related to that (or more related as sleep deprivation and beatings have been pointed as torture also) and to many republicans like Trump, one should remember how useful harsh interrogations were in New York to find the “guilty” in the Central Park rape case. Very useful to Donald Trump’s demagoguery indeed, the inconvenient fact that the 5 accused were innocent was/is of no consequence to the autocrat.
I agree that there is no evidence specifically to accuse Scalia of actual corruption in this case.
But I would love to see a general rule barring high office holders from accepting any expensive gifts from non-relatives, directly or indirectly. If a justice wants to go to a hunting resort, he or she should be required to pay out of pocket for it.
No, he didn’t. I deny he did. And to that end, since you are the one saying he did, I ask you for a cite to support your claim. Show me.
You fail to understand the difference between “what the words meant at the time,” and “what the legislator intended to accomplish.”
Words change in meaning over the years. Scalia has consistently said we should understand what words meant. He has also consistently said that we cannot be guide by what the legislators may have intended. Their act speaks through their words.
Now that you understand the distinction, do you still claim he was inconsistent?
And seriously: step outside yourself for a moment. You accuse me of dishonesty for taking your “best I’ve got” for “best I can do.”
Its a preemptive strike, isn’t it? For whatever reason, he simply isn’t interested in pursuing his anecdote in order to appease your demand for proof. Its the verbal equivalent of a shrug. You expand upon that “how it is” to “how it will be”. Its an anecdotal recollection of a memory that informs his opinion, and is clearly stated as such. It is not offered as the “smoking gub”.
Your insinuation that this is the best he can do to meet your strict expectations is a bit underhanded, rhetorically speaking. Knuckleball pitches are entirely legit, spitball, not so much.
Of course, if he is singular and unique in this view of Scalia, if none of the various legalistic *punditti * who have offered their opinion had ever suggested such a thing, that would indeed be stronger. Is that the case? My own anecdotal response is that I’ve read very much the same thing in a variety of venues. I think it fair to think that many of us here have as well, though it is not likely that any of them took the trouble to store it away for later.
So, yes, I have read such, and most likely, so have you. Surely you aren’t about to deny that no such opinions have been expressed? But when you insinuate that not only does he not have such a citation, no such citation exists?..is a bit much. “You don’t have it, and can’t bring it, because it isn’t”.
If that bit of slipperiness was not intended, here is another opportunity to clarify.
Yep. That’s your style, dude. That’s what you do, day in and day out. You make alterations in text, to favor your views and denigrate others. If I say I believe in abc, you’ll shoot back, “Trinopus concedes that he believes in abc.”
You’re dishonest as the day is long. Anyone who read through the voter suppression thread saw a hundred examples of it. This is why you’re such a fixture in The BBQ Pit, and less often post outside of it. You’re Pit-worthy, both in giving and taking.
To your credit, you’ve written some posts on music appreciation that stunned me by their beauty and insight. I’d love to see more of this from you in Cafe Society.
Scalia was dishonest also. Another example was when he tried to argue a man should be acquitted of the charge of “firing a gun into a building” because the man was, himself, inside the building. Scalia tried to twist a dictionary definition around to take that to mean the man couldn’t have fired “into” the building.
That’s sick, man. That’s not brilliant judicial reasoning, that’s jacking off with (into) a dictionary.
Thank you very kindly. As I noted above, Google “Scalia Hypocrite” and you’ll find metric shit-tons of blasts against the man’s spurious reasoning.
Another dictionary-abuse case: he argued that a quesadilla shop didn’t fall under a zoning ban against “sandwich shops.” He actually cited a dictionary to the effect that a sandwich is two pieces of bread with meat, cheese, and vegetables between them. (Never heard of an open-face sandwich, Tony?) The worst part of this is that a quesadilla is meat, cheese, and vegetables between two tortillas – which are pieces of bread. So the fucker couldn’t even parse a dictionary definition properly!
On SDMB, there is a long history of sneering at people who try to “argue from the dictionary.” We know how damn lame that is. But Scalia actually descended to that level of naivete, and tried to pass it off as legal reasoning – affecting the lives of millions.
If he were one of the judges on Jeopardy, nobody would give a damn. That was about the proper level for his skills and talents.
It wasn’t a quesadilla shop, it was a Mexican Food shop, with burritos, tacos, etc (and burritos were the comparison to sandwiches). And it was not a case Scalia ruled on, but rather a case ruled on by a state judge that Scalia commented on in a book about textualism (it was the state judge who cited the dictionary). And it was a narrow point made about one particular line of reasoning by that judge, not about the ruling in its entirety.
BTW… all the culinary experts called in as witnesses in the case agreed that a burrito is not a sandwich.
Now, I haven’t read Scalia’s book, nor the long rebuttal by Posner. But suffice it to say that this is a more complicated subject than you present, and throwing out your superficial analysis (where you even get the facts wrong) doesn’t do your argument any favors.
And just to add…
This case hinged on a non-compete agreement Panera had with the shopping center owners that they would not allow another “sandwich shop” to open in the center. Trouble is, the contract didn’t define what a sandwich was, so it was left up to the court to decide. This was a case in Massachusetts, so it was decided at the state level.
Now… we are left with the challenge of defining a sandwich. Is a burrito a sandwich? Or is it a “wrap” and does that mean any type of wrap is a sandwich? What about a bruschetta? Is a taco a sandwich? Is a charcuterie plate a sandwich (build your own)?
The line has to be drawn somewhere, and reasonable people can disagree about where it must be drawn. Hell, even reasonable textualists might disagree. Textualism isn’t meant to be some magic algorithm that anyone can use and get the same result every time. If that were the case, we could just program a computer.
Not to mention that Scalia agreeing with the state judge means he was siding with “the little guy” in this case, against the “corporate interests” of the landlords. If we are to believe his detractors, he would have sided with a ruling that favored the corporate interests.
It was a childish exercise in arguing from the dictionary. That’s what Scalia did: he went out and got a dictionary.
He didn’t interview actual sandwich shop owners, or actual Mexican Restaurant owners. He didn’t engage in any kind of due diligence. He looked it up in his Funk & Wagnall’s.
That’s shitty “legal reasoning.”
Yes, I simplified the facts, to avoid presenting a Wall o’ Text. We have to do that here. “All the news that fits.” You’re completely wrong in saying “I got the facts wrong.” I hit the important point: Scalia tried to argue from the dictionary.
John Mace: I have seen you cut stripes off people, here on the SDMB, for arguing out of a dictionary. You know it’s fallacious. And that’s just in a friendly BBS debate. Can you imagine the horror of someone basing Constitutional Law on it?
Well, to be ruthlessly fair, he wasn’t. His total understanding of Constitutional law and its proper and correct interpretation was always the source of his decisions. These rhetorical stunts are just something to assist lesser minds to the truth. The legalistic equivalent of a parable.
He doesn’t need such flimsy devices to support his opinion, he merely employs them to help the rest of us.
(This sort of thinking is pretty common to humans. Especially smart ones, the kind who get used to winning arguments. Or so I’m told…)