Answered by villa:
…and, again, irrelevant to the OP. C’mon Bricker, you can’t claim to be the voice of wisdom and a Master of Rhetorical Craft™ and then allow yourself to be buffeted around from hijack to hijack.
I’ve checked the Master of Rhetorical Wisdom sourcebook quite carefully, and it says nothing about that. Maybe you have the annotated version.
Even more so than villa, I have an interest in not letting that ridiculous and unsupportable Thomas-is-Scalia’s-puppet meme pass by unchallenged.
If you check the MoRW Sourcebook, it will say that if you want to come across like you are focused and genuinely trying to resolve an issue, don’t allow yourself to be distracted by *ad hominem *attacks.
You, too, are welcome to start another thread.
WAY more so. Impossibly more so. So much more that from where you are, I am a dot on the horizon. 
I had to put that in for my commie street cred.
And Wordman, how about accusing the people saying Thomas is a Scalia puppet of derailing the thread, rather than just the people saying he isn’t?
Or is it on topic to state falsehoods, and off topic to correct them?
TWEET!!*
All you Dopers taking shots saying Thomas is a Scalia puppet - knock it off or at least acknowledge you are taking off-topic shots that aren’t relelvant to the OP!
Okay - we’ve covered the “But Sis does it, too!” aspect of this, right?
It is not just the percentages . Although they are very high. It is the kind of cases Thomas went along with. This ultra conservative, activist court has clearly demonstrated a pro business right wing slant… They has adopted a position against the poor, under represented and weak. Thomas has voted against people getting the same benefits for education and living that he used .
I understand and expect a corporate lawyer like Roberts to side with big business. He is a believer who was enriched by them and has worked for them. I wonder why his votes are 100 percent pro business. Are the weak never right in case before this court? Are they always on the wrong side? This court sucks. It acts like an arm of the wealthy and powerful. The righties made a huge point of getting control of the court and they have succeeded. But a black man like Thomas should have some empathy for the poor . He instead is a nasty bitter little man who somehow thinks he is being treated unfairly.
His wife is powerful Tea bagger and Thomas is just like her.
In the spirit of **villa’s **whining above, c’mon **gonzomax **- irrelevant to the OP. If you want, start another thread…
The OP has played itself out. Nothing more to say. The thread has evolved as a living, breathing document.
Okay, if so, I will stop trying to be OP Facilitator Guy.
Carry on.
You don’t suppose the Thomases might be interested in reading Ms. Hill’s statement since, you know, they’re expecting an apology? Give me a break.
The fact remains that Ms. Thomas asked for an apology three years ago, didn’t get one, and now asks for one again. The first request coincided with an interview and book that were both unflattering to Ms. Hill, so one could even perceive the FIRST apology request as tone deaf under those circumstance.
And look, I consider myself pretty impartial to the facts of this case. I was a mere teen in 1991 and don’t remember much at all about it. I’ve not studied the case and I can’t really say if I’m convinced either way as to who was telling the truth. What I can say is that to an outside observer, repeatedly requsting an apology from an unresponsive target adds a level of cluelessness to an otherwise impolite action. If we define tone deaf as “not realizing how a statement will be perceived” then I think not knowing how eyerollingly nieve you’ll sound counts. And I think even the most vocal Thomas supporter would realize by now that Anita Hill stands by her testimony and has no reason to change it. So if I were a Thomas supporter I’d wonder why Ms. Thomas insists on dreding this all up again.
…AAAAnd, we have a post directly focused on the OP. Well stated, SMW.
It’s not a gratuitous assertion. You’re simply asserting that it is, gratuitously. El oh el.
Let’s break it down, shall we? Anything in quotes is from the post of mine you keep mischaracterizing.
Ms. Thomas claimed that her voicemail was meant as an olive branch. That means she must think of it as “polite, friendly, and conducive to mending bridges.” Instead, it is “rude, condescending, and insulting.” When there is that level of disconnect between what you claim to have thought you were saying and how what you’ve said is being interpreted by the majority of people who hear it, there are two possibilities.
1.) You knew all along that it was “rude, condescending, and insulting.” You are therefore “engaging in disingenuous shit-stirring.”
2.) You honestly thought that you were extending an olive branch, in which case you are “tone deaf as hell, i.e., completely unable to predict how anyone who is not [you] will interpret [your] words.”
Ms. Thomas has claimed her words were an olive branch. You yourself have conceded that they cannot possibly be considered as such. So, was Ms. Thomas lying when she said they were an olive branch (shit-stirring), or did she honestly not realize how she came off (tone deaf)?
Everybody knows fairies hate unicorns. What kind of moron are you?
If somebody doesn’t throw a switchblade down on the table, I’m going to be severely disappointed.
Here’s the bit that you keep missing: at this point, everything is “he said, she said”–or more accurately, “they said, they said,” because both sides have had people backing them up (Thomas has people saying that he would never behave that way; Hill has people saying that they’d also seen Thomas behave that way). So, at this point, the only people who have absolute certainty about who was lying are Hill and Thomas themselves, personally.
For someone who is not one of the two people directly involved to call one of them and demand that that person admit they were lying all along, with *absolutely zero evidence *that the person lied, is absolutely tone deaf (or shit-stirring, if it was intentionally rude).
There’s solid proof that Mitchell kidnapped and raped Smart.
Smart would still have her own knowledge of the events. The problem is that you’re tying this hypothetical to a real-world event for which there is copious evidence. So let’s make it a better analogy.
A woman accuses a coworker of having raped her. There is no physical evidence that the crime took place, so he is never charged. Ten years later, the woman gets married, and her husband posts a notice in the paper that his wife’s former coworker should be ashamed enough to finally come forward and admit that he’s a rapist.
Tone deaf? Ab-so-fucking-lutely.
What actually happened, both in this hypothetical and in the case of Hill and Thomas, is irrelevant. What matters is that someone who *wasn’t there *decided to give credibility to one party over another because of a *personal involvement *(i.e., feelings rather than evidence).
So we can tell **Bricker **to stop being such a fucking idiot.
Speaking of which: Hey, Bricker? Stop being such a fucking idiot.
Wrong. The fact is, and remains, that *no one other than Thomas (Mr.) and Hill *can possibly know who, if anyone, has been deliberately lying. And that’s why Ms. Thomas’s involvement, if intended as an olive branch, is tone deaf: she has zero evidence that Hill is lying; she just loves her husband. And for her, that’s enough to “know” that Hill is lying and accuse her accordingly.
Anyone calling those words an olive branch is tone deaf. However, either Hill or Thomas (Mr.) leaving a similar message would be more appropriate than a third party doing so.
Oh, whatever. It’s the Pit. You’re throwing things more off track by trying to referee.
Yes ma’am.
Please then give me a comparison of the type of cases in which Scalia and Thomas have agreed, and the type of cases in which Breyer and Ginsburg agreed. I’ve got no problems at all with you criticizing Thomas. But criticize him as a jurist, and there is much good material there. When people make crap up about him, it annoys me. Like the idea he is stupid, when everyone I know who has spent time with him (including many SCOTUS clerks, from all points on the political spectrum) report back that he has a great mind, and is often referred to as the smartest man on the court.
When he votes with Scalia (or Scalia votes with him) andthey are both wrong, as they often are, I’ll critique them. But it isn’t because he voted with Scalia. It’s because he was wrong. And my point in posting the other voting requirements is that no one accuses Breyer of being dumb, or Marshall of being dumb. Thomas is accused of this based on his percentage agreement with Scalia because it fits in with the “Uncle Tom” view of him.
Scalia and Thomas share a legal philosphy. Textualism, though intellectually flawed, is a theory out there. It is likely that textualists will vote together frequently. Similarly, if you put two disciples of Cass Sunstein on the Court, or two disciples of Ronald Dworkin there, there would be a strong correlation between their votes. And if you only accused the black one of being too stupid to form his own opinions, just slavishly following the others, then I would have to be suspicious of your motivation for so doing.
::resists urge to referee to avoid the wrath of Shot From Guns::
The posts I make referencing Thomas’ voting records are at least on the topic of the same person the thread is about.
WordMan - your junior modding has no relevance to it whatsoever. Oh, apart from that sterling contribution of…
Way to go, sparky. Way to go.
Yeah, boy, I sure am the one who looks bad in this thread. Thanks for pointing that out.
Care to respond to the rest of the post, sparky?
What - that I was junior modding? Nah - I backed off based on Shot From Guns, but I had checked with the real Mods a few pages ago and got clearance behind the scenes that, on their official basis, I was behaving properly…