Once upon a time, I would. But then I realized that no matter how earnest and willing the showhorse is, it can’t learn algebra.
[QUOTE=examiner.com]
After hearing the voicemail, Hill contacted the public safety office on the campus, and they called the FBI.
[/QUOTE]
Can’t remember where I read it, but I think she’d had death threats, and presumably Brandeis campus security asked her to keep them posted on developments.
OK, that’s weird; I was a-Googling to try to find where I’d read about death threats and my previous post came up! About 30 seconds after I posted it! Since when does Google crawl that fast?
Does that mean your post is legitimately now your cite? 
First you and a friend have to carry your argument across the street like a large pane of glass, so Shot From Guns can squeal around the corner on two wheels and smash through it.
What if neither of them does? My only opinion regarding apologies is that Virginia Thomas stands to lose more than she gains if she keeps poking the apology beast, though I understand why she may not feel that way.
You know, it would be much faster if you’d just admit that you have no good way of refuting my perfectly valid points. Look, I’ll even quote them back for you, so you can be embarassed again. (Dammit, would you believe I’m actually missing the nested quotes for once?)
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)?
[…]
[QUOTE=Bricker]
The claim is that regardless of politics or one’s personal beliefs about that past event, her actions must be seen the same way. To test this, we are entitled to assume that Hill deliberately lied, and proceed from there.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Bricker]
Smart escapes from her captor, and by the time he’s caught, there is no evidence with which to convict him. She knows he did it, but there’s no conviction to point to.
[/QUOTE]
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).
[…]
[QUOTE=Bricker]
But if you believe that Hill deliberately lied, deliberately made up, out of whole cloth, her testimony, then “we” (all honest people, that is) know that no one could describe it as tone deaf.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[/QUOTE]
IIRC, she forwarded the voicemail to Campus Security in case it was an issue and THEY forwarded it to the FBI…
I’ll play along…
Why do you think she believed it was a violation of federal law?
The same tawdry reason he assumes she was lying about Thomas.
Same way he’s conveniently ignoring all of the valid objections I’ve raised to his dead-wrong nitpicking.
I don’t think that is fair. I don’t think Bricker anywhere said he thought or assumed she was lying. He said that in a situation where Hill had deliberately lied, then asking for an apology would not be tone deaf.
I seem to remember him later saying that he did not think she had actually lied, but instead believed her testimony, though it wasn’t necessarily the full truth.
Yes - post #346
[QUOTE=Bricker]
My agreement on the former arises from my personal conviction that Hill did not lie in a major way. I think she shaded her testimony to cover gaps in memory, but I believe SHE believes she was telling the truth. Under that real-life circumstance, it’s delusional to expect an apology.
[/QUOTE]
She might have considered it to be stalking or threatening.
Not ignoring. Just out trying to jump-start the goalpost mover.
A lot of responses in this thread! There seems wide agreement that Mrs. Thomas is tone-deaf or stupid. Since it’s BBQ Pit, I think I’m allowed to hijack and focus on a key underlying question: which of Thomas or Hill was lying?
With a math background, I use Bayesian analysis to guess the answers to questions like that. On that basis it seems more than a thousand times as likely that Thomas was lying rather than Hill. (Perhaps such analysis would be prohibited in jury deliberations, but that’s beside the point.)
(1) Many of us have witnessed male behavior much ruder than anything Thomas was accused of. And of course, he’ll deny it, whether true or false.
(2) If Hill was lying, what was her motive? She wasn’t particularly interested in politics, but even if she were, why ruin her career? Only a psychopath would pursue such a lie.
The right-wing hack David Brock authored a book attempting to demonstrate that Hill had lied. Brock later repudiated the book, calling himself a right-wing hack and admitting it was lies. (I mentioned this to a right-wing idiot; he answered “How do you know he’s not lying now?” There’s a logic fallacy there, but I can’t put my finger on naming it or explaining it briefly.)
I’m not sure Hill regarded Thomas’ inept flirtations as a “great wrong.” Wasn’t she coerced into testifying at all? His subsequent lies wronged her, but she obviously understood he felt he had little choice.
He said … she said … no other witneesses. IANAL, but I think any judge (or Senate committee) would have to vote for innocence. That hardly proves Hill was lying. Instead, as I explained above, unless you have evidence that Hill was an imbecilic psychopath, her story was almost certainly based on truth.
And look who gets the answer wrong again, as usual.
Wow - way to cut up a post to totally misrepresent its meaning. This is what I actually said…
[QUOTE=villa]
If you assume she was incorrect in her testimony, but incorrect as a result of error - that she firmly believed her testimony, but that she was mistaken … then it would be completely tone deaf to request an apology from her when, to the best of her knowledge, all she has done for the last 20 years is tell what she sees as the truth about a man she truly believes did great wrong to her.
[/QUOTE]
It makes it absolutely bloody obvious I am talking in the hypothetical there. That’s really disingenuous of you.
Hey, Bricker, if you’re looking to put your nitpicking legal skills to better use, you might have fun over here, where a new moron is claiming that “Obamacare, social security, medicare, [and] the Department of Energy” all violate the Constitution.
Hahahaha. Honestly, after all this time, you’d think he’d have bulked up enough to haul them around by hand.
Actually this seems to be pretty standard for a number of Republicans (see healthcare legislation). To them compromise and bi-partisanship means “You agree with our point, admit that you were wrong and do what we say.”
Calling someone out of the blue before 8AM on a saturday morning, after twenty years, and asking them to pray about some shit or other, is however, a good indicator that you’ve a few loose screws rattling around in your skull. Well, that or run a lobbying organization in need of some free national publicity.
Crazy, unethical, or both, those seem to be the possibilities with regard to Ginni Thomas.
I apologize. Anyway, it was not my intent to disagree with you, but rather to use an excerpt as a pivot for a sincere question: Did Hill think Thomas had done a “great wrong” to her, or was her testimony instead the result of pressure?