I still think that this was his sock.
That’s just dumb. There is no reason why being of a particular political party means someone needs to be partisan. Being partisan is a flaw. It’s not an inherent characteristic. It makes no sense to give someone kudos because they may be a little less partisan.
It’s like defending a chronic liar by pointing out the few times they’ve told the truth. Yeah, it’s nice they told the truth. But it’s not a reason to think well of them. Being a liar is not an inherent characteristic that they needed to overcome.
What takes the line to hating on Bricker is that he always presented himself as the one who is not partisan, and that all of us liberals are the true partisans. There’s a reason why you guys know about those times when he “changed his mind” or “withdrew his argument”–he would constantly tell you about them. It’s important to his rhetorical image.
Which gets into my main issue with Bricker: he constantly used rhetoric instead of real argument. He would not just present his argument and the evidence. He always had to throw in some trick that you had to read carefully to dismantle. There was a reason he was well-known for planting “gotchas.” And I do not think it was accidental.
It makes perfect sense why people didn’t like him. Most people aren’t going to grade him on a curve. And his own argument style was just of a kind that would make people angry at him.
None of this means I’m not concerned about him. But he didn’t reply to my email last time he went MIA, so I doubt he would now. I’m pretty sure that email is just for the SDMB, and that he likely doesn’t check it. Plus he hates me.
And, yeah, I miss having him on legal threads when they weren’t partisan in nature.
I always said he was Starving Artist with a J.D. His bouts of “reasonableness” were calculated events to bolster his image and I thought he was insufferably pompous.
Eh, I disagree completely. He wasn’t even in the same zipcode as Starving “The-world-reached-its-peak-in-1950’s-America” Artist. But it probably isn’t worth worth arguing about.
Well, he had his moments, I’ll grant. But so have more than a few of us :).