I have a degree in Russian studies, studied in Moscow and lived in the former Soviet Union. I can assure you that old bigots were making the exact same arguments that are being made here. Stupid and bigoted is universal.
Victor’s Distinction, I’m saying. It explains a lot.
(bolding mine)
Not taken in context, because the students and faculty were fighting for oppression. If they had won, black people would still be slaves, so I say fuck them and their statue.
Exactly, for every klansman burning a cross, there were a thousand “moderates” who said “too soon.”
You might literally be right, I don’t have a map of the 1913 dedication ceremony, but the dedication to oppression, including bragging about the public torture of a black woman who “was disrespectful to” a white woman, was likely to have taken place no more than a dozen large steps away from the monument itself.
I find it absolutely fascinating that the lawlessness that people like you seem to object to most strongly is tearing down racist statues. The fact that you express such hyperbolic outrage over the lawlessness of tearing down a statue dedicated to oppressing black people on one hand, while showing no similar anger when the same campus fails to follow the law in handling rape cases and the legislature of the same state refuses to follow federal election law even after being ordered to by a federal court is… interesting. Violating statues beings out the abhorance, violating women or federal election laws gets a shrug.
The Daughters of the Confederacy are a group that supports white supremacy and lying about the history of the Confederacy. The dedication speech for the statue included the immortal words: “I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.” It’s a monument explicitly dedicated to white supremacy.
I don’t agree, he appears to do the same as other law and order advocates who only care about really specific forms of disobedience of the law. I see him doing a lot of pontificating on the wrongness of the lawlessness of toppling racist statues, for example, but I’m not aware of him ever applying that principle to UNC-CH failing to follow federal law in handling rape cases, or the NC legislature failing to follow federal law in creating election districts, even though both topics came up in the thread (to be fair, the rape case one came up after the last time he posted, so he likely never saw it). It seems pretty consistent for the ‘law and order’ types to be very selective in exactly what laws they follow; things like election laws don’t apply to the legislature if they like the result, and things like laws about handling sexual assault don’t matter as long as no one is toppling a racist monument while they bury the issue.
Do you believe that the Daughters of the Confederacy had a purely benign intention in erecting such moments?
Your referencing this group as being the dedicators of said statue suggests to me all the more reason why it ought to have long since been removed. From what little I know of that organization, their primary intent was to champion the very ideals you rightly despise, particularly through revisionist history and manipulation of education.
Martin Luther King, Jr.; letter from Birmingham jail.
If he had been alive then, I think we have a pretty good idea what side of history Boozahol Squid, P.I. would have fallen on in the 60s.
I don’t see that he even recognizes a distinction between justice and the law. To most of us, the law is just a tool to implement justice, and, like most tools, is sometimes used for purposes antithetical to its intent and has to be fixed to prevent that. But to him, the law is the mere codification of societal standards of justice, and the law can therefore never be other than synonymous with justice. Any suggestion that a law passed via due process is still immoral and anti-justice is met with that tiresome claim that the suggester hates democracy and wants to impose his personal opinion of all of us etc. ad nauseam. He truly doesn’t think a moral question can be settled unless there’s a Supreme Court ruling on a law relating to it, or in some situations a papal bull.
You refer to the innate morality of following the law? He isn’t immoral, but amoral. In another time and place, he’d be a Good German.
This post is an example of some serious nonsense.
We’ve got a thread talking about how courts have, multiple times, found the NC legislature’s gerrymandering to be unconstitutional, due to its hyperpartisan nature. They’ve found that it violates both the equal protection clause and the first amendment.
A poster opines that it’s unconstitutional.
So Bricker posts:
Man, fuck that bullshit, dude. You know, or should know, what portion of the constitution it allegedly prohibits. Your condescending “education” is unwelcome here.
Of course he could elaborate on why he thinks it violates neither equal protection nor first amendment (specifically, I believe, the right to free association), and that’d be fair. Better yet, he could address the standing arguments around page 40, explaining why he disagrees with the court’s conclusions.
But that’d take work. Y’know what doesn’t take work? Smarmy insinuations about other posts.
You know what doesn’t take work? Typing “unconstitutional,” instead of developing the argument you wish to use. Shockingly, that’s OK with you, but my equally brief rebuttal is not.
That is a puzzlement.
- So you scored points against Aescwynn, assuming they don’t come back to cite a “specific clause.” Big smart lawyer man! I hope you feel extra smart today. Also for the snarky “puzzlement” dig at LHOD. Liberal hypocrisy blah blah blah. The shtick is old, man.
- Bet you five dollars your rebuttal wasn’t equally brief.
LHOD said it much better in the other thread.
That’s stupid. A layperson, upon learning that a court has multiple times declared the districts unconstitutional, may declare the districts unconstitutional, without developing a legally airtight argument. The case has quite literally been made already.
It’s up to you to dispute it if you want, not just ask snide questions.
They didn’t tear them all down. In Estonia they put some in the basement of the Museum of the Occupation, next to the bathrooms.
They were too big to fit in the urinals.
Has it occurred to any of you guys that by utilizing such techniques, Bricker is both educating the poster on how to state his case more effectively while at the same time leading him to see how he is wrong in a way that is more substantive and persuasive than simply yelling “Cite!” or rattling off the pertinent legalese to disprove it?
Clearly any poster who makes a factual claim without knowing whether it’s true sets himself up to look like a fool when an opponent challenges him to support it. So it’s equally clear that before making such a claim, it would behoove such a poster to get his ducks in row and be able to explain why his claim has merit. Everyone complains about Bricker’s superior debate style, but then when he tries to educate people how to be better debaters themselves, they and everyone else totally miss the point and accuse him of being lazy or insult him in some other way instead.
I’m also of the belief that if you can lead someone to see how and why they’re wrong in such a way that they participate in that discovery themselves, it resonates with them more deeply and becomes part of their internal belief system much more readily than if you were to simply hit them with a wall of text purporting to prove them wrong.
I’m sure some of you will believe that to the degree this is true, Bricker is being a condescending ass. But I don’t see it that way at all. IIRC, he stated once that he was his state’s high school debate champion. And he’s obviously schooled in the techniques lawyers use to try to outwit their opponents. So he’s a pro, highly trained in using the skills he brings to bear in arguments here on the Dope. But how is his attempting to increase the skills and abilities of other here any more “condescending” that if he were a master chef debating with people here over cooking techniques and trying to enlighten them in how to use the correct ones? I doubt that such a poster, were he to appear here, would be dismissed as being condescending…and to those of us here on the board who don’t get into passionate disagreement with him, both Bricker’s posts and his posting style can be quite enlightening and are most definitely welcome.
I find it ironic that here on a board alleged to be devoted to fighting ignorance, one of its brightest lights is being criticized for demonstrating how best to fight it.
Fuck no.
The thread is full of examples of information and ignorance-fighting. My OP contains a link to an article about the decision, as well as a link to the very quote that Aescwynn was shocked by and questioned the unconstitutionality of.
The article linked in the OP explained EXACTLY WHY THE COURT FOUND THE GERRYMANDERING UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The article explained why that quote acted as a smoking gun. It explained the several constitutional provisions violated by such gerrymandering.
THAT’s what’s educational. THAT’s what fights ignorance. And there are plenty more posts in the thread in that vein.
Later, I asked for an attorney to explain the issue of standing as it related to this lawsuit and to other lawsuits against gerrymandering. An attorney interested in fighting ignorance could have answered that question.
But Bricker’s question? Already answered, in great depth, earlier in the thread by other people.
Okay, sure, fine, he wasn’t asking what the courts thought made gerrymandering unconsitutional, he was asking Aescwynn. But, no disrespect to Aescwynn, nobody gives a shit what their specific opinion is (or mine, or Bricker’s); what matters are the arguments to be made on the subject–WHICH WERE, AGAIN, ALREADY MADE, EXTENSIVELY, IN THE THREAD.
Bricker at his best will think about and concede error. Bricker at his best provides clear, cogent analysis of legal issues.
But this isn’t Bricker at his best. This is Bricker at his worst.
You mention that he was a high school debate champion. You know what high school debate champions want to do? They don’t want to have a deep, respectful discussion; they want to score points.
You mention that he’s an attorney. You know what attorneys want to do? They don’t want to get to the heart of tricky issues so that they and everyone can understand them better. They want to win and to make other people lose.
Neither of those models are good models for message board discussions.
It makes me wonder if high school debate is all about JAQing. If you have an argument or a critique of an argument, make it yourself.
Well done, LHOD.
I am not a fan of lawyers using their education and experience to make others feel stupid, score cheap political points, or think they’ve scored some kind of win by someone else’s lack of legal education. Bricker does that a lot. And even worse, he tries to hide behind the whole “socratic method” or “trying to educate” people when he does it.
Another example, in this thread, his actions made me comment: "Personally, I don’t think the inability by a non-lawyer to point to an exact code section for a possible criminal violation negates the entirety of the points they make. Seems to me requiring an exact code section and the equivalent to a legal complaint before engaging a general point is just more legalistic nitpicking than an actual rebuttal. "
Or in this thread, where he uses his legal background to deliberately misrepresent the difference between motive and specific intent.