Thomas says/does whatever to get power and wealth, it’s not complicated. Gutting voting rights and 14thA protections isn’t part of some some 3D-chess black militant strategy, he just does whatever his Nazi buddy tells him to. He’s dumb and greedy and he’s wormed his way into a job where he can openly accept bribes and grope women all he pleases.
The idea that black people can advance only with the help of whites is anathema to Clarence Thomas, who has identified with Wright’s protagonist throughout his life. For him, white benevolence denies black people the pride of achievement. By contrast, if one is black and overcomes the barriers of Jim Crow, one can be assured that the accomplishment is real. Thomas often invokes the example of his grandparents, who, despite segregation, managed to acquire property and support their family. Though they “had to work twice as hard to get half as far,” they knew, however far they got, that the distance was theirs. When black people succeed in the shadow of white benefactors, that certainty is lost.
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Black Nationalism is diametrically opposed to AA.
It’s also diametrically opposed to yukking it up on your Nazi billionaire friend’s yacht while your dingbat wife reads Qanon youtubes, but here we are.
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Malcolm X feared “racist white liberals” trying to “fix” everything by diktat.
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You are making a mistake of equating awful human with dumb human.
I’m just saying, I’ve also read Richard Wright, I should be referred to as a black militant too.
I always assumed he was a moron, since he spent decades on the bench before even asking a question, and no one had ever suggested that he was social phobic.
You obviously didn’t listen to it.
Anyway, I found it pretty interesting to better understand someone with so much power.
It’s boring and reductive to just say “he is evil” and leave it at that.
This is the Corey Robin take on Thomas. I think it’s laregly wrong. One advantage to being a lawyer is that you can read Thomas opinions and see just where he goes against the grain, ignores precedent, and makes his “original” contrbutions. It’s not like he’s pushing some nuanced understanding, except maybe regarding affirmative action (one of the few things about which he has expertise).
I read opinions from a guy like Stevens and am impressed with how he solves genuinely difficult issues with novel and thoughtful solutions. I read Thomas opinions and it’s like, oh here’s the obviously dumb solution that you could reach by being willfully ignorant about context or whatever, and that’s where he goes.
Is Thomas even dumber than Breyer though, that’s the real question. I think probably not.
Breyer is smart by any understanding of smart and has even written a couple of books on the nature of language interpretation, which is the primary meta issue courts deal with.
Breyer couldn’t figure out why a guy held incommunicado at Guantanamo couldn’t testify before the court. He actually badgered the defense about this, asked them why they hadn’t filed for habeas corpus. The man is… dumb
I think trying to give him a coherent philosophy that’s somehow outside the conservative movement is bound to fail. I don’t think he had a well thought out philosophy to begin with other than a kind of vague conservatism but after he wandered into the Conservative movement and it so infused with whatever he thinks that you’ve never going to pull something out that doesn’t have glaring inconsistencies or contradictions that make no sense.
In my my mind though he’s barely a legal thinker, he’s a political movement thinker. Take his gun control opinion, from a practical legal view, it’s an absolute shit show; impractical, incoherent, etc, but politically it makes sense. The Constitution says we can have guns therefore we can’t enact anything that the Founders didn’t pass. Threat of gun control neutralized.
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Breuer is smart by many metrics. By some other (very important) metrics, he’s a fucking moron.
I’ve always wondered why so many held the assumption that the Supreme Court Justice was a moron because he didn’t ask questions at oral argument (as if merely talking was evidence of intelligence). It’s as if nobody who held this view was familiar with Bayes (or had read any of Thomas’ opinions/articles).
Ludicrous. The insipid blathering of somebody that’s only read the “political” opinions.
The meta discussion of intelligence always delivers.
But does he have a high EQ?
How it works in Canada.
Our PM gets to appoint his 6th Justice!