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I find the requirement of "civility" over "truth" to be rather off-putting. The direct line here is Scalia's belief that justice is trumped by tradition, and th

I find the requirement of "civility" over "truth" to be rather off-putting. The direct line here is Scalia's belief that justice is trumped by tradition, and therefore an innocent person has no right to be declared so by new evidence. This makes him a terrible person, because he is directly standing between an innocent person (or people) and their freedom and the justice this country promises. It's calling a spade a spade. Civility doesn't (edit: shouldn't) trump that.

dang 11y ago
Statements like "X is a terrible person" don't come from a concern for the truth, they come from our desire to see the people we identify against as evil. Whatever truth is, the ability to suspend this motive in oneself is sine qua non for it. > I find the requirement of "civility" over "truth" to be rather off-putting. That would of course be absurd, and there's no such requirement. People regularly conflate judgment made from strong feeling with truth, and so they blast out the former with a righteous sense of legitimacy. Those with the opposite judgment feel equally so entitled. This dynamic is destructive, both of civil discourse and of the search for truth, so we needn't choose between the two.