The Volokh Conspiracy

Both Dave Hoffman and Orin Kerr have recently suggested that some of the liberal legal commentators who claimed that the individual mandate was a slam dunk case for the government were doing so for the purposes of “shaping the narrative” about the case, and may not have actually believed what they said. Paul Horwitz of Prawfsblawg suggests that such advocacy blogging (at least by legal academics) is unethical.

In one sense, all blogging that expresses a position on a controversial issue is “shaping the narrative.” Whenever I write a post on a disputed issue, whether it be the individual mandate or the politics of The Hunger Games, part of my purpose is to persuade readers that I’m right and competing views wrong. I don’t think there is anything unethical about engaging in such efforts at persuasion. Indeed, they are part of what makes blogging – including blogging by academic experts – a useful enterprise.

At the same time, Horwitz is right to suggest that it is wrong for an academic to publicly “assert… with confidence a view that one doesn’t really believe, or doesn’t believe with that degree of confidence” for the purpose of influencing public opinion. Doing so attaches the veneer of academic respectability to an opinion that isn’t actually backed by the scholar’s expert judgment.

As I said in my previous post on this subject, I don’t think this is what most of the liberal commentators who claimed that the mandate was an easy case actually did. I believe that they meant what they said and said what they meant.

And, for what it is worth, I myself have never said anything in a VC post that I didn’t actually believe at the time I said it. Can I definitively prove that? Obviously not. I’m the only one who knows what I really think, and even I don’t remember my exact state of mind at the time I wrote every one of the hundreds of blog posts and dozens of op eds I’ve written over the six years I have blogged for the VC.

However, I will note that I have often said things that weren’t helpful to the position I was defending at the time. For example, I would not have initially expressed the view that the individual mandate was covered by Gonzales v. Raich, or later called attention to my change of mind on this point. The former post was written before the mandate litigation began, but at a time when it was becoming clear that lawsuits against the mandate were likely to be filed should it pass. Similarly, I would not have repeatedly predicted that the Supreme Court was more likely to uphold the mandate then strike it down (e.g. – here), or pointed out flaws in some of the lower court decisions striking down the mandate (e.g. – in my analysis of the very first such decision).

The issue on which I have probably had the most involvement in public debate was the controversy over Kelo v. City of New London and its aftermath. In my writings on that subject (most recently here), I pointed out that Kelo was consistent with previous Supreme Court precedent which already allowed the government to condemn property for almost any reason (though I also noted that Kelo could have been decided the other way without completely overruling those earlier precedents). From a “shaping the narrative” point of view, it would have been more effective to portray Kelo as a radical new departure. In my view, however, the case was actually an opportunity for the Court to correct – or at least cut back on – some egregious errors from previous decisions.

I have also foregone making plausible claims that might help my cause, but which I did not believe to be true. For example, some mandate opponents have argued that the federal government’s shift away from its Commerce Clause argument to put greater emphasis on the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Tax Clause was a sign of desperation, or at least declining confidence in the commerce argument. I did not believe there was any proof of this (making every plausible argument for your side is just good lawyering), so I didn’t say it, even though it might have helped “shape the narrative” in our favor.

Law Daily Blogger has a list of reasons “Why Big Firms Don’t Blog well.” Most of the reasons aren’t surprising, at least not to me. Big law firms do many things well, but they don’t really have a comparative advantage in blogging. The one revelation in the post is that so many big firms seem to have blogs (41% of the Amlaw 200, according to this 2009 study), despite all the reasons why those blogs are unlikely to succeed.

UPDATE: Apparently, the Law Daily Blogger site copied verbatim – and without attribution – a 2009 post by Mark Herrmann at the Drug and Device Law Blog. I have taken down the link to the LDB post so as not to reward them for their bad behavior. My apologies to Mr. Herrmann for failing to notice this egregious copying until he brought it to my attention.

At Prawfsblawg, Paul Horwitz offers useful perspective on “Inside the Law School Scam” and its author’s decision to reveal his identity.

In the latest post at Inside the Law School Scam, titled “An apology,” the LawProf reveals himself to be the author of this essay.

UPDATE: Paul Caron rounds up coverage and background here.

FURTHER UPDATE: Brian Leiter comments quite critically here.

THIRD UPDATE: A reminder that Campos and Leiter have clashed before.

FOURTH UPDATE: The comments of Paul Horwitz on this affair are much worth reading.

The NYT reports that a former CIA official is alleging that the Bush Administration sought damaging information on liberal blogger Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who had been quite critical of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy..  From the story:

In an interview, [former CIA officer Glenn L.] Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.

Intelligence officials disputed Mr. Carle’s account, saying that White House officials did ask about Professor Cole in 2006, but only to find out why he had been invited to C.I.A.-sponsored conferences on the Middle East. The officials said that the White House did not ask for sensitive personal information, and that the agency did not provide it.

Cole comments here.

The New York Times recently ran an interesting article on the Secular Right blog, which I commented on here back when it was first established:

As a child, Razib Khan spent several weeks studying in a Bangladeshi madrasa. Heather Mac Donald once studied literary deconstructionism and clerked for a left-wing judge. In neither case did the education take. They are atheist conservatives — Mr. Khan an apostate to his family’s Islamic faith, Ms. Mac Donald to her left-wing education.

They are part of a small faction on the right: conservatives with no use for religion. Since 2008, they have been contributors to the blog Secular Right, where they argue that conservative values like small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them….

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, noted that conservatives throughout history have esteemed “mediating institutions” like schools and churches, sources of authority other than the state. “If that’s the way you’re thinking, concern for the strength of organized religion follows pretty naturally,” Mr. Ponnuru said.

I do have a small bone to pick with the article and possibly with Ramesh Ponnuru. There is a difference between being an atheist and having “no use for religion.” One can deny the existence of God, while simultaneously recognizing that religious institutions sometimes serve useful purposes. Being an atheist doesn’t prevent me from seeing that the Catholic Church runs an excellent system of private schools, for example. It also doesn’t prevent anyone from recognizing the value of “mediating institutions,” including religious ones.

At the same time, it is also the case that organized religion has often contributed to grave injustices, providing support for slavery, gender inequality, and occasionally (in the case of “Liberation Theology”) even communism. Whether a mostly secular society will be better off than a mostly religious one depends on the values advocated by the religious and secular ideologies in question. Atheism doesn’t require anyone to believe that every conceivable secular belief system has better social consequences than every conceivable religious one. One can be an atheist while still believing that Catholicism, Judaism, or Mormonism is less harmful than Marxism, for example.

Like my George Mason colleague Bryan Caplan, I gave two talks at the Students for Liberty International Conference this weekend. And I emphatically agree with Bryan’s observation that the SFL students I met had vastly better social skills and are generally much more socially “normal” than were the young libertarians of my own generation (I graduated college in 1995):

The Students for Liberty conference has to be seen to be believed: the attendance (about 500 students), the energy (off the charts), and most remarkably of all, the high social skills. Twenty years ago, a pack of libertarian students would have been roughly as awkward and freakish as attendees at Comic-Con… or, say, me. Now I see hundreds of students who aren’t just smart, but smooth. What happened?

The best explanation I’ve got so far: the Internet. Back in the old days, libertarian students spent a lot of time alone with their books. It was awfully hard to meet others with a shared interest in liberty. This social isolation had two effects…..: Libertarians got a lot less practice sharing their ideas in a civilized and constructive way [and]… Few “people people” became libertarians because it was too depressing. As the Internet – and social networking, its favorite child – blossomed over the last two decades, these effects of libertarian isolation largely faded away.

A closely related trend is the high proportion of women among today’s young libertarians. By my rough estimate, about 40-45% of the SFL attendees were female. That’s a sea change from twenty years ago, when young libertarians were an overwhelmingly male group. Considering that women are on average less interested in politics than men are in general, the percentage of women in SFL is roughly what one would expect in a student political group that isn’t specifically focused on “women’s issues.”

I think Bryan’s explanation for these changes may be right. But I would point to other factors as well. First, as libertarianism has become better known and more mainstream, it has attracted a wider range of personality types. Even before the rise of the internet, the work of people like Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand helped popularize libertarianism to a wider audience than would have known about it in the 1940s and 50s.

People with poor social skills are more likely than others to adopt an unpopular ideology. They tend to care less about adherence to social norms and conventional wisdom, and thus are less reluctant to embrace unpopular ideas. In addition, because they are already disliked by their peers, they generally don’t have much to lose from the social stigma attached to adherents of an ideology considered to be weird or extreme. When I was in high school, I was the only libertarian I knew, with the partial exception of my father. There weren’t any other libertarian student or teachers. At Amherst College in the early 1990s, I knew only two or three other libertarian students, and there wasn’t a single libertarian on the faculty. This isolation didn’t bother me very much in part because I wasn’t that popular to begin with. As an ideology becomes more common and seems less “weird,” more socially normal people join the bandwagon.

This point also helps explain the greater involvement of women in the libertarian movement. Social science research suggests that women are, on average, less willing to violate social norms and court unpopularity than men are. That’s not necessarily a bad quality; as a result, women are less likely than men to act like insensitive jerks. But it also makes them less willing to adopt unpopular or stigmatized political ideologies (for similar reasons, women are less likely than men to be atheists). The mainstreaming of libertarianism has increased its appeal to both genders, but may be especially important for women.

Second, the effect of the internet goes beyond facilitating networking by people who are already libertarian. It also enables more people to learn about the existence of libertarianism in the first place. At most academic institutions (including most academically strong high schools), left-liberalism is the overwhelmingly dominant political ideology. Some students, however, reject liberalism for any number of possible reasons. In my case, it was the experience of being an immigrant from the Soviet Union. For others, it may have to do with their personality type or other factors.

In an earlier era, many of these people would not be aware of any alternatives to liberalism other than conservatism or establishment centrism. As a result, they became conservatives or centrists themselves or simply lost interest in politics altogether. I myself might not have become aware of libertarianism when I was in high school were it not for my father’s introducing me to the work of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, and my own discovery of Robert Nozick as a result of involvement in high school debate.

With the proliferation of libertarian blogs and other websites, any high school or college student with a strong interest in politics is likely to become aware of libertarianism as a potential alternative to liberalism and conservatism. The fact that these people learn about libertarianism while they are still young is critical; most people become less receptive to new ideas as they get older, especially if they go against their preexisting views. If I had first learned about libertarianism when I was 35 rather than 15, it’s a lot less likely that I would be a libertarian today. This is not because libertarianism has some special appeal to the young, but because older people are less likely to adopt new political ideas of any kind, libertarian or otherwise. Because the internet enables more people to become aware of libertarianism at an early age, a much higher proportion of those who might find libertarianism appealing will learn about it and become converts.

Obviously, “rationally ignorant” people who pay little or no attention to politics are still largely unaware of libertarianism. But they are unlikely to become active participants in an ideological movement, though libertarians can and should do a lot more to channel this group’s skepticism about government in a more libertarian direction.

Alleged Mafia boss Thomas Gioeli has started his own blog from prison [correction: jail] [HT: Instapundit, who claims that he himself is the true "Blogfather"]:

Call him the blogging crime boss: Reputed Colombo kingpin Thomas (Tommy Shots) Gioeli has set up a behind-bars blog to portray himself as a good guy – not a wiseguy – and rant about everything from jail conditions to the way the FBI went after a 94-year-old mobster.

Prosecutors say Gioeli, 58, is trying to influence potential jurors through a blog called “Alleged Mob Boss Tommy Gioeli’s Voice.”

The first posting vowed, “It’s going to be Tommy’s voice; the voice of a generous, good humored, kind, compassionate, and loving husband, father, son, brother, uncle, and friend.”

Gioeli, awaiting trial for six murders, including the rubout of NYPD cop Ralph Dols, has no Internet access from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn – but he can email with family members who could post the blog items, a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman said.

I actually predicted the phenomenon of blogging mobsters several years ago. On one of my Property final exams, which I loosely based on The Godfather, I included a hypothetical scenario where Fredo Corleone starts a blog called “Life in the Mafia,” and then gets sued for cybersquatting by other members of the Corleone family.

No word yet on whether imprisoned New York mobsters are forbidden to play Dungeons & Dragons.

Are bloggers the 21st century equivalent of political pamphleteers?  Would James Madison have had one? I don’t know.  But I do know that several faculty members at the University of San Diego School of Law’s Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism have launched “The Originalism Blog.” This blog won’t endeavor to answer the question in this post’s title, but it is a good source for information and commentary including the latest scholarship, for and against.  If you have any interest in originalism — whether you love it or hate it — this is a blog worth bookmarking.

Brad DeLong responds to my post.  As illustrated below the jump, he engages in selective editing and continues to misrepresent the players in this saga.  (He also omits links to most of those to whom he’s responding.)  Larry Ribstein also comments here.

Continue reading ‘DeLong Doubles Down’ »

Would you consider it sound for one academic to attack a paper written by another, calling it (among other things) “obviously erroneous” and “simply stupid,” based upon a third-party representation of what it says?  And would you consider it responsible to use the third-party representation of said paper as Exhibit A for questioning why the author has a tenured job at a prestigious academic institution?  You would if you were University of California at Berkeley economics professor J. Bradford DeLong, who has continued his series of attacks against University of Chicago law professor M. Todd Henderson.  ”I genuinely do not understand why Henderson has his job,” writes DeLong, pointing not to anything Henderson himself wrote but instead to what another academic blogger wrote about Henderson’s scholarship.  [Yes, this is the same Professor DeLong who repeats baseless accusations against other academics and then, when asked to substantiate his charges, selectively edits his comment threads and then dissembles about said editing when called on it.]

According to University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein, DeLong’s attack on Henderson’s scholarship is quite off base:

the most remarkable thing about DeLong’s post is that it accuses Todd of being “stupid” and unfit for law teaching because of an argument Todd didn’t make!

If DeLong had bothered to look even at the abstract of Todd’s article, perhaps he would have noticed that the article’s not about alignment of incentives, but about whether boards bargain with insiders over their gains.  Todd finds evidence consistent with the hypothesis that “boards pay executives in a way that reflects the profits they are expected to earn from informed trades.” . . .

I will leave it to the reader to decide what we should make of a Professor of Economics at U.C Berkeley, Chair of Berkeley’s Political Economy major and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury who is willing, in print, to accuse somebody of being “simply stupid” for a position he does not take expressed in a blog post he didn’t write.

J.W. Verret has more here and here.

UPDATE: DeLong responds here.

Co-blogger Eugene Volokh gives some sensible reasons for why he chooses not to blog about some topics. I gave my own criteria for making such decisions here:

I try to limit blogging to issues where I have a comparative advantage: that is, questions on which I can say something useful or interesting that is unlikely to be said by others…..

I take seriously the implications of some of my own scholarly work on political ignorance. Merely knowing a few basic facts that can be gleaned from perusing a newspaper is not enough knowledge to conclude that I have something original and important to say about an issue, except in very rare cases where the issue in question is unusually simple. My experience as an expert on political information is that there are far more issues that are more complex than most nonexperts believe than the reverse….

For these reasons, I try to limit my posts on political issues to the following three categories:

1. Issues on which I am an expert (primarily political participation, federalism, and property rights). This is where I have the greatest chance of making an original contribution.

2. Issues on which I’m not officially an expert, but have a lot of knowledge because I follow them closely (i.e. – far more closely than merely reading occasional articles about them in the media or online).

3. Rare cases that fall outside of 1 and 2, where I come up with an original point that other commentators have for some reason ignored.

Have I violated these principles in the four years since I first developed them? Probably. There surely have been situations where I thought that some issue fell under category 2 or 3 when it really didn’t. Even experts on ignorance sometimes overrate their knowledge! But the fact that I don’t follow my own rules perfectly doesn’t mean they aren’t good rules. The quality of political debate would be improved if more pundits stuck to issues where they know what they are talking about.

Many people (including, perhaps, a few of our readers) tend to assume that if you are a lawyer or a law professor, that must mean you are an expert on every possible legal issue. In reality, that simply isn’t true. There is far too much law out there for anyone to be an expert on more than a small fraction of it. Even within a particular subfield, it’s hard to be an expert on every part of it. For example, I teach constitutional law. But that doesn’t make me an expert on every constitutional issue out there. I know a lot about federalism and property rights, the issues I write about the most. I also have considerable (though lesser) knowledge of several other constitutional issues. On the other hand, there are areas of constitutional law (e.g. – the criminal law provisions) that I know very little about.

I try to be aware of the limits of my expertise, and so should my readers. If you want to read about a subject that I don’t know much about, you are better off looking up the works of someone who is a real expert in the field rather than asking me to write about it.

I’m sure Our Chief Conspirator is far too shy, modest, and retiring to note that the ABA Journal is inviting people to come and name their favorite legal blogs … but I’m not.

It is an interesting format, actually – it is not an online vote or poll, where the blogs with the most buddies win.  Rather, the editors are making their own judgments, and are asking for responders to say in the comments to the page why they favor this blog, what they like (or don’t) about it.  They’d like to hear from a lot of people, but are interested in what they have to say and are making their own editorial judgments.  (I should add, though, that I am torn between loyalties, as I post here as well as Opinio Juris, the specialty international law professor blog; those of you who read it as well as VC might considering posting about it, too.)

Someone emailed to ask me what law professor blogs (Insta and Althouse aside, and Opinio Juris) I regularly read and routinely check (I don’t use a feed).  Just off the top of my head – I am probably forgetting some:

• Lawfare (the new Wittes-Chesney-Goldsmith national security law blog);
• EJILTalk (blog of the European Journal of International Law);
• Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog;
• Balkinization;
• Truth on the Market;
• Concurring Opinions;
• The Conglomerate;
• Bainbridge;
• The Faculty Lounge;
• International Law Reporter. (ps, if you’re in the IL academic biz, hugely helpful!)

But that’s not including a bunch of econ and finance blogs, also national security and milblogs; robotics blogs; etc. that I also check regularly.  I read a lot of blogs, probably more than is good for my scholarly productivity.

I just learned that SALT — the Society of American Law Teachers, as which bills itself as “a community of progressive law teachers working for justice, diversity and academic excellence” — has a blog: The SALTLAW Blog. Worth checking out.

University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein is abandoning his solo blog, Ideoblog, and joining Truth on the Market. More here.

The latest National Journal poll of political bloggers asked: “With the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, does it make political sense for President Obama to stick to his plans to allow increased oil and gas development along the coasts?” Only 6% of the Left, but 75% of the Right thought that it did still make political sense. I thought it didn’t make political sense, unless the President were ready to make a strong affirmative case: “The president would have to convince the public why some types of new drilling would not pose the same risks that the BP well did.”

The other question asked what is best for the Democratic/Republican parties this year on immigration. Two-thirds of the Left thought Democrats would be best off with a pathway to citizenship, and without any tougher enforcement. Nobody on the Right thought that would be a good idea for Republicans. The Right bloggers split between citizenship + enforcement, enforcement without citizenship, and “stay away from the issue.”

My vote was for the middle choice, at least as the essential first step: “Effectively closing the border has to come first. Offering citizenship but without effectively securing the border would simply repeat the mistake of 1986 and result in even more illegal immigration.”

This poll marked the last of the National Journal’s weekly blogger polls as part of NJ’s “Blogometer.” The National Journal is undergoing major budget cuts, and Blogometer is disappearing, although parts of its will be folded into other National Journal coverage.

Far worse, from a social utility point of view, than the disappearance of the blogger polls is National Journal cutting Stuart Taylor’s weekly column. Taylor is one of the best legal journalists in the United States, and he will continue to write for a variety of other outlets. However, the loss of his weekly column is a major loss of high-quality legal journalism.

Last year, Maryland law professor Danielle Citron published “Cyber Civil Rights” in the BU Law Review. Here’s the abstract:

Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. . . . Attackers manipulate search engines to reproduce their lies and threats for employers and clients to see, creating digital “scarlet letters” that ruin reputations.

. . . .

General criminal statutes and tort law proscribe much of the mobs’ destructive behavior, but the harm they inflict also ought to be understood and addressed as civil rights violations. Civil rights suits reach the societal harm that would otherwise go unaddressed and would play a crucial expressive role. Acting against these attacks does not offend First Amendment principles when they consist of defamation, true threats, intentional infliction of emotional distress, technological sabotage, and bias-motivated abuse aimed to interfere with a victim’s employment opportunities. To the contrary, it helps preserve vibrant online dialogue and promote a culture of political, social, and economic equality.

Citron’s article detailed some particular cases of such abuses. As she acknowledged, the mob actions are solidly within the scope of existing criminal law and tort law. Nevertheless, she made the case that federal civil rights laws should be revised to cover Internet threats and defamation–since civil rights statutes provide attorney’s fees for a successful plaintiff, and since prosecutors would be more likely to bring criminal charges if the underlying offense has a civil rights association. She arguds that “Just as changing circumstances justified curtailing the right of contracts in the 1930s, today’s networked environment warrants a rejection of free speech absolutism.”

Citron also proposed that website operators be civilly liable for the content of postings on their websites (by means of an exception to 47 U.S.C. § 230, the immunity statute), and that operators be required to collect and maintains ISP logs for all posters.

Last fall, the Denver University Law Review held a symposium about Citron’s proposal, featuring commentary from 11 scholars, plus a response from Citron. Rather than being required to submit a full-length article, the commenters for the on-line symposium were asked to provide a lightly-annotated essays. The full collection of commentary is here, as a PDF. (HTML versions of individual comments are here.)

Essays by Paul Ohm, Viva Moffett, and Wendy Seltzer suggest that mandatory ISP collection and civil liability might cause many problems than they would solve. In response, Citron acknowledges the force of these arguments. Accordingly, she suggests that the best remedies would be to amend federal civil rights rights statutes so that they fully cover the abuses she has described. She also suggests that some version of Notice & Takedown might be appropriate, although, as she detailed in her Boston University article, this has problems of its own.

Comments welcome, of course, but before commenting, please read at least one of the essays, or Citron’s original article.

Instapundit points us in the direction of Joseph Bottum’s First Things blog post yesterday; also Althouse’s comment:

[W]hile I was [at NYU Law School] I saw posters for a lecture this afternoon by Eugene Volokh on the structure of slippery-slope arguments.  … the posters for Volokh’s talk read, as I remember: “Founder of The Volokh Conspiracy blog and Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at UCLA.”

I wonder how the Schwartz family feels about that. Indeed, I wonder how UCLA law school feels. For that matter, I wonder how I feel. Since when has even a blog as interesting as the The Volokh Conspiracy trumped, for a law-school audience, a chair at a major law school and all the speaker’s academic publications?  A fascinating change in the culture of things.

Well, heck (and  not speaking for Eugene), I feel pretty darn good as a coat-tails participant at VC!

Starting next week, I’m going to be dividing some of my blogging time as I try out co-blogging over at SCOTUSblog. SCOTUSblog is bolstering its commentary and analysis role, and as a part of that I’m going to be blogging over there occasionally about various aspects of the Court’s criminal law docket (and especially the Fourth Amendment and consitutional criminal procedure cases). My initial plan is to either cross-post those contributions at the VC or at least link to them to alert readers here. Of course, as with many blogging developments, this is an experiment. My previous forays into solo blogging and another group blog didn’t last very long, so we’ll see how this one goes, too. But I’m excited about the opportunity: SCOTUSblog has been one of my daily reads for years, and I think it has a unique and important niche in the legal blogging world.

A few minutes ago I deleted a comment from a conservative commenter, “Gaydude,” that was an obnoxious and personal attack in response to liberal commenter “ArthurKirkland.” GayDude then wrote another comment directed to me that I think deserves a wider audience:

Wait, my post criticizing Arthur’s post was removed? Oh, right, this is an Orin Kerr thread. And now I will post a comment that is much less civil than what I posted before, but it needs to be said, even if it gets me banned. (And hopefully it will.) A message to Orin…

Orin Kerr, in your quest to prove how fair you are (due to your own Kennedy-esque insecurity that stems from not being loved enough by others in your field), you insist on trying to make everything look fair, even when the situation doesn’t call for it . Notice how you make a comment about both DailyKos and RedState. In this situation, it’s perhaps not too bad, but you do this all the time. If you criticize something from the Left, you will always do the same to something from the Right, even if the things or comments or posters in question are not at all the same in terms of degree, just so you can feel better about yourself. It is not intelligent moderation.

On a side note, this kind of silly fairness desire (that is really not fair at all in reality) is exactly what leads to silly rules in schools, in crime & punishment, etc. You are probably against people who shut off their brains in those areas, but fail to see how your kind of “liberal” fairness thinking is actually quite similar to those who do those things (though the reasons for the desire may be different).

Do not confuse this behavior with that of those who intelligently consider all sides. It’s based on something entirely different.

And with that, please ban me. I do hope that one day you will realize there is at least a bit of truth to what I’m saying here.

A few thoughts in response.

First, I think this is the first time a commenter has criticized my comment moderating on the ground that I am trying to be fair. Normally, those who find their uncivil comment deleted claim that I harbor a bias against the commenter and I am afraid to recognize the deep truth of their message. So this is a bit new, and I appreciate that.

Second, moderating comments can make you feel many things, but one thing it cannot make you feel is deeply loved. The kinds of people who write uncivil comments are the kinds of people who get furious when their comments are deleted. They often write in with very angry responses filled with an unusual number of four-letter words, usually indicating their belief that you have some deep-seated insecurity that is making you not realize how right they are. If you need to feel loved, you don’t generally volunteer to spend your time interacting with that sort of person.

Third, Gaydude is right that I am against people “shutting off their brains.” I always have been, and I don’t expect to change that. I realize not everyone agrees, but then it’s a big Internet.

Some of our readers are probably already aware of it, but I only recently found out about Norman Geras’ interesting archive of interviews with prominent political bloggers. Among many others, there is a recent interview with the VC’s own David Bernstein, and earlier ones with Jonathan Adler and Eugene Volokh. In reading the interviews with bloggers of widely differing political ideologies, I found it interesting that such a high percentage chose the spread of weapons of mass destruction as “the main threat to the future peace and security of the world.” There seems to be a cross-ideological consensus on this point, which is perhaps noteworthy. WMD proliferation would also be high on my list of dangers, especially if it becomes easy for individuals or small groups to acquire them.