Prof. Bernstein-- We commentors certainly welcome, hope for, and encourage the author of the original post to participate in the thread. But the discussion among commentors alone is often worth reading, and often takes a shape that one could not predict by reading the initial post. So please don't feel that, by leaving comments open then being unable to participate in the discussion, you are rendering the comments futile.

Also, I submit that for the most part, we behave ourselves and don't need a monitor for compliance. I've seen a few obnoxious and unhelpful comments, but never a thread totally derailed. Are you reluctant to open comments because you think that your comments on matters such as Israel's self defense are more likely to attract trolling?

Also, can anyone affiliated with the site tell us if it's true that Greedy Clerk has been banned?

I agree with the first post. The comments interesting and have really increased my understanding of legal and political issues.

I agree with DK. When comments are open all the time, it gives the place more of a chat room atmosphere, as a set of "regulars" come to talk, which makes it significantly more likely that the discussion will drift off topic, turns into sneers and point-scoring, etc.

I think more of the Conspirators should go this route as well.

DK and RichC make good points. So I'm more open to closing more threads to comments because of the views expressed in the comments on this thread.

I still would prefer a general policy of open commenting, though. Even if DK and RichC are right about openness attracting petty comments, I don't think that those kinds of comments necessarily kill off substantive discussions.

Is it true that Greedy Clerk's IP address has been blocked?

Or social security number!

Seriously, given that one of the people who posts to this site has chosen to remain anonymous, it's not too hard to think that anonymity might encourage comments and views from people who might otherwise not share.

I understand William Henderson's point; how can we figure out which effect would counterbalance which?

I have to respectfully disagree with Bill Henderson (and Brian Leiter) here. While abusive and off-topic comments should certainly be banned, some people may have legitimate reasons for anonymity, e.g., they have something interesting to say, but legitimately fear the consequences of speaking openly, i.e. irrational retaliation. Juan Non-Volokh is one example of this, a professor who wants, and perhaps deserves, tenure, but (understandably in light of recent events, see the case of Jacob Levy) fears denial on account of speaking controversially or nonacademically in public. Practicing lawyers who do not want their views attributed to their law firms or government agencies are another example. We should naturally apply some discount or filter to the value of anonymous speech, for example, Juan's silly attacks on Leiter. Also, it is difficult, though obviously not impossible, to verify the true identity of a named poster. What stops someone from creating a new email address and calling himself "William Henderson," and then posting unpleasant comments?

steveh2, is that because you agree with him? I have found his posts to be both unsubstantive and laughable to the point I just quit reading them because I assumed that someone else would make the point better and more reasonably (the same reason I don't read Prof. Leiter, for example). I don't, however, see why he ought to have been banned. People who don't want to read him can do like I do and DON'T READ HIM. There are two other commentors who get the same treatment. I see their names (at the top of the post, I might add) and I just skip to the next one. Easy, and those who *want* to read the posts can.

I don't know that I would call the banning "pathetic" as I can see how reading him could become annoying, and since what we're talking about is minimizing annoyance and not stifling public debate (he can, after all, have his own blog and link to posts with which he disagrees and have a field day), it's not pathetic, or even ill-advised, I should think. If someone of sufficient authority found Greedy Clerk's posts annoying, aggravating, or distracting enough to ban him, well, that's life. It doesn't much matter to me. (Hell, I've had comments deleted here). If tomorrow, Orin Kerr decides to ban me for some reason, why should I care? It's (partially) his site and if he doesn't want me here, I don't want to be here.

The most laughable thing I've read on the subject was someone else threatening never to comment again because of the alleged banning (then violating said self-ban almost immediately). I'm taking my ball and going home is *so* mature, after all.

Present company, of course, excepted. It has been my experience with group blogs where some posters turn off comments that they do so when they know their reasoning is weak and won't stand to scrutiny.

In response to some factual misapprehensions by Mary:

I wonder if all the American money that goes to weapons now, how different things would look if it had gone for...recompensating farmers and landowners who have legitimate claims for land lost when the Balfour Declaration was signed.

The Balfour Declaration gave no land to Jews, nor did the British Mandate. It was mostly purchased from existing landowners by the Jewish Agency and by individual Jews. Most was not currently used for agriculture, being desert and swampland.

Perhaps with good nutrition and fair recompensation policies (like what was paid to the Gaza settlers when they left) plus education, the angry people would see they too can have a good future and that the scales of justice are not tilted one way. It's sure is a big job to ask Palestinian leaders to stop violence now. Better to work on the roots, and providing hope without violence.

The first intifada started AFTER the Oslo agreement, supported BY the Palestinian leadership. The second intifada starete AFTER Barak at Camp David offered 93% of the west bank and much of Jerusalem to Arafat for a Palestinian state, not as a final, take-it-or-leave-it offer, but as part of a negotiating process. Arafat broke off the negotiations. There is hope.

There's an old joke: if you get the gift of land from Brits, check the title

Israel was created by the United Nations, and not by Great Britain. All nations in the General Assembly except the Arab nations, Greece and Cuba voted "aye."

I wonder if others have thought that perhaps in retrospect, it would have been more beneficial if the new land of Israel after WWII was carved out of the defeated Axis countries, like Germany. I understand the biblical importance of the current homestate, but call me a monster, I wish the whole creation of the state could have been undertaken in a more forward-looking process that would have eliminated the current situation, where there are barbarians at the gate.

Did you know that over half of Israeli Jews are refugees not from Europe, but from Islamic countries? And that the number of Jewish refugees to Israel was comparable to the number of Arab refugees? Should the 80,000 or so Iranian Jewish refugees to Israel (whose community had been in Persia from before 550 B.C.E) and their children go to Alaska, to Europe, or back to Iran? Furthermore, did there were 600,000 Jews in Israel at the time of the declaration of Independence? Many were descendants of Jews who had always been there, though most had settled there between 1896 and the onset on nazism. (Unfortunately, Great Britain did its best to prevent Jewish immigration to its Palestine mandate during the 1930's condemning hundreds of thousands to extermination by Germany.) Few were refugees of the Holocaust, though it would be unreasonable to expect survivors to resettle in the communities that had tried to destroy them.

At the present time, the nation consists of 5,000,000 Jews and 1,000,000 Arabs with Israeli citizenship. The Jews were mostly born in Israel, speak Hebrew as a native language, and know no other home. They are not refugees from someplace else, though most are descendants of Jews from Islamic nations. There has now been considerable intermarriage between Jews of European and Middle Eastern origin, so the distinction is becoming blurred. If displaced, Israeli Jews would be refugees. Israel is their home.

Perhaps some of the blame for the current plight of Palestinians is that neighboring countries have declined to integrate refugees into their own societies the way Israel has integrated all refugee Jews. Rather, they have kept them in camps and have fed them on UN rations and promises of repatriation. Of course, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza should have political self-determination whether as a separate entity or in association withthe eastern part of historical Palestine, which is now the nation of Jordan. Israel is naturally disinclined to allow this to happpen unless the Palestinian Arab entity recognizes Israel's own national rights.

John Jenkins: Yes, I do happen to agree with most of what Greedy Clerk usually posts, but my concern re a banning would be that, in my view, he has done nothing that could possibly justify banning. As you pointed out, someone who finds his posts annoying can just skip them. In my view, we are not so delicate that we need to be protected from Greedy Clerk.

I do, however, recognize that my view is not going to count for much, and rightly so. It's not my board, it's the VCers. It's their party, and they can invite and disinvite whoever they want.

Heck, maybe I should get myself banned, too, since I really should be getting my work done, anyway.

In my opinion (not that it's worth anything), the blog belongs to the posters, so they can have whatever policy they want.

That being said, of course, there's nothing wrong in saying that their policies will have an effect upon how the blog is perceived.

Also, my suspicion is that the various bloggers on VC have different reasons for blogging. The two extremes, in my mind, are shown in Orin's recent posts concerning the NSA wiretapping controversy vs. David's recent postings.

Orin seems to be using this blog to work through complicated issues. Aside from having a forum to show off his obvious talent and expertise in an area of law (nothing wrong with that, I should add!) he is engaging now and then with his commenters, sometimes to clarify a point, and sometimes to argue, in an intellectual fashion, against other points of view. Of course, a majority of the comments are probably irrelevant to the development of his legal argument, but then again no one has to read those comments anyway if they don't want to.

David, by contrast, seems less interested in developing/discussing complex legal arguments than he does in expressing his political opinions. As most of us who read blogs know, this kind of blogging typically leads to the "echo chamber" effect where the only people reading the blog will be those who already agree with the blogger's opinion.

So, it's up to the "owners" of this blog to decide. Do they want their blog to be known as one where complicated issues are analyzed in an open, intellectual fashion, or do they want another political blog. It will be interesting to see how things develop.

Steveh, (Is that like Timmeh?)

>I do, however, recognize that my view is not going to count for much, and rightly so. It's not my board, it's the VCers. It's their party, and they can invite and disinvite whoever they want.<

They can, of course. Being creative libertarians, though, I'm sure they realize that the law isn't the only thing that matters.

If they start banning people for dubious reasons, it will delegitimize their blog, and attract a lot more criticism. And while we benefit from their generosity, they benefit from us as well. So sure, they can ban whoever they want for any old reason, but not without damage to the blog's reputation.

I don't mean to sound abrasive. The thing is, I currently recomend this blog to friends, because it is interesting, and I respect the way it is run. I think many people respect the way this blog is run. Assuming they want to retain that reputation, though, they are not limitless in what they can do. I think the conspirators would generally acknolwedge this.

For once I agree with dk35 (my similarly named nemesis ;-) -- some of the posts here (such as Orin's) are clearly trying to suss out complex legal issues and others (such as David B's posts on Israel) are venting? or voicing? simpler political opinions. This is exactly why I favor a sometimes-comments/sometimes not blog: the comments help on the deep legal posts, but on Israeli/Palestinian posts, comments risk heading into little green footballs/democratic-underground terrority. And, as this thread demonstrates, the people who want to argue all day for and against Israel are very quick to seep into totally unrelated threads.

But, as a longtime reader here, I would be equally upset if this blog became as stultifyingly academic as Left2Right or even Crooked Timber. I like hearing David B's political comments on Israel (although I do not agree with many of them), as well as his travel observations (which is what these particular comments are.) I just don't want this blog to attract too many of the let's-insult-each-other crowd.

In fairness, though, we should note that David B. clearly _does_ post complex, nuanced legal posts related to his scholarship, so I wouldn't agree that he is "less interested" in that. It's just normal, really, that he is or recently was on vacation in Israel and he thus is doing more personal observation posts than serious scholarship.

Thanks for your prompt response, Orin. Comments like Eugenen’s recent, “Don't be distracted by the first comment . . .” (see < http://www.volokh.com/posts/1135049068.shtml>) will often do more to encourage reasoned debate (and discourage irrelevant remarks) than turning off comments.

TRC

I am not interested in comments activated for all posts. Not at all.

In fact, I am not interested in all posts here, either.

I read here regularly because I regularly find mostly the posts of two posters interesting. They are Professor Kerr and Professor Volokh.

It is a nice side effect that these two activate the comments regularly (Volokh) or practically always (Kerr). I assume it is not a coincidence.

On the other hand, *if* Greedy Clerk deserves to be banned, so does a range of posters on the right, most notably Clayton Cramer.

This is the kind of argument I had in mind when I wrote "[Banning commentators] leads to all kinds of distracting personal disputes and "fairness" issues, e.g., why does Greedy Clerk get banned for X but Norman Bates not get banned for Y?" Not to compare Mr. Cramer to Mr. Bates, of course. (Although I'm sure there are some who would find the comparison apt.)

This is one of the rare places on the net where left and right engage in civil discourse. Not that I don't occasionally bring a 700 level vibe to the debate, but Prof. Bernstein's point about the "dynamic effects" of comments on his incentives is a good one. Maybe I'd suggest not posting entries that are "vents," where commentors will probably respond in kind like how a principal being sued for saying something stupid is maybe unjust but hardly the worst decision of the year and how it's not fair to point to one incident of the checkpoints being useful and ignoring the larger harm they impose not to mention whether other means of stopping that terrorist could have been employed. See? Anyway, some of the other people here have interesting points of view and why not use them?

Much depends on what the group bloggers agree to do with comments. As VC has a comment policy - then I assume (maybe wrongly) that each poster is requested to read through comments and be sure they conform to the policy. If that is the case, and why have such a policy if that isn't the case, then David has a responsibility to the group to turn off comments if he is unable to police them. Commenting adds a great deal to the original post and even can add unintended side lights. But, it can go completely off track too.

I was amused to see that after a question about the banning of Greedy Clerk... with no quick answer by David as to whether or not it was true... it suddenly morphed into being a truism in later comments. It's interesting that just because he hasn't been commenting, it was assumed that he had been banned.

Most big bloggers I've read, will give a warning to commenters behaving badly and then ban them publicly. All commenters I have seen banned at various places certainly deserved it - posting completely off topic and generally extremely profanely.

But to get back to the point at hand - even though this is a big blog - the bloggers are still the ones who must decide for themselves how they want to conduct their blogging and how much time they have for comments. I can certainly understand someone being very busy and unable to read the lengthy comments that are made, thus not making every post open for commenting. While I like comments, I consider this to be up to the blogger.

In the thread in which he threatened to ban Greedy Clerk, David Kopel said, "Comments are fine when they conform to the explicit rules for comments; non-conforming comments will be deleted." But as I read the comment policy, there are no "explicit rules," and there certainly is no rule requiring the deletion of "non-conforming" comments. Rather, the Conspirators have tried to set a calm and respectful tone by asking commentors to be "civil" and as "as calm, reasoned, and substantive as possible" and to "avoid rants, invective, and substantial and repeated exaggeration." They have also "reserve[d] the right" to "exercise [their] editorial discretion" as to deleting comments and banning commentors.

This is a good policy, and IMHO it has worked well since it was adopted. But if David Kopel thinks that Greedy Clerk is "one step away from being banned," it is not because Greedy Clerk objectively violated some explicit policy by telling Kopel "I do not think you have any clue what you are talking about." It is because Kopel thinks that banning Greedy Clerk would be a good exercise of his editorial discretion.

Obviously the Conspirators have the right to control the content of this site in whatever manner they deem appropriate. But it might be a good idea for them to make sure they're all on the same page about how they choose to exercise their editorial discretion, especially if any Conspirator has the authority to unilaterally and permanently ban a regular commentor, as Kopel has suggested.

Ok, so my latest understanding is that GC's IP address was in fact blocked, although that address is now in the process of being unblocked. (Or so I understand -- It's a Conspiracy here, so we like to keep things mysterious.)

I hadn't realized DB had told a whopper about liberal Jews. He gave what may or may not be a reason that Jews are more liberal than one might otherwise assume based on other non-religious/ethnic factors. Maybe he's wrong, or maybe you disagree, but that doesn't make it a whopper. It seems that is EXACTLY what DK meant when he wrote

People here (not just you) are often misreading and misrepresenting Prof B's posts on Israel, either exaggerating what he says or omitting points he mentions. No wonder he isn't always comfortable with comments -- and if he removes the comments that misstate his words, he'll be accused of censorship!

John,

I'll concede the point that I should have made it clear that it is MY OPINION that DB told a whopper about liberal jews. But in a sense that is what I was trying to get at in my initial post. DB has a political opinion regarding liberal jews that is simply that, an opinion. It is based upon a general knowledge of history, and his own family circumstances. That is fine, and he certainly has a right to his opinion (as I do to mine) but it is a political opinion, and no more. It is not, for example, an reasoned opinion based upon advanced knowledge of caselaw and legal philosophy, as Orin's FSA postings have been. DB's postings will have the effect of turning off people who have political opinions different from his. If that's what he wants the VC to be, that's none of my business. But let's not deny the effect that such comments have (particuarly when he seems not to want to hear other people's comments on the matter).

To clarify, I pretty much agree with DK35's original post in this thread.

John,

Even if I completely accepted everything that you wrote (which I don't think I do), that doesn't really change my view that DB's post was simply a political opinion based upon a general knowledge of history and his personal family circumstances.

DK: So, that means you agree that Jews should naturally be libertarian on economics because of their entrepreneurial histry? Or is your argument that the historical experiences of groups so clearly has nothing to do with their trust in/regard for government that by even raising the issue Bernstein is "lying" about liberal Jews?

vccommentor, I don't think that's a fair interpretation of what he said. I believe that he disagrees with my reading of DB, but since it is exactly that, *my reading*, I can't see *his*, which is why I asked for him to explain it to me. Maybe there is something I am missing.

As frustrating as a polemical blogger can be, reactionary responses (especially when moderators single-out such characters) will only encourage that behavior.

This situation reminds me when I was a younger student in prep school and my professor had to compete with one unruly student whose caustic persona drew the attention of surrounding classmates. Over a period of time, his cult of personality became the focus of the class rather than the curriculum itself.

Short of slanderous comments, I think it’s easier in a blog to avoid such situations simply with the intellectual and logical force of our arguments. And if that isn’t sufficient, ignoring one’s frivolity usually does the trick.

Everytime someone makes a comment, a new alternative universe is created (at least according to Glenn Reynolds and those sci-fi guys). So you are better off not having comments--keeping all those universes straight is a real pain in the neck!

Cal,

Perhaps you've overlooked something when you say "If comments were disabled and every commenter left the site never to return in outrage, the VC would take at most a ten percent hit in readership." I think the comments add a great deal to each of the subjects broached here, and I probably read the blog more avidly because of the insightful comments. Aren't you overlooking a percentage of the people who enjoy the blog more because of the comments but don't actually comment themselves? So if all comments were disabled, and only 10% of the readers comment, a much larger than 10% drop in readership would be expected.