A year in the life of the blog.

This is a New Year's Eve eve tradition -- see? I did it last year -- to select one blog post from each month. What is the basis for the selection? Oh, it's just the post I like the most, the one that represents what I consider to be the essence of what I'm trying to do here. It will take me a while to make the choices, so I'll start with the months followed by blank spaces.

January: When a judge writes a memoir.

February: Mysteries of the Althouse house.

March: Simulblogging the Oscars.

April: Live-blogging the Bloggership conference!

May: "We're emenies on account of we both loves Olive Oyl."

June: Blind item.

July: Two lawprofs, vlogging.

August: Arches.

September: Yes, it was a tad ridiculous to pay $8 million for it...

October: Think. Respect....

November: What happened last night?

December: That conversation about a whole lot of blood.

"Then, with his eyes wide open, no stutter or choke in his throat, he said his final words cursing the Americans and the Persians."

Marc Santora writes a vivid description of Saddam Hussein's last moments. I believe the full video of the hanging can be seen on the web now. I won't watch it. I have watched the video that goes up to the part where the noose is put around Saddam's neck. It is very disturbing, and one must admit that he accepts his fate with dignity.

ADDED: Allahpundit writes:

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to let three punks in leather jackets and balaclavas take care of business instead of the Iraqi army, but the more I watch it, the more it looks like a hit instead of a state execution. This doesn’t help either:

The room was quiet as everyone began to pray, including Mr. Hussein. “Prayers be upon Mohammed and his holy family.”

Two guards added, “Supporting his son Moktada, Moktada, Moktada.”

Mr. Hussein seemed a bit stunned, swinging his head in their direction.

They were talking about Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric whose militia is now committing some of the worst violence in the sectarian fighting; he is the son of a revered Shiite cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who many believe Mr. Hussein had murdered.

“Moktada?” he spat out, a mix between sarcasm and disbelief.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some readers don't think I focused enought hate on Saddam for what he did in his life. I say:

When I look at the video, I see a man who is facing death. I see death itself, and it distracts me from the details of what this man did before he arrived in that place.

Oligonicella responds:

Sorry, Ann, I think you need to learn to compartmentalize about death. Everyone dies; you, me, Saddam. It's what happens before that is important, not what happens at.

Why do you not notice your own failure to compartmentalize? What is happening in the picture is the state executing a man. In the past, that man did things, and I recognize the evil of it. In the video, I am witnessing the state's grim, methodical destruction of a human life.

I love this new moderation!

I've switched to moderating comments on Blogger. Forced by annoying circumstance... but it turns out to be saving me an immense amount of time, because it's easier to read through the comments on Blogger's moderation page than to check them out in the email (and actually finding them all in the posts is impossible). And I've been able to turn off word verification. You wouldn't believe how bad I am at typing in those verification words. (All those double "v"s trying to look like "w"s!)

I hope you enjoy the change, this escape from having to type gibberish, even though it means there may be some delay in getting the comments up.

And here's some advice for avoiding having your comments rejected. Don't use bad language. (I don't mind it myself, but I'm worried about filters.) Don't be abusive. (I'm fine with people disagreeing with me, but if you just want to call me a moron, get your own blog. You can whine about censorship over there too.) Don't try to make the thread be all about you. Don't cut and paste long quotes. And don't bring up subjects that are completely unrelated to the post, unless it's funny or cool or aptly analogous or something else that I happen to appreciate.

Are we having Fund yet?

Dan Drezner, having encountered the giant to-do about my experience inside an exceedingly right-wing Liberty Fund conference, makes some general observations about Liberty Fund conferences:

1) Liberty Fund conferences attract idea geeks -- people who will stay up until 2;00 AM debating the merits and demerits of different ideas. That's kind of the point of these things.

2) I've never encountered any racist attitudes, ideas, or even the benign neglect of these attitudes at these conferences.

3) At these conferences I have, on occasion, encountered a personality type that I suspect gave Althouse the willies -- people so besotted with the positive appeal of an abstract idea that they will argue in its defense against any and all comers. Indeed, they consider this a pleasurable activity. The worst of these lot will pooh-pooh valid counterarguments or appeals to pragmatism as besides the Big Point they are trying to make. Let's call these people True Believers.

4) Give that these are Liberty Fund conferences, I would wager that libertarians comprise a high percentage of True Believers at these functions compared to other ideologies.

5) Despite point (4), True Believers make up a very small minority of overall Liberty Fund attendees. Indeed, with the acknowledgment that modern liberals are probably the least represented group at these functions, the intellectual and professional diversity of these conferences is pretty broad.

6) I'm enough of an idea geek that I'm usually glad that one or two True Believers are in attendance, because it forces me to keep my arguments sharp in a Millian sense of debate.

7) The overwhelmingly predominant personality type in attendance at these functions are Contrarians. Wich [sic], of course, makes consensus pretty much a logical impossibility.

Idea geeks. Okay. Well, my experience in legal academia is that people who try to get into the idea geek zone need to get their pretensions punctured right away. The sharp lawprof types I admire always see a veneer on top of something more important, and our instinct is to peel it off. What is your love of this idea really about? That's our method.

We are here to harsh your geek zone mellow.

Should judges accept amicus briefs from former judges?

Here's a conspicuous rejection:

A divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which will soon decide an important case concerning detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, rejected a friend-of-the-court brief submitted in the case by [seven retired federal] judges. Two former chief judges of the court were among those rebuffed....

“It certainly tells you,” Mr. Rivkin said, “how at least some of the D.C. Circuit judges feel about the anti-Bush-administration judicial activism by their former colleagues.”...

The two former chief judges on the brief, Abner J. Mikva and Patricia M. Wald, were appointed by President Jimmy Carter.

Mikva interviews that it's not political, it's personal: the judges are just mad at him for opposing those free vacations people like to give them.

Let's assume, though, that this was an actual legal opinion and not an abuse of power or a fit of spite. Isn't this a serious issue? Two legal experts take two sides:

Ronald D. Rotunda, a law professor at George Mason University, said it was an unexceptional application of a sensible policy.

“There is no particular reason why former judges should be able to leverage their titles in litigation,” Professor Rotunda said.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, disagreed. “It’s more than petty,” Professor Gillers said of the brief’s rejection. “It’s unnecessary and insulting.”

The court's opinion -- for Judges David B. Sentelle and A. Raymond Randolph -- is very short, little more than an invocation of a sentence in Advisory Opinion No. 72 of the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct:

Judges should insure that the title 'judge' is not used in the courtroom or in papers involved in litigation before them to designate a former judge, unless the designation is necessary to describe accurately a person's status at a time pertinent to the lawsuit.

That opinion appears in full in Judge Judith W. Rogers's dissenting opinion, and you can see there that the concern was the appearance of partiality where a judge calls one lawyer "Mr." and the other lawyer "Judge," not any larger question about whether judges have a sufficient interest in the litigation to justify filing an amicus brief. In this case, here's how they phrased their interest:

Amici are retired federal judges who have dedicated their professional careers to our judicial system. The issue presented by these consolidated cases challenges the integrity of that system: may this Court sanction life-long detention in the face of credible allegations that the evidence upon which the detention is based was secured by torture?

Basically, the judges offer their judicial opinion. As the dissenting judge notes, the U.S. Supreme Court accepts briefs from former federal judges whose interest is solely a judicial perspective. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, there was a brief from former federal judges whose stated interest was only that they were former federal judges and had an opinion on the issues in the case.

If it is an established practice and since the motion to submit the brief was unopposed, it does seem "more than petty" and "unnecessary and insulting" to reject the brief. I might be willing to accept the idea that there is something deeply wrong with former judges submitting what are nothing more than judicial opinions to sitting judges, but with no substantial opinion explaining this position, Sentelle and Randolph have nothing.

ADDED: To stave off confusion and needless corrections, let me say that the usage of "interviews" above is Television Without Pity style slang. And you can consider me to be doing Courts Without Pity. And don't steal Courts Without Pity™ as name for your blog.

MORE: Three Volokh Conspirartors weigh in.

Eugene Volokh says:

[T]he reason that they are filing the brief is that they are hoping that their experience and past accomplishments will impress the judges and Justices who may consider the case, and will move those active judges to pay special attention to the arguments in the brief. (They may also hope that the public and the bar will pay such special attention as well.) But there seems to be nothing nefarious in that -- the whole point of having amicus briefs be signed rather than anonymous is so that the court may consider, for whatever it's worth, the identity of those making the argument as well as the contents of the argument.

Orin Kerr suspects that the retired judges are probably just allowing their names to be used on briefs they didn't work on and know little about. Maybe this should be discouraged, but it wasn't worth rejecting the brief.

Jonathan Adler writes to reject Mikva's charge that Sentelle and Randolph had a personal grudge: "I think it clear that Judges Sentelle and Randolph believed that Mikva and the other judges on the brief were inappropriately using their status as former judges in an effort to influence the case."

"It’s like the suffocating rubber clown suit begins to dissolve."

David Lynch explains Transcendental Meditation. He's into it. Is it going to change his films?

“You don’t have to suffer to show suffering,” he said of the violence in his movies. The filmmaker sees no contradiction between inner harmony and external edginess.

“I heard Charles Bukowski started meditation late in his life,” Mr. Lynch said, referring to the poet laureate of Skid Row, who died in 1994. “He was an angry, angry guy, but he apparently loved meditation.”

Of course, just as meditation never got Mr. Lynch over a taste for the macabre, it never quenched Mr. Bukowski’s famous thirst for whiskey. “Well, maybe in time, it would have,” Mr. Lynch said with a smile. “In the meantime — just more enjoyment of the whiskey.”

I wonder how it would go with blogging. All the same old taunts and snark, but inside: new mellowness!

The exclusion of African Americans from "the social, communal and intimate cultural life of white Americans."

Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson calls this "The Last Race Problem" (TimesSelect link):

[A]ccompanying [the integration of African Americans into "the upper echelons and leadership of American society, public life and national identity"] has been the near complete isolation of blacks from the private life of the white majority. Recent modest improvements notwithstanding, blacks, including the middle class, are nearly as segregated today as they were in DuBois’s day....

The celebrated tipping-point theory of Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has long appeared to offer a pessimistic answer to the puzzle. It holds that even where a majority of whites favor having black neighbors, the all-white preference of just a few will always rapidly escalate into total segregation.

However, the economist William Easterly, after examining data on segregation over the past three decades, has demonstrated conclusively that Schelling’s theory is groundless in regard to race. In the vast majority of neighborhoods studied, Easterly found no pattern of acceleration of white decline, no evidence of a sudden, extreme exodus at the fabled tipping point, but instead a steady, almost constant decline in the proportion of whites from one decade to the next. Moreover, the typical neighborhoods that did change from being predominantly white to predominantly black in this period still had a significant proportion of whites living in them.

So why does segregation persist? The evidence seems clear that, in sharp contrast with the past, the major cause is that blacks generally prefer to live in neighborhoods that are at least 40 percent black. Blacks mention ethnic pride and white hostility as their main reasons for not moving to white neighborhoods. But studies like Mary Pattillo-McCoy’s ethnography of middle-class black ghettos show that the disadvantages, especially for youth, far outweigh the psychic gains.

It would be naïve to discount persisting white racism, but other minorities, like Jews, have faced a similar dilemma and opted, with good reasons, for integration. The Jewish-American experience also shows that identity and integration are not incompatible, and that when the middle class moves, others follow. If America is ever to solve the second part of DuBois’s color problem, it will be on the shoulders of the black middle class.

So, according to Patterson, it is up to the black middle class to change its ways. Whether they are reading TimesSelect is another matter. I assume the people who get TimesSelect are already living in middle class white neighborhoods. Patterson is encouraging complacency on their part. That doesn't mean he's not right, though.

(Here's an article of his from last March about "the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream.")

"That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption."

John Burns on Saddam Hussein:

The man who stepped into the court had the demeanor of a condemned man, his eyes swiveling left, then right, his gait unsteady, his curious, lisping voice raised to a tenor that resonated fear....

At that instant, I felt sorry for him, as a man in distress and perhaps, too, as a once almighty figure reduced to ignominy. ...

That I could feel pity for him struck the Iraqis with whom I talked as evidence of a profound moral corruption. I came to understand how a Westerner used to the civilities of democracy and due process — even a reporter who thought he grasped the depths of Saddam’s depravity — fell short of the Iraqis’ sense, forged by years of brutality, of the power of his unmitigated evil.

I too have that "profound moral corruption" of expecting to see "the civilities of democracy and due process." I hope that corruption spreads.

The mature-woman porn genre.

Eh... The NYT is covering it, so I'm flagging it for you. Maybe you're interested in the 50-year-old "administrative assistant at a sex-related entertainment company" who decides to become a porn actress because she "loves sex" and "wanted to do something different." So she says! Her husband supports her because "She’s doing it for the right reasons." The "right reasons." I love that. What are the wrong reasons? Presumably: money, to please someone else, low self-esteem. You know, all those things that motivate those other people. But not you. You just love sex and have a wonderful sense of adventure. Well, that's just peachy. Celebrate yourself.

So I find the woman really pretty dull... because she thinks she's exciting. I'm more interested in the director:

The director, Urbano Martin, points his camera strategically, scarcely disguising his boredom. “I shoot specialty films,” he explains during a break in filming, adding that he has been in the business for 17 years. “Fat women, old women, hairy girls — all kinds. We feed the niche.”

The market for beautiful, airbrushed young women “is oversaturated,” he says. “This is more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home.”

Now, this guy is a human being: suitably bored by what is boring and working for the money. Mature-woman porn is not some NYT-appropriate culture trend. It's just one more way to find a niche in a saturated market.

Do you worry more about dancing or the kind of people who worry about dancing?

Dad tries to write an essay about a middle school talent show "without sounding like a prig." He sounds like a prig:

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again.

Reminds me of this:

They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire...

Do you worry more about dancing or the kind of people who worry about dancing?

"If you take a cold bath in pure libertarianism... it's horrifying. It's not a world you could want to live in."

So says Mark Schmitt about 14 minutes into the new Bloggingheads episode (with Jonathan Chait). And I'm not just linking to this because they start off talking about the recent Althouse/Goldberg episode. They've got a good discussion about libertarianism (and federalism). Both Chait and Schmitt recognize that a lot of people say they're libertarian or express some attraction to it, but they don't mean real libertarianism. That resonated with me, as you can imagine.

The creepy death watch...

... for Saddam Hussein.

UPDATE: I've been watching the cable news stations, mainly Larry King, and it is quite something. "You've heard the word imminent today, and I'm sure it's really imminent. I'm sure it's going to happen within minutes," says Larry. Every time he goes to commercial, he assures us that they will break in if they hear Saddam has died. I'm sure it's about to happen any minute. Anderson Cooper, taking over on CNN, says: "Everything we are hearing points to it, perhaps, in minutes."

ANOTHER UPDATE: CNN reports that the hanging took place 10 minutes ago. We see a split screen, with the reporter on the left. On the right, they put up an old clip of Saddam laughing heartily. A million viewers make the wisecrack, "He ain't laughing now." Meanwhile, Drudge is running two revolving sirens.

MORE: I get the impression that every commentator that goes on to fill the air time tonight makes a fairly lame effort to seem to be talking about the execution while really doing not much more than telling us whatever it is they think about the situation in Iraq in general.

NOW: The news channels try to figure out whether to show the pictures of the hanging. It's quite exquisite how they want to demonstrate their taste but loathe to see any other channel get the jump on them.

Moderating comments.

If you want to know why I've started moderating comments, it has nothing to do with the Reason Magazine attack. I'm up to fending that off. In fact, it's just great the way I've been -- essentially -- authorized to take off the itchy, stuffy gloves I've been wearing for the last few weeks. I'm moderating comments because of one individual -- and regular readers know who it is -- who is a longtime abuser of the comments section here.

When divas attack, Part 2.

Virginia Postrel seems to approve of her colleague's attack on me. It's just a short post. I can't tell how she feels about government being so bold as to ban racial discrimination in hotels and restaurants. She seems to think it was amusingly ridiculous of me to object to ideologues who took umbrage at such laws.

ADDED: I'm just remembering that I tangled with Postrel over this before Bailey wrote his post. I suspect that lit a fire under Bailey somehow. Maybe it was this line: "What is shocking is to encounter walking relics who are in love with the ideas that were used back in the 1960s to fight off the Civil Rights movement... and who aren't ashamed to declare their love publicly."

Here's the post where I take on Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine.

Ron Bailey has put up a long attack on me on the Reason Magazine blog. It's his version of what happened at the Liberty Fund colloquium on Frank S. Meyer, which I've alluded to but avoided talking about in detail. Now that he's written so much over there, it forces me to get specific about some things I'd rather leave unsaid. Here's Ron:

... Althouse bizarrely came away thinking that conservatives and libertarians were frightening "true believers." Why? Evidently because they took political and moral ideas seriously.

False. I came away surprised that some people, especially the libertarians, were hardcore, true believers, wedded to an abstract version of an idea and unwilling to look at how it played out in the real world. I had come to the conference thinking I had more in common with libertarians but was quite put off by them in person. By contrast, the conservative position, because it had more to do with the real-life context, was much less troubling to me. This surprised me, because I disagree with so much of what social conservatives favor.

Much too seriously for Althouse's comfort. For one thing, there was quite a bit of discussion about the relation of virtue to liberty. Meyer's argument is that liberty is the necessary prerequisite for practicing virtue. Apparently some conservatives, such as L. Brent Bozell, Jr. (see Bozell's 1962 essay "Freedom or Virtue?" which we read for the seminar) with whom Meyer was arguing, believe that the state has the right and obligation to coerce virtue. This is anathema to libertarians. The first concern of libertarians is state power and this paramount concern for the abuse of state power means that the state should stay out of private activities that traditional conservatives might consider vicious, e.g., personal use of recreational drugs, voluntary prostitution, and so forth. Anyway, this politico-philosophical discussion apparently confused Althouse. Perhaps her skills at abstract thinking have been dulled by all the time she spends dissecting the particularities of legal cases as a law professor.

False. This didn't "confuse" me. But thanks for the "apparently." I agree -- and said at the conference many times -- that the state should not coerce virtue when it doesn't affect other persons. What disturbed me was the assertion in the writings that the public accommodations provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were pernicious. And when I said that at the conference, a lot of the participates immediately challenged me. Did I think the law was right?!! This is what I mean by the excessive belief in the libertarian principle at the abstract level. These folks -- including Bailey, I think -- would have left restaurants and hotels to continue discriminating against black people as long as they pleased. Someone asserted that the free market would solve the problem better than government regulation. I said that the restaurant in the case about the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in fact made more money by seating only white customers and serving take-out to black people. One other person at the table agreed, but the point was pushed past. It didn't fit the abstraction. I thought the failure to deal with this point was very damaging to the credibility of what we were reading and talking about.

In any case, I had never met Althouse before the colloquium nor even read her blog. When chatting with her over cocktails, she seemed pleasant enough if a bit vague. In casual conversation, she made sure that I knew that she had been a "hippie" back in the day.

Self-deprecation and modesty doesn't play well with libertarians. "Cocktails," by the way, was a glass of wine. Bailey -- I'll say -- wasn't pleasant or vague. Should I counter with some adjectives about him? He was brusque and didn't seem at ease chatting over cocktails. Think about it. You're a middle-aged man, meeting a woman for the first time, having a drink, and she reveals some little fact about herself. What do you do? Smile and reveal some little thing about yourself and make connections? Or do you grunt a few syllables and decide she's a lightweight?

During the sessions when the group analyzed various texts from Meyer, she often seemed lost, not really following the discussion. As she has blogged, she was clearly out of her milieu.

I was uncomfortable with the crowd I found myself in because I felt they were essentially celebrating a man who had written a slim book touting a political philosophy that was used in its time very specifically to oppose civil rights and desegregation. Too many people at the table wanted to talk -- at length and repetitiously -- about abstractions, such as the meaning of the word "virtue." I found this perverse and offensive. I may have "seemed lost" to Bailey, and I surely was not content to just "follow the discussion." I thought there were serious matters that had to be dealt with. Why should I respect this man Meyer at all to want to engage with his book? He wrote screeds in the National Review urging the southern governors to take over the National Guard and fight off school desegregation! It was simply bizarre. Yet I had committed myself to nine hours of conversation! I had to listen to everyone politely. I had no option to walk out. If that look on my face "seemed lost," then I was doing a decent enough job of concealing my true feelings. It wasn't easy.

One session at the end of conference was devoted to Meyer's defense of federalism-his idea is that the constitutional structure that divides state power among political subdivisions tends to limit the power of the state over individuals, thus enlarging the sphere of personal liberty. The tragic historical abuse of federalism was state-mandated racial segregation which Meyer defended. As I understood Meyer's argument, he believed that preserving federalism as bulwark [sic] against the growth of central government power was more important to him than vindicating the rights of black Americans.

Big of him, huh? He really believed his principles, so deeply that black people were just going to have to suffer for his beliefs. What a guy! But you tell me: How do I know he loved his principles first and felt just terrible about how other people were going to have to pay the price for his lofty commitments or whether he actually came to love his ideas because of where they would lead? Why do you love the abstractions you love? To ask this question is not to fail to be an intellectual. To fail to ask this question is to fall short as a thinker.

I heard way too many people say they wanted to stay on the abstract level and then flatter themselves by saying this made them intellectuals. This did not unleash waves of admiration from me, however. It made me begin to entertain the thought that some of these seemingly normal, nice enough people really were racists. How could you tell?

Now here's where Althouse begins to get strange. During that session, as I recall, absolutely everyone around the table condemned Meyer's defense of federalism in the face of the real evil of state-mandated segregation. Everyone!

Yes, state-mandated segregation. But I had brought up the subject of discrimination by private business-owners, which was roundly defended at the table in the name of restricting government to the most minimal level of intrusion on the individual, in hardcore, true-believer libertarian style. (Believe me, the readings expressed the most morbid fear of government you can imagine.)

But apparently not vigorously enough for Althouse.

Because my problem was not limited to state-mandated segregation. You were very clear that that was all you opposed.

Although she did not say it during the sessions, she apparently believes that past racism means that federalism is tainted. She has not made very clear what that "taint" means for the future of federalism.

I've written about this a lot, and not only did I talk about it at the conference, but I've been writing about this in law review articles for 20 years. You might try educating yourself about what I think before writing a big attack on me. Or maybe you're the one with dulled thinking skills. My point, which is quite clear, is that federalism has been associated with the evils of racism historically and that this presents a problem for those who would portray it as good thing today. There are many people who simply experience "federalism" as a code-word for racism. I have written about the positive values of federalism for a long time and have often encountered this problem. I know from long experience that it is crucial to disaggregate federalism from the history of racism to make it attractive in political and legal arguments. As long as Bailey is disparaging my intelligence, I may as well say that Bailey's inability to get this point doesn't make him look terribly smart.

However, during the session, some participants did wonder if there was a way to rescue federalism and really re-establish states as 50 different "laboratories of democracy." Contemporary libertarians strongly favor federalism because it allows some states to permit gay marriage, physician assisted death, medical marijuana, concealed carry of handguns, and surrogate motherhood contracts and other private activities without interference from the Feds. I would be even more startled to discover that Althouse opposes these and similar cases of federalism.

Bailey doesn't seem to know that this is a subject I've written a great deal about in my scholarly writing. Nor does he seem to remember that I brought up this aspect of federalism at the conference. I was the main person who did! Talk about not paying attention!

Of course, libertarians who are eager to prevent the state from interfering in the lives of citizens in order to enforce its version of virtuous behavior, support this kind of federalism. This point was made repeatedly in conference sessions.

Yeah, mainly by me.

As I said, if Althouse thought America's shameful racist history meant that federalism is beyond rescuing (including the "good kinds" just mentioned), she had ample opportunity to make that point during the formal sessions.

Which I don't, so this is just an obtuse point.

However, she can't expect everyone in the room who have been discussing these issues for years to just roll over and agree with her. Oh, by the way, did I mention that no one defended Meyer's views on federalism and racial segregation?.

Again: obtuse.

Liberty Fund colloquia strongly encourage conversation among participants outside of the formal sessions. Participants dine together every evening and are usually seated at tables of six or so participants in order to facilitate conversation. (Althouse weirdly and incorrectly refers to these rules that aim to encourage discussion as "cult-like" here.)

The surly Bailey doesn't appreciate my sense of humor.

After dinner, conferees are invited back to a hospitality suite for cocktails and snacks where they can talk further with one another for as long they like. As it happens, I was sitting at a table at the dinner in which Ann Althouse had her apparent epiphany about tainted federalism and her panic attack about the racial sensitivities of conservatives and libertarians.

We'll get to what he terms a "panic attack" further down.

What happened is that since she had not joined several of us in the hospitality suite the previous night, she asked what we have been discussing until 2 am. Some of my tablemates at dinner told her that I had provoked a spirited debate (lasting perhaps and hour and a half) about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I had asserted that state-sanctioned racial segregation was so egregious a violation of the rights of black citizens that it was absolutely necessary for the federal government to intervene to smash it.

Again, note that he was only opposing "state-sanctioned racial segregation" and only because it was "so egregious" a violation. And apparently, it took a big one-and-a-half-hour fight even to get through that point! I'm trying to convey to you readers just how retrograde things were here. At what point would you start to wonder if this is what it is like to be with racists (of a certain level of intelligence and social class)?

The whole political point of libertarianism is to strictly limit the power of the state over individuals. Mandating racial segregation via state power (as was done in the Southern states) is precisely the kind of state tyranny what libertarians detest [sic]. In any case, I think she found my view of the Civil Rights Act agreeable.

Hardly. You would have protected the individual rights of the businesses that would have gone on discriminating. You only wanted to limit the state, which is what you always want to do anyway, in service of your big idea.

During the discussion in the hospitality suite, absolutely no one defended state-sanctioned segregation and all agreed that Federal intervention was necessary to outlaw state-enforced Jim Crow segregation.

Again with the "state-sanctioned"! That isn't the point. This is so obtuse!

Once the topic had been broached over dinner, I turned to another tablemate who is a fervent Catholic intellectual to discuss some bioethical stuff. We had brought up transhumanism during one of the sessions earlier in the day. The two of us were having a perfectly civil conversation about the moral status of embryos. Anyway next thing I know, Ann Althouse is shouting at two of our dinner companions demanding that they prove to her (Althouse) that they are not racists! She kept asking over and over, "How do I know that I'm not sitting at a table full of racists?" This was completely bizarre! It should go without saying, but I will say it: No one at the conference could even remotely be accused of being racist.

I've already explained how I came to feel that the people I was sitting with could in fact be racists. At the table, I asked my question calmly at first, but was met with continued assertions about the rights of business owners and hypotheticals about the rights of white people. There was a long, irritating hypothetical about KKK members that I couldn't hear over the din of the restaurant. The other woman at the table who was going on in this vein was very young, in her mid-twenties, and she maintained a smug expression on her face as she talked about the rights of white people and repeatedly declined to express concern for the history of racism in the United States and the suffering of real people. It was always back to the hypos about white people. I tried very hard not to express anger at her, but finally I did: How do I know you're not a racist? It was a serious question, something I'd been wondering about all day.

Apparently, the three of them had been discussing the constitutionality of the public accommodations sections of the Civil Rights Act that forbids private businesses to racially discriminate among customers. That is an interesting issue where people ask serious questions about how to balance state intervention and individual choice. Anyway, it's an important issue over which people of good will may disagree-once state-enforced segregation is obliterated, will individual choices under equality of law and in a free market place end racial discrimination? Perhaps not. As Nobel Economics Laureate Gary Becker has argued if a minority group is a very small percentage of a population, then the costs of discrimination will be borne mainly by the minority and market forces may not be strong enough to overcome such discrimination. To me, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that compelled private businesses to serve people of all races have largely resulted in beneficial outcomes. But beneficial outcomes may not be the only desideratum of state intervention. Consider the egregious violation of property rights that took place in the Kelo v. New London case. After all, forcing Ms. Kelo to sell her house so that the city could give it to a private developer is beneficial to the city of New London's tax base. Again, people of good will can have serious disagreements on where the proper limits to state power should lie. For example, should the Feds outlaw gay marriage, medical marijuana, concealed carry, surrogate motherhood even though some states want their citizens to have the opportunity to participate in those activities? Some conservatives would say yes. Libertarians would say no.

Got that? He thinks the government should have left the private businesses alone to discriminate against black people as long as they felt like it.

In trying to explain to Althouse why private discrimination might be OK, I later pieced together that my tablemates had posed the question of whether or not Althouse would want to have the right to refuse to serve KKK members if she owned a restaurant--say, the KKK members were planning to have a weekly luncheon meeting at her cafe? My interpretation of what happened is that because she didn't want to appear to be hypocrite, she refused to answer and kept asking more and more abstract questions about their example. When she was backed into a corner, she lashed out, suggesting that people who disagreed with her feelings were racists. Eventually, she was so upset that she began crying. Of course, at that point the possibility of civil intellectual discourse completely evaporated.

My friends, in all honesty, what made me cry -- and I'm not too sentimental, as you may have noticed -- was the realization that these people didn't care about civil rights.

I was also astonished by the poise with which my tablemates handled Althouse. Our companions did not raise their voices nor dismiss her (as I would have), but tried to calm her down. In fact, Althouse made the situation even more personal by yelling repeatedly at one of my dinner companions (who is also a colleague) that she was an "intellectual lightweight" and an "embarrassment to women everywhere." In fact, in my opinion, with that statement Althouse had actually identified herself. Before Althouse stalked away, I asked her to apologize for that insult, but she refused.

I don't think I said "embarrassment to women everywhere." That doesn't sound like my language. But I really was very angry at this young woman for her smiling and for her incessant justification of racial discrimination. I left the table because Bailey himself yelled at me in an extremely harsh way. He just kept saying "You don't know her. I know her." Basically, they were colleagues, and he was vouching for her. He didn't respond on the substantive issue. How could he? He agreed with her about private discrimination. At that point, I was so offended by these people that I got up and left. I felt terrible about causing a scene and being part of any ugliness. But on long reflection, I think I would have felt far worse if I had sat through all of that without saying anything.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ron Bailey shows up and I respond:

RON BAILEY: Professor Althouse: It is perfectly OK to complain that you think that people are foolishly adhering to principle while ignoring actual experience in the real world. What is NOT OK is for you to shout at other people calling them "racists" because they don't completely agree with your analysis. Especially when they are NOT racists.

Ron, you took the cake for shouting that night, but I agree that I got angry in the end, after much provocation and a severe lack of friendliness. I did not call people racists. I talked about how important it was to distinguish yourself from racist things that adhere to your abstract ideas. If anyone at that table had had the decency to say sincerely that they cared about civil rights and wanted to find a way to make it show that they hated racism, I would never have gotten angry like that. You suddenly became very vicious toward me, in defense of your friend. It looked really ugly. I was just begging for people to care about racism. Your colleague had an infuriatingly insolent smirk on her face for two hours. I tried very hard to deal with it, but it was just too much for me in the end. You did nothing to reach out toward me, a moderate, who came to the conference interested in libertarians. You completely alienated me and lost me as a potential ally, which was surpassingly foolish politically.

RON BAILEY: As you know calling someone a racist in America in the 2lst century is the worst epithet you can use. Deservedly so, racism is despicable. So you'd better reserve the term for people who really are racist, say, David Duke.

Oh, spare me. You're the one that just wrote a big, long post on a prominent website insulting me every which way you could think of. And yeah, racism is very bad. That's why you should try harder to disassociate yourself from it! Since it's so ugly, get the hell farther away from it. Don't attack me for saying you're standing too close to it... unless you like the impression it gives!

RON BAILEY: Finally, as much it pains me, I guess I have to spell it out for you. When I write: "To me, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that compelled private businesses to serve people of all races have largely resulted in beneficial outcomes" that means that I support the public accommodations sections of the Civil Rights Act. Now have I jumped through your racial sensitivity hoops enough?

No. You admit that there were benefits but you still stood by the principle that government should not have acted, and you're still calling my concern about civil rights "racial sensitivity hoops." It's quite absurd, really. You didn't have to make a big display today of how little you cared, and I never wrote a post about you. Go ahead and stew in your own fetid juice. You're missing a part, man.

RON BAILEY: BTW, your ad hominem, "Think about it. You're a middle-aged man, meeting a woman for the first time, having a drink" implying that if I'm not racist, that I may be anti-feminist. Priceless.

It wasn't an accusation of sexism, Ron, as the context of my post makes pretty damned clear. It was a way of saying that you did not understand the function of small talk and were socially awkward. You still don't get it. And the only reason I went ahead and wrote it is because you blatantly insulted me. You took any number of gratuitous shots at me and that freed me to be rude right back at you.

UPDATE: Three academics respond to this post, and I fight back here. I'm not responding to everyone who goes after this post, though. There are a few people who apparently monitor this blog constantly and do dumb little posts that -- really -- I have seen. If you send significant traffic here, and I never respond to you, it's because I think you're boring, little man.

A benevolent law plays out unfairly in real life. Surprised?

Here's a story about how statutory law is forcing Old Greenwich, Connecticut to oust a family who has been operating a coffee stand for 8 years and give his concession to a man who happens to be blind:

[L]ittle-known but longstanding federal and state laws [gives] preference to the blind when it comes to operating concessions on government property....

On Wednesday, a crowd of regulars were quick to speak their minds in support of the Mahers. “To me, it seems unconstitutional,” said Ralph DellaCamera, a hedge fund trader passing through the station about 6:30 a.m. “That’s not the capitalistic system.”

Well, that is a funny understanding of constitutional law.

Some customers said they would treat the new vendor warily. “I’m not looking forward to giving him any of my business,” said Stephen Mesker, a regular. “Preference is one thing when you award a contract” for the first time, Mr. Mesker said, but taking it from an existing operator is “like telling someone who owns a house: ‘Guess what? We have someone better for it.’ ”

Hmmm... Don't tell him about Kelo.

The ordinary person's sense of justice means something, but it's hard to see how the law is unconstitutional or how the city can avoid it. The customers are certainly free to shun the new guy and to say in advance that they will to try to pressure him to withdraw.

I'm sure the people who passed the law thought highly of their benevolence toward the blind, don't you think?