L'affair d'Ann Althouse.
Dec. 30th, 2006 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs(Or: Those who do not remember Usenet are condemned to repeat it. Badly.)
If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can skip this post. If you're still reading this, here's the skinny: Ann Althouse, an "A-List blogger" (I've gotten that from several different people) attended a conference of the Liberty Fund, where lots of various conservative and libertarian thinkers around the country assemble to discuss some historical writer and his or her impact on traditional concepts of liberty. That's the idea. Althouse is a law professor from Madison, Wisconsin and a self-described "liberal hawk." Althouse decided to attend one of these colloquia, this one on Frank Meyers, a libertarian writer of the post-WW2 era.
One of Meyers more controversial points is that the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s were a disaster for civil rights because they forced people to associate commercially with people they did not want to associate with, which Meyers argued violated the first amendment, and expanded the powers of the federal goverment by embracing the notion that the interstate commerce clause overrode the first amendment in this case. This has led to bizarre things like the Justice Department trying to control a single state's drug laws because someone might try to sell "medicinal marijuana" in another state, and the Commerce Commission mandating that states adopt uniform in-state highway fees because allowing the states to set their own rates might be disruptive to neighboring states' economies. I think Meyers was absolutely wrong to reject the federal government's power to override state-mandated segregation, but absolutely right to defend the right to private association, even of commercial interests, over the excessive empowement of the ICC.
Apparently, a discussion of this point came up over the dinner. One of the people at the table with Althouse was Ron Bailey, and you can read his account if you like. Both Althouse and Bailey agree on one thing: she left the table "quickly." Bailey's account, which is one of the most civil things I've read in a while, shows all the aplomb Ron's writing is known for.
Before I get to the meat of my point, I'm just going to announce that I'm taking sides. I had dinner with Bailey when he came through on his last book tour for Liberation Biology, although I ended up learning more about Civil War history than I did medicine that night. I've been reading him for years. Ron is a geek, and I mean that in a good way: He's learned to be outgoing because he had to, but really he's one of "us", focused and thoughtful and relieved when the topic is somewhere in his intellectual territory.
Althouse, on the other hand, has never impressed me, no matter how "smart" some of her fans say she is. When the photograph of Joseph Padilla being led from his prison cell to the dentist blindfolded, Althouse defended the actions on the grounds that Padilla, who to the best of anyone's knowledge is mentally incompetent anyway, could have communicated with his co-conspirators in code by blinking. When London police officers shot an innocent man in the subway last year, Althouse wrote, "A further good has been created: as ordinary persons change their behavior and drop the bulky clothing and unnecessary running, the real terrorists will stand out more. Indeed, if anyone ever behaves like Jean Charles de Menezes again, the presumption that he is a terrorist will be so overwhelmingly strong that the police really must kill him." More recently, when confronted with the news that more American soldiers had died in Iraq than American citizens killed on September 11th, 2001, Althouse wrote, "A key question -- with an unknowable answer -- is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?" (The answer, of course, is that given that Iraq provided no material support to Al Qaeda and had no relationship whatsover to the events of 9/11, the answer is knowable and is, quite simply, "far fewer.") There's a reason the liberal economist Brad DeLong has repeatedly nominated her for "stupidest woman alive."
Just so you know I'm not unbiased.
The real issue at the table was whether or not the long-term and detrimental consequences of the empowerment of the Interstate Commerce Clause is overriden by the good done by the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s. As Ron repeatedly stresses, "People of good will can and do disagree on this point."
There's a lot of interesting stuff here. Althouse makes a bit of a hash of her argument when she writes about how upset she was that libertarians are "deeply serious" about continuing to discuss this issue and put real intellectual firepower behind it. She finds it shocking that there exist conservatives and libertarians who are "true believers" in the notion of liberty so eloquently described by the First Amendement.
You can read Althouse's second response, in which she attempts to give "her side" of the story. She's a "true believer" herself, mocking these people because they believe in freedom and liberty. Ron should not have to defend himself against the charge of racism because he's willing to discuss whether or not the expansion of federal power in the 1960s that resulted from civil rights legislation was a bad thing, and Althouse demands that he should.
Althouse makes her point: "What made me cry was the realization that these people didn't care about civil rights." When she writes this, I know she wasn't at the same colloquia as Ron Bailey. Because those people do care about civil rights: they care so much about them that they're dismayed by how few "rights" and how many wrongs have come out of the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Althouse is outraged that the First Amendment trumps her extraconstitutional philosophical standpoint.
What gets me most, though, is in reading Althouse's second response, I had the curious feeling I had read this before. Often. Too often. On Usenet. Because Althouse has reached the stage in a Usenet writer's life where she just can't let things go. She has to refute, point by point, line by line, sentence by sentence, everything Ron said, repeating herself over and over because she thinks we didn't get it the first time.
L'Affair d'Althouse is an object lesson every aging Usenetter has learned at one point in his or her life: people will say stuff about you, and you just have to let it go. Life is too important to waste on this kind of stuff.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can skip this post. If you're still reading this, here's the skinny: Ann Althouse, an "A-List blogger" (I've gotten that from several different people) attended a conference of the Liberty Fund, where lots of various conservative and libertarian thinkers around the country assemble to discuss some historical writer and his or her impact on traditional concepts of liberty. That's the idea. Althouse is a law professor from Madison, Wisconsin and a self-described "liberal hawk." Althouse decided to attend one of these colloquia, this one on Frank Meyers, a libertarian writer of the post-WW2 era.
One of Meyers more controversial points is that the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s were a disaster for civil rights because they forced people to associate commercially with people they did not want to associate with, which Meyers argued violated the first amendment, and expanded the powers of the federal goverment by embracing the notion that the interstate commerce clause overrode the first amendment in this case. This has led to bizarre things like the Justice Department trying to control a single state's drug laws because someone might try to sell "medicinal marijuana" in another state, and the Commerce Commission mandating that states adopt uniform in-state highway fees because allowing the states to set their own rates might be disruptive to neighboring states' economies. I think Meyers was absolutely wrong to reject the federal government's power to override state-mandated segregation, but absolutely right to defend the right to private association, even of commercial interests, over the excessive empowement of the ICC.
Apparently, a discussion of this point came up over the dinner. One of the people at the table with Althouse was Ron Bailey, and you can read his account if you like. Both Althouse and Bailey agree on one thing: she left the table "quickly." Bailey's account, which is one of the most civil things I've read in a while, shows all the aplomb Ron's writing is known for.
Before I get to the meat of my point, I'm just going to announce that I'm taking sides. I had dinner with Bailey when he came through on his last book tour for Liberation Biology, although I ended up learning more about Civil War history than I did medicine that night. I've been reading him for years. Ron is a geek, and I mean that in a good way: He's learned to be outgoing because he had to, but really he's one of "us", focused and thoughtful and relieved when the topic is somewhere in his intellectual territory.
Althouse, on the other hand, has never impressed me, no matter how "smart" some of her fans say she is. When the photograph of Joseph Padilla being led from his prison cell to the dentist blindfolded, Althouse defended the actions on the grounds that Padilla, who to the best of anyone's knowledge is mentally incompetent anyway, could have communicated with his co-conspirators in code by blinking. When London police officers shot an innocent man in the subway last year, Althouse wrote, "A further good has been created: as ordinary persons change their behavior and drop the bulky clothing and unnecessary running, the real terrorists will stand out more. Indeed, if anyone ever behaves like Jean Charles de Menezes again, the presumption that he is a terrorist will be so overwhelmingly strong that the police really must kill him." More recently, when confronted with the news that more American soldiers had died in Iraq than American citizens killed on September 11th, 2001, Althouse wrote, "A key question -- with an unknowable answer -- is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?" (The answer, of course, is that given that Iraq provided no material support to Al Qaeda and had no relationship whatsover to the events of 9/11, the answer is knowable and is, quite simply, "far fewer.") There's a reason the liberal economist Brad DeLong has repeatedly nominated her for "stupidest woman alive."
Just so you know I'm not unbiased.
The real issue at the table was whether or not the long-term and detrimental consequences of the empowerment of the Interstate Commerce Clause is overriden by the good done by the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s. As Ron repeatedly stresses, "People of good will can and do disagree on this point."
There's a lot of interesting stuff here. Althouse makes a bit of a hash of her argument when she writes about how upset she was that libertarians are "deeply serious" about continuing to discuss this issue and put real intellectual firepower behind it. She finds it shocking that there exist conservatives and libertarians who are "true believers" in the notion of liberty so eloquently described by the First Amendement.
You can read Althouse's second response, in which she attempts to give "her side" of the story. She's a "true believer" herself, mocking these people because they believe in freedom and liberty. Ron should not have to defend himself against the charge of racism because he's willing to discuss whether or not the expansion of federal power in the 1960s that resulted from civil rights legislation was a bad thing, and Althouse demands that he should.
Althouse makes her point: "What made me cry was the realization that these people didn't care about civil rights." When she writes this, I know she wasn't at the same colloquia as Ron Bailey. Because those people do care about civil rights: they care so much about them that they're dismayed by how few "rights" and how many wrongs have come out of the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Althouse is outraged that the First Amendment trumps her extraconstitutional philosophical standpoint.
What gets me most, though, is in reading Althouse's second response, I had the curious feeling I had read this before. Often. Too often. On Usenet. Because Althouse has reached the stage in a Usenet writer's life where she just can't let things go. She has to refute, point by point, line by line, sentence by sentence, everything Ron said, repeating herself over and over because she thinks we didn't get it the first time.
L'Affair d'Althouse is an object lesson every aging Usenetter has learned at one point in his or her life: people will say stuff about you, and you just have to let it go. Life is too important to waste on this kind of stuff.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-31 01:16 am (UTC)I'm glad I clicked on the cut explaining "stupidest woman alive", because -- wow. Skimming your post, I had the vague idea that Althouse was arguing with a libertarian, and so I felt I'd probably take her side, because libertarian arguments often make me angry, scared, or both. So I almost didn't read the rest. Silly me.
It's also good for someone like me, who occasionally falls into the trap of thinking that women are smarter than men, to be reminded that even if it's true that men have a wider scatter on the intelligence spectrum than women, the difference is small enough that there are plenty of stupid, stupid women out there -- just like there are plenty of brilliant ones.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-31 05:30 pm (UTC)The metaproblem at the table was simple: given what was happening in the late 1950s, if the United States avoided the overreach of Civil Rights legislation as it occurred, could we have looked out ourselves in the collective mirror and considered ourselves a moral nation?
Althouse was arguing with a libertarian. And she considers this matter so utterly undebatable-- she has her own "true beliefs"-- that when she encountered people willing to seriously discuss "liberty was harmed by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s", she got angry and frightened and she ran away. Given that she chose to go to the symposium in the first place, such hysterics are the mark of an intellectual lightweight.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-31 08:36 pm (UTC)Women do cry more easily than men, so I'm cautious when I read a man's opinion of a woman's crying. It's too easy to look down on someone for a behavior you know you're not prone to. And the word "hysterics" may not be an ideal choice in this context. She may be an intellectual lightweight, whatever that means -- I certainly grant that she makes stupid arguments. But being deeply moved doesn't need to stop an intelligent person from thinking deeply as well.
If you've ever been in the place some of my friends have -- the null point of some forms of depression, where affect drains away from the world around you and there's no emotion, pleasure or displeasure, tied to any thought or action -- then you know that without emotion, thought is meaningless. Without preferences, what you have is paralysis.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-31 03:16 am (UTC)I recently realized that I am becoming an old fart. Someone took a post of mine to a mailing list and refuted me line by line, and I just walked away.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-31 08:02 am (UTC)(And when you look into something like NAFTA, you have to wonder just who gets to make the choices in setting new rules.)
But the EU, just like the ICC, does sometimes deal with problems that the more local governments ignore, or even create.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-01 08:45 pm (UTC)Intelligence requires a certain amount of consideration.