Lighten up, it's just fashion.

Until it's not.

And here's the "I love Hitler" video that just couldn't be brushed away as drunken smack-talking.

Why does the left hate free speech?

Because they don't know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don't know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting "shut up"... when they aren't prissily imploring everyone to be "civil."

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux, the blogger I linked to above, has written a new post in which he might think he's responding to my challenge and providing substance rather than crude denouncement. If you can slog through his laughably poor writing — "It’s not just liberals but Althouse herself who don’t believe in the standards of free speech she criticizes 'liberals' for not practicing" — you'll see he's come up with 3 links to posts of mine which supposedly show that I don't have principled free-speech values. Follow those links and see what I actually wrote.

"Hoft gets this through Instadouche and, unsurprisingly, Ann Althouse, who has been looking at pictures again, something that never ends well..."

"... as also of course happens when she 'thinks things' and then 'writes them down' and 'alerts the public as to her thoughts.'"

Heh. I got FireDogLake writing in the anti-Althousiana genre.

ADDED: I guess Firedoglake is flouting the "civility" bullshit that's been bandied about lately.

AND: Here's the link to Hoft, where there is a nice juxtaposition of photographs along with my quote about the President's hair color change. (Let's call it his "mood hair.")

I think it's important to talk about the way politicians use their visual image in communicating their message. Clearly, we talk about female politicians' hair all the time. It is different to talk about men's hair, of course, because men aren't supposed to care much about their hair.

It's part of the conventional manly image not to pay attention to hair, and when a man runs afoul of that image, he gives his opponents raw material that... well, that can make a hilarious video. (That video was much funnier before the pricks that own the "Theme from Rawhide" asserted their candyass rights.)

AND: Here's how female politicians are treated when they change their hair:

Stray anti-Althousiana.

ADDED: Bashed that humungous melon-head into a wall? I feel sorry for the wall!

ADDED:  Ironically, complimenting themselves on their civility, they are uncivil to me!

Oh, the violent ideation of the lefties!

It's so hypocritical!

They need to restore sanity again.

If you're thinking of saying something about Elizabeth Edwards in the comments to the previous post....

... you need to put it here instead.

ADDED: Let me front-page something Clyde said in the comments to yesterday's post noting the death of Elizabeth Edwards:

This is probably an inappropriate question, but if as some have speculated, she knew the end was near and stopped taking the drugs: Did she decide to check out in December before the Death Tax kicks back in in 2011? Dying before January would be very lucrative for heirs, as opposed to hanging on until January 1st and having her estate get slammed with a 55% tax (or I think 35% if the deal Obama made with the Republicans goes through)...

AND: Irene said:

Rich people like Elizabeth Edwards plan for death, and their lawyers draft dispositions that minimize the impact of the estate tax. She knew she was dying, and she probably had a plan that gave a good chunk to charity. She also had plenty of warning since her initial diagnosis, and she could take advantage of making lifetime gifts to her children.

If she didn't plan, then everything passes to John Edwards without any tax implications. They're still married, and there is an unlimited marital deduction for spouses.

I didn't realize they were still married. Did they stay married as a tax-planning scheme?

Althouse is censored by the IRS.

A reader who works at the IRS and has, in the past, read my blog from his computer there — on lunch break, of course — couldn't get through to my blog today. This message came up instead:

The Internal Revenue Service has restricted access to the requested URL.

Reason: The Internal Revenue Service's category "Phishing and Other Frauds" is filtered.

URL: http://althouse.blogspot.com/

By what process and what standard was my blog identified as a "fraud"?

Roy Edroso imagines that Leslie Savan had the courage to "dispute Muslim articles of faith."

He's presenting something I wrote to his readers, who follow his direction and call me an idiot, but he's got it wrong. I blogged (and agreed with much of) Savan's piece in The Nation and tweaked her by asking if she was "paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs?" I also snarked that "I didn't know you could do that in The Nation."

Roy Edroso pretends to laugh at my joke ("Tee hee") and lobs the sarcasm: "Because libs are so cowardly they cannot dispute Muslim articles of faith. Which Savan proves by just having done so."

But Savan did NOT do so in the paragraph that precedes my joke. Savan savaged Americans. First, she said:

Regardless of what the Muslim world may or may not believe, this whole seed fixation is profoundly un-American. 

In other words: Put the beliefs of Muslims to the side; I want to talk about American values. Then:

It says that genealogy is destiny, that a man is Muslim regardless of what he espouses or believes. It’s all about descent—and nauseatingly close to the “one drop rule” of the post-Reconstruction South. That rule held that if a person had any African or Indian ancestry whatsoever, he or she was classified as “colored” and subject to anti-miscegenation laws, voter disenfranchisement, and segregation at large. At least eighteen states adopted some form of the rule; Virginia’s 1924 law, for instance, was called the Racial Integrity Act.

Having purported to limit herself to American values (as opposed to universal truths), she goes through a litany of historical wrongs, committed by Americans, a comfortable and familiar place for readers of The Nation. This is the point at which I asked my question whether she's "paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs."

I think she thought that she'd limited her inquiry at that point to American values and American racism. Although some Muslims are Americans and could presumably be swept up into an inquiry about American values, Savan has specifically set aside what Muslims believe. Plus, she's switched to talking about race. What interested me is something I don't think she meant to do but only unwittingly implied.

Did Edroso even understand my point? I deliberately write in an elliptical style sometimes. You have to think a minute to get it, and I don't think Edroso did. The writing may look simple, but there is a challenge in that simplicity that you'd better be sure you see and meet before you decide you've done the easy reading and are now in a fine position to call me stupid.

I'll be heavy-handed so he can rethink his insolent attitude toward me. I think that Savan didn't mean to say that the Muslims are repellent if they believe that a person is a Muslim because his father is a Muslim. She only meant that Americans violate American values if they perceive someone — such as Obama — as Muslim because his father is a Muslim. I would guess that she subscribes to the cultural relativism that accepts Muslims (even American Muslims) viewing their religion as a genetic matter. I don't think she wanted to deal in higher level philosophy about individual freedom and autonomy (which is the subject that I went on to talk about, quoting James Madison).

So, Roy, imagine that an editor at The Nation had responded to Savan's draft with these direct questions: Did you mean to imply that you are disgusted by a Muslim's belief that religion is inborn? Did you mean to say that that Muslim belief is like racism, because it looks like you may have implied that? I think you probably meant to say that Muslims should be judged by Muslim values and that you are leaving that judgment for other Muslims, and that you only mean to say that Americans are judged by American values and that you are all about being very critical of Americans who say that Obama was a Muslim — right?

Do you think Savan would have answered yes or no to those questions? If she answered yes, don't you think the editor would be likely to say: Could you rewrite this to make that really clear? And if she said no and wanted to make that absolutely clear, don't you think that the editor would have killed the piece?

Accused of frigidity, I push back.

The accusation.

The pushback.

AND: Here's the Hattie Carroll stuff in the same comments thread. And here's my parody of the Bob Dylan song, written upon the death of William Zantzinger (of Zanzinger, if you prefer) in January 2009. And, by the way, "The Bob Dylan song that turned on Jimmy Carter is the one that Barack Obama calls a favorite."

Over at Media Matters, Eric Boehlert is writing about me.

Eric Boehlert. Eric Boehlert? Oh, I know where I read his name recently. He's a character in Iowahawk's brilliant "I'll Take a Cashier's Check, Mr. Breitbart." He's the one handing out the assignments:

EZRA KLEIN: hey boehlert whats the assignment

ERIC BOEHLERT: 3 part essay

ERIC BOEHLERT: 1. Explain why unemployment report shows stimulus is working

ERIC BOEHLERT: 2. link BP oil spill to teabaggers

ERIC BOEHLERT: 3. spin latest Gallups

JOSH MARSHALL: crap crap crap and I have a lab assignment for global warming due

ERIC ALTERMAN: o fack me looks like an all niter...

Ha. But why is he on my case? "Ann Althouse continues to blog about Journolist; appears to have no idea what it was," he says. Well, then, release the archive so I can cure my terrible ignorance. That's all I want.

Althouse continues to post item after item about Journolist, despite the fact that... Althouse has no idea what Journolist was.

Stop me before I blog ignorantly again, Eric. Send me the archive. Or send it to Breitbart and collect $100,000 and I'll get to it that way.

Boehlert goes on to quote me saying that if I were to sue a Journolist member for defamation — something I'm not inkleined to do — I would be able to get discovery into the archive. Eric B. says:

Althouse, a law school prof and very public blogger, was thinking out loud about suing the owner of Journolist to find out if any of the 400 journalists on the listserv ever wrote anything nasty about her in their private emails. (Ego much?)

Eric Boehlert continues to write about me like that even though he has no idea what the thing I wrote that he just quoted says.  I cited a specific item of defamation against me that was published on the web and that remains there. If I were to sue based on that remark, I would be able to get discovery into relevant evidence about that claim. Moreover, I know that there are specific, related remarks about me in the Journolist archive, because that remark was tweeted, in Ezra Klein's own words, "after I was alerted to her thread on Journolist."

Boehlert imagines that one of my commenters nails his argument for him. Here's that comment:

I would think a law professor might have a better grasp of this. But on what grounds would you seek the archives? To borrow a popular argument of the right, where in the Constitution does it say you have the right to know what others are saying about you, especially when you have no proof they are saying anything defamatory about you.

Clue to Boehlert: Not all law is in the Constitution. The tort of defamation is a matter of state law. The extent of discovery is a matter of procedural law. I don't need a constitutional right. (Conceivably, there is a right that would bar my access to the archive, but I don't need a constitutional right to discovery if I bring a defamation claim.)

So, Boehlert, your post is incredibly lame, but, as a law professor, I'll give you a rewrite. I think Media Matters portrays itself as a champion of truth, so... see if you can get a little closer to something that feels a little more truth-y.

***

On a related note: Yesterday, James Taranto, in Best of the Web, opined that a journalist's shield law would prevent discovery into the Journolist archive in a defamation suit:

Seems to us it would depend on the venue. Most states have some sort of shield law protecting reporters from having to disclose confidential sources, but the specifics vary from state to state. In federal court, however, there is no such privilege.

The privilege is about shielding confidential news sources — informants. The Journolist archive contains the statements of journalists talking to each other. I don't see how the privilege could apply.

[Journalists] should, of course, have all the legal protections of the First Amendment, which among other things mean that Althouse almost certainly would not win her defamation suit against Klein. His offending tweet, it seems to us, is a constitutionally protected opinion rather than a false statement of fact.

One reason I have no interest in suing is that I want the broadest First Amendment rights here. I would not want to have to argue that the statement in question — "Ann Althouse sure has a lot of anti-semitic commenters" — is not an opinion but a false statement of fact. But I'm afraid it is, quite plainly, a false statement of fact.

Isthmus publisher Vince O'Hern embarrasses himself pontificating about the value of his paper over my blogging.

"We who labor at turning dead trees into public knowledge feel some obligation to make the sacrifice of the atmosphere-cleansing, oxygen-producing creatures worthwhile. It's possible that the theoretical infinity of cyberspace encourages throwing whatever is lying around into the void. It achieves nothing. It is simply wasting time by people who have time to waste."

LOL. Great Earth Day bullshit for the landfill, Vince. I hope you appreciate this blog post, which will lie around in the void... forever... searchable by Google.

Isthmus finally came out with that article about me by UW student Jack Craver — to whom I refused to give an interview.

Here's the article, in which — among other things — Craver quotes  my blog post from last January, where I talked about why I didn't want to do the interview. I don't know if he realizes it or not, but Craver's article is better because he needed to do what I told him to do and he did it: read the blog and try to get it instead of asking me to explain myself.

I'm not saying he got everything. He most assuredly didn't. For example, after (correctly) noting my peeve about men in shorts, he tells the story of Meade asking me out like this:

In fact, Meade's first date proposal came after Althouse posted a response to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, from which she drew this piece of advice for men: "A young man should perceive when a girl likes him and he needs to ask her out to dinner and a movie before somebody else does."

Meade saw his opportunity and seized it. "OK. Want to have dinner with me and see it again? I'll wear my pants [a reference to Althouse's distaste for shorts]," wrote the loyal commenter, eyes averted.

That wasn't about shorts at all. It was a reference to my delight — "LOL! The green pants..." — when Meade changed his comments avatar to a close-up of a male model in green trousers immediately after — I can't find exactly where — I'd professed love for said model.

Mistakes aside, picking around through my various posts, looking for clues and quotes, resulted in a better material than Craver is likely to have produced if I'd talked to him for an hour. But he does make me look a little pissy in the email I sent him declining the interview:

Basically, the answers to all these questions are already on the blog. If that sounds enigmatic, I mean to be enigmatic. I'm bored by whether something is right wing or not and how can anyone be right wing and so forth. The point of the blog is not to be bored.

He doesn't include the questions he's proposed. In trying to decide if I wanted to overcome my instinctive disinclination to do an interview with a UW student writing for the Isthmus, I asked, "Could you give me an idea of what kinds of things you are looking at and how much of the blog you have read?" He offered these questions:

Why is your blog so successful?...

What is the goal behind your blog?...

What is the blog's politics?...

How have your experiences shaped the world view/political view expressed on the blog?

I didn't think I'd be very interesting blabbing in person about such things, and I didn't want to see what quotes would be cherry-picked out of my babblings for the readers of the local "alternative" paper. Isthmus, as you'd expect in Madison, has a lefty slant, and I had every reason to expect a hit piece. (Including past experience.) And since the writer was a UW student, if I'd spoken with him, I would have treated him in that friendly, accommodating, supportive way that suits my professorial role. Consequently, I would have found it hard to protect myself from a hit piece and to respond to it after the fact. I'm not going to get into any kind of a public fight with a UW student.

I wasn't going to read the article because I didn't want to get annoyed, but then reader Larry K emailed me the link to it and — even though he alerted me that it was "scurrilous" — I couldn't resist. Then I was surprised that it wasn't as bad as Larry K seemed to think:

[Criticize Democratic politicians and policies long enough] and you'll get a scrawny University student trawling through your personal life and making repeated references to your UW salary (which is healthy, but a fraction of what I'm sure she could earn in private practice)....

If this dude thinks her blog is right-wing, he ought to move out of the basement - and work on his critical thinking skills. The apparently big insight of this article - "People who call Ann Althouse a right-wing political blogger miss the point. She's a right-wing pop-culture blogger" - is simply asserted, and then goes nowhere. Having "attitude" is right-wing? Did this guy miss the 20th century?

Ah, but wait! Maybe having attitude is right wing! In the Isthmus article, Craver wonders about my (oft-derided) line "to be a great artist is inherently right wing." I stand by that, for the reasons I gave at the time. Now, I realize I could expand that into: Having attitude is right wing. That might ring true, and, in any case, it will rile the lefties, which is how I have my fun a motivating force behind my blogging, which you know I consider to be art work (and therefore... right wing!).

Who are the Mobys?

I think that lately the comments section of this blog has been attracting a lot Mobys. Yesterday, I called attention to a commenter who wrote something outrageous (and actually funny, if you recognize it as fake). A very high-traffic blog had exposed me to criticism for having that in my comments, and a commenter over there suggested it was a "false flag operation," and linked to a post by SEK over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, that begins: "I went over to Althouse’s and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare 'April Fools'!" Now, I already thought I was dealing with a Moby, and here was SEK, apparently, bragging about being a Moby. So I threw him a link and quoted him. He then showed up in my comments and said:

Dear Ann,

I didn't write any of those comments. You just got fooled twice over by your own racist and misogynist commenters. Please, feel free to check the IP addresses of the comments I claimed, all April-Foolsy, to have written.

I was in the middle of a 1000-mile drive, so I wasn't exactly anguishing over my failure to pick up whatever-the-hell SEK had layered into his blog post that was written in the form of a confession. My response to that — written at 11:23 at night from an I-80 rest stop in Iowa — was:

Someone was fooling, either you, per your confession, or someone else, if you're not fooling now. It makes no difference to me who did it. It wasn't one of our regulars and it wasn't a believable story.

The attempt to paint my commenters (or me!) as racist or whatever is inflammatory and ugly, and I've lost track of who wants that to stop.

Now, SEK has updated his post, with a not-too-attractive mix of hostile insults and whiny fears for his own fate:

You Althouse people really aren’t very bright.  To anyone who thinks that I actually wrote the comments paraphrased above, I suggest you click here and enter my last name into the “Instructor” field.  I’ll wait … so are you really ready to accuse me of writing that?  

Well, you'll have to wait a long time, because I don't know your last name, SEK. Is that me being not very bright? Or are you patently a fool?

I’m only asking because, unlike Althouse, who has tenure and can misbehave as she pleases, I’m a lowly lecturer who, if he steps out of line, will be fired on the spot.  

So why are you being so hostile and calling people names? It's interesting that you feel vulnerable, but what are you doing slugging people and then claiming vulnerability when you get a response.

Ann has the IP addresses of the people who left those comments and knows that it wasn’t me.  If she insists on lying, I can’t afford to prove her wrong in a court of law; however, I’m willing to put my name and career on the line and proclaim, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t write the racist comments I mocked her for brooking on her blog.  She can’t be fired for besmirching her university in public like this, but if I’m lying, I can be dismissed with two snaps from an irate bureaucrat.  So in the interests of truth, I demand that should Althouse insist on claiming that I wrote those comments, she publish the IP addresses of the authors of the comments I linked to.  If they all resolve to Corona, California, I’ll exit the internet for life.

As noted above, I do not have a collection of IP addresses. I have no way to check who's behind the various pseudonyms, so you're on your own denying that you wrote what you previously said you wrote. I believed you then, and you ask me to believe you now, and the reason you're supposed to be believable now is that you have a strong self-interest in disassociating yourself from your own words. You made your own problem, and yet you are still being nasty to me, trying to smear me with racism for nothing but maintaining a free-speech forum. You accuse me of lying for quoting you. You threaten to sue me — for quoting you! — and at the same time whine that you can't afford to sue me. You stress that you would like to see me fired — for what?! — and yet you beg in the most pusillanimous fashion that I should pity you because you could be fired.

This is all so pathetic. Or is this another satire that I'm not bright enough to understand?

Anyway, to my commenters: Please understand that there are Mobys here. There are commenters who pretend to mean what they are saying, when what they are trying to do is to make us look bad somehow. Take that into account when you interact with people here.

Things that make John Cole think about his testicles...

... if he has any testicles.

***

I'm getting a lot of flak for saying "So what if some idiot said a bad word?"

I'm not going to link to some of the outrageous anti-Althousiana out there, but you can easily find it by Googling "Althouse" and "So what if some idiot said a bad word?" You'll find some harsh stuff. Did you know I'm "lunatic fringe right-wing blogger Ann Althouse"? Anyway, here's my old post, where I've added this new material:

I'm not approving of ugly epithets, just emphasizing the comparison between an individual ordinary citizen, who might not be very sane/smart/educated, and a member of Congress, who wields great power. The member of Congress should not pretend he's weak, when he is in fact strong. It's also exceedingly lame — and, frankly, racist — for white people to be so quick to think of powerful black politicians as vulnerable and besieged. I assume the black politicians laugh at them in private. The willingness of black politicians to make power moves in racial terms suggests to me that they know exactly what they are doing: leveraging patronization.

The death of Jon Swift — a formidable blogger.

I'm very sorry to read about the death of Jon Swift — whose real name was Al Weisel. He died after 2 aortic aneurysms, which happened as he was on his way to his father's funeral, according to a comment on his blog — which hadn't been updated in about a year. The comment is (apparently) from his grieving mother.

Swift was a terrific writer. He liked to antagonize me, but that means nothing now, other than that I'm honored to have provided some raw material to a fine writer. Here, he pretends to find it fascinating that I stopped by his blog:

Although I am grateful for every one of the new readers who visited this blog in the last week, I am especially surprised and delighted with one new reader in particular who finally decided to drop in. For years she adamantly refused to read my blog or even mention my pseudonym even as she said the most scurrilous things about me. I'm not sure why she resisted coming here for so long unless it was because she was afraid that my writing was so persuasive and reasonable it would shake the very foundations of her carefully constructed world view and set off a dangerous logic loop in her brain that would cause it to short circuit. For many years she remained steadfast in her refusal to let one word of my prose sully the purity of her thoughts. But perhaps the evenings in Madison, Wisconsin, are particularly cold and lonely this time of year and perhaps she had had one too many glasses of wine by 5:30 p.m. on January 8, 2009. And so that evening, as a bitter wind howled outside her window, she checked her Sitemeter to see how many visitors Instapundit had sent her that day and saw yet another link from my site, just sitting there enticingly, beckoning, whispering, "Click me. Click me." Imagine the inner turmoil she experienced as she tried with all her might to resist clicking on the link. Must. Not. Read. Jon. Swift. Then her will power failed her and she could no longer resist, and throwing all caution to the wind, she finally succumbed and clicked that fateful link that whisked her away to my blog. And soon she was reading, feeling that first rush as my prose entered her veins. Who knew it could be so good, she said to herself as one by one the words swept away the cobwebs and the dust in the attic of her cranium, cluttered with crazy theories about breast-bearing feminists, the plots of unfinished books that bored her, deep insights into American Idol episodes and even that dark corner where Bill Clinton waits, crouched lasciviously, ready to betray her all over again. And imagine that moment when her giddy anticipation was finally fulfilled and she came to the first mention of her name, right there, right there in black and light brown, her name in all its glory!: Ann Althouse. So welcome to my modest blog, Ms. Althouse. I wish you had told me you were coming and I would have tidied up the place a bit. I hope you finally found what you were looking for.

He emailed to let me know he'd written that. He said:

Thanks for the visit. I hope you enjoyed it and will be coming back soon. But let me know next time when you're coming over and I'll tidy up a bit first.

I responded:

That post was awfully needy. Not that I read more than the parts right around my name.

He said:

You know, as reflexively mean as you can be sometimes, it's hard not to like you anyway.

I responded:

Okay, I gave you a link, since you bowed down to me.

He said:

Very funny. Thank you.

Jon Swift

Thank you, Jon Swift.

"So everyone has pretty much agreed that I was right yesterday when I said the 'moderation' language about Obama’s alcohol consumption was just boilerplate."

Says Glenn Reynolds:

Still, to show my support for our President, I went out to the Downtown Grill & Brewery last night and hoisted a couple — moderately, of course — in his honor. Kinda like when some Obama fans changed their middle names to Hussein to show support, only more delicious . . . .

Ha ha. So, then, this is me, the other day at Brasserie V:



Ah, but look at the prudes — the killjoys — who freak out about drinking, who think that lifting one glass depicts degeneracy. These people call themselves "liberals," but they are not liberal at all. They despise your pleasure and revelry and want only to clamp down on any fun. Don't trust them with power, my friend!

The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy...

IN THE COMMENTS: Jim Treacher said:

Is there enough booze in the world to get those guys laid?

Sadly, no.

"WOW!! Althouse, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard."

"At no point in your rambling, incoherent writing were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone who read this is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul."

A comment that someone made and then — for some reason — deleted, on this old post.

ADDED: Oh! I thought it was a little too well-written:



(Thanks, Awesome.)

"This post does a great job of parodying Althouse’s own obsession with irrelevant minutae."

"... That *is* what it’s doing, isn’t it?"

Ha ha ha. That's the 8:57 comment (from Bitchphd) on this obsessive and humorless post about the Obama-Sarkozy ass-gawk and my description of it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Rick Lee says:

Well... I AM an expert in photography and this guy's analysis is stupid. You can see from the feet position of Obama and the girl that Obama is standing exactly beside the ass in question because they are on steps.

Indeed!

"The disdain is palpable," Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes about Andrew Sullivan writing about me.

Link.

I don’t read Ms. Althouse... But I was arrested by Mr Sullivan’s response to what ought to be a celebration-worthy event — an engagement! —: his post was titled No Comment Possible.

Of course, saying “no comment possible” is, by itself, a ton of comment. In fact, Mr Sullivan comments further: “Ten days of emailing … and she was ready” (the slut!) and quotes another blog, the famously moderate and even-keeled Pandagon: “OMFG.”

The disdain is palpable.

Go to the link Gobry's story of meeting his fiancée on Facebook and his defense of on-line meetings. I'm continuing with the part about Sullivan. Gobry notes the "cognitive dissonance":

Mr Sullivan is, after all, one of the most talented and articulate proponents of same-sex marriage, and no doubt needs no education on the discrimination, both soft and hard, that can befall human beings based on their relationships. Yet he doesn’t miss a beat in responding derisively to Ms Althouse’s engagement even though… Who cares?

What should be treated as an unremarkable event, worthy of cheer if anything, is held up for derision, by someone who ought to know better. So I felt the need to speak up.

Yes, I too think that Sullivan's reaction to me was detrimental to the cause of same-sex marriage (for which he has fought so admirably). Obviously, he had to have thought he was serving his cause by asserting that his 5-year relationship deserved more respect than mine, but he has a tragic blind spot. He was acting as though it's perfectly fine to trash someone else's relationship because it strikes you at a gut level as wrong. But that's how millions of people feel about his relationship! If we start arguing in that emotional mode, your cause is doomed.

The first comment chez Gobry is quite something:

is this post about althouse or about you?

Look, it’s not that complicated. Online relationships are weird. Flirting between a blogger and a random commentator is double weird. Marriage after three dates is just fucking stupid. Toss in a raging storm of Ann Althouse hatred, plus Althouse’s own special brand of comic cluelessness, and you got a fun little story to pick over for a while. The bizzaro [sic] marriage is a final confirmation of what we all already knew, namely that this woman is batshit insane.

As for minding our own business? If Althouse didn’t want people to gossip about her private life, then maybe she shouldn’t have posted about it on the internet.

I love that Gobry responds right away in the next comment:

Actually, it’s about Sullivan and a few others.

And look, I disagree with you. Online relationships are no longer weird. Online dating services have been around for more than a decade now and countless people use them. And here in France, people have been using the Minitel to date since the 80s. Note that I haven’t used online dating services, but I honestly don’t see how anyone should find them weird in 2009.

Same thing with flirting between a blogger and a commentator. Why? I mean, honestly: why? Why is it weird? Why is it any weirder than, say, flirting with someone in line at Starbucks?

And marriage after three dates being “fucking stupid”… What particular expertise do you claim on the subject? I have friends who dated for like 5 years, moved in together, and then broke up after 3 weeks. That, to me, is fucking stupid. If a friend has met someone and wants to get engaged after three dates, I might be surprised and curious, but I haven’t been in his shoes, how the hell can I claim it’s stupid? I mean, seriously?

We’re talking about two private individuals we don’t know, who have made a decision that by definition none of us can understand because we haven’t been in their shoes and can’t understand their innermost motives, and yet we feel entitled to heap judgmental scorn on them.

That’s what’s pretty fucking stupid, in my opinion.

A good comment, from matoko_chan:

I thought Althouse’s love story was charming and romantic.

It is like a chaste victorian correspondence.

Since love and sexuality are initiated by brain function, what better way to really get to know someone, than as a pure intelligence scraped off of physical packaging and environmental distractions?

After 4 years of meeting minds, I think Ann Althouse and her sweetheart have a much better chance than most.

To give Andrew credit, I think he wonders if Althouse’s erstwhile suitor presented himself factually. After four years, I would believe the guy.

It is true that stalkers and predators roam the virtual spaces, but 4 years should be enough to reveal it.

Stalkers and predators are everywhere, on-line and off. You've got to look out. But who would spend 4 years writing comments on a blog to get at some 58-year-old lady in Madison, Wisconsin? You might as well worry that your spouse of 20 years is just faking the whole damned thing. Or that you yourself are a big empty fraud.