Video of Saturday’s arrest at the Jefferson Memorial is now on YouTube.  I’ll have a more complete writeup at Ars Technica later, but here are some stills:

So, among my many character flaws is a tendency to overgeneralize my own reactions—to assume that, though we may disagree along any number of dimensions, other people’s thought processes work roughly the same way my own do. I wrote the post below on the assumption that just about everyone would share approximately my response, which was: “Man, it sure sounds as though these park police overreacted. I bet they’ll be deservedly embarrassed when this excessive response to a benign celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday is publicized.”  Looking over at the comments on Megan’s blog, I see at least three reactions I didn’t really expect, but probably should have.

The first is that this is one more symptom of the jackboot of the looming police state stamping on the face of humanity. Uh, no.  Calm down, have some dip. This is a couple of bullies who, having managed to get drunk on an incredibly small amount of power, flipped out over some kids who chose a very mildly unorthodox way to honor the signer of the Declaration of Independence. It is suggestive of an unhealthy attitude some police apparently have toward anyone who politely asks for justification or explanation of an arbitrary order, but it’s not exactly the outrage of the year.

Incidentally, contra what Peter Suderman implies, I think most of the libertarians I know “hold both police officers as people and police as an institution in pretty high esteem.” As a D.C. resident, I’m usually glad to see them on the street, certainly. What struck me about this is precisely that I can recall seeing many instances, here and in New York, where police handled truly belligerent (though non-violent) people with really admirable restraint and professionalism, defusing tense situations without resorting to the paddy wagon. Nine times in ten, as those cops understood, people who are treated calmly and with respect will (perhaps after venting a bit) respond in kind.

The second reaction was that libertarians in general, and especially anyone who’s friends with Megan McArdle, must be irredeemably evil and deserve whatever’s coming to them. Which is true, certainly, but still probably doesn’t justify police acting like jerks.

The third, and most disturbing to my mind, was that there were plenty of people who seemed determined to go through all sorts of contortions to rationalize the police response. Of course they were justified, the monument was closed! Well, no, as three seconds of Googling would reveal, it’s open to the public 24 hours a day.

Well, but you surely need a permit!  Except, as far as I can tell, you don’t. This was a small number of people—apparently you can forego a formal permit application for groups smaller than 25, even in cases where you’d otherwise need one—who’d taken pains to avoid inconveniencing anyone, by using headphones and showing up at a time when their “bopping” wouldn’t interfere with crowds of tourists. Even with larger groups, my understanding is that you need a permit if you’re holding a “demonstration” which is likely to attract crowds of onlookers, which seems unlikely at midnight. Obviously, you don’t need a permit to visit the monument with 20 friends and walk around wearing headphones. I’m not sure I follow the logic according to which this requires a permit because you’re walking around sort of funny in time with the music playing on those headphones.

But they could have anticipated mayhem! There could have been droves of other revelers on the way! They might have been plannign to vandalize the monument! Uh, I guess that’s possible. But it seems like like reasonable people could have walked up to someone, asked “Hey, what’s going on here?”, then rolled their eyes at the weird kids and let them finish with their fifteen minutes of silliness.

What bugs me here is that there seem to be lots of people who—perhaps in recognition of the hard and vital job cops do—want to excuse even pretty clear mishandling of a situation by any means necessary. And this, I think, is conducive to the kind of scenario that Radley Balko so often writes about, where officers who botch things much more seriously, harming, harrassing, jailing, or even killing innocent people, seldom get more than a slap on the wrist.  I understand the attitude, but it seems pretty institutionally unhealthy.

Twitter informs me that a friend—whose name I’ll omit for the moment—just got arrested at a little dance party some libertarians were holding at the Jefferson Memorial (which, apparently, is open to the public 24/7). I’m not entirely clear on what the charge could have been—I wasn’t aware dancing at a public monument was prohibited by any statute—but given that my friend’s immediate social circle is largely composed of journalists, bloggers, and constitutional lawyers who sue the government for fun, I predict hilarity. The purpose of the dance party, ironically, was to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. Updates shortly.

Update: Here’s a friend’s (slightly edited) account of what happened at the scene:

The gist is that we started dancing with only headphones (no boom box or other external noise) and they forcefully asked us to leave. [Our mutual friend] was further back behind the cops and she kept dancing. They took her into custody and would not tell us why. We filmed almost the whole thing including the cops putting her in the paddy wagon. One cop swore at us and when Pete Eyre quoted him a few times the same cop said he would arrest Pete if he swore again. They told us that [our friend] was making noise (whatever that means) but people next to her said that she didn’t make a sound. There was absolutely no reason to handcuff her and take her to the station. Most of the people who were there are now at the station waiting.

Another friend passed along a photo from the arrest; click the thumbnail above for the full-sized version. I feel vaguely like Theora Jones.

Update II: Megan McArdle snarks:

As a resident of DC, I’m certainly overjoyed to hear that violent crime has fallen to a level where we can spare valuable police resources to fight the silent scourge of . . . dancing. Now that we have no more murders or muggings, it seems to me that we should also be looking at newsboys who smoke, women who attend the theater, and of course, the iniquitous habit of playing cards on the sabbath.

Jason Talley, who was at the scene, now reports that our friend was arrested on a charge of “disorderly conduct”.  Under District of Columbia law, “disorderly conduct” occurs when a person:

with intent to provoke a breach of the peace, or under circumstances such that a breach of the peace may be occasioned thereby;..(2) congregates with others on a public street and refuses to move on when ordered by the police.

Now, I’m no attorney, obviously, but I see at least a couple points on which the instant situtation seems to fall short. Especially if most others were moving along, I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out how dancing at the Jefferson Memorial at midnight can possibly be construed as either intended to or, indeed, remotely likely to “provoke a breach of the peace.” Again, going by Jason’s estimate, there were about 20 libertarian dancers, the police, and perhaps six other unaffiliated monument-visitors. The Jefferson Memorial, for those of you who haven’t been, is enormous. Twenty people grooving along quietly with their iPods probably wouldn’t be in anyone’s way at noon, never mind midnight. Second, I don’t know how instantaneously one is supposed to comply with broad orders, but it seems like a stretch to say that our friend was “refus[ing] to move on”.  Jason also says the officers would not give their badge numbers, which the District of Columbia requires them to do upon request. There should be video of all this shortly. And, naturally, there’s already a Facebook group: Free the Jefferson 1.

Update III: Radley Balko was there as well, and offers an account that jibes with what we’ve got here so far. Word is now that her release has been pushed back two hours because she had to be taken downtown, for some reason. So as I understand it, she’s going to spend five hours getting processed by police because she was celebrating Jefferson’s birthday at his open-to-the-public monument, and had the temerity to ask an officer why they had to leave. Message recieved: Never question a cop.

Incidentally, while my point here is mostly just to poke fun at these guys for being humorless jerks, I’m thinking this degree of touchyness about being questioned might yield less amusing results in situations that don’t involve educated white girls with lots of camera-toting friends on hand.

Update IV: She’s out and apparently fine. Video in a bit, supposedly.

Samitha at Feministing offers up a bit of a thumbsucker about Stuff White People Like, which reminds me that I’d meant to second Megan’s take from last month: The vast majority of the stuff there has always felt a bit like one of those fantastic Onion headlines that’s followed up by a lame article. It seems like it ought to be funny, but always ends up reading like one of those rambling C-grade Andy Rooney monologues that begin “didja ever notice…?”

Quite apart from that, the site also strikes me as mistitled. A less pithy but more accurate title might be “Stuff a small number of hipster kids and 30-something bobos like.” (And last graf notwithstanding, The Onion typically does this better.) Which one could overlook, except that in a few cases the title leads to some weird implications, especially given that the author of the site is himself white. For instance, am I alone in finding it slightly offputting to suggest that graduate school is in the category of stuff “white people like”? (Minorities, presumably, not being interested in all that book learnin’?) Or, along the same lines, that a dating prospect’s being “poorly read” could only be a “white problem”?

Adam Thierer links a sound post on the way concerns about privacy in the digital context seem inconsistent with our reactions in the physical realm:

Let’s say you are a tall, dashing, smartly dressed Chief Research Officer at a major Internet audience measurement company, and you walk into Nordstrom’s. A sales clerk you recognize comes up to you and says, “Hey, your wife’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and we just got in those sweaters she likes. Should I put a couple of them away for you in her size and color?” Now let me ask you. Does this hypothetical Chief Research Officer perceive this to be: (a) an egregious violation of his privacy, causing him to immediately rush home and write his state assemblyman; or (b) another example of Nordstrom’s world-class customer service? If you answered (b), then you’re tracking with me so far.

So how come if this exact same thing happens on the other side of the screen, it stops being outstanding customer service and turns into a violation of privacy?

Just to tack on a frivolous personal anecdote, I recall my father relating to me a visit to a Nordstrom’s we’d visited a year or two previous. The same sales associate who’d helped us then immediately walked up to him and said, without prompting: “Oh, Dr Sanchez! How is Julian enjoying NYU? Did he end up sticking with journalism? I hope that Joseph Abboud worked out for him. You were more partial to the Hickey Freeman’s, as I recall, though. I think we have a few in you might like.” When he’d finished picking his jaw up off the floor, he purchased several of the very aptly-chosen suits she’d recommended. Declan McCullagh wrote about the upsides of “zero privacy” for Reason a few years back.

All that said, I think there is a clear distinction between the knowledge stored in that Nordstrom’s associate’s impressive memory bank had and the kind of information compiled in  online transactions. As Lawrence Lessig and others have stressed, privacy is not just a function of what others know about you, but of the searchability of that information. That’s why we don’t fret a great deal that hundreds of dispersed people may each observe some fragment of our public comings and goings, but may get a little edgy when a network of closed circuit surveillance cameras can perfectly record and archive the same behavior, perhaps eventually subject to search by face-recognition technology that can pluck our trail from a vast store of tape. You may not care that the Rite Aid clerk knows you bought a tube of Astroglide; you may be less sanguine about having that data correlated with your dinner reservations later the same evening.

Gene Healy was a founding don of what, lo those many years ago, we jokingly called the Cato Blog Mafia.  Long out of the game, Gene has just announced his triumphant return to the blogosphere, where he’ll presumably be focusing on the issues at the heart of his excellent new book The Cult of the Presidency, which you must purchase and read unless you hate the troops, America, and puppies.

Last month, I wrote a short piece for the American Spectator in which I argued that the position Republicans have taken on executive-branch spying powers in recent decades is as much a historical accident as a natural outgrowth of conservative principles. I wish that at the time I’d read Kathryn Olmstead’s fine book Challenging the Secret Goverment, in which she notes that in the early Cold War period, it was often the taint of McCarthyism that prevented Congress from exercising greater intelligence oversight.  Olmstead writes:

[President] Eisenhower vehemently opposed [a congressional oversight body], claiming that McCarthyites would dominate the committee. The president’s opposition convinced fourteen cosponsors of the bill—all but one of whom were Republicans—to change their minds and oppose the measure. Ultimately, the bill was defeated by a 59–27 vote, with liberal Democrats and right-wing McCarthyites forming an uneasy and unsuccessful alliance in support of greater oversight.

I don’t generally consider it an endorsement to learn that a position is associated with Joseph McCarthy, but whatever we think of the man, we do know now that his worries about infiltration of the executive branch were not wholly groundless either. Ann Coulter has been attempting to revive Tailgunner Joe’s reputation; I won’t claim to find the effort particularly compelling, but if some conservatives do, they might try emulating his insistence that there be checks on powerful and secretive executive agencies.

The University of Texas at Austin has recently made available online the video archives of the old Mike Wallace Interview (complete with Wallace touting the joys of the Parliaments he’s chain smoking throughout). I was especially fascinated by this interview with Salvador Dalí. Oddly, its when Dalí is most cogent and illuminating that Wallace seems to think he’s just spouting his trademark nonsense.  For instance, he starts talking about his painting as an advance in “nuclear physics,” which certainly sounds like a facetious answer at first. But he soon makes it quite clear that he’s talking about relativity, and saying that his “soft watches”—appearing, most famously, in “The Persistence of Memory”—are a representation of the plasticity of rigid-seeming space and time. Worth a look if you’re a Dalí fan.

So, my RSS reader routinely presents me with a quandary. A bare minimum of once per day, the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb produces a piece of truly stunning hackery audacious even by the standards of partisan blogging. Often, I’m tempted to comment on this. Normally, I refrain on the grounds that it’s low-hanging fruit, and could probably provide enough material for its own dedicated blog if I began giving in to this temptation with any regularity.  Still, just to get it out of my system, I’ve settled on a compromise: I’ll just link the hackiest post I read on a given day via this charming photo of an old Hackney cab. Writers other than Goldfarb will be eligible, though I expect he’ll be difficult to unseat.  Without further ado:

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s notion of “Libertarian Paternalism” has already occasioned plenty of blogospheric debate, but their recent LA Times op-ed has reopened the floodgates. Jonah Goldberg has a crop of posts, and Jim Manzi and Will Wilkinson also take shots. I’ve been at least somewhat more open to the idea than some of my fellow travelers in the past—many of the objections I saw in previous go rounds amounted to complaints that Sunstein & Thaler weren’t using “libertarian” to mean “strictly in accordance with Rothbardian side-constraints.”

That said, I think Will makes the best case I’ve yet seen against the idea—at least to the extent that the authors are calling for an enforcable public policy, rather than simply recommending a practice for private firms. He writes:

Sunstein and Thaler may wish to design the presentation of choices to bias decisions in favor of, say, happiness. But other choice architects may be more interested in biasing our choices toward virtue or toward participation in great collective projects. Obviously everyone is a “choice architect” to some degree in his or her daily intercourse with others. And some people, like marketers and salespeople, try to shape choices for a living. The thing is, we often rightly resent their attempts to manipulate us, but at least we are more or less in control of our exposure to such people. But when choice architecture is implemented politically, we cannot opt out of these attempts at manipulation, attempts which may or may not be benign. That’s a big problem because political choice architecture may do a great deal to shape us, even if, in its “libertarian paternalist” incarnation, it makes a show of leaving the ultimate choice open to individuals.

For example, I would object if President John McCain implemented a policy of opt-out national service because such a policy would communicate all-too-clearly that individuals need some kind of special justification or rationale not to serve the state. The default rule itself contains meaningful content. If allowed to stand, such a policy could shape norms and individual preferences in a direction antagonistic to the value of autonomy. Soon enough we might find ourselves asking, “Why should you be able to opt out at all?” The paternalistic nudge may “leave the choice open” but accepting the legitimacy of the certain nudges may imperil liberty.

And, of course, there are varying degrees of “nudges,” as Manzi points out. You can make the “opt-out” procedures so burdensome or costly that it’s functionally indistinguishable from a ban. (From a certain perspective, after all, fines and prison terms are just very high opt-out costs.) The only thing that restrains me from joining in a full-throated rejection of the notion is that given our growing tolerance of all sorts of paternalism, I worry that in many cases the alternative is just full-blown old-fashioned paternalism. In other words, I’m pretty sure there’s a slippery slope here, but I’m not sure which direction it tilts in.

I would very much rather see the national conversation shift in such a way that the self-appointed guardians of public health and welfare feel themselves compelled to talk about ways to encourage people to make “better” choices while respecting their autonomy, instead of plowing ahead on the assumption that once we know the “right’ decision, we should mandate it. I would obviously be dismayed if the upshot of this was to concede that it’s valid to “shape” people’s decisions, with the only remaining debate concerning the strength of the “nudge”. There’s always the possibility that, precisely to the extent that people exercise their autonomy by opting out, our soi-disant guardians will infer that we need yet more vigorous “shaping”. At this point, the new paternalism bleeds into the old sort because the appropriate “nudge” is one just strong enough to yield only trivial noncompliance with the guardians’ notion of what’s best. The key, for this to be made attractive to actual libertarians, would be to precommit to the idea of low, fixed opt-out costs, rather than allowing the optimal cost to be a function of the level of compliance produced.