I believe that black people are perfectly capable of making up their own minds about who and what is racist. They don't require the aid of anybody, even people whose fathers are English professors.

Yeah, and Catholics like Wm Donohue, or Protestant Xians like the hordes complaining about the War on Xmas, are perfectly capable of deciding what is anti-Catholic or antiXian. We should all abide by their exquisite sensitivities and demands.

Well, opposition to "speech codes" is simply not an example of a moral panic. Moral panics are a fascinating topic, and they usually cause great harm, such as the wave of sentiment that Satanists were raping toddlers at day care centers.

But there ought never, ever be a "speech code" at a campus, of all places (except for authoritarian private religious schools enforcing their dogma). If someone had wanted to call me a "dumb cunt who should be out of the classroom and in the bedroom breeding," whether said in a bar by some idiot patron, or another student in a classroom debate, I'm not going to credit that person with any power or sense. And if the person wants to express the sincere view that women are, in the aggregate, inferior to men in terms of spatial relations skills, they ought to feel free to say so without terror of the thought police coming after them at a *university.*

There is no doubt at all a sea change is going on, and my ideological cohort, the Reason-magazine type, Hayekian libertarians is something of a canary in the political coalmine. For decades, since the 60s or so, we tended to overwhelmingly vote GOP. That began a decline in 2000, and we made a number of differences in the 20006 midterms, with the most significant percentage of us yet voting Democratic, including many high-profile libertarians such as (in)famous global warming skeptic Ron Bailey (who has for a few years now accepted the science is in on that, btw).

As Cato Institute's Executive vice president David Boaz (Cato is a big deal libertarian think tank) has co-written that the studies show the GOP is losing us (http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121106B):

President Bush and the congressional Republicans left no libertarian button unpushed in the past six years: soaring spending, expansion of entitlements, federalization of education, cracking down on state medical marijuana initiatives, Sarbanes-Oxley, gay marriage bans, stem cell research restrictions, wiretapping, incarcerating U.S. citizens without a lawyer, unprecedented executive powers, and of course an unnecessary and apparently futile war. The striking thing may be that after all that, Democrats still looked worse to a majority of libertarians...

this was the year that New Hampshire and the Mountain West turned purple if not blue, and libertarians played a big role there. New Hampshire may be the most libertarian state in the country; this year both the state's Republican congressmen lost.

Meanwhile, in the Goldwateresque, "leave us alone" Mountain West, Republicans not only lost the Montana Senate seat; they also lost the governorship of Colorado, two House seats in Arizona, and one in Colorado.

Boaz identifies 15% of the electorate as being either self-identified libertarians, or fitting-the-profile of his (and my) kind of libertarianism. We used to abide very heavily in the GOP. That has been changing, and is now very much changed thanks to George W. Bush and the Elmer Gantrys who surround him in the party.

Finally, let me join the chorus comneding DCLAW1 for that elegant comment; this was especially rich:

An undeniable intellectual and social confluence is rapidly gaining momentum and solidarity. This solidarity is amazingly organic, not hierarchical -- its only guide is the sixth sense of skepticism, outrage, and, yes, reason.

Translation: Ooops! My bad!

Now Paul, not at all. People from your POV are never going to agree with people of mine on a great many issues, and it didn't make sense for libertarians to favor Democrats for quite some time. (Tho it did make sense not to vote, which I had taken to doing.) What binds us right now is that the things the left (excluding Stalinists and allied types) has always had in common with 'tarians are the most pressing matters du jour -- civil liberties under attack and authoritarian power running amok and beyond control. Not to mention opposition to a neocon war cult.

But we can return to our regularly scheduled disagreements when the immediate crisis has been averted. In the meantime, do you realize that I put you on the frontpage of LGF, albeit Johnson omitted my link to your Altemeyer post?