Author: admin

Only
Officer Daniel Pantaleo knows what motivated him to confront and
ultimately kill Eric Garner—and what spurred him in previous
incidents that drew two civil rights lawsuits during his eight
years with the New York Police Department. Maybe he’s a racist.
Maybe he’s a martinet. Maybe he’s just an asshole. The fact of the
matter is, it’s difficult to think of a good reason for killing a
man who attracted police attention by breaking up a fight and
peddling a few untaxed cigarettes. We’ll never know what demons may
lurk in any officer’s heart, which sets the stage for dangerous
encounters in a country where 70 percent or more of us are
technically lawbreakers.

If we really want to reduce the chance of future Eric Garners,
writes J.D. Tuccille, we need to slash the spiderweb of laws,
rules, and regulations that turn the majority of Americans into
criminals, and make us all potential targets for the police and
whatever inner demons may drive them.

View this article.

• Former CIA Director
  Michael Hayden insists the agency’s interrogation methods
  provided a “Home Depot-like storage of information on Al Qaeda” in
  the wake of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture.
  The report’s appendix spends 37 pages, by the way, countering the
  claims about the program Hayden made in just one hearing.
• Other countries’ leaders have
  mixed response to the torture report. Some are upset it
  happened but appreciate that the United States came clean. Poland’s
  former president finally admitted that his country was the home of
  one of the CIA black sites used to interrogate detainees.
• A story that actor
  Lena Dunham described in her memoirs about an alleged sexual
  assault against her when she was a student at Oberlin has started
  falling apart. She has taken to BuzzFeed to
  defend herself.
• A House Committee is still trying to get at answers about the
  
  security lapses that led to four deaths at the Benghazi
  consulate in Libya, even though the Obama administration has been
  cleared of any wrong-doing.
• Here, have some evidence that increasing the
  minimum wage eliminates jobs to share with your friends.
• Detroit will finish the paperwork to
  exit bankruptcy today, according to the city’s emergency
  manager.

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content.

You suffered through the blue pop-up ads, you
endured the extra bold paragraph at the bottom of each blog post,
you withstood more than two dozen direct pitches (only one of which
featured
Lobster Girl), and most importantly, you made our
7thannual Hit & Run Webathon smash all previous
donation records like
HULK SMASH GRAMMAR.

We asked you for $200,000—having only broke through the
$100,000 barrier
for the first time last year—and you gave us a stunning
$223,000. Halfway through this past week I flippantly asked for a
total of 1,000 different donors, us having never drawn north of
700, and you coughed up…1,167. An anonymous donor promised up
to
$25,000 worth of matching grants for new or new-levels-of
money, and you zoomed through that in just a couple of days. And,
importantly, you gave along with your donations a bunch of very
valuable feedback (above and beyond the
beloved comments snark), which we are digesting, acting
on, and laughing out loud at (I mean with, of
course)!

At at time of
turmoil and woe for magazines of political opinion, you have
made it immeasurably easier for us to go boldly forward into our
second half-century of giving you kick-ass journalism and
commentary in defense of Free Minds and Free Markets. We are
humbled by your generosity, and accept it as a challenge to get a
helluva lot better during this
Libertarian Era of ours.

I wanna give some special shout-outs to the Reason people not
named Gillespie or Welch ho have been crucial in the Webathon’s
(and Reason’s) success: Managing Editor Katherine
Mangu-Ward (pictured)—who first started interning at Reason at
the ridiculous age of 19 and has since gone on to tell
you people not to vote, champion private education and
space
travel, while dying the ends of her hair purple—organized the
raw material for many of the Webathon posts, and saw to it that the
rest of the print-magazine shop hit its marks (you can’t
wait for our next issue, laying out the Libertarian Policy
Agenda of 2015-16!). Chief Financial Officer Jon Graff whipped the
whole project into shape; Melissa Mann, Amy Pelletier, Cynthia
Bell, and Jennifer Kambara handled all sorts of fulfillment and
communication and brainstorming responsibilities; Katie Hooks made
it work on social media, and of course, Publisher Mike Alissi

did not write a terrible op-ed in the Washington Post,
and instead did what he always does, which is everything.

Plenty of other people made plenty of other contributions,
most notably YOU, so thanks again, and see you this time next
year!

Jacobin magazine readers discover something Nick
Gillespie was telling
you here at Reason
at least as long ago as 2010: that lefty intellectual hero Michel
Foucault late in life found himself attracted to aspects of the
ideas of free-market thinkers such as Mises and Hayek, or, as the
lefties prefer to pigeonhole them, “neoliberals.”

Excerpts from an
interview with Daniel Zamora, a writer on Foucault who
“exposed” that their hero might have had a soft spot for the
liberating powers of free market:

I wanted to clearly break with the far too consensual image of
Foucault as being in total opposition to neoliberalism at the end
of his life. From that point of view, I think the traditional
interpretations of his late works are erroneous, or at least evade
part of the issue. He’s become sort of an untouchable figure within
part of the radical left….

Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in
it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less
normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left,
which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in
neoliberalism a “much less bureaucratic” and “much less
disciplinarian” form of politics than that offered by the postwar
welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t
project its anthropological models on the individual, that would
offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state……

….Foucault was one of the first to really take the
neoliberal texts seriously and to read them rigorously. Before him,
those intellectual products were generally dismissed, perceived as
simple propaganda….

“One of the first” if you refused to read anything but
people you consider politically sympatico, I
guess. Foucault saw something in “neoliberalism” that anyone
who pretends to care about human liberty, possibility, or dignity
should respect. And Zamora understands this is a problem for the
left, their willful ignorance of their imagined intellectual
opponents:

Sequestered in the usual sectarianism of the academic world, no
stimulating reading had existed that took into consideration the
arguments of Friedrich
Hayek, Gary Becker,
or Milton
Friedman….

The intellectual left….has often remained trapped in a
“school” attitude, refusing a priori to consider
or debate ideas and traditions that start from different premises
than its own. It’s a very damaging attitude. One finds oneself
dealing with people who’ve practically never read the intellectual
founding fathers of the political ideology they’re supposedly
attacking! Their knowledge is often limited to a few reductive
commonplaces.

The interview goes on with Zamora noting that Foucault
dared question the totalizing social security system (“To
[Foucault’s] mind, the mechanisms of social assistance and social
insurance, which he put on the same plane as the prison, the
barracks, or the school, were indispensable institutions ‘for the
exercise of power in modern societies.'”) in favor of a
welfare state that was merely about ameliorating poverty, even
through a Friedmanite “negative income tax.”

This is an important point. As I’ve written before, a
welfare state that was just and only about making sure no one fell
below some level of near-absolute destitution would be far
preferable to our unimaginably complex quasi-totalizing system of
roundrobin income redistributions along multiple dimensions or some
leftist quest for “equality” as opposed to nobody dying in the
proverbial streets from poverty.

Zamora is uncomfortable with a line of thought from the
left that critiques more comprehensive social security, and he
gripes about “a certain ‘libertarian’ left” and in general is
disturbed by a Foucaultian emphasis on the marginalized and social
“power” writ large. That, he fears, takes our eyes from where he
seems to think they belong: on the supposedly lamentable fact that
some people are richer than others and the economic “exploitation”
that inevitably accompanies that fact.

Whole
interview very interesting for those wanting to see a
smart lefty grapple with the libertarian-ish temptation to a left
that he wants to stay Marxist or generally against a world with
free markets, private property, and the ineqaulity that comes along
with that freedom.

Students are so coddled by the
feelings-protection regime at university campuses that they now
believe disheartening national news developments—such as the grand
jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases—entitle
them to final exam extensions.

To be clear, the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police
officer who choked Garner to death is indeed a travesty of justice.
It’s a horrible thing—for the victim and his family—and a reminder
that racism endures in law enforcement agencies around the country,
which need reform.

Why on earth that means Columbia University law students should
be granted relief from their coursework, I have no idea. But the
university evidently agreed with the conveniently traumatized
students,
according to Fox News:

This won’t prepare them for tough judges, unscrupulous clients
or merciless partners at the law firms they hope to work
for. 

Columbia Law School has agreed to delay final exams for students
who face “trauma” and disillusionment following two recent,
racially-charged cases in which grand juries declined to indict
white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men. And now,
students at Harvard and Georgetown want the same dispensation, also
saying they just can’t face their tests in the wake of the grand
jury decisions in Missouri and New York.

“For some law students, particularly, though not only, students
of color, this chain of events is all the more profound as it
threatens to undermine a sense that the law is a fundamental pillar
of society to protect fairness, due process and equality,” Robert
E. Scott, Columbia’s interim dean, told the school in an email
Saturday.

David Bernstein, a professor of law at George Mason University,
described Columbia’s decision as “infantilizing.” He explained that
if any students received special extensions, all would soon require
them:

“In an understandable effort to show sensitivity to students
upset by the grand jury decisions, Columbia has unfortunately
chosen to infantilize them, suggesting that adult law students
can’t handle hearing about perceived injustices in the world. 
I can’t imagine why any law student would admit that hearing about
a seemingly unjust legal decision incapacitates them; how would
such people function as lawyers, given that many verdicts deeply
disappoint advocates for one side or the other? Meanwhile, to the
extent that Columbia students take advantage of delaying their
exams, they are getting an unfair advantage – that is, more time to
study – over students who don’t claim the delay.”

Unsurprisingly, this malady of entitlement has spread to other
universities. According to
Businessweek.com:

“This is more than a personal emergency. This is a national
emergency,” Harvard Law School students wrote in a letter to the
school’s administration over the weekend. In a similar letter,
Georgetown Law School students wrote: “We,
students of color, cannot breathe. … We charge you to acknowledge
that Black Lives Matter.”

Most schools have policies that allow students who are observing
religious holidays, have suffered a death in the family, or
have a medical emergency to reschedule their exams. Yet
the Michael
Brown and Eric
Garner cases could signify the first time schools
have been asked to move exams because of a grand jury’s decisions.
It’s also forcing law schools to evaluate individually whether
students are traumatized enough that their exam
grades would suffer should they be asked to press forward.

If law students are upset about the grand jury decisions,
perhaps they should rededicate themselves to their coursework in
hopes of one day working to reform the system or standing up for
those abused by it. But if disappointing legal decisions render
them truly unable to function… well, they aren’t going to make
very good lawyers.

In related news, the president of Smith College
had to apologize for writing “all lives matter” instead of
“black lives matter,” and an associate director of the
journalism program at the University of Iowa thinks an offensive
art display
should be banned.

Perhaps today is the day we can formally announce the completion
of a transformation begun long ago: higher education has officially
become bumper bowling. Colleges should cease handing out diplomas
and instead award participant ribbons.

In a 48-minute speech to the Senate, likely his last, outgoing
Sen. Mark Udall (D-Col.), who was defeated in last month’s
election, blasted President Obama and his White House for being
untruthful about the CIA’s use of torture and other interrogation
practices. He called on the president to “purge” his administration
of officials involved with approving, overseeing, and participating
in CIA torture and demanded, as he’s done before, that the CIA
director, John Brennan, resign.

“Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully
provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of
torture,” Udall said. “In other words, the CIA is lying.”

Watch the whole speech below: