Category: reason

Hope Cozart says her 11-year-old son Maddox was given an in-school suspension and confined to an isolated cubicle for more than a week at Raymond Mays Middle School in Troy, Texas, because he wore his hair braided atop his head. Cozart says school officials told her the hairstyle violated a rule in the student handbook that says boys’ hair “may not be worn in a ponytail, top knot, bun, or similar styles.” Troy Independent School District Superintendent Neil Jeter told a local TV station he could not comment on disciplinary actions taken against any student.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3xfXE56
via IFTTT

The 9/11 attacks gave us the heightened security theater now on display in all U.S. airports. Day after day for the last two decades, Transportation Security Administration agents have patted down travelers from teens to the elderly, looking for weapons that nobody expects to find. While airplane cockpit doors are now locked to prevent hijackings, the pat-downs remain.

And now we have pandemic hygiene theater to give uninformed people a false sense of control and sustain their fear of the virus.

Think of the number of hours that schools, restaurants, and other businesses spend wiping down surfaces to prevent COVID-19 transmission even though we’ve known since last July that this wiping isn’t necessary. Yet Americans continue to spend untold hours and dollars wiping surfaces to provide the appearance of virus protection to their patrons.

In Arlington, Virginia, my kids’ schools have implemented overly stringent and frankly illogical measures that create barriers to accessing an effective education. For starters, the schools have only welcomed back a subset of their student population for two days a week for in-person education. They’ve also reduced the number of actual teaching days from five to four, during which the kids get only half of the education time they used to get. But they do spend time and energy wiping down surfaces and making students wipe their desks. They’re also instructed daily to “limit touching of surfaces to only when is necessary.”

That isn’t the only form of hygiene theater some schools perform.

Every morning I must fill out a form for each of my kids, assuring the school that they have no fever, yet the school still has temperature checks at every entry point of the building. The alleged need for temperature checks is one stated reason for why kids cannot be taught on site more than two days a week and why more kids can’t be brought back for in-person instruction.

These theatrics continue even though Anthony Fauci admitted last August that temperature checks “are notoriously inaccurate.” Nobody should be surprised. We’ve known for months that up to 40 percent of Americans with COVID-19 are asymptomatic.

Our schools also claimed that they couldn’t bring the kids back last fall because students must stay six to 10 feet apart. I’m reminded of this every morning when I electronically agree to my kids following the safety standards. That’s 4 feet more than even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended for months. And even the origin of that 6-feet rule is mysterious. It’s twice the length recommended by most countries and the World Health Organization.

Adding insult to injury, the CDC finally changed its guidelines from 6 to 3 feet, yet Arlington schools still require distances of at least six to 10 feet and universal mask use. Never mind that teachers have been prioritized for vaccination, and research shows that schools don’t increase COVID-19 spread in the community.

And as the Manhattan Institute’s Connor Harris notes, the evidence behind some of these mask mandates “turns out to be quite weak.” The “widespread use of masks throughout the United States and Europe has failed to stop massive pandemic waves in the fall and winter,” he observes, adding that “preliminary signs also suggest that mask mandates may be causing considerable harm. Several state governments have recently rescinded their mask mandates, and a look at the science suggests that more should consider following.”

Likewise, for a number of valid social-development and health-related reasons, Harris’s colleague John Tierney concludes that “mask mandates are especially cruel to young children.” As Tierney’s research explains, “The CDC’s policy placates the leaders of teachers’ unions but flouts the guidance issued jointly by UNICEF and the World Health Organization.”

These theatrics play out in a world where many of us reuse our face masks such as the one we keep in our car, reuse surgical masks many times, or wear masks below our noses. There are many actors starring in this daily health drama. The same applies to the number of Americans who continue to wear masks outdoors despite evidence that transmission rarely takes place outside. And the same will be said of those who, although vaccinated, will continue to wear masks long after we reach herd immunity.

While some of these examples may seem silly, hygiene theater has huge costs and wastes precious resources. It also keeps Americans unjustifiably scared of the virus while promoting the delusion that with enough such measures, we can finally live in a world free of risks.

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3xfIJI0
via IFTTT

I just got a mass mailing today informing me that this is Alcohol Awareness Month; and in the spirit of alcohol awareness, I thought I’d recommend Fidencio Clasico Mezcal:

I’ve come to like Mezcal a good deal recently, and this is very tasty; flavorful but mellow, and worth the $40-$50 you’re likely to have to pay for it. Thanks to my colleague David Ginsburg for recommending this one (and in turn to his son and my former student Lev Ginsburg, who I’m told was the source of the information).

I appreciate that some people view Alcohol Awareness Month as a means of making people aware of (among other things) the “dangers of alcohol misuse.” That’s a worthy cause, since there are indeed many such dangers.

But I expect that most of our readers are well aware of that feature of alcohol. Learning about tasty alcoholic beverages, on the other hand, is News You Can Use. Please make us aware of other good alcohol in the comments.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3n7WyU6
via IFTTT

Today was my last substantive class of the semester. I hope you’ve enjoyed my lectures. In the fall, we should all be back on campus.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3x9Z7db
via IFTTT

Conservatives feel besieged in the culture war. Large corporations that previously seemed at least somewhat ideologically more sympathetic to Republican views have moved openly left. Amazon, Starbucks, American Express, and countless other big businesses criticized Republican efforts in Georgia to restrict voting rights, and Major League Baseball (MLB) moved the All-Star Game out of the state.

In response, conservatives are considering retaliation: Republicans might strip the MLB of its antitrust exemption and repeal certain tax breaks. The intellectual leaders of the new political right also occasionally discuss loftier schemes: breaking up large companies like Amazon entirely, taking away the broad liability protections enjoyed by Facebook and Twitter, and various legislative remedies.

The problem for the opponents of “woke capital” is that many of these proposals would either fail outright or cause worse problems than the ones they intend to solve. For instance, vesting the federal government with enhanced power to split apart massive tech companies on antitrust and anti-monopoly grounds—an approach favored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.)—would do little to tackle the issue of social media sites censoring conservative users. But it would expand the state, empower traditional media, and in general harm the profits of private businesses, which is probably why it’s a strategy beloved by progressives in the mold of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.).

Indeed, the Senate held a hearing today to confirm Columbia University law professor Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khan, who was nominated to the post by President Biden, is a Warren progressive who thinks Amazon is anticompetitive in nature and should be split into several different entities. It is the Democratic Party that’s truly coming for woke capital—not because of the wokeness, but because of the capitalism part.

Richard Hanania, an expert on partisanship and ideology, has an excellent Substack post, “Why Is Everything Liberal?” exploring the subject of how woke capital came to be. Hanania’s post is essentially an extended rumination on Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: Any organization that is not explicitly rightwing will eventually become explicitly leftwing. Hanania points out that the U.S. is roughly split between conservatives and liberals as evidenced by our national election outcomes, but liberals dominate in terms of who donates to campaigns, shows up for rallies, and becomes extremely active in politics. He presents some evidence that the least invested and most invested people tend to be liberals; conservatives are moderately invested, and vote for Republicans, but otherwise prioritize things like making money and having families.

“Those who identify on the right are happier, less mentally ill, and more likely to start families,” writes Hanania. “But in the end, the world they live in will ultimately reflect the preferences and values of their enemies.”

That’s because their enemies are highly interested in capturing influential positions in politics, government, the media, universities, and even within corporations. In order to force Coca-Cola to take a progressive stance against Republican positions on voting, climate change, and antiracism, a person who cares about those things doesn’t actually have to take over the entire company: Consumer or low-level staffer, they simply have to make a lot of noise. A small number of employees at media companies have managed to leverage human-resources-adjacent concerns about safe workplace environments against their ideological foes, replicating a process that is already well underway on university campuses.

Thus far, the conservative opposition to this phenomenon has largely taken the forms of complaining and then threatening vast government action. Hanania explains why this is impractical: “Do you want to give government more power over corporations?” he asks. “None of the regulators will be on your side.” The people who staff the regulatory bureaucracies are Lina Khan types: They’re there to battle capitalism, not woke-ism.

There clearly is something that can be done about woke overreach, to the extent that part of the problem is caused by bad government incentives. Republicans would probably benefit from a strategy of freeing businesses from the regulatory burden of appeasing their most easily offended employees. And lawmakers should stop forcing taxpayers to subsidize baseball stadiums—not because the government needs to punish the MLB, but because it is not the role of the government to fund private stadiums.

The conservative war on woke capital will fail because the weapons of the regulatory state are progressive by their very nature. Conservatives should consider strategies that actively shrink the state, if they ever take power again.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3sEukBF
via IFTTT