Category: reason

Dozens upon dozens of animated features have encouraged viewers to chase their dreams, but few have focused on setting realistic expectations. Pixar’s Soul breaks the mold by showing that happiness is more complicated than just pursuing the one thing you love the most.

Aspiring jazz musician Joe (Jamie Foxx) finally catches his break as he approaches midlife, only to fall through a manhole and die. Rather than accepting his death, he flees into a quirky cosmic bureaucracy, inadvertently being paired with a stubborn soul (Tina Fey) who refuses to be born into a body in the first place, having been overly pressured to decide in advance what her interests should be.

Their entertaining misadventures have a familiar carpe diem veneer, but the movie also shows that the bliss of success is often transitory, that it requires a lot of hard work, and that obsessing over your pursuits can be self-destructive rather than fulfilling. A spark can ignite a lifelong passion, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of enjoying the totality of experience.

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An old saying holds that all politics is local. In The Expanse, all politics is interstellar. Somehow, they’re kind of the same thing.

The series, which completed its fifth season on Amazon Prime Video in February, is set hundreds of years in the future. Human beings have colonized the solar system and divided into three broad political sects. There’s Earth, an economically stagnated political mess and also the species’ breadbasket; Mars, the elite technological center; and the Asteroid Belt, the working-class locus of resource extraction.

From the beginning, these three groups are in rotating conflict with each other. That conflict intensifies with the discovery of the protomolecule, an alien organism that is both immediately deadly and a warning sign of greater dangers beyond the solar system’s limits.

Eventually, the protomolecule leads to the discovery of a portal to the rest of the galaxy and a slew of inhabitable worlds. There’s a land rush, but the conflict doesn’t disappear; it shifts venues and even increases. All this unfolds with smart plotting, intricate world building, and consistent characterization.

Refreshingly, this intensely political show doesn’t feel like it’s simply rehashing today’s real-life arguments as a thinly veiled sci-fi metaphor. Instead, it reminds us that human society will always be an unpredictable product of economic interests, obscure individual motivations, cultural rivalries, bureaucratic infighting, ideological disagreements, sociological shifts, pride of place, and personal profit motive. People are people and politics is politics, no matter how far you get from planet Earth.

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The Atlantic City, New Jersey, City Council has voted to spend $36,000 to repave and repaint a section of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard covered by a Black Lives Matter mural. The huge yellow lines that spell out “Black Lives Matter” obscured the yellow center dividing line as well as the white lines marking individual lanes. The mural violates state Department of Transportation Guidelines, and acting Police Chief James Sarkos said it has left motorists so confused about where they are supposed to drive that police had to close that section of the street to traffic. The street will have to be repaved because the type of paint used in the mural can’t be painted over, according to officials.

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The prosecution in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial argues that the former Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by pinning him facedown to the pavement for more than nine and half minutes. In that position, prosecutors say, Floyd could not breathe enough to stay alive.  Today expert witnesses reinforced that account, saying the evidence indicates that Floyd—who complained 27 times that he was having trouble breathing—died from lack of oxygen.

Chicago physician Martin Tobin, who specializes in pulmonary and critical care medicine, noted that Floyd, who was arrested on May 25 for using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes, was handcuffed behind his back and forced to lie on his stomach, both of which would have made breathing difficult. At the same time, Chauvin had one knee on Floyd’s neck and frequently had the other on his arm, pressing against the side of his chest. Officer J. Alexander Kueng, meanwhile, was applying pressure to Floyd’s back, and Officer Thomas Lane was holding down his legs. Tobin also noted that video shows Chauvin and Kueng “pushing [the handcuffs] into his back and pushing them high,” which would have made it even harder to breathe.

Based on how Chauvin was positioned and taking into account the gear he was wearing, Tobin estimated that he was applying 87 to 91 pounds of weight to Floyd’s neck. “We’re talking half of his body weight and half of his gear [weight], and all of that is coming down,” he said. “It’s like the left side is in a vise. It’s being pushed in from the street at the bottom, and the way the handcuffs are manipulated…totally interferes with central features of how we breathe.”

Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, has suggested that the officers thought Floyd was faking when said, over and over again, that he could not breathe. But Tobin cited other indications of Floyd’s respiratory distress: He lifted his left shoulder in an attempt to relieve the pressure on his lungs, for example, and tried to create breathing space by pushing his fingers against the street and a squad car tire.

With his chest against the pavement and the officers pushing on him from above, Floyd “was being squashed between the two sides,” Tobin said. “On the left side of his lung, it was almost as if…a surgeon had gone in and removed the lung…There was very little opportunity for him to be able to get any air to move into the left side of his chest.” He said the pressure on Floyd’s neck also restricted the “air getting into the passageway,” with an effect similar to breathing through a straw, which is “enormously difficult.”

About five minutes after he was pinned to the street, Floyd “kicked out his leg in an extension form,” which Tobin said indicated “brain injury from a low level of oxygen.” Floyd lost consciousness around the same time and stopped breathing 23 seconds later. Chauvin’s knee “remained on the neck for another 3 minutes and 2 seconds,” even after Kueng checked for a pulse and said he could not find one.

“Floyd died from a low level of oxygen,” Tobin said. “This caused damage to his brain that we see, and it also caused a PEA [pulseless electrical activity] arrhythmia that caused his heart to stop.”

That conclusion is broadly consistent with the results of an independent autopsy commissioned by Floyd’s family. Forensic pathologists Michael Baden and Allecia Wilson said Floyd died from “mechanical asphyxia.” The autopsy report from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office, by contrast, said nothing about asphyxia, attributing Floyd’s death to “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Both reports described the manner of death as homicide.

“Cardiopulmonary arrest,” of course, means Floyd’s heart and lungs stopped functioning, which would describe any death. As Tobin noted, lack of oxygen can cause arrhythmia. But the same use of force that made it hard for Floyd to breathe also could have affected blood flow or heart activity more directly. The respiratory and cardiovascular systems are so intertwined that it may be impossible to conclusively say which failed first.

Does it matter? If “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression” contributed to the “cardiopulmonary arrest” described in the official autopsy report, that still means the cops killed Floyd, and so does the determination that his death was a homicide.

The defense argues that Floyd “died of a cardiac arrhythmia that occurred as a result of hypertension, his coronary disease, the ingestion of methamphetamine and fentanyl, and the adrenaline flowing through his body, all of which acted to further compromise an already compromised heart.” But it strains credulity to suppose that the stress inflicted by Floyd’s prolonged prone restraint had nothing to do with “the adrenaline flowing through his body” or the ensuing “cardiac arrhythmia.”

Nelson has implicitly conceded that the officers’ actions were the but-for cause of Floyd’s death. In a pretrial motion, he faulted Kueng and Lane for needlessly escalating the situation by trying to force Floyd into their squad car. “If Kueng and Lane had chosen to de-escalate instead of struggle, Mr. Floyd may have survived,” he said. What can that mean except that Floyd died because of the way the cops treated him?

Although video of the arrest plainly shows Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, Nelson maintains that Chauvin actually placed his knee “between the shoulder blades at the base of the neck.” Today he noted that no bruising was found on Floyd’s neck, which Tobin said is consistent with the steady pressure that Chauvin applied. “When I go to church, I sit on a hard bench,” he said. “I don’t get bruising on my bottom.”

But the exact position of Chauvin’s knee, or the way we describe it, does not matter if the issue is the respiratory difficulty caused by keeping Floyd pinned facedown to the ground. Nor does it matter if the issue is the cardiac stress caused by that prolonged prone restraint. Either way, Floyd would have survived this encounter if the cops had handled it differently.

Nelson has suggested that Floyd, who had swallowed black-market “Percocet” tablets containing fentanyl and methamphetamine, might have died from a drug overdose. But judging from the blood test results, that seems quite unlikely. David Isenschmid, a forensic toxicologist who also testified today, said ratio of fentanyl to the metabolite norfentanyl in Floyd’s blood was much lower than what is typically seen in fatal overdose cases.

Tobin also cast doubt on the idea that fentanyl could have killed Floyd. While Floyd was having trouble drawing adequate breaths, he said, his breathing rate was normal, which is inconsistent with the respiratory depression caused by an opioid overdose.

“The cause of the low level of oxygen was shallow breathing,” Tobin said. Because of the pressure on his chest, he said, Floyd was taking “small breaths…that weren’t able to carry the air through his lungs down to the essential areas of the lungs that get oxygen into the blood and get rid of the carbon dioxide.”

Tobin also noted that someone who dies of a fentanyl overdose first lapses into a coma, and that did not happen in Floyd’s case. Bill Smock, a physician who specializes in emergency medicine, likewise said Floyd did not exhibit signs of a fentanyl overdose: He was talking, he was not sleepy, and his pupils were not constricted. “That is not a fentanyl overdose,” he said. “That is someone begging to breathe.”

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Generally speaking, private restaurants, hotels, and the like can’t exclude people based on their race, sex, religion, national origin, and similar attributes. The Equal Protection Clause doesn’t apply to private entities—but state and federal “public accommodation” statutes do.

The federal statute is (Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) is actually pretty narrow: It applies only to discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin (not sex or sexual orientation or gender identity or age, for instance), and it applies only to hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, and some related businesses. (The Americans with Disabilities Act, which focuses on disability, covers many more businesses.) But many state laws are quite broad, both in the range of businesses they cover, and the range of bases for discrimination that they forbid.

But what about discrimination against Republicans or Democrats or people wearing NRA shirts or people who have expressed various political statements that a business owner dislikes? Generally speaking, such discrimination isn’t forbidden by most such antidiscrimination laws (unlike political discrimination in employment, which is forbidden to some extent in about half the states). Still, several important cities, counties, and territories, and (to a narrow extent) one state do ban such discrimination, broadly or narrowly. It’s also possible, though not certain, that California broadly bans at least some such discrimination as well.

In this post, I want to just lay out the prohibitions I’ve found so far, without opining on whether or not they are good ideas. For each provision, I’ll indicate what sorts of political discrimination it forbids; some terms are well-defined in the provision, in which case I’ll include the definition, and some are just left general (e.g., “political affiliation”).

Note that

• different laws may apply to different kinds of businesses, but I won’t focus on that in this list (if you’re interested in how broadly a law applies, you should read it directly);
• it’s not clear that these laws apply to any online platforms (in part because of 47 U.S.C. § 230, in part because of the Dormant Commerce Clause, and in part because of the uncertainty of their own terms)—for now, let’s focus on them as they apply to physical businesses that are physically open to the public;
• it’s not clear to what extent some of these laws restrict businesses’ discriminating based on what you say or display on the business’s property, as opposed to businesses’ discriminating against you because they don’t like what you’ve said elsewhere.

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D.C.: D.C. Code § 2-1401.02(25), -1402.31(a) (“political affiliation,” defined as “the state of belonging to or endorsing any political party”).

Maryland counties: Harford County (Md.) Code of Ordinances §§ 95-3, -6 (“political opinion,” defined as “[t]he opinion of persons relating to government or the conduct of government or related to political parties authorized to participate in primary elections in the state”).

Prince George’s County (Md.) Code of Ordinances § 2-186(a)(3), (15), -220 (same as Harford County).

Howard County (Md.) Code of Ordinances § 12.201, .210 (“political opinion,” defined as “the opinions of persons relating to: Government, The conduct of government, Political parties, Candidates for election, or Elected office-holders”).

Durham (N.C.) area: Orange County (N.C.) Code of Ordinances § 12-54 (“political affiliation”).

South Florida areas: Miami Beach (Fla.) Code of Ordinances § 62-31, -87 (“political affiliation,” defined as “ideological support of or opposition to, membership in, or donation of value to an organization or person which is engaged in supporting or opposing candidates for public office or influencing or lobbying any incumbent holder of public office on any single or number of issues which may be before any governmental branch”).

Ft. Lauderdale (Fla.) Code of Ordinances §§ 29-2, -16 (“political affiliation,” defined as “belonging to or endorsing any political party”).

Broward County (Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.) Code of Ordinances §§ 16½-3, -34 (“political affiliation,” defined as “belonging to or endorsing any political party”).

Shreveport (La.): Shreveport (La.) Code of Ordinances §§ 39-1, -2 (“political or religious affiliations”).

Illinois cities: Champaign (Ill.) Code of Ordinances § 17-3, 17-56 (“political affiliation,” defined as “the state of belonging to or endorsing any political party or organization or taking part in any activities of a political nature.”).

Urbana (Ill.) Code of Ordinances § 12-39, -63 (same as Champaign)

Michigan areas: Wayne County (Detroit, Mich.) Ordinance No. 2020-586 (“political affiliation”).

Ann Arbor (Mich.). Code of Ordinances §§ 9:151, :153 (“political beliefs,” defined as “[o]ne’s opinion, whether or not manifested in speech or association, concerning the social, economic, and governmental structure of society and its institutions,” “cover[ing] all political beliefs, the consideration of which is not preempted by … local law”).

Lansing (Mich.) Code of Ordinances §§ 297.02, .04 (“political affiliation or belief”).

Madison (Wisc.): Madison (Wisc.) Mun. Code §§ 39.03(1), (5) (same in relevant part as Ann Arbor).

Minnesota: Minn. Stats. § 604.12 (“wearing clothing that displays the name of an organization or association”).

Seattle (Wash.): Seattle Mun. Code § 14.06.020-.030 (“political ideology,” defined as “any idea or belief, or coordinated body of ideas or beliefs, relating to the purpose, conduct, organization, function or basis of government and related institutions and activities, whether or not characteristic of any political party or group,” including “membership in a political party or group” as well as “conduct, reasonably related to political ideology, which does not cause substantial and material disruption of the property rights of the provider of a place of public accommodation”).

Territories: P.R. Stats. tit. 33 § 4819 (“political ideas”).

V.I. Stats. tit. 10 § 64(3) (“political affiliation”).

California, maybe: Though the California public accommodation statute doesn’t specifically list political affiliation as a forbidden category for discrimination, court decisions have read it as generally barring a wide range of “arbitrary discrimination,” including—though in dictum—political discrimination. “As our prior decisions teach, the Unruh Act preserves the traditional broad authority of owners and proprietors of business establishments to adopt reasonable rules regulating the conduct of patrons or tenants; it imposes no inhibitions on an owner’s right to exclude any individual who violates such rules. Under the act, however, an individual who has committed no such misconduct cannot be excluded solely because he falls within a class of persons whom the owner believes is more likely to engage in misconduct than some other group. Whether the exclusionary policy rests on the alleged undesirable propensities of those of a particular race, nationality, occupation, political affiliation, or age, in this context the Unruh Act protects individuals from such arbitrary discrimination.” Marina Point, Ltd. v. Wolfson, 640 P.2d 115, 117 (Cal. 1982) (emphasis added).

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Note that in some instances the First Amendment might trump such laws, when the laws burden the business’s own First Amendment rights, such as videographers’ right not to be compelled to make videos with a message they disapprove of; compare laws banning discrimination in public accommodations based on religion or sexual orientation. But that is the exception, and wouldn’t apply to typical businesses’ refusals to deal.

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The N.D. House passed it 77-16, and yesterday a Senate committee reported it back (with amendments) and a recommendation to pass (5-2).

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If it passes, this will leave only 12 states as duty-to-retreat states:

• Eastern Seaboard: MD, DE, NJ, NY, CT, RI, MA, ME.
• Midwest: WI, MN, NE.
• West: HI.

Pennsylvania does impose a duty to retreat when you’re faced with an attacker who is not displaying or using a weapon “readily or apparently capable of lethal use”; but since most threats of death or serious bodily injury tend to come from people who have such weapons, or are physically restraining you in a way that prevents a safe retreat, I view the Pennsylvania rule as being more on the stand-your-ground side.

For more on what all this means, see this post.

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