Category: reason

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union seemingly called on America to follow France’s lead—and ban catcalling. The tweet was swiftly deleted, though I obtained a screenshot.

A U.S. ban on catcalling—defined as street harassment of women, usually by men, often of a sexual nature—would likely violate the First Amendment, unless the law was very narrowly tailored to prohibit only severe, pervasive, objectively offensive conduct, or threatening behavior. Even then the Supreme Court might strike it down; think of Snyder v. Phelps. As obnoxious as catcalling is, the government simply can’t prevent men from talking to women in public. This is something that many anti-catcalling groups understand explicitly, which is why they often oppose attempts criminalize such behavior.

So it’s pretty telling that the ACLU could forget, even for a moment, that banning catcalling would be a significant blow to civil liberties, and would likely undermine other important goals, like criminal justice reform. (In the U.S. at least, the government would disproportionately arrest poor people, immigrants, and people of color for catcalling.)

Yes, I am aware that a single tweet does not indicate a broad structural shift in the ACLU’s thinking: most likely this was done by one social media editor. I am still astonished that such a person—someone who is deeply confused about what the ACLU ostensibly stands for—would find themselves in the position of running the ACLU’s Twitter feed. Did free speech not come up during the job interview?

I previously expressed concern that the American Civil Liberties Union was wavering on its ironclad commitment to free speech, given concerns raised by former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer. Another friend of the organization, former president Nadine Strossen, disputed this characterization.

My fear—and it’s a fear that this stray tweet would seem to confirm—is that free speech is becoming a secondary concern for the ACLU. Generic lefty social justice goals take precedence. And so the notion that the organization would stridently oppose catcalling legislation is no longer obvious to the people who work there; they think it’s a progressive organization, not a civil liberties organization.

Imagine if France had just banned burqas, and the ACLU had retweeted a news story about it with the added caption: “Your move, America.” This would be an outrageous betrayal of the organization’s core mission, would it not?

Does private, consensual gay sex warrant a police raid? How about a smear campaign?

In Florida last month, officers of the Hollywood Police Department raided an adult store called the Pleasure Emporium. Someone had called the cops claiming that patrons were committing lewd acts inside; an undercover couple went to the store, purchased tickets for an adult video room, and found gay men allegedly performing sex acts either on themselves or with each other. It wasn’t prostitution, but the cops decided it violated the statutes against lascivious acts and exposure of sexual organs. The arrests followed, and a police report noted the identities of those involved.

Just a day later, the men became victims of what the Miami New Times has rightly called a smear campaign.

Local outlets such as WPLG and The Miami Herald posted the men’s names and mugshots. Abbie Cuellar, a lawyer representing one of the men, tells the New Times that her client lost his job as a result. The man had fled Cuba two decades ago because he was persecuted for being gay; he saw the United States as a “beacon of ‘freedom.'”

“Imagine: You’re having sex with a consenting adult,” she says, “and then you’re arrested and held overnight, and your whole, entire life has been exposed on TV. Your picture is everywhere. You’re on the internet! My client has even been getting calls from Cuba. This was horrible, horrible, horrible”

After the New Times reached out, the Herald revised its story by removing the arrestees’ identities and mugshots. A joke about the arrested watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show was also removed. An editor’s note read, “This story has been updated to remove portions deemed inappropriate under the Miami Herald’s editorial standards.”

The New Times also tried to contact the journalist who wrote the WPLG story, but it did not receive an immediate response. The WPLG story has not, at this point, been revised.

With Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination—and near certain confirmation—to the Supreme Court, the pro-life lobby can finally look forward to overturning its much-hated Roe v. Wade ruling that prevented states from banning abortion. At the same time, however, there are signs that public opinion is shifting on the side of protecting reproductive rights.

Pro-life conservatives have so far tried to appear sympathetic to women who opt for abortions. However, if their impatience to change the status quo that they find intolerable gets the better of them, they might dial up the rhetoric that abortion is murder, and women who opt for the procedure are murders.

That is not only false but would also be strategically unwise. Do they really believe that the government would be a better guardian of the rights of the unborn than mothers themselves, asks Shikha Dalmia?

View this article.

DUI arrests have plummeted in the Miami area. The Miami Herald reports that activists and public safety officials are giving partial credit to ridesharing services.

“Ride-sharing has definitely impacted things,” Lt. Joaquin Freire, who commands the city’s traffic enforcement unit, tells the Herald. “There’s always an Uber around.”

“We know it’s had an impact,” adds David Pinsker of Florida’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving branch. “I can say that certainly.”

Drunk driving arrests made by the Miami-Dade County police force are down some 65 percent, falling from over 1,500 in 2015 to 594 in 2017. Arrests by Miami city police have fallen by a smaller but still significant 35 percent from 2015. (Uber and Lyft both started operating in the city in mid-2014.)

The drop in arrests has come hand-in-hand with safer roads. Forty-two fewer people died on Miami’s roads in 2017 than did in 2015. And though the raw number of traffic accidents has ticked up slightly in Miami-Dade County—not surprisingly, given the growth in both population and vehicle miles travelled—traffic injuries are down in real terms.

Correlation does not equal causation, of course; many factors could be contributing to the fall in both DUIs and traffic fatalities. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think that ridesharing can claim a good deal of responsibility.

According to a February 2018 study from the Shared Use Mobility Center, Uber and Lyft use is at its peak during nights and weekends, when drivers are more likely to be both drunk and bereft of public transit options. Being able to summon a car at the touch of a button no doubt keeps a lot of these weekend warriors from getting behind the wheel.

A similar phenomenon can be observed at the national level. Drunk driving deaths have fallen from a high of .45 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles travelled a decade ago to .33 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles travelled today.

Academic research is also increasing suggesting that ridesharing brings down alcohol-related crashes in most cities.

A 2016 study on the topic found no relationship between the number of drunk driving fatalities and the introducing of rideshare services in 100 cities across the country. But this study depended on data from 2009 to 2014, just as ridesharing was really taking off and before the fall in DUI arrests in late-adopting cities like Miami.

Subsequent investigations have turned up significant safety improvements. A 2017 study, for example, looked at crash data from four cities—Portland, Reno, Las Vegas, and San Antonio—where Uber and Lyft experienced month-long pauses in their operations. They found a 60 percent decline in crashes in Portland when ridesharing returned, and a 40 percent decline in San Antonio. Researchers found no effect in Las Vegas or Reno. (That may be because those cities are big tourist destinations, where most drunks are out-of-towners choosing between an Uber and a cab, not an Uber and their personal vehicle.) And a 2017 working paper from the City University of New York attributed a 23 to 35 percent decline in alcohol-related collision rates to the introduction of ridesharing in New York City.

Yet more and more cities are looking to restrict these services. Washington, D.C., upped its tax on rideshare trips by 500 percent in June, justifying the move in part as a way for Uber to pay for the increased congestion it has allegedly caused. San Francisco politicians are trying something similar. In New York City, political will is increasingly coalescing behind a proposal to cap the number of rideshare vehicles.

The main effect of such measures will be to limit people’s transportation options. To the extent that this applies to people who’ve had a few too many while out on the town, that will likely mean more intoxicated people getting behind the wheel—and, thus, more accidents.

Donald Trump has a history of questioning Russia’s involvement in efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, presumably because he bridles at the notion that his campaign colluded with the Russians and the implication that he might not have been elected without Vladimir Putin’s help. Trump seems to have trouble separating those three issues, which helps explain why he condemns special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s election-related activities as a “witch hunt” and wants Attorney General Jeff Sessions to shut it down. It may also explain why Trump described Russian-sponsored Facebook ads as part of “the Russia hoax.” Yesterday the White House tried to compensate for such comments by staging a press briefing in which five national security officials offered a decidedly more alarming take. Rather too alarming, if you ask me.

“Our democracy itself is in the crosshairs,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen warned. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and it has become clear that they are the target of our adversaries, who seek…to sow discord and undermine our way of life.” FBI Director Christopher Wray said “malign foreign influence operations” are “targeting our democratic institutions and our values.” This “information warfare,” he said, is intended to “sow discord or undermine confidence.”

National Security Adviser John Bolton described Russia’s “meddling and interference” as “aggression” against the United States. “The Russians are looking for every opportunity, regardless of party, regardless of whether or not it applies to the election, to continue their pervasive efforts to undermine our fundamental values,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said. He explained that “Russia’s intent” is “to undermine our democratic values, drive a wedge between our allies, and do a number of other nefarious things.”

According to the Trump administration, Russia is waging “information warfare” that threatens to destroy “our way of life,” “democracy itself,” and “our fundamental values.” Either that, or the whole thing is a hoax. I am inclined to think the truth lies somewhere in between. As Coats mentioned in passing, “Russia has tried to use its propaganda and methods to sow discord in America” for “decades.” Somehow our democracy and way of life have survived. To put the matter in perspective, it helps to distinguish between three kinds of activities that fall under the heading of Russian “meddling and interference.”

Manipulation of vote counts is the most serious threat, but it also seems to be the most remote. “All the states realize that securing their election systems—both administrative systems and voting machines—is a high priority,” Charles Stewart III, an expert on election administration at MIT, tells The New York Times. Stewart “said computer systems and voting machines were now probably the most secure part of the election infrastructure, thanks in part to a stepped-up effort by Homeland Security officials.”

The next most serious problem is the hacking of computer systems used by politicians and parties. That sort of intrusion is (and ought to be) a crime, but it’s not clear that it undermines democracy in any meaningful sense. As Putin himself has pointed out, when Russian patriots (operating totally independently from the Kremlin, mind you) steal emails from the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and post them online, they are disseminating accurate information that may be of legitimate public interest. Even if you don’t share that perspective, candidates and campaigns obviously have a strong incentive to avoid embarrassing revelations like these by improving their cybersecurity.

The third kind of meddling is the most amorphous, the hardest to stop, and the one that least resembles an act of aggression. As Wray noted yesterday, “There’s a clear distinction between, on the one hand, activities that threaten the security and integrity of our election systems, and, on the other hand, the broader threat of influence operations designed to manipulate and influence our voters and their opinions.” The FBI director meant that the defenses against these distinct forms of interference are bound to be different, but the two threats are also morally different. While one violates people’s rights (by trespassing on and messing with their property), the other may amount to nothing more than political discourse.

That sort of activity—creating Facebook pages, organizing rallies, running online ads, tweeting commentary—is not ordinarily described as malign or nefarious, and it is indisputably protected by the First Amendment. When Americans do it, we call it participating in democracy. When Russians do it, we call it undermining democracy.

The influence operation described in the federal indictments unveiled in February and July did involve various types of fraud and dishonesty, including social media accounts created under phony identities, Russians posing as Americans, and (in some cases) the dissemination of fake news. But the essence of what these operatives did was still speech. That is how they sought to “sow discord”: through messages that people were free to consider or ignore, believe or dismiss, accept at face value or check, take to heart and act on or skim and forget. If that is “aggression” or “warfare,” so is any speech that aims to persuade people or reinforce their pre-existing beliefs.

It’s true, there is plenty of stupid, illogical, ugly, and misleading stuff in the Russian-sponsored messages that have been publicly released. But there is plenty of stupid, illogical, ugly, and misleading stuff in the messages manufactured by Americans right here in the USA. Why not focus on the content of the speech, rather than the nationality of the speaker?

Even benign speech can take on a sinister cast when it is linked to people who live in other countries. Facebook recently deleted a bunch of pages after finding evidence that they were created by foreigners pretending to be Americans. One of those pages was dedicated to organizing and promoting a counterprotest against a white supremacist rally next week in Washington, D.C. The real activists who are participating in the event are pretty pissed at Facebook’s ham-handed censorship. “There wasn’t much on the page before we were added,” one of them told The New York Times. “The content, when it was taken down, was all from us.”

This is the sort of thing you can expect when politicians start demanding that social media platforms help protect American democracy from ads suggesting that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for Satan. “It’s an extremely dangerous situation for free speech when politicians are screaming at web platforms to ‘do something’ about a problem that is difficult to address,” Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, told the Times. “Censoring an anti-Nazi protest was a particularly egregious example of collateral damage.”

Does an anti-Nazi protest “sow discord”? I guess so, and by Nielsen et al.’s logic it represents a threat to democratic values.

No network runs more true-crime slice-and-dice than Investigation Discovery. From Beauty Queen Murders to Bad Teachers to the epochal work of sociology Truth Is Stranger Than Florida, Investigation Discovery is pretty much round-the-clock police procedural, with cops hunting killers and rapists and guys who tear those tags off of mattresses.

Sugar Town is a complete reversal of form: This time, the police are the bad guys and their investigation is the crime. And the result is a show more horrifying than anything about the Boston Strangler or Aileen Wuornos. Low-key but packing a powerful punch, Sugar Town ought to convince even the most indifferent citizens that maybe this #BlackLivesMatter stuff is worth worrying about. Television critic Glenn Garvin explains more.

View this article.

Earlier this year, Michael Fairbrother was closing in on a huge deal: a contract to send 100,000 bottles of mead—a wine-adjacent alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey—to a distributor in China.

Landing the $750,000 contract would have been a game-changer for Moonlight Meadery, the New Hampshire–based business that Fairbrother started in his garage eight years ago. Already recognized as one of the best breweries in the state, it would have opened a huge new market for for its products. It also would have hired at least six new employees and bought new equipment to meet the new obligations, he says.

Then the trade war came.

President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from around the world, then followed up with another round of tariffs on various Chinese-made goods. China responded with a range of tariffs that mostly targeted agricultural products—including those, such as mead, that are made with honey.

“We had gone through multiple rounds of evaluation, and we were getting to the final point, negotiating down to the penny,” Fairbrother tells Reason. “The conversation at that point went dry, so I followed up to see how things were going. They said with the tariffs happening, they were taking their business to Poland.”

Trump’s trade war has many costs that can easily be measured, like the job losses triggered at places like the Mid-Continent Nail Corporation, or the jobs at Harley-Davidson that could be shifted overseas. But there are hidden effects too—costs that won’t show up in a ledger. Jobs that could have been created but never were, as shifting trade policy changes businesses’ decisions about where to invest and build. Or, as in the case of Moonlight Meadery, causes prospective buyers in China to take their business elsewhere.

“Basically, the second runner-up got the contract because of the increase in cost,” says Fairbrother.

Instead of protecting American jobs and businesses—as the White House claims it is trying to do—Trump’s tariffs (and the predictable response they have triggered from America’s biggest trading partner) have limited businesses’ ability to grow.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D–N.H.) brought Moonlight Meadery’s circumstances to the attention of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer during a hearing on trade policies last week. What’s the plan, she asked, to address the costs of tariffs on small businesses?

“The president is very sympathetic and I, personally, am very sympathetic,” said Lighthizer. “It certainly is not our plan to have small business or agricultural or anyone else in America feel the brunt of a change in trade policy which is designed to make the U.S. stronger and richer.”

But if that’s not the plan, one might reasonably ask what the plan actually is. Before erecting tariffs, Trump proclaimed that a trade war would be “good and easy to win.” Peter Navarro, director of the White House’s National Trade Council, predicted that no country would retaliate to American tariffs.

Each day seems to bring new evidence of just how inaccurate those claims were. Today China announced another round of retaliatory tariffs aimed at $60 billion worth of U.S. imports, with rates ranging from 5 percent to 25 percent. That means another set of American businesses face the prospect of reduced access to Chinese markets. Like Moonlight Meadery, they might miss out on a chance to expand their sales, hire more workers, and grow their business.

“Any unilateral threat or blackmail will only lead to intensification of conflicts and damage to the interests of all parties,” the Chinese government said in a statement, according to a translation by CNBC.

Meanwhile, Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on literally all Chinese imports. The two sides are growing farther apart, and the prospects of a deal to end the escalating tensions seem to be fading. Indeed, Chinese officials say they don’t even know what concessions the White House trying to get.

Until there’s a plan, and until the trade war comes to an end, more businesses will get caught in the crossfire.

At the end of our conversation, I ask Fairbrother what would he say to Trump if he had a chance. He chuckles and then pauses, like he’s holding back what he really wants to say.

“I’d just love to see some wisdom from his years on this earth,” he finally offers. “Instead of all this.”

In Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, Michael Shermer seeks to explain why so many of us are deeply invested in the idea of a world beyond the one we’re already living in. Shermer isn’t just talking about religious believers. He also chronicles the ways socialists and others have tried to create paradise now, and the obsessions of transhumanists trying to create a secular version of immortality.

One of the world’s best-known “skeptics,” Shermer teaches at Chapman University, is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, writes a column for Scientific American, and has penned a shelf of best-selling books on such subjects as evolution, the brain, and the morality of capitalism.

In a wide-ranging conversation taped at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians held in Las Vegas each July, I asked Shermer about his long association with libertarian ideas, including his involvement with Andrew Galambos, an idiosyncratic self-help guru whose ideas about intellectual property were famously parodied in Jerome Tuccille’s underground classic, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. We also discussed the welcome return and explicit defense of Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, disinterestedness, and progress—in his work, and in the work of such figures as Matt Ridley, Deirdre McCloskey, and Steven Pinker.

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The Senate voted 86–12 this week to keep funding the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) until November. The House passed the same bill last week, so it’s now on its way to the president’s desk.

Too bad. When Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) voted against the bill, he rightly called it “fiscally unsustainable” and “structurally unsound.” It’s also a handout to the rich.

When Congress created the NFIP in 1968, it was trying to shrink the role of federal aid in disaster-prone areas by offering incentives to undergo risk mitigation. But instead of reducing the need for federal dollars, the program done the opposite. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the NFIP is around $30 billion in debt.

Lee tried to mitigate the fiscal blow with an amendment that would have capped the payouts at $2.5 million, but the measure failed to get enough support. Meanwhile, other legislators called for rushing the bill through. “We need to reform this program, but we also need to keep it alive through the end of hurricane season,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). The NFIP insures more than five million properties; failing to reauthorize it would amount to “scaring” the policyholders, Kennedy said.

But the people who benefit from the NFIP do not tend to be impoverished Americans looking to rebuild their lives after hurricanes. Homes covered by the insurance program are, on average, more expensive than those not covered by the programs.

A Cato Institute report last year found that the median value of a subsidized coastal property was $402,768, while the median value for an unsubsidized property on the coast was a much smaller $339,842. Another study—this one from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth—found an “inverse relationship” between property values and premiums: The owners of higher-value properties paid a smaller premium than the owners of lower-value properties. In effect, taxpayers across America are subsidizing the lifestyles of rich people with waterfront homes.

Congress may want to create incentives for risk mitigation, but artificially low flood insurance premiums incentivize people to live in riskier areas. People should be free to choose where they want to live, but it’s shouldn’t be the role of the government—especially a government $21 trillion in debt—to take bail out wealthy citizens’ risky decisions.

Federal air marshals have secretly stalked about 5,000 Americans since March. None of these people were suspected of any specific criminal or terrorist activities, and the surveillance didn’t turn up any evidence of criminal or terrorist activities.

Nevertheless, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says the program should and will continue.

The Boston Globe reported over the weekend that the TSA’s program, called “Quiet Skies,” tracks fliers who weren’t even on terror watch lists, based on a vague concept of suspicious behavior. The air marshals themselves object to the program, and their union would like them assigned elsewhere rather than having to follow these people around. Some members of Congress have complained too, saying they weren’t been informed about the launch of this program. So this week, TSA officials have been having closed-door meetings with various lawmakers.

The TSA wouldn’t acknowledge the program existed until the Globe revealed it. Now that it’s been publicized, they’re quick to defend it. Spokesman James Gregory said Monday, “The program analyzes information on a passenger’s travel patterns, and through a system of checks and balances, to include robust oversight, effectively adds an additional line of defense to aviation security.”

It has other defenders, too. The Washington Post‘s editorial board gave it a quasi-stamp of approval with the “If it’s done right” disclaimer, noting that this system would allow the TSA to deploy air marshals to keep track of suspicious people rather than sticking them on large airliners to keep tabs on entire flights even when there’s no sign that anything may happen:

Among other things, the marshals employ behavior detection techniques similar to those that TSA agents use to evaluate all passengers at security checkpoints, such as watching for signs of excessive nervousness. Since airliners are spaces where no one expects privacy, it is unlikely the marshals’ scrutiny constitutes an illegal search. If the 90 days pass without incident, the scrutinized passengers are removed from the list and their files are closed and later purged, the TSA spokesman said.

The editorial highlights a behavior that the average person would find suspicious—”excessive nervousness.” But in practice, the TSA “behavior detection techniques” can find just about any behavior that anybody normally exhibits at an airport to be suspicious. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted on Monday, suspicion can be triggered by such behaviors as boarding late, sleeping on flights, or simply sweating.

ReasonTV pointed out the absurdly contradictory triggers in the TSA’s behavior detection systems. The short version: We’re all potential terrorists no matter what we do at the airport. But the longer version is funnier to watch:

In any case, the fact that this secret surveillance of 5,000 Americans uncovered nothing actionable is a sign that it is not, in fact, being “done right.”