Category: reason

The Libertarian Party officially “supports the decriminalization of prostitution,” according to a new plank in the party’s political platform. This makes the L.P. the only notable U.S. political party to stand unequivocally for sex-worker rights and in opposition to cops caging people for consensual sex.

“We assert the right of consenting adults to provide sexual services to clients for compensation, and the right of clients to purchase sexual services from consenting sex workers,” reads the new language, adopted by vote today at the Libertarian National Convention in New Orleans. The convention brings together Libertarian Party members for forums, speeches, and debates, while delegates vote on proposed amendments to the party’s platform and bylaws and who will be the national leaders.

After some debate Monday morning, delegates adopted the decriminalization amendment as Plank 2.8 of the party’s platform. The previous platform made no mention of sex work or prostitution. The language of the new amendment was drafted by sex workers, and L.P. delegates rejected a similar amendment in order to approve the sex-worker-penned version.

The L.P.’s move comes the same week America’s other most popular third party, the Greens, explicitly rejected a platform that protects sex worker rights.

“In a not surprising, yet still disappointing, move,” the Green Party “failed to pass a platform resolution calling for the decriminalization of sex work,” the Sex Workers Outreach Project noted on Twitter this morning. “Instead they retain their current platform which recommends ‘Nordic’ model criminalization and conflates trafficking with [sex work].”

The “Nordic model” puts more emphasis on prosecuting sex buyers than sex sellers and lets some sex workers avoid arrest as long as they do so under very specific circumstances.

In voting that ended July 1, Green Party delegates rejected a proposed platform amendment that would add the decriminalization to the party’s official platform. The measure was co-sponsored by the Green Parties of Alabama, Colorado, North Carolina, and Utah and the Lavender Greens and Youth Greens. “It is the opinion of the authors of this document that the party’s current stance on sex work…is morally indefensible, ideologically incoherent, and politically damaging,” they suggested. The amendment failed.

The Democratic platform makes no mention of prostitution or sex work, though it does contain at least a dozen references to sexual orientation. The Republican platform also avoids commentary on prostitution, though it does claim that “Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions.”

An American huntress who shot and killed a supposedly rare giraffe in South Africa is facing widespread backlash from animal rights activists. But the creature in question does not, in fact, appear to be all that rare.

Photos posted to Twitter last month by the South African media outlet Africland Post showed a woman posing next to a “rare” dead giraffe. “White American savage who is partly a Neanderthal comes to Africa and shoot down a very rare black giraffe courtesy of South Africa stupidity,” the outlet declared:

White american savage who is partly a neanderthal comes to Africa and shoot down a very rare black giraffe coutrsey of South Africa stupidity. Her name is Tess Thompson Talley. Please share pic.twitter.com/hSK93DOOaz

— AfricaDigest (@africlandpost) June 16, 2018

The woman, Kentucky resident Tess Thompson Talley, went on the hunt last June and had originally posted the photos to Facebook. “Prayers for my once in a lifetime dream hunt came true today! Spotted this rare black giraffe bull and stalked him for quite a while. I knew it was the one. He was over 18 years old, 4000 lbs. and was blessed to be able to get 2000 lbs. of meat from him,” she wrote on the social media platform at the time.

Though the hunt was more than a year ago, Talley has faced criticism in recent days from animal rights activists due to the Africland Post tweet, with some people saying she deserves to be abused and shamed:

Apologies if this tweet comes across as a bit intense but I’m sick with rage. This waste of life #TessThompsonTalley is hunting beautiful creatures for a laugh. Here’s her Facebook https://t.co/1qmQVYT81U. Lets share it and give her as much abuse as possible! pic.twitter.com/dyinkAQoy7

— Tom Kay (@tomkaymusic) June 20, 2018

TESS THOMPSON TALLEY.
Where is the fun in killing such a beautiful animal. Why do human beings think it’s acceptable to go around killing innocent beautiful creatures, FOR FUN.
Disgraceful name and shame this grotesque excuse for a human being#Tessthompsontalley pic.twitter.com/QjUXWsv8c2

— Jessica Worley (@PinkLunatic1994) June 29, 2018

Actress Debra Messing even said on Twitter that Talley is “a disgusting, vile, amoral, heartless, selfish murderer.”

Talley has defended herself from the critics, telling Fox News that the breed of giraffe she killed was far from endangered. “The giraffe I hunted was the South African subspecies of giraffe. The numbers of this subspecies is actually increasing due, in part, to hunters and conservation efforts paid for in large part by big game hunting. The breed is not rare in any way other than it was very old. Giraffes get darker with age,” Talley said.

She also claimed that the 18-year-old giraffe she killed was not able to breed and had killed three younger giraffes, which would mean its actions were actually decreasing the population of the subspecies.

Julian Fennessy, co-founder of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, seems to agree with Talley. “The giraffe in the photo is of the South African species, which are not rare—they’re increasing in the wild,” Fennessy tells Yahoo. “Legal hunting of giraffe is not a reason for their decline, despite the moral and ethical side of it which is a different story.”

This is not the first time an American trophy hunter has come under fire for his or her legal exploits in Africa. Recall Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer, who received global criticism for killing a lion named Cecil during a 2015 trip to Zimbabwe.

Palmer’s case is somewhat different in that the the lion in question was indeed rare. Still, it’s worth asking: Is it ever acceptable to hunt endangered animals?

Reason‘s Nick Gillepsie thinks it is. “One thing that we know that helps endangered animals more than endangered species lists,” Gillepsie said in 2011, “is actually giving people ownership rights over animals”:

“In a libertarian society,” he continued, “there would be ownership of more types of animals, and there would be more types of animals.” Ownership would encourage conservation, but it wouldn’t end hunting. Not only would people “be able to hunt and eat those endangered animals,” but they could also “prepare them with an absinthe sauce, or a heroin sauce, or a cocaine sauce, and the world would be a better place.”

It’s been an enlightening economic experiment, but the Trump administration’s plan to use tariffs to reshape global trade is now unraveling before our eyes.

Each day seems to bring fresh evidence of exactly how wrong the president was to declare trade wars “good and easy to win.” Unfortunately, each day also brings evidence that the White House is determined to stay the course, consequences be damned.

The big news Friday was that several major automobile manufacturers told the administration that planned tariffs on imported cars and car parts would wreck their operations in the United States. That follows a week’s worth of news that a wide range of industries—from motorcycles to steel railings, from tires to nails—were shifting jobs overseas or postponing expansions because of the tariffs. The stock market continues to reflect the uncertainty imposed by Trump’s trade policy, and even the White House’s own assessment shows that economic growth will slow as the tariffs hit.

Over the weekend, in defiance of the mounting evidence, Trump insisted that “it’s going to all work out.” On Monday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the administration will not stop the trade wars, even if the stock market tanks. “There’s no bright line level of the stock market that’s going to change policy,” he told CNBC.

The big question is how much more damage will be done—to the American economy and to the mechanisms of global trade—before the president retreats from these misguided policies.

The automotive tariffs might be the turning point. Trump has instructed the Commerce Department to conduct a formal investigation into whether tariffs could be applied to imported cars on the grounds that they are national security threat. (No, it doesn’t make any sense.)

“The domestic manufacture of automobiles has no apparent correlation with U.S. national security,” BMW writes in its comments to the Commerce Department. In other comments submitted to the department, automakers say tariffs will increase the price of their cars, potentially by thousands of dollars, and will force industry-wide supply chain adjustments that could see American automaking jobs cut or moved overseas.

Trump announced those proposed auto tariffs last month in response to European tariffs targeting such American goods as motorcycles, whiskey, and blue jeans. Those tariffs, in turn, were the European Union’s response to Trump’s 25 percent import duties on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum.

That tit-for-tat escalation of the conflict between America and Europe has already claimed some victims. Harley-Davidson, the Wisconsin-based motorcycle brand that also builds bikes in Missouri and Pennsylvania, announced last week that it would shift some manufacturing to Europe to avoid the E.U. tariffs. Building motorcycles in the U.S. and shipping them to Europe would leave consumers paying $2,200 more per bike, the company said in a statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and would cost the company about $100 million annually.

Polaris, a Minnesota-based company, could soon follow Harley-Davidson’s lead. A spokeswoman told the Associated Press on Friday that Polaris is considering shifting production of its Indian Motorcycle brand from Iowa to Poland.

Harley-Davidson and Polaris could not be more explicit about the reasons for shifting jobs overseas. Neither could any of the car companies that submitted comments last week to the Department of Commerce.

As with the tariffs on steel and aluminum (and another set of tariffs targeting $50 billion in Chinese imports), Trump’s proposed tariffs on cars would needlessly harm American workers while aiming to punish close allies and key trading partners.

Whether Trump is aware of that remains unclear.

Last week, while giving a speech in South Carolina, Trump said he wanted to erect trade barriers so carmakers like BMW would have to “build them here” instead of shipping cars from Germany. But BMW does indeed build them here—the company’s largest manufacturing facility in the world is in Spartanburg, South Carolina, less than 100 miles from where Trump was speaking at the time. The plant employs more than 9,000 people and produces more than 40,000 vehicles every year.

But ignorance can only account for so much of the White House’s bullheaded approach. The consequences of tariffs are well-known.

Trump’s tariffs could grow the steel, iron, and aluminum industries by about 33,400 jobs, according to an analysis by the Trade Partnership, a pro-trade think tank. But the tariffs are projected to wipe out more than 179,000 other jobs. That’s a net job loss of about 146,000—five jobs gone for every job gained.

A separate study released in March by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a protectionist think tank that favors tariffs, also found that Trump’s steel and aluminum levies would cost American jobs. The U.S. manufacturing sector is projected to lose 10,000 jobs and the construction industry is projected to lose 7,500 jobs, according to the group’s analysis. The White House’s own report on the tariffs, released in early June, also showed—surprise, surprise!—that they would raise prices and slow economic growth.

All of which should be cause for some second thoughts. But for someone who promised to “drain the swamp” and do things differently, President Trump’s response to the slow-motion failure of his trade agenda is a classic move straight out of the Washington playbook: If a government policy isn’t working, you declare that just means it hasn’t been tried hard enough.

Ross today downplayed tariffs’ potential to cost thousands of American jobs and tank the stock market. Those consequences are nothing more than “hiccups,” he said.

“There obviously is going to be some pulling and tugging as we try to deal with very serious problems,” he told CNBC. “So there will be some hiccups along the way.”

In other circumstances, there might be something admirable about Trump’s determination to continue full speed ahead even as the warning lights are flashing. But the thing about a “damn the torpedoes” approach is that sometimes the torpedoes actually hit you.

Vermont officially became the ninth state to legalize the recreational use of cannabis yesterday, joining Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Gov. Phil Scott (R-Vt.) signed H. 511 into law back in January, saying: “I personally believe that what adults do behind closed doors and on private property is their choice, so long as it does not negatively impact the health and safety of others, especially children.”

This is the first time a state has legalized pot via a bill in the legislature rather than a ballot initiative. Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, has praised Vermont’s governor and lawmakers for “responding to the will of the voters, rather than choosing to ignore them.”

As in the other eight states (and the District of Columbia) that have decided to allow recreational weed, Vermont has enacted some very specific regulations for the newly legal substance. Not all the rules are clear yet, but here are some things Vermonters can be sure of:

What?

Vermonters can posses up to one ounce of cannabis and two mature plants. The substance is not eligible for sale.

Who?

Pot is only for adults aged 21 or older. There will be strict penalties for selling to minors.

Where and when?

Consumption is allowed on private property but is expressly prohibited in public. Schools, employers, municipalities, and landlords are allowed to put their own restrictions into place. There is also a note against smoking at Lake Champlain, as it is currently considered to be federal waters.

Vermonters are also prohibited from operating motor vehicles while under the influence, especially when a child is present. Both the driver and the passengers are prohibited from smoking inside of a vehicle.

There are strict penalties for possessing cannabis on school grounds.

A case that helped jump-start a wave of campus sexual assault activism across America has ended in a big win for the complainants. Last week the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education released its findings on the federal complaint four students and an administrator filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in January 2013. The office concluded that the school had failed to establish “grievance procedures that provide for the prompt and equitable resolution of student, employee, and third-party complaints” of sex discrimination, including sexual misconduct. While the university has not admitted wrongdoing, it has agreed to review its procedures and to submit to federal monitoring.

Among those celebrating this outcome was former UNC student Andrea Pino, the co-founder of the national organization End Rape on Campus and the best-known of the five women behind the complaint. “I was 20 years old taking on a 200-year-old university and today I can say that I won,” Pino told ABC11.

But that victory comes with an asterisk, writes Cathy Young.

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Google, one of the biggest online platforms for advertising, is currently refusing to accept local political ads in two states: Washington and Maryland.

Blame the panic over Russian-purchased political advertisements intended to sway U.S. elections. Thanks to fears of Russian interference, some states have passed laws demanding more information about who is buying ads and how much they’re paying for them.

The problem isn’t the demand for transparency. It’s politicians’ insistence on creating hyperfast reporting guidelines without knowing if or how tech and media companies can comply. In Maryland, a new law requires online platforms to keep track of political ad buys and disclose the information to the public within 48 hours. The problem is that Google doesn’t sell advertisements in a way compatible with the law. It’s not selling ads with a flat upfront charge; it has a dynamic system that charges based on the campaign’s success in reaching people.

So on Friday, Google announced that it would, at least temporarily, stop accepting ads for political campaigns within the state of Maryland. This follows on the heels of a similarly move in Washington a month ago, after the state enacted “emergency” rules required real-time reporting disclosure of online ad buys including “descriptions of the geographic areas and locations targeted and the total number of views generated by the ads.” According to a Google spokesperson, the company values transparency but doesn’t have the tools to comply with these rules as written.

It’s not as though Google is resisting transparency itself. The company has been working to provide more information about online political ad buys. In May it announced it would start verifying the identities of people purchasing political ads to make sure they were American citizens or lawful residents. It’s building a database of political ads that includes sources of funding and how much gets spent.

But candidates in two states are (for at least the moment) going to have to live without Google ads. That’s kind of a problem. Google and online platforms now dominate the advertising market—Google brought in $95 billion in ad revenue in 2017—because they’re an efficient mechanism for targeted campaigns. The Baltimore Sun explains who will be hit hardest by the suspension in Maryland:

They are especially useful for candidates in down-ballot races such as for state delegate, for whom the costs of television or radio can be prohibitive. The trade magazine AdAge calculated that from 2012 to 2016, spending on political digital ads increased 789 percent.

These rules don’t impact everybody in the political sphere equally. Google’s decision makes it harder for challengers with less money and connections to reach voters. The incumbents, who wrote and voted for these regulations, get the benefits. They have years of press coverage. They have war chests. They have name recognition.

And do we really think the Russians are trying to meddle in the race over who represents Rockville? The New York Times notes that the Internet Research Agency, the Russian company accused of meddling in the 2016 presidential election, spent $5,000 on Google ads. Yet the panic over Russian ads (which don’t even appear to have been particularly effective) has allowed these bills to sail through. Hardly anyone seems interested in considering why these regulations are being written and pushed by elected officials who stand to benefit from them.

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) wants retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement to oppose abortion.

CNSNews.com asked Paul on Friday whether he wants President Donald Trump to nominate a judge who thinks “an unborn child with a beating heart is a ‘person’ entitled to equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment.” Fetuses generally develop beating hearts roughly three weeks after fertilization.

“I think we do need a pro-life justice, and I’ve always been in favor of that,” Paul responded.

Though Kennedy was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, a conservative, he was considered a swing vote. In the landmark case Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), he joined the plurality opinion upholding Roe v. Wade (1973), the case that legalized abortion at the federal level.

With Kennedy gone, many people are predicting that Roe v. Wade could be overturned. Trump said while running for president that he would nominate “pro-life” justices to the Court, but it’s not exactly clear how pro-life they have to be.

In an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures, Trump said his nominee to replace Kennedy will be “conservative,” but he said he “probably” won’t ask his pick whether he or she supports overturning Roe v. Wade. Overturning that 1973 ruling would not make abortion illegal, but it would allow individual states to ban the procedure.

It’s not entirely clear how current conservatives on the Court would vote on the issue of overturning Roe v. Wade. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, wrote a brief as a Department of Justice employee in 1990 that supported overturning the ruling. But during his 2006 confirmation hearing before the Senate, he said the ruling was “settled as a precedent of the Court.”

Similarly, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who Trump nominated to the Court last year, is widely seen as a pro-life conservative. But during his Senate confirmation hearing, he said he accepts Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land.”

So whether or not Trump appoints another pro-life justice to the Court, Roe v. Wade might remain in place. Even Leonard Leo of the conservative Federalist Society, who is advising Trump on his Court pick, has noted the importance of precedent. “I don’t think at the end of the day it’s about Roe v. Wade,” Leo said on Fox News Sunday. “It’s about having judges on the Court who are going to interpret the Constitution the way it’s written, and part of interpreting the Constitution is taking into account major precedents.”

Trump has said he will announce his Supreme Court nominee on July 9.

A new study of people who use Juul e-cigarettes provides further evidence that such products can reduce tobacco-related disease by offering smokers a much less hazarous source of nicotine. In a Juul-sponsored survey of nearly 19,000 vapers who had purchased the company’s products online, the Centre for Substance Use Research, a Scottish consulting firm, found that smokers who had switched to vaping far outnumbered vapers who had switched to smoking.

A large majority of the Juul customers (87 percent) were current or former smokers when they first used one of the company’s vaping devices. Of those who were smoking when they first tried Juul, 64 percent were no longer smoking, and more than three-quarters of that group said they had quit by switching to Juul. The “new former smokers” who had quit by switching to Juul represented 31 percent of the total sample.

Most of the Juul users who were still smoking (56 percent) had reduced their daily cigarette consumption by 50 percent or more. The respondents who had not quit but had reduced their smoking by at least half represented about 7 percent of the total sample.

By comparison, about 8 percent of the respondents who were former smokers when they started using Juul products had returned to smoking. They represented 2 percent of the total sample. About 2 percent of the respondents who had never smoked before trying Juul were smoking at the time of the survey, although the vast majority of them (more than nine out of 10) were not smoking every day. They represented 0.3 percent of the total sample.

These percentages are important because public health officials worry that e-cigarettes might lure people into smoking or cause former smokers to relapse. This survey suggests that sort of behavior is not very common. The number of smokers who quit after using Juul (7,520) was 137 times the number of never-smokers who started (55) and 21 times the number of former smokers who relapsed (359). In total, the people who went from smoking to vaping outnumbered the people who went from vaping to smoking by 18 to 1.

These results should be interpreted with caution because the survey was limited to online Juul customers and only 35 percent of the 89,000 or so people who were invited to participate agreed to do so. Eliminating respondents who did not meet the study’s criteria and those who did not complete the survey left just 21 percent of the people who received invitations. The low response rate is cause for concern because people who had successfully used Juul to quit smoking might have been especially inclined to participate, meaning they would be overrepresented in the sample.

Even allowing for response bias, the survey shows it is not at all unusual for people to stop smoking after they begin vaping. It also suggests that vaping is more likely to be a gateway to cessation than a gateway to smoking, which is consistent with the continued downward trend in cigarette consumption. Firmer evidence for that hypothesis will require surveys with broader and more representative samples.

Thousands of Spanish-speakers have fled from their homelands in Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere in Central America, only to be greeted at the border with harsh family separation policies and other barriers designed to discourage foreign newcomers.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rico’s population has suffered a sharp decline in recent years. After peaking at 3.8 million in 2004, the island’s population fell by to an estimated 3.3 million people by mid-2017 due to low birth rates and out-migration. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the rate of departures spiked, with many of those leaving not expected to return. Projections recently released by Puerto Rico’s federal oversight board call for a 6.4 percent population decline during the current fiscal year, with further decreases through 2023.

Could we solve one problem with another, asks Marc Joffe.

View this article.

Michael Moore thinks he knows who will win the 2020 presidential election. Appearing last Friday on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the filmmaker declared that Donald Trump would be reelected. Moore begged the audience to take his prediction seriously, saying that otherwise America could turn into an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale:

It’s obviously a little early for any certainty about the next presidential race, but Moore at least has a track record he can point to. In October 2016, he declared on Meet the Press that Trump could defeat Hillary Clinton, calling the Republican a “human Molotov cocktail” that Rust Belt voters were preparing to throw at a political system they once supported.

Later in the month, Moore predicted Trump’s win during a promotional event.

“I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump, and they don’t necessarily agree with him,” he explained to the audience. “Trump’s election is going to be the biggest ‘fuck you’ ever recorded in human history—and it will feel good.”

Trump won Moore’s home state on election night, carrying 12 counties that had previously voted for Barack Obama. A breakdown of the election revealed that Trump’s decision to take his message to working-class Michiganders contributed to his win. At the same time, the Clinton campaign failed to appreciate how many more resources were needed in the state, campaigning somewhat harder but not to the extent urged by party activists on the ground.