Category: reason

In early May President Donald Trump announced the U.S. was withdrawing from the Iran deal. Among other things, this means the re-imposition of sanctions—the “highest level” of sanctions, as he put it, which he said would be “crippling.” Those sanctions include efforts to block Iranian oil sales, limits on Iran’s ability to access international banking systems, and measures to prevent Iran from trading with other countries.

That last provision would “have a swift effect on some big companies,” Fortune reported. Among them: Boeing and Airbus, which “had been planning to start selling aircraft to the Islamic Republic for the first time.” General Electric also will be hit hard: “Not only is it one of the U.S. companies making parts for Airbus, but it has also received big parts orders for oil and gas facilities in Iran.” Volkswagen had started selling cars in Iran, and might have to stop. Ditto for the French company that makes Peugeots.

Reimposing sanctions, as Trump wants to do—including sanctions that limit imports—therefore will hurt Iran’s economy and put pressure on the company’s leaders to change their ways.

But that is the precise opposite of what Trump says about the United States. When it comes to America, the president claims limiting imports will help the country. A. Barton Hinkle explains why this makes no sense.

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Young love is confusing. In Ohio, legislators want to make it criminal—at least when it’s mediated through modern technology. Last week, members of the House Criminal Justice Committee voted unanimously in favor of a bill to ban teen sexting, even for some teenagers who are legally adults.

Under the proposed measure (H.B. 355), teens could still have sex with each other without the state stepping in. But a teen who sends sexualized imagery of him- or herself to another teen would be guilty of a first-degree misdemeanor. And the same goes for kids on the receiving end of sext-messages.

The ban would apply to Ohioans ages 13 to 18.

That’s right: Ohio lawmakers apparently think that age 18 is old enough to marry, vote, or join the Army, but not old enough to control naked images of your own body.

Teens found guilty of sexting could be sentenced to a “sexting educational diversion program,” to be developed by county courts, upon completion of which they would see the sexting charge dismissed. But judges would be free to overlook this program, and minors with previous sex-related offenses on their records would not be eligible.

Outside the diversion program, a sexting charge could lead to a sentence o eight hours of community service—a light punishment that the bill’s supporters have brandished to make their proposal more palatable. But of course, community service is just the immediate punishment. The real harm comes from saddling these kids with criminal records for the rest of their lives.

“The stigma behind any criminal conviction is severe, but to tar these kids as sex offenders could quite literally ruin their lives,” writes Celine Coming, communications manager for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “This charge could make it impossible for young people to access opportunities for education, housing, and employment for years to come.”

The bill’s sponsors have argued that theirs is a compassionate plan because it gives prosecutors an option to avoid charging teen sexters with more serious child pornography charges. But there’s nothing requiring the state’s cops to crack down on teen sexting to begin with, and even when they do, prosecutors could use their discretion to not bring child porn charges. And if legislators think overzealous prosecutors are the problem, they could always pass legislation prohibiting juvenile sexters from being charged as child-porn producers.

Instead, they’re simply adding on another possible charge for law enforcement to slap onto texting teens. As H.B. 355 explicitly states, “prosecution of a person for a violation of” the teen sexting ban “does not preclude prosecution of that person for a violation of any other section” of Ohio criminal law and “an act that can be prosecuted under this section or any other section of the Revised Code may be prosecuted under this section, the other section, or both sections.”

Say farewell to Active Shooter. The video game, which was to be released on June 6, was going to offer players a chance to shoot up a (virtual) school. But last night the online game store Steam pulled it from its platform and permenantly banned the game’s publisher, the Russian company Acid, following intense anger and disgust from pretty much every corner of the internet.

Acid’s cheery promotion of its controversial title was bound to ruffle more than a few feathers. “Be the good guy or the bad guy. The choice is yours!” read the game’s description, which stressed that gamers could play either the shooter or a police officer in this “dynamic SWAT simulator.” Typical stuff for Acid, which has had a number of poorly reviewed, trollishly titled games on Steam, all of which have now been removed. (Sample title: Tyde Pod Challenge.)

Neither Acid’s obscurity nor its request that people “not take any of this seriously” endeared people to Active Shooter.

“I have seen and heard many horrific things over the past few months since my daughter was the victim of a school shooting and is now dead in real life. This game may be one of the worst,” tweeted Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter died in the Parkland massacre. “Everyone that cares about school & public safety should be OUTRAGED,” tweeted Parkland survivor Jaclyn Corin, who launched a Change.org petition demanding that Valve—who owns Steam—shelve the game.

Elected officials on both sides of the aisle were quick to weigh in. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, whose state experienced its own mass shooting earlier this month, sent a letter to Valve asking that the game be pulled. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fl.) called the game “inexcusable.”

Games of this type are hardly unprecedented. Indeed, trollish releases mocking obscenely violent or horrific historical events are almost as old as the video game industry itself.

Take the 1982 release Custer’s Revenge. Later renamed Westward Ho, the primitive side-scroller puts the player in the shoes of a naked, visibly aroused General Custer who must dodge arrows in an attempt to get to the other side of the screen where awaits a ready and unwilling Native American woman. Charming.

Then there’s the 2004 game JFK Reloaded, a “historical simulation” that lets you relive the Kennedy assassination from the perspective of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Indeed, Active shooter is not even the first school shooting simulator. That honor, as far as I can tell, goes to 2005’s Super Columbine Massacre RPG, where you play one of two perpetrators of the Columbine massacre.

Even some mainstream games give players the chance to commit acts of terroristic violence. The second installment of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has a playable (albeit skippable) level where players massacre unarmed civilians in a Russian airport. The Grand Theft Auto franchise gives you any number of opportunities to run over, mow down, stab, beat, burn, or blow up a whole city just going about its day.

So tasteless video game violence isn’t new, and it is not even obviously getting worse. If anything, games have maintained a steady amount of obscenity while society as a whole has gotten safer.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos spoke with some members of Congress last week. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D–N.Y.) asked whether she thought public schools should call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents if they suspect students of being illegal immigrants. DeVos’ reply, via The Huffington Post:

“I think that’s a school decision, it’s a local community decision,” DeVos told the House Education and the Workforce Committee. “I refer to the fact that we have laws and we also are compassionate. I urge this body to do its job and address and clarify where there is confusion around this.”

That response led to the HuffPost headline “Betsy DeVos Stirs Uproar By Saying Schools Can Call ICE On Undocumented Kids: The education secretary said it’s a local decision, but she didn’t argue against it.” By the time GQ reported on the issue just three days later, its headline declared, “Betsy DeVos Says Schools Should Call ICE on Undocumented Students” (emphasis added). That’s even though GQ‘s Luke Darby writes:

DeVos is right, we do have laws—laws that forbid exactly what she’s directing schools to do. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that schools cannot deny children their right to a free education based on their immigration status.

So there’s actually no justification for the idea that DeVos and, by extension, the Trump administration is actively calling for sweeps and raids on public schools or even that she’s partial to the idea.

Two things are worth noting. First, DeVos has revealed herself since her confirmation hearings to be untroubled by the finer points of education policy. That’s not good. Second, she is targeted so continuously by critics of the Trump administration because she supports school choice programs that allow K-12 students to exit traditional public schools. The federal government is strictly limited in how much choice it can enable, but it’s very good that she supports the concept.

But since this is the Age of Trump, where all public discourse is conducted at best in the spirit of truthiness, it’s worth digging into what ICE policy is toward school sweeps. The answer is mixed and muddled but it also illuminates a truth very few people want to acknowledge: Our immigration policies, especially regarding kids, are a bipartisan nightmare. During the Obama years, ICE didn’t randomly sweep schools looking for undocumented foreign kids, but it did pick them up from time to time at bus stops.

The 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyer v. Doe is little-discussed but hugely important. In response to a Texas law that would have either charged the children of illegal immigrants $1,000 per kid to attend local public schools or banned their attendance altogether, the Court ruled that a school district must accept all children who live within its borders for K-12 education without concern for citizenship status. Though this was a 5–4 decision, both sides agreed that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident immigrants whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident immigrants whose entry was unlawful.” The decision settled a thorny issue, but it also opened up a different can of worms. Nationwide, schools spend as much as $20,000 per student, with the national average coming in at $11,392. Typically, K-12 spending is the single biggest outlay that gets counted against illegal immigrants whenever restrictionists start talking dollars and cents.

Yet ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have a policy against most school sweeps. As the American Civil Liberties Union summarizes it, the two agencies

will not engage in immigration enforcement in sensitive locations like schools absent prior approval by a supervisor or exigent circumstances. This policy has recently been reaffirmed by the Department of Homeland Security. This means that ICE and CBP generally will not arrest, interview, search, or surveil a person for immigration enforcement purposes while at a school, a known school bus stop, or an educational activity.

From ICE’s own policy page:

Pursuant to ICE policy, enforcement actions are not to occur at or be focused on sensitive locations such as schools, places of worship, unless;

1. exigent circumstances exist;
2. other law enforcement actions have led officers to a sensitive location, or
3. prior approval is obtained from a designated supervisory official.

The policy is intended to guide ICE officers and agents’ actions when enforcing federal law at or focused on sensitive locations, to enhance the public understanding and trust, and to ensure that people seeking to participate in activities or utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so, without fear or hesitation.

That isn’t to say that ICE never picks up kids at schools or closely related locations (such as school bus stops) that meet the agency’s definition of a “sensitive location.” In 2016, for instance, ThinkProgress described agents picking up an 18-year-old high school student at his bus stop in North Carolina. That happened on Barack Obama’s watch.

In all, ThinkProgress reported over 300 students were picked up in a coordinated raid that

ignited controversy over the Obama administration’s longstanding struggle between enforcing border security and allowing undocumented immigrants with roots in the country to continue living without the fear of deportation.

A spokesman for ICE told the Charlotte Observer that that agency doesn’t do wide-ranging sweeps or dragnets:

The targets are more specific, he says: All are “recent arrivals” who came into the country after Jan. 1, 2014; they are legally adults who lost in court and received deportation orders.

“When we showed up, it should not have been a surprise[.]”

What’s more, the location where the specific student was picked up was, er, bus-stop-adjacent:

“People will tell you that kids looked out of the school bus and saw it happening, but what they leave out is that the bus was driving down the road at the time (the arrest) was taking place,” said [the spokesman]. “It’s being portrayed as if it happened directly at the bus stop.”

To bring it back to DeVos’s comments, ICE isn’t conducting sweeps at schools or other sensitive locations populated by K-12 students. Though it will go after specific individuals at or near those locations. And when it does, it will be doing exactly what the Obama administration was doing.

As an pro-immigrant libertarian, I don’t find any of that comforting. But I think most rational people would agree it’s miles away from “Betsy DeVos Says Schools Should Call ICE on Undocumented Students.”

Until we can begin to acknowledge the awful immigration continuities between Obama (who forcibly removed far more immigrants than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush) and Trump (who is doing his damnedest to beat Obama), we won’t be able to grapple with policies that a majority of Americans find distasteful and immoral. The nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minors “lost” by the Department of Health and Human Services showed up during Obama’s tenure. Even the Trump administration’s newly announced policy to separate families caught at the border dates back to 2005, around the time that George W. Bush was pushing for supposedly humane immigration reform. Large majorities of Americans believe that immigrants under the age of 18 who were brought here illegally by their parents (“Dreamers”) should be allowed to stay. In polls, illegal immigration ranks far behind other concerns, such as health care, guns, and government spending.

If the debate over immigration—or foreign policy, or government spending, or anything—remains little more than an exercise in partisan point-making, nothing good can and will happen.

The British far-right anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson has been sentenced, initially in secret, to 13 months in jail for committing acts of web journalism outside a Leeds court regarding an ongoing criminal trial.

The arrest last Friday, as Fox News reports, happened because Robinson was filming Muslim men “accused of being part of a gang that groomed children.” LeedsLive reports that Robinson was livestreaming for an hour to Facebook outside Leeds Crown Court and that 250,000 people saw his reporting.

His imprisonment was for violating what the British system calls a “postponement order” on any public reporting of an ongoing court case, in this case because it involves a series of linked trials. The theory is that reporting on one before the others are over could undermine defendants’ ability to have a fair trial. The judge who sent Robinson away justified the severity of the punishment by invoking the potential costs of any retrial made necessary by Robinson’s actions.

Even reporting that Robinson had been sentenced to more than a year in jail for what could certainly be seen as an act of pure free expression was itself under a legal gag order. That led to some reporting on Robinson’s sentence being memory-holed. The judge rescinded the gag on reporting the Robinson story in response to a challenge from LeedsLive.

British law allows for expansive restrictions on the right to speak or publish regarding certain trials. These rules are framed with a general presumption that free reporting on court proceedings is of course a public good, unless a judge decides it “would give rise to a substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice” that cannot be overcome by “less restrictive means.”

Robinson’s initial arrest for livestreaming was announced at the time as an arrest for “breach of the peace.” While he was in custody, the authorities discovered he had already been arrested last May for filming in front of and inside a court building where a rape trial involving four Muslim defendants was being held. Robinson had been given a suspended three-month sentence at the time, and if he did nothing more to get the court’s attention in 18 months following, he would not actually serve the time. Now he is, plus 10 more months for last week’s livestreaming.

In America, the recourse for defendants who suffer prejudicial publicity generally isn’t to lock up the reporters. Overturned convictions are more likely, though even those are rare.

The British blog The Secret Barrister is firmly on the side of existing British law and perfectly happy Robinson is in prison:

To avoid jurors having their deliberations contaminated by what they might read or hear about the earlier linked trials, reporting of all of them is often postponed until the end….This is what we had here. The judge had imposed a postponement order preventing the media from reporting on the ongoing trial until all linked trials had concluded.

Breaching a reporting restriction amounts to a contempt of court.

That’s it as far as the Barrister is concerned: crime committed, justice served with 13 months in jail. Those who see Robinson’s imprisonment as any kind of restriction on free speech, the blogger writes, are “ye of little brain. He was found to be in contempt of court…because his actions put a serious criminal trial in jeopardy. Running around a court building shouting ‘paedophile’ at defendants during a live trial, or live-streaming defendants and members of the public—potentially including jurors—entering and exiting a court building against a tub thumping narration of ‘Muslim paedophile gangs’, is hardly conducive to ensuring a fair trial.”

But jurors can be instructed, as they generally are in the U.S., to judge based on the evidence presented in court, not on something they heard some guy with a camera scream. Jurors apt to reach verdicts based on “but I heard a guy shouting in the hall he was guilty” have problems no amount of secret and draconian speech restrictions can solve.

Over a year in jail, especially for someone who is a thorn in the side of a regnant national ideology, feels politically punitive to many of Robinson’s supporters. A sympathetic German MP is offering Robinson political asylum. Fox News points out many recent refusals on the part of Britain to let in anti-Muslim activists shows an ongoing prejudice against the ideology on the part of that government.

I am unsure how frequently this law is broken (though British officials have for years also making sure they troll the internet for violators of enforced legal proceeding privacy), nor do I know how people who do not have Robinson’s political baggage tend to be treated when arrested for this offense. But November 2000 NYU Law Review article by Joanna Armstrong Brandwood argues that the relevant law, the Contempt of Court Act,

has proven, at times, both stiflingly strict and woefully ineffective….[C]ritics charge that both the definition of contempt and the extent of the public affairs exemption are unworkably vague. Wide discretion granted to authorities increases both the uncertainty for publishers and the dangers of selective enforcement. This has a chilling effect on free speech, and, not surprisingly, the amount of information published in Britain about the courts and criminal cases noticeably has declined since 1981….From an American perspective, the British law of contempt unnecessarily and inadvisably restricts freedom of the press. While the media might interfere with criminal defendants’ fair trial rights, it also has an important role in securing those rights….The British law of contempt limits the effectiveness of the press as a guarantor of individual liberties, thereby potentially compromising the very values it seeks to protect. British commitment to the preservation of the right to a fair trial is commendable, but the heavy club of contempt of court may not be the wisest tool with which to secure that right.

Perhaps Robinson was treated exactly as he would have been if he were a radical vegan reporting on a series of criminal cases involving meat eaters. Even were that the case, and despite the excuses offered by British law, jail for reporting on a criminal case is on its face a blow to both free speech and the public interest, and a jury system that requires such laws has flaws such rules cannot be expected to remedy.

Censors against censorship. ABC’s decision to drop the wildly successful new reboot of Roseanne has spawned a social-media race to the bottom from outraged-about-liberal-outrage conservatives. The network’s move comes in the wake of series star and creator Roseanne Barr making what appeared to be racist remarks about former Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett. Roseanne said Jarrett was like a cross between “the Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes.”

Ignoring the long and ugly history of white people describing black people as simians, prominent #MAGA cheerleaders began pretending the offensive part of Roseanne’s statement was simply a matter of any person describing any other person as an ape. Armed with this self-serving interpretation, folks like Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk began pouting about a 2014 joke by Bill Maher on his HBO series.

In a segment discussing Donald Trump’s insistence that then-President Obama was foreign born, Maher had joked that he would pay Trump $5 million to prove that he hadn’t been born to an orangutan.

Led by Kirk, Twitter conservatives began calling for Maher’s show to be canceled along with Roseanne. The idea seemed to be based on a theory that this would make liberals see the error of their outrage-mongering ways. But the general tenor of liberal responses was more one of eyerolling amusement.

Some pointed out why Barr’s and Maher’s comments were not alike. Others noted that ABC and HBO are very different outlets and argued that it’s silly to see ideological bias in the different business decisions they respectively make. But the biggest refrain from liberals was, more or less: “Great!” The host hasn’t been a darling of Democrats and progressives for quite some time.

Oh no not Bill Maher. pic.twitter.com/XlTX51I1R5

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) May 29, 2018

What Maher has been is one of few mainstream left-of-center types with a no-nonsense attitude toward free speech. In calling for his demise, conservatives are trying to silence the very type of principled speech warrior they consistently tell (but not show) us that they believe in.

But at least Kirk and company aren’t calling for the government to intervene in this Twitterized TV-culture war. That’s more than we can say for some other Republican “free speech defenders” this week.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has been speaking out against the alleged “censorship of conservatives” on social media, which earned him a head pat from Eric Trump. It seems Eric Trump is so outraged by the prospect of private companies playing favorites with speech that he wants to give the federal government more control over these companies—you know, for freedom! Because if there’s one thing that says Principled Defender of the First Amendment, it’s using state force to punish private businesses for not promoting the speech you like in the way you like.

.@Jack I hope you do the right thing and put an end to the censorship that so many individuals (myself included) are experiencing on @Twitter. If not, I hope congress investigates this abusive behavior and regulates as necessary. @GOPLeader #StopTheBias https://t.co/xX4s9bG8qU

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) May 30, 2018

FREE MARKETS

Vegetarian KFC and lab-grown diamonds. Sure, KFC’s new vegetarian “chicken” options might make a lot of folks roll their eyes. The same goes for De Beers’ new lab-grown diamond line, which is drawing some well-deserved scoffing after the company insisted for years that lab-grown diamonds were inferior. But one needn’t be in the market for a diamond ring or soy drumsticks to see both developments positively. This is the beauty of free markets in action—a Poptart flavor for every taste, cruelty-free bling, and a vegan chicken-combo meal in every strip mall.

I think you meant: “De Beers celebrates mankind’s ongoing victory over scarcity of all kinds” https://t.co/npZkdlKSQQ

— Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) May 30, 2018

QUICK HITS

• The Supreme Court has declined to hear cases involving San Francisco’s street advertising regulations and Arkansas’ ban on pill-induced abortion.
• Kim Kardashian heads to the White House today to talk prison reform with the president.
• The misguided crusade to ban brothels in Nevada continues.

The poor ones are leaving. The rich are staying. The country is literally geographically dividing on class lines. Concerned about income inequality? Look at land use regulations. https://t.co/JecT1AcyUC

— Cathy Reisenwitz (@CathyReisenwitz) May 29, 2018

• “Every flip-flop in international relations simply depletes a country’s credibility,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said of the White House going back and forth about new tariffs on Chinese imports.
• Good news! SCOTUS says cops can’t enter your driveway to search for vehicles without a warrant.
• Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens is resigning amidst sexual miscoduct allegations and a felony charge for allegedly running afoul of campaign finance laws.

A couple of years ago at a motel in Columbus, a young woman shared a bag of heroin with her father. Both of them nodded off. Because she woke up and he did not, she was sentenced to three years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

That arbitrary outcome, Jacob Sullum argues, encapsulates the senseless cruelty of a strategy that in recent years has gained favor among prosecutors across the country: treating opioid-related deaths as homicides, regardless of intent. The resulting prosecutions not only are manifestly unjust, Sullum says, but could make fatal overdoses more likely by discouraging bystanders from seeking help.

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Today, all Americans are told, “Go to college!”

But economist Bryan Caplan tells John Stossel that most people shouldn’t go. “How many thousands of hours did you spend in classes studying subjects that you never thought about again?” he asks.

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This latest edition of Reason, J.D. Tucille writes about finding freedom in the American West’s open spaces. A sampling:

I fell in love with the wide-open West during a cross-country drive that followed what’s left of Route 66, starting in over-governed Boston, ending in overcrowded Los Angeles, and traversing the wonderful places in between. I remember looking down crumbling strips of pavement, across the empty desert, up at the brightly speckled night sky, and thinking, “Hot damn. There isn’t a soul around to screw with me.”

To roam the West at all is to inevitably cut across the trail of the late Edward Abbey. The writer with a fondness for untamed places famously commented, “We cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.”

Read the rest of the article at the link below.

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Police in Conroe, Texas, handcuffed and arrested a 12-year-old autistic boy after he played with an imaginary rifle in class. His teacher reportedly felt threatened by the gesture.