Month: December 2014

Continuing
on its recent censorship-happy path, the U.K. government amended
regulations this week to prohibit online porn from depicting a variety of erotic
activities. Now-illicit acts range from the very specific
(female ejaculation; “spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a
gentle level”) to the incredibly broad (“verbal abuse”). But
basically, the U.K. has banned BDSM and certain forms of fetish
porn—or at least, charging money for that sort of porn. 

The new rules come as part of the 2014 Audiovisual Media
Services Regulations, which amends the country’s previous
communications law to require all “Video on Demand” services to
meet standards set by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC).
From Vice UK: 

… from now on, VoD porn – online porn you still pay for,
essentially – must fall in line with what’s available on DVD.
That means that British pornography producers will no longer be
able to offer content online that couldn’t be bought in a sex
shop.

Acts that are no longer acceptable include: spanking, caning and
whipping beyond a gentle level; penetration by any object
“associated with violence”; activities that can be classed as
“life-endangering”, such as strangulation and facesitting; fisting,
if all knuckles are inserted; physical or verbal abuse, even if
consensual; the portrayal of non-consensual sex; urination in
various sexual contexts; and female ejaculation.

It’s a strange, highly-subjective list of sexual behavior deemed
too deviant for folks to be exposed to. (Who knew women orgasming
were so scandalous?) “R18 is a strange thing,” Jerry Barnett,
founder of anti-censorship campaign Sex and Censorship, told
Vice. “There appear to be no rational explanations for
most of the R18 rules–they’re simply a set of moral judgements
designed by people who have struggled endlessly to stop the British
people from watching pornography.”

Adult filmmakers in the U.K. who show their videos on for-pay
porn sites are now limited in what they can feature, and websites
that charge for porn content are limited in what they can show. But
of course there’s plenty of (both free and for-sale) BDSM and
fetish porn out there on the World Wide Web. U.K. lawmakers are
essentially just further driving homegrown porn purveyors out of
business. The industry is already strained by age-verification filters,
mandated last year, which have driven up website operating costs
while turning away customers. 

Both regulations disproportionately affect smaller, independent
porn producers and websites. As Vice’s Frankie Mullin
points out, the new censorship rules will have less effect on large
porn producers and mainstream sites, “which tend to favour the
strip, blowjob, fuck, cum-all-over-a-woman’s-face formula, but the
UK’s smaller, independent producers,” specifically fetish
producers. These include people like Ms Tytania, who makes
feminist-tinged dominatrix porn, and pretty much anybody else whose
products deviate from normative sexual practices. The rules really
are a crazy infringement on freedom of artistic expression, not
solely a commercial setback for someone who runs subscription
rough-sex sites (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
 

This comes in the wake of increasing action from the U.K. government
(as well elsewhere in the European Union) toward censoring the
Internet. The more I read about things like this latest round of
U.K. porn censorship or the Europe Union’s new “right to be
forgotten”, the more I do stop and appreciate the speech
protections we have in the U.S., even if those are ever
under-attack from over-zealous politicians and culture warriors. As
J.D. Tuccille wrote in response to a recent report on press freedom in the
Americas, “the bad news is that the United States has …
downward-spiraling respect for freedom of the press. The good news
is that our officials’ transgressions pale in comparison to the
crimes inflicted on free speech and free inquiry” elsewhere. I
don’t think British-style web (and porn) censorship will fly here,
but not for lack of a want of it from both lawmakers and activists.
We’re just lucky enough to have the First Amendment. 

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An
unsigned
editorial in The Wall Street Journal today calls for
Republicans to better control the institutions of Congress—namely
the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as well as the Joint
Committee on Taxation (JCT)—ideally by abolishing them entirely.
But it does not portray the history and purpose entirely
accurately, and, as a result, is mistaken what would likely happen
if the office were to be shut down.

The CBO, according to the editorial, “was created by Democratic
majorities to counter GOP Presidents and support the Democratic
agenda of expanding government.” This misunderstands the conflict
that gave rise to the office. The legislation that created the CBO
didn’t come from a partisan dispute, but a long-brewing power
struggle between the executive and legislative branches.

As Philip Joyce writes in his
book on the CBO’s role and history, in the late 1960s and early
1970s, Congress became “frustrated with what it perceived as its
domination by the executive branch in the budget-making process.”
For decades, the legislative branch had been understood to be
subordinate to the administration when it came to budgeting. But
starting with President Lyndon Johnson—a Democrat, notably—Congress
became increasing frustrated with its lesser status in the
budgeting process, and with the way the administration exerted its
greater power. As Joyce notes, President Johnson promised in his
1967 budget report that military operations in Vietnam could be
funded along with new Great Society programs like Medicare and
Medicaid. The following year, however, he called for new taxes the
following year to fund them. Congress wasn’t happy.

This was the essential problem that Congress was trying to
solve: a powerful executive branch with incentives to offer
conveniently misleading, overly rosy projections about the costs
and budgetary impacts of major federal expenses like war and
entitlements. Congressional frustration boiled over during the
Nixon administration in a dispute over impoundment (which as Joyce
explains was less about spending limits and more about which branch
had the authority to enforce spending limits), and the
Congressional Budget Office was born.

Basically, the CBO was created as a budgetary power center that
could check the influence of the administration’s Office of
Management and Budget (OMB). This was practically
explicit in the Senate’s recommendation that legislation be passed
creating what was then referred to as the Congressional Office of
the Budget, because Congress needed “a highly competent staff to
guide it in fiscal policy and budgetary considerations, similar in
expertise of the President’s Office of Management and Budget.”

The Journal editorial argues that because CBO’s
staffers aren’t elected, there’s no democratic accountability. “The
wisest course,” the editorial says, “is to abolish CBO and Joint
Tax and allow open debate about the tax and spending implications
of policy changes. Let the politicians with the authority to make
these decisions be accountable for the results.” The editorial
acknowledges that this may not be possible, and more reasonably
urges Republicans to pick a new CBO director if this is too much,
but this drastic step seems to be the ideal. 

If the CBO were to be abolished, however, the most likely
outcome would be that power and authority would return to the
executive, where OMB (which is also staffed and managed by
unelected individuals), would once again be the most influential
government player in the budgetary ballgame. To the extent that
individual congressional offices or committees might take the job
of estimating legislation and budgetary effects themselves, they
too would be unchecked by any powerful neutral arbiter, which can
also lead to misleading, overly optimistic projections. One of
CBO’s first acts after its creation was to help tank a universal
health care plan put forward by Ted Kennedy—by estimating that the
plan would cost three times more than Kennedy’s office had
indicated. In general, members of Congress, regardless of party,
are not known for the precise or accurate explanations or estimates
of budget details. 

This is not to say that leaving things exactly as they are is
the only reasonable choice. I believe there is a
good case for reform at the CBO, though the risks of wholesale
overhaul should be clearly understood. (It’s worth
reading Avik Roy’s measured, well-argued case for reforming the
office, also in today’s Journal.) But if you’re looking to
shut down government offices and agencies, one that tells us how
much stuff costs and how deeply we’re in debt should be pretty far
down the priority list. Simply getting rid of the CBO would further
empower an executive branch that already has too much power, and,
in the process, make wise, informed budgeting and policymaking even
more difficult than it already is. 

As noted earlier (and trust me,
every few hours for the next week), this is Reason’s annual
Webathon, where we ask readers of Reason.com to support our
award-winning (and, full disclosure, award-losing) journalism in
print, online, and via video.

This year, we’re hoping to raise $200,000 to help promote “Free
Minds and Free Markets” in 2015. Go here for swag and
giving levels and rest assured, you can give in Bitcoin
and any payment method this side of Camel Bucks.

I outlined some  reasons
to give here. Here’s another: Unlike an increasing number of
sites, we let you—the hoi polloi, the rabble, the masses—comment
freely at Reason.com.

That’s not simply because we’re lazy or because we don’t read
the comments anyway (we do, and we cry, just like real humanoids!).
When we started Reason.com and, later, our staff blog Hit and Run,
it was central to our conception that we would allow immediate and
unfiltered feedback from our readers as much as possible.
Commenters can be brutal—I’ve been called everything from a “gay
Elvis impersonator” to an “apologist for stupefaction” and worse
(and will almost certainly be in the comments section of this
post).

But one of the great things about classical liberalism,
capitalism, the internet—indeed, one of the things we celebrate
generally in all of our work—is the way that new technologies have
in general leveled long-standing hierarchies. Hell, that picture
above of me is an example of the ease with which all of us can
speak more freely. Thank you,
poopdogcomedy of The Daily Kos, for helping to prove my point
(I know I’m living in a glass house on this, poop, but investment
in a spell-check app, why don’t ya?). You may be a mangy left-wing
cur, but this much we can agree on: Speaking up and speaking out
and speaking back has never been easier.

Keeping the conversation open like we do at
Reason.com is an increasingly endangered sensibility, especially
among folks who don’t like having to mix with the, er, wrong sorts
of people. Consider this recent column by The Washington
Post‘s Chris Cillizza, which was forwarded to me by Reason
columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy. “The
elites,” she notes, “are being annoyed that the common man can call
them out on their brain farts.”

RESOLVED: Comments Sections Need to Go

…Reuters recently got rid of comments on
articles….Vox, the site run by former WaPo-er Ezra
Klein, doesn’t have comments at all.  The New York Times
heavily curates its comments sections….

In the early days of [Cillizza’s blog at the Post] the
Fix, a group of regular commenters — some who liked my work, some
who didn’t — banded together to keep the guy typing IN ALL CAPS
ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL POST from
overrunning the site.  It worked — for a while. But, as we
added more writers and the traffic numbers grew, the ability of a
small-ish number of commenters to police an increasingly large
number of “loudest guys on the block” was reduced
significantly….

The best solution? Not to get rid of comments entirely. Instead,
deploy an army of comment curators who harvest the best of the best
for each article so that scrolling to the bottom of the page is
rewarded. Unfortunately, given the amount of content that any news
site produces in a given day, you would need hundreds of people to
curate the comments….

Rather than use resources on people who try to make comments
sections smarter…[h]ire more content creators who can widen our
community in ways that make more and more people want to be a part
of it. That seems to me to be the way to be the best steward of our
growing online city.  And the bigger the city grows, the
harder it is to hear the loud guy screaming nonsensically down the
block.  Win-win.

Whole thing here.

As a matter of basic logic, that’s not win-win. It’s Cillizza
wins, commenters lose.

Invest in Reason.com and claim your right to comment like it’s
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The cops involved in the fatal 2012 shooting of
Timothy Russell and Marissa Williams, which occurred at the end of
a 25 minute car chase involving at least 26 cops, are now suing for
being treated unfairly by the department because they’re not black
and their victims are.

The chase began when a cop mistook the backfire of a car for
gunshots. The city of Cleveland settled with the families for

$3 million last month. Only one of the 13 cops who shot at
Russell’s car was charged, with involuntary manslaughter. He jumped
onto the hood of the car and fired at least 15 rounds into the
windshield. Five other cops were charged with dereliction of duty
for allowing the car chase to get out of control. T

The other 12 cops involved in the shooting all got slaps on the
wrist and a little bit of paid time off. But that minimal
punishment cost the cops promotions they would have apparently been
given otherwise, according to a lawsuit by 9 of them,
as CNN reports:

“The City of Cleveland, through the other named defendants, and
the other named defendants in their individual capacities, have a
history of treating non-African American officers involved in the
shootings of African Americans substantially harsher than African
American officers,” reads the lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

It continues: “A serious dichotomy exists as a result of the
defendants’ longstanding practices and procedures which place
onerous burdens on non-African American officers, including the
plaintiffs, because of their race and the race of persons who are
the subjects of the legitimate use of deadly force.”

The plaintiffs are seeking an unspecified amount of damages.

It’s hard to tell when black officers are involved in fatal
shootings—only white cops tend to have their race specifically
identified in media reports about police shootings.

Neither the race nor identity of the Cleveland cops who shot
12-year-old Tamir Rice last month has been revealed. The attorney
for the Rice family
said the shooting wasn’t a “black and white issue” but a “right
and wrong issue.”

Insofar as the allegations in the lawsuit are true, they should
be rectified by applying harsher treatment to black cops involved
in fatal shootings not by giving white cops involved in fatal
shootings an easier time.

A ProPublica
analysis of police shootings found it 21 times more likely for
a black person to be a victim of a fatal police shooting than a
white person. It also found that while 44 percent of police
shooting victims it found in the last 33 years were white, for
black officers more than 78 percent of their victims were black.
Black officers were involved in about 10 percent of all fatal
police shootings—in 2007 the Department of Justice found that
about 25 percent of police officers in the U.S. are non-white.

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“I’m a narc. I’ve been a narcotics guy forever,” says San
Francisco police chief Greg Suhr. “But I’m just telling you, I’ve
always felt bad for the people that were addicted to drugs.”

Suhr is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, George
Gascon, who is now District Attorney in the city and who began the
process of de-emphasizing drug enforcement in the midst of cutbacks
to the police force in the wake of the 2007 recession. Since Suhr
has taken over, he’s disbanded most of the force’s narcotics unit,
and drug arrests have plummeted by 85 percent. 

Watch the interview above, or click the link below for the full
text, associated links, and downloadable versions of this video.
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Approximately 3 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller.

View this article.

Who could be against choice?
That’s the argument Los Angeles school district administrators are
now employing to push their latest round of expensive technology
upgrades. Schools will be given the choice to receive Chromebooks
instead of iPads—and some schools will get laptops, the most
expensive option of all. The Los Angeles Times
reports:

Under a new plan, 27 schools that were originally set to receive
iPads, made by Apple, now will also have the choice of choosing a
less-expensive Chromebook, which uses a Google operating
system.

“We’re trying to gear this around giving choices to the
schools,” said Mark Hovatter, who heads the facilities division for
L.A. Unified.

The idea is to eventually place such a device in the hands of
every child in the district. The problem administrators encountered
when rolling out the iPad plan, however, was that kids kept losing
or breaking the devices. What happens then? Do parents pay, or does
the district? Do kids get a replacement? Teachers also struggled
mightily to incorporate the technology into their lesson plans, and
concerns about kids using iPads for unsanctioned purposes caused
headaches.

The initial iPad deal unravelled after allegations of an
improper relationship between then District Superintendent John
Deasy, Apple, and curriculum company Pearson. As I
wrote in the December 2014 issue of Reason:

Forced to admit the idea was a costly fiasco, Deasy cancelled
the order for more iPads. That’s when evidence surfaced that the
superintendent and his deputy, Jaime Aquino, were overly friendly
with executives at Apple and Pearson, the company supplying
curriculum for the devices. Aquino may have improperly advised
Pearson representatives on how to guarantee that they landed the
contract, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Fastforward to today, and the new plan is well underway.
Administrators would like people to believe that they are merely
introducing choice and competition—all that good stuff that us
free-marketeers love—to the technology plan. Each school can choose
the right device for its kids.

That’s all well and good, but I have little reason to believe
that the individual schools will be more responsible stewards of
the taxpayer’s money than the district was. Indeed, 21 schools
decided to go with an even more expensive option:
laptops.

Steve Lopez of the LA Times
argued persuasively in October that the iPad fiasco was a
costly diversion from the district’s real problems. Schools can’t
even find the money for math textbooks, but administrators want to
force unneeded technology on them and impose computerized
tests.

The district should prioritize basic instruction before deciding
to purchase thousands of fancy gadgets.

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As noted in A.M. Links this morning, St. Louis
County police chief Jon Belmar is claiming that the NFL Rams have
apologized for players who made a “hands up” gesture in solidarity
with Michael Brown before Sunday’s game. A spokesman for the
Rams
says Belmar is wrong.

“I expressed regret for any perceived disrespect of law
enforcement,” Demoff said. “Our players’ goal was to show support
for positive change in our community. I do believe that supporting
our players’ First Amendment rights and supporting local law
enforcement are not mutually exclusive.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said county chief Jon Belmar told
his staff by email Monday night that Demoff had apologized. The
email said Demoff “clearly regretted that any members of the Rams
organization would act in a way that minimized the outstanding work
that police officers carry out each and every day.”

CNN has a slight variation on the
story:

“I received a very nice call this morning from Mr. Kevin Demoff
of the St. Louis Rams who wanted to take the opportunity to
apologize to our department on behalf of the Rams for the “Hands
Up” gesture that some players took the field with yesterday,”
Belmar wrote in the e-mail, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

But the Rams said that’s just not true.

“We did not apologize,” Rams spokesman Artis Twyman told
CNN.

The official St. Louis County Police Department Twitter feed
posted this:

Apology: “expression of regret for not being able to do
something” @kdemoff: “I
regretted any offense their officers may have taken.”

— St. Louis County PD (@stlcountypd) December
2, 2014

The
replies to that tweet are something to behold: “that doesn’t
prove your point!”; That’s fine, but Chief Belmar stated he
specifically apologized for the players gesture. That’s different”;
“Wow. You guys are really reaching…”; “oh shut the fuck up”;
“arguing semantics is always a sign that you’re in the right.”; and
more.

And the players
who made the gesture?

“We just understand that it’s a big tragedy and we hope
something positive comes out of it,” [Stedman] Bailey said,
following his five catch 100-yard performance.

Added [Jared] Cook: “We help build up the people around this
community daily with our visiting schools and talking to kids, so
coming out and showing that we’re unified with the rest of them, it
was key to us.”

Rams’ head coach Jeff Fisher said it was the players’ “choice to
exercise their free speech” and he won’t be commenting further on
the matter.

At 5-7, the Rams have enough to apologize for. Protestig events
in Ferguson—especially the over-reaction of cops to peaceful
demonstrators and the larger militarization of police around the
country—isn’t one of them.

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Reason’s annual Webathon with a tax-deductible donation and help
change the world in a libetarian direction. For details on giving
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