Month: March 2022

“I am a professional rememberer,” writes Nathan Rabin in The Joy of Trash. “It is my duty to remember not just for my own but for society.”

Rabin is really taking one for the team here, especially since his new book accurately bills itself as the “definitive guide to the very worst of everything.” Among the godawful things he explicates are Academy Award-winning actress Joan Crawford’s bizzare and patently false 1971 lifestyle guide, My Way of Life; the misbegotten Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which improbably included numerous “water ballet” routines along with endless dad jokes; cocaine-addicted movie producer Robert Evans’ 1981 court-ordered, star-studded, anti-drug TV special Get High on Yourself; and the entirety of billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential candidacy.

Rabin was the headwriter for The A.V. Club for two decades and the inventor of the popular-but-controversial term “Manic Pixie Dreamgirl” to describe a recurring film character who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” He now runs his own website, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, where he sifts through all manner of cultural detritus with endless wit and energy. He also co-hosts Travolta/Cage, a podcast about “the greatest actors in history.”

The 45-year-old Rabin talks with Nick Gillespie about how his Gen X roots inform his appreciation for and critique of consumer culture. Kids his age, he explains, learned early on through D.A.R.E. and transparently phony TV shows that adults and other authorities were often lying. Gen X came of age in the 1990s, he says, a time when the belief that technology would make everything perfect was widespread, an optimism severely tested both by the bursting of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks. “Irony and satire and comedy,” he says, “can bring light to a very dark situation, and it can be very cathartic being able to laugh at things that you’re not supposed to laugh about or being able to laugh about things that are incredibly dark.”

Rabin also discusses how musician Grimes, who had a widely covered relationship and two children with billionaire Elon Musk, is reclaiming—or perhaps satirizing—the manic pixie dream girl trope and why Weird Al Yankovic, the subject of a good deal of his writing, has had a career far longer than most of the people he parodies.

Watch the video version of this interview here.

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The post Nathan Rabin: Why Gen X Is Super Media-Literate appeared first on Reason.com.

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The country is belatedly shedding its last vestigial pandemic policies and practices. Once shuttered public schools are open for in-person instruction everywhere. Customers are flocking back to restaurants free from capacity restrictions and mandatory vaccine checks. Attendance at concerts and theme parks is booming.

But public transportation remains a rare exception to the opening of America. A federal mask requirement for riders remains firmly in place and ridership is stuck at a terminally depressed fraction of its pre-pandemic levels.

Subway ridership in New York City, America’s transit capital, is about half of where it was pre-pandemic. Rail ridership in Washington D.C. remains at levels not seen since the late 1970s, when the system had about a third of its current number of stations. BART, which services the San Francisco Bay Area, is patting itself on the back for seeing ridership rise to 30 percent of 2019 levels.

One question facing the industry is whether it should ditch its mask requirements as a way of saving resources and winning back a few straphangers or keep them around forever.

In the former camp is a coalition of 21 mostly Republican state attorneys general who filed a lawsuit today aimed at overturning the Biden Administration’s mask mandate for travels aboard airplanes and public transportation.

“Even lockdown States like California have announced the end of their mask mandates. Still, the CDC unabashedly leaves its mandate intact,” reads the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

The lawsuit goes on to argue that the mask mandate imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is an “arbitrary and capricious” measure that violates numerous federal laws as well as the U.S. Constitution. It demands that the mask mandate be declared unlawful and that the federal government be forbidden from enforcing it.

The transit industry itself has also urged the Biden administration to reconsider masking requirements. Back in early March, the American Public Transportation Association asked that the CDC masking order not be extended beyond its prior March 18 expiration date.

“We know that the Administration is resolute in its efforts to lead the country back to normality and a path to economic recovery. Ceasing the federal mask mandate will support those efforts,” wrote American Public Transportation Association President Paul P. Skoutelas in a March 3 letter to the Biden administration asking that the CDC order be allowed to expire on March 18 as scheduled.

Not everyone is so keen to let mask mandates for travelers go. The Biden administration, contra APTA’s urging, is keeping its mask order in effect until at least April 18.

Writing at Bloomberg today, columnist Justin Fox suggests we go further. While shying away from mandates, he suggests agencies and individual citizens vigorously support a social norm of mask-wearing on public transit.

“In general I’m all for getting back to normal as we figure out how to live with Covid-19,” Fox writes, saying he has returned to the office, restaurants, and shaking hands. Nevertheless, he says “I’d be happy to keep wearing masks on the bus and subway pretty much forever, and would really like it if lots of other people did, too.”

Fox suggests that the minor cost of wearing a mask on a short bus or train ride is worth the modest benefit they might provide in stopping COVID-19 as well as other transmissible viruses like the cold and the flu.

That’s silly. People obviously don’t ride public transit just to ride it. They’re trying to get from somewhere to somewhere. If masks aren’t being worn at one’s origin or destination, their value in suppressing disease for the brief time you’re in transit is probably close to zero.

In New York City, solitary motorists likely did more to drive the early spread of COVID-19 than subway riders. That’s because it matters more where you’re going than how you get there.

The cost of wearing a mask on public transit also increases if nowhere else requires or encourages you to wear one. It’s less likely you’ll remember your mask for the bus and more likely you’ll find it conspicuous and irritating that you put one on once you get there.

This is probably one reason that people’s compliance with mask-wearing on New York’s buses and trains is in free fall, as Fox acknowledges in his column.

Fox suggests a number of other reasons for wearing masks on transit outside of disease prevention. Having one environment where people have to wear masks constantly will shore up demand for the mask industry, meaning it will be ready to meet the demand of the next pandemic, he says. Having riders cover their faces will also stop them eating (which is already against the rules) or talking (which is annoying), he continues.

The first point is hardly convincing. Pre-pandemic, about 5 percent of workers commute via transit. Even if all those workers started taking transit again and all wore their masks every time they did, they wouldn’t sustain production capacity at a level necessary to meet demand during the next pandemic.

(Getting rid of federal regulations on new mask-making facilities would probably be an easier way of ramping up mask production.)

Meanwhile, APTA specifically cites the costs and hassle of enforcing mask mandates as a reason to get rid of them. They clearly don’t think they’re some magic compliance tool that gets people to follow all the other rules as well.

Again, Fox argues for a permanent masking norm on public transit, not mandates. He suggests transit agencies run public relations campaigns urging people to wear masks.

If that’s how agencies really want to spend their shrinking pile of farebox revenue, they can. It’s unlikely it’ll do much good.

Almost everyone seems to view masks as a temporary expediency that is no longer necessary. The number of people who think that will only grow as the pandemic continues to fade away. It seems more likely that their preferences about the social norms of mask-wearing will win out in the end.

The post America's Post-Pandemic Reopening Is Passing Public Transportation By appeared first on Reason.com.

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One of the most discussed trends in American religion at the start of the 21st Century is the so-called “Rise of the Nones,” the sharp increase, since the 1990s, in the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they have no religious affiliation. Depending on the study, Nones now make up about a quarter to a third of Americans, up from something like six percent a generation ago. The category is quite broad, comprising militant secularists, atheists, agnostics, and the “spiritual but not religious”—persons who reject formal religious affiliation but nonetheless believe in some supernatural power or powers. Often, Nones mix and match elements of different traditions to come up with their own, DIY forms of religion—what one scholar has referred to as a kind of spiritual “bricolage.”

A couple of fascinating new articles by law professors Gregory Sisk (St. Thomas) and Michael Heise (Cornell), available here and here, shed light on the ways Nones have started to influence religion cases in the federal courts. For years, Sisk and Heise have done empirical research on the effect of religious affiliations—the judges’ and the parties’—in such cases. Their new articles contain some surprising, and some not so surprising, observations about the growing impact of the Nones.

First, the not-so-surprising: just as the percentage of Nones in the general population has increased over the past few decades, so has the percentage of Nones among federal judges. The percentage of Nones among judges in Sisk and Heise’s current study, which covers the years 2006-2015, is 11.5%, double the percentage in their first study, which covered the years 1986-1995. Nones are more likely to have been appointed to the bench by Democratic presidents (though Sisk and Heise point out that Nones also number among GOP-appointed judges), which is to be expected, given the comparatively prominent role secular Americans have in the Democratic Party.

In addition, although Sisk and Heise didn’t observe a large effect in their study, Nones on the bench appear comparatively hostile to religious accommodations under the Free Exercise Clause. Perhaps Nones, who reject traditional religion, object to such accommodations as a form of special pleading, especially because—and this a final, unsurprising observation—Nones are comparatively unsuccessful when they themselves seek such accommodations in the courts. Nones have a success rate of 25% in such cases, Sisk and Heise report, while claimants from traditional religions have a success rate of 39%.

Now for the surprising observation. One might expect judges who reject organized religion to favor Establishment Clause claims. For example, one might expect such judges to rule that public displays of religion violate the separation of church and state. But that is not what Sisk and Heise found. In fact, they report, Nones on the bench are significantly less likely than religiously affiliated judges to favor Establishment Clause claims. “Holding other variables constant,” they write, “the predicted probability that a judge without a religious affiliation would approve an Establishment Clause challenge was 24.9 percent,” while judges “with a religious affiliation approved such claims at a 40.0 percent rate.”

What might judges who are Nones view Free Exercise and Establishment Clause claims differently? Sisk and Heise believe that Nones, who are detached generally from organized religion, may be more or less indifferent to public displays of religiosity. Recall that many Nones do not reject religion as such and even adopt elements of traditional faiths as their own. But Nones are very concerned about enforcing non-discrimination laws, which of course have been the focal point for many recent controversies regarding religious accommodations.

This is only one study, of course. But Sisk and Heise’s observations are worth considering. A few years ago, I predicted that the rise of the Nones would portend sharp controversies in our culture and our law. I still think that’s likely to be the case with respect to religious accommodations, and Sisk and Heise’s seem to bear that out But, if Sisk and Heise are right, the effect of the Nones on Establishment Clause conflicts may be more irenic. We’ll see.

The post The Nones and the Religion Clauses appeared first on Reason.com.

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William Virgil spent almost three decades behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit. That guilty verdict came down after police in Kentucky withheld evidence that may have exonerated him during trial.

Yet Virgil won’t see any justice for that police misconduct, as he is now dead—the government roadblocks to his lawsuit so long and winding that they outlived him.

Such is the case with qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows local and state actors to violate your rights without fear of having to pay for it in civil court if the government misbehavior in question has not been “clearly established” in a prior court ruling.

But the cops at the center of Virgil’s story did violate “clearly established” law.

In April of 1987, Retha Welch was found dead in her Newport, Kentucky, home after she was stabbed repeatedly, hit on the head, and raped. Virgil was almost immediately pinpointed as a suspect, having developed a sexual relationship with Welch after Welch’s work in a jail ministry brought the two in contact. Based on circumstantial evidence, he was convicted the following year and was not released until December of 2015 after DNA testing excluded him as the killer.

Whether or not Virgil would have spent time in prison were it not for government malfeasance is impossible to say. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled in 2018 that it should have been plainly obvious to any reasonable police officer—even in 1988—that withholding evidence from a defendant is unconstitutional. Specifically, former Newport Police Department officer Norman Wagner declined to disclose that he paid a jailhouse informant named Joe Womack to testify against Virgil after Wagner allegedly fed Womack details about the crime and promised to put in a good word with the parole board if Womack obliged. What’s more, Wagner, along with former officer Marc Brandt, failed to tell the defense about a serial killer investigation possibly connected to Welch’s murder, and that other suspects had been identified as a part of that effort.

“[Virgil] alleges, for example, that the officers tried to frame him; that they coerced an inmate to testify falsely that Virgil had confessed to the murder; and that they then deliberately suppressed exculpatory evidence regarding alternative suspects,” wrote Judge Joan Larsen for the 6th Circuit in December of 2018. “Such conduct, if proved, would surely amount to bad faith or its functional equivalent; and there can be little question that it was well established before September 1988 that police officers could not deliberately conceal material, exculpatory evidence.”

Virgil died in January of this year—almost three years after that decision came down, and even longer after a lower court came to the same conclusion. But his case was still prohibited from going before a jury, as the government insisted on appealing again to the same court which already ruled in Virgil’s favor.

“A reasonably trained police officer in 1988 would have certainly known that you have to disclose exculpatory evidence implicating other people in a homicide investigation,” says Elliot Slosar, an attorney at Loevy & Loevy, who is representing Virgil. “That type of law was clearly established not only by 1988, but by 1968. Because of that, we do view their appeal as frivolous.”

The suit was first filed in early 2016. Virgil’s estate is not expected to go to trial until 2023, with the government invoking its special protections to continue delaying a claim that multiple courts have already said should proceed to a jury trial. “Qualified immunity…enable[s] defendants who have been plausibly accused of misconduct to stretch out the litigation, to make it longer and more expensive than it would be,” says Clark Neily, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. “Unfortunately, some plaintiffs do end up dying during litigation….It’s a real tragedy.” Meanwhile, Virgil overcoming qualified immunity did not entitle him to any sort of judgement—it merely afforded him the privilege to impanel his peers and state his case, something his cousin will now do in his stead.

“William just always wanted justice, which means a lot of different things,” says Slosar. “He wanted his day in court. He wanted for the public to see how he was framed for a crime he did not commit. He wanted for the public to see evidence of who really committed this tragic murder. More than anything, William always wanted these police officers to be held accountable for every single day that he was ripped away from his family and spent wrongfully incarcerated.”

That’s perhaps a modest list for someone who spent 28 years behind bars paying for a murder he didn’t take part in. And yet asking the government to pay for its part in ruining Virgil’s life is apparently too big an ask.

The post He Spent 28 Years Behind Bars for a Murder He Didn't Commit and Died Before Seeing Justice appeared first on Reason.com.

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