Category: reason

Tonight’s Kennedy (8 p.m. Fox Business Network, with a repeat at midnight) is the usual heady mix of rock goddesses (Lita Ford!!!) and dadaist political/social commentary—I’m on the panel talking Bernie/Hillary/Trump/Rubio, plus stupid college tricks, with Tom Shillue and Gillian Turner—but Reason readers may especially enjoy the exchange over the FBI vs. Apple over iPhone-cracking. I play the junior in a tag-team with hostess Kennedy making a case that Scott Shackford has been hammering away at here for the past several days

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The owner of a club where New Orleans hip-hop artist Big Freedia was supposed to perform said an agent from Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) threatened to shut down the concert, and possibly the entire venue for the year, if she was allowed to perform.

The agent’s concern apparently revolved around Big Freedia’s on-stage performance, which includes ‘twerking‘ and the ABC agent considered a potential violation of rules against simulating a sex act.

“You can’t wear a thong. You must keep the cleft of your buttocks covered. And you cannot simulate a sex act,” Rusty Hanna, the state ABC chief of enforcement, explained to The Guardian. “Sexually orientated adult entertainment is not permitted in a place that sells alcoholic beverages.”

Big Freedia’s manager said he didn’t want to cancel the show, except that the venue faced a fine, not the performer. The Guardina reports:

After learning of the threats to shut down the show, Freedia’s manager, Reid Martin, contacted the alcohol agency. He says he was told that the agent had “seen things on YouTube that might be against Mississippi code” and that agents would supervise the show if it went forward so that they could shut it down if it exceeded the terms of the town code.

“I would happily have us take a stand for twerking,” Martin said. “The fact of the matter is that the way that [agent Miles] spelled it out was, we wouldn’t be fined. It’s the venue owner that would have his license revoked, that would get fined. But it wasn’t certain what the punishment would be. The terms of the clause are broadly defined and there’s no defined punishment so they could just make something up.”

Big Freedia told The Guardian she didn’t understand Mississippi’s decision. “Even though we do ass shaking, it’s the culture of bounce music,” she told the newspaper, referring to the sub-genre of hip-hop that she performs and out of which twerking emerged. “I didn’t know twerking violated anybody’s amendments. Our right is to be who we want to be and dance in a manner that we want to.”

Wait until she learns about all the other bullshit laws that don’t violate anyone’s rights.

Decide for yourself on twerking.

• Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the U.S., Russia, and other countries have agreed to a ceasefire in Syria. The agreement notably does not include ISIS or al-Qaeda.
• A new poll from Pew shows 51 percent of Americans think that Apple should unlock deceased San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook’s phone to help the FBI. Of the remainder, 38 percent say they shouldn’t and 11 percent don’t know.
• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, however, is supporting Apple.
• London Mayor Boris Johnson is supporting the idea (and upcoming vote) of Great Britain exiting the European Union.
• Jason Brian Dalton, 45, has been charged with six counts of murder for his weekend shooting rampaging in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
• Pressing political question: “Why is Ben Carson still running for president?”
• Jeb Bush’s extremely expensive presidential campaign was a miserable failure, but his consultants probably aren’t even pretending to cry on the way to the bank.

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Tesla’s ongoing war with state legislatures over direct-to-consumer sales continues, this time in Connecticut. Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff has proposed legislation that would allow the company to sell its cars directly to consumers, something that’s not currently legal there.

The proposed law would greenlight certain car manufacturers to open up to three stores in the state. While it technically isn’t exclusive to Tesla, it’s written in such a way that few if any other companies would qualify. To sell direct, manufacturers can only make electric cars—and they can’t have franchise agreements with any existing dealerships.

If it wasn’t already clear this legislation was designed specifically to benefit Tesla, note that a spokesman from the company, Jim Chen, was at the press conference unveiling the bill.

“Because of the unique technology that goes into a car and because of their made-to-order design, our business model does depend on the ability to sell cars directly to our customers,” Chen said. “These customers can in turn take solace in Tesla’s direct accountability for every sale.”

One of Duff’s selling points is that all the tax revenue that could go into Connecticut’s pocket is instead going to nearby states, like New York, that allow Tesla sales.

“We know that consumers have choices, and if they don’t have those choices in Connecticut, they’ll make that choice in another state,” he said.

Loosening economic restrictions is, of course, a good thing. Should the legislation pass, Connecticuters will have increased access to a wider array of cars. But critics such as auto manufacturer General Motors (G.M.) make a valid point when they argue that electric-car companies and gasoline-powered-car companies should play by the same rules.

Most states have some form of ban on direct car sales, and Tesla isn’t the only one hurt by these laws. For example, G.M. launched a built-to-order, direct-to-consumer car in Brazil back in 2001. The same laws that Tesla is fighting also prevent G.M. from bringing that product to the United States. So it’s understandable if G.M. is a little bitter that Tesla has been allowed to open stores and galleries in 26 states, some of which refuse to extend the same freedom to competing manufacturers.

Prohibitions on direct-to-consumer sales benefit dealerships far more than consumers. Back in 2009, the Justice Department published a study that called the arguments in favor of such laws unconvincing. Industry publications like Road and Track agree, describing the current laws “blatant protectionism.”

In an article for the environmentalist website CleanTechnica, James Ayre took Connecticut’s dealership association to task for its support of the protectionist laws. “They are in such an indefensible position to my eyes,” he wrote. “After so many decades of people having no option other than to get ripped off by some scubby sort at a dealership, who’s really going to side with them against direct sales?”

Even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked states to take a libertarian approach on this matter. As the agency wrote back in May:

Blanket prohibitions on direct manufacturer sales to consumers are an anomaly within the larger economy. Most manufacturers and suppliers in other industries make decisions about how to design their distribution systems based on their own business considerations, responding to consumer demand. Many manufacturers choose some combination of direct sales and sales through independent retailers. Typically, no government intervention is needed to augment or alter these competitive dynamics—the market polices inefficient, unresponsive, or otherwise inadequate distribution practices on its own. If the government does intervene, it should adopt restrictions that are clearly linked to specific policy objectives that the legislature believes warrant deviation from the beneficial pressures of competition, and should be no broader than necessary to achieve those objectives.

Perhaps pigs are flying through a frozen hell, because the FTC hit the nail on the head. Manufacturers should get to decide whether or not to sell directly to consumers without the government mandating they go through a middle man. And picking and choosing certain companies or industries for special treatment is arguably even worse than a blanket prohibition. While the Connecticut law is potentially a step in the right direction, there’s no good reason to single out Tesla; states should let any manufacturer who wants to sell direct-to-consumer.

[Read our previous coverage of Tesla’s battle over direct-to-consumer sales in New Jersey, Georgia, and Michigan.]

Will it be a fight or a trap? That’s the choice facing President Obama in the wake of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, as Obama looks for a candidate for what is likely to be his final nomination to the Court. Republicans who control the Senate have already signaled their preference and intention to wait until after the presidential election to confirm a nominee. President Obama has said he will go ahead with a nomination anyway.

Now the decision facing Obama, writes Ira Stoll, is whether to go for a fight that would mobilize the Democratic base, or instead choose a candidate who has some distantly plausible chance of getting confirmed, or at least of making Republicans seem unreasonable to independents or swing voters for failing to confirm him. Here’s a look at some candidates in both categories. 

View this article.

Hostilities have apparently resumed in the GOP War on Women: John Kasich told a group of people at a townhall in Virginia that women “left their kitchens to vote for him,” according to the media.

The operative phrase being according to the media. 

It’s easy to see why the quote would offend women and feed into the idea that all Republicans—even mild-mannered Kasich—are hopelessly sexist, which is probably why Mashable, Jezebel and countless left-of-center journalists covered it. 

But Kasich’s remark is much less outrageous when restored to its proper context. Here’s what he said: 

How did I get elected? Nobody was — I didn’t have anybody for me. We just got an army of people and many women who left their kitchens to go out and go door to door and put yard signs up for me. All the way back, when things were different. Now you call home and everybody’s working. But at that time, early days, it was an army of the women that really helped me get elected to the state Senate. 

Kasich ran for state Senate in 1978. Yes, there were a lot of working women in 1978, but there were also a lot more housewives than there are today. It’s good that social progress over the last 35 years has given women—and men—more choice over what they do with their lives. Kasich’s comments don’t actually suggest that he opposes said social progress, and they certainly don’t suggest that modern women are just sitting at home with nothing better to do than distribute yard signs. 

In any case, there’s plenty to dislike about John Kasich (hint: his presidency would be an “interventionist nightmare”). No need for the media to quote him out of context.

Statistician and black swanning anti-GMO alarmist Nassim Taleb withdrew from the debate with me over GMO crops in which he had earlier agreed to participate. The debate was arranged by the Journal of Markets and Morality and Taleb backed out after he received and read my initial essay on the subject. Since that essay had been largely written in response to his red-herring-filled working paper, “The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms,” I decided to go ahead and publish my debate essay anyway at Reason.

With his characteristic intellectual generosity Taleb responded with a tweet linking to a letter that he has apparently now emailed to the editor of the journal. Tweet: The reason we decided not to respond to this idiot. 

This idiot is, of course, me. Anyway the tweet and letter is below.

Just a few observations about Taleb’s letter. To the extent that elementary points were “rehashed” in my essay that was necessary because Taleb and his colleagues in their poorly done “working paper” had made such an elementary hash out of both the science and relevant policy arguments with respect to the safety of modern biotech crops. I mean, really, check it out for yourself.

It’s also amusing that Taleb claims that he withdrew from the debate because he does not want to give my arguments the credence and authority of being published in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s particularly hilarious coming from Taleb. Why? Well, I cannot forego pointing out that Taleb’s anti-GMO “working paper,” located on the e-print site arXiv and his own proprietary website, has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

While arXiv content is moderated, the site states: Disclaimer: Papers will be entered in the listings in order of receipt on an impartial basis and appearance of a paper is not intended in any way to convey tacit approval of its assumptions, methods, or conclusions by any agent (electronic, mechanical, or other). We reserve the right to reject any inappropriate submissions.

Taleb and his colleagues prefer to leave their “working paper” on arXiv rather than publish it in “questionable journals.” Well, so far no journal, questionable or otherwise, has yet seen fit to publish Taleb’s alarmist nonsense.

Taleb also throws in the red-herring of iatrogenics in policymaking. The concept of iatrogenesis stems from medicine in which undesirable or unwanted effects are caused by therapeutic intervention, i.e. problems induced by treatment. As examples of how modern medical technologies can inadvertantly cause more harm than benefits, Taleb lists a number of pharmaceuticals that have been withdrawn from the market. Perhaps he thinks that the application of his so-called non-naive version of the precauationary principle would prevented these medicines from making into the marketplace.

In any case, Taleb’s assertion that I “miss the long tradition of iatrogenics embedded in policy making” is simply false. Among other things, I point out in my essay that econometric research has found that excessive Food and Drug Administration precaution that slows down the introduction of new drugs has killed many more people than it has saved. Precaution can and does kill. See my scientific and moral arguments with respect to golden rice. Again, check it out.

Cutting through the conceptual fog engulfing Taleb’s invocation of iatrogenics, he and his colleagues are asserting, without evidence, that biotech crop varieties might turn out to be the moral equivalent of drugs whose risks are greater than their benefits. Which brings me to Taleb’s biggest red-herring, the notion of that modern biotech crops represent a “ruin problem.”

Let’s be blunt. Taleb and his colleagues provide no evidence whatsoever in their working paper that current versions of biotech crops might cause global ecocide or human extinction. They assume ruin and then crank through some equations that they evidently believe proves the truth of what is ultimately just a tautology. As I explained in my essay:

It is a trivially true statement that if some activity will eventually lead to total ruin, then total ruin, even if it takes a long time, will eventually follow that activity. Taleb and his colleagues just assume that producing and growing modern biotech crops is such an activity, then trivially predict a GMO apocalypse. There is a lot of hand-waving about the dangers of global connectivity and dose response relationships that may be relevant to the workings of financial markets, but they provide no justification for their assumption of biotech disaster. Unwarranted dire assumptions in; unjustified devastating consequences out.

Yes, as Taleb’s letter says, the “advancement of thought” is certainly a worthy goal of debate and discourse. As it stands, Taleb’s “working paper” comprehensively fails to further that goal.

I conclude again: Fallacious arguments against developing and growing modern biotech crops is cause for great moral concern.

So, about those Afghan military forces who the U.S. is keeping troops in Afghanistan to train: They’ve pulled out of at least two districts in the Helmand province, the site of heavy fighting between Taliban and other forces and U.S. and NATO troops.

Voice of America reports:

Afghanistan’s military has downplayed the recent withdrawal of troops from bases in a restive southern province, saying “logistics” and “tactical” reasons prompted the move. This comes as Afghan, Pakistani, Chinese and U.S. officials prepare to meet in Kabul for a new round of four-way discussions to promote Afghan peace talks.

The military retreat over the past few days from Musa Qala and nearby Nawzad districts is said to have enabled the resurgent Taliban to further expand its influence in the largest Afghan province of Helmand.

Deputy Army Chief General Murad Ali Murad, while addressing a news conference in Kabul Monday, dismissed criticism Afghan forces have retreated from the area under pressure from the insurgents.

Afghan officials insist troops have been redeployed so that they could get in touch with their families (since troop levels are not high enough to rotate troops out of combat operations) and for more training.

The U.S. has been training Afghan troops since the war started in 2002. “If you’re just waiting to train the Afghans to be policemen and the military,” Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) told Reason in 2013, “it’s taken 11 years already. You can train a monkey to ride a bicycle in less time.”

Almost 6,000 U.S. troops are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through 2017, though the number of troops and the date could be revised upward.

Related: Death of the Anti-War Candidate

Jane Jacobs is often called one of the most influential urban thinkers of the last century, and in a sense that’s true. Ten years after she died and 100 years after she was born, she remains more famous than most living urbanologists. Her 1961 book The Death of Life of Great American Cities is still widely read today. Several of the practices she criticized, from neighborhood-destroying “slum clearance” schemes to high-rise public housing projects, are now far less popular than they once were, thanks in part to her critiques.

But some of Jacob’s core ideas have never gotten much traction among planners—unsurprisingly, since they undermine a great deal of what those planners do. Nolan Gray makes that point in a nicely done article about the ways Jacobs’ critique of centralized urban planning parallels F.A. Hayek’s critique of centralized economic planning. “For all the love Jane Jacobs has received from urban planners and policymakers since her first book was published,” Gray writes,

her greatest theoretical innovation seems to be largely disregarded. Cities across the country continue to centrally plan the minutiae of urban life, from obsessively detailed land-use regulations to impossibly ambitious comprehensive plans. Even many of those who have embraced Jacobs’ urban design insights scrapped her theoretical underpinnings, using rigid, top-down plans to create unsettling and unchanging recreations of natural neighborhoods and cities.

You should read the whole thing. And then, if you want to see some thoughts in a similar vein, go here to read one of my earliest articles for Reason—a long complaint about the ways Jacobs’ work is misappropriated by people who don’t share her more libertarian impluses.

FBI Director James Comey starts his defense of their effort to force Apple to help them break into the iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist and killer Syed Farook with a sentence that is that is extremely hard to take seriously: “The San Bernardino litigation isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message.”

That’s from a Sunday contribution on the Lawfare blog, focusing on the same talking points we’ve been hearing from the feds since a judge last week ordered Apple to take some actions that would make it easier for the FBI to brute force the passcode into Farook’s phone. Comey insists that what the FBI is asking for is very narrow and is not about breaking encryption or creating a “master key” to force back doors into encryption.

There are also plenty of appeals to emotion to try to make people feel bad for resisting their efforts. The title of the post is “We Could Not Look the Survivors in the Eye if We Did Not Follow this Lead,” a sentiment repeated in the content of the short commentary

The problem with treating Comey’s claim credibly is that we all know full well that the White House, the executive branch, federal law enforcement, and intelligence are all united in a concerted effort to do pretty much the opposite of what Comey says: to find ways to break through encryption. Bloomberg got its hands on a memo from a strategy meeting from last Thanksgiving that showed that what Comey is doing here is exactly the White House’s plan:

The approach was formalized in a confidential National Security Council “decision memo,” tasking government agencies with developing encryption workarounds, estimating additional budgets and identifying laws that may need to be changed to counter what FBI Director James Comey calls the “going dark” problem: investigators being unable to access the contents of encrypted data stored on mobile devices or traveling across the Internet. Details of the memo reveal that, in private, the government was honing a sharper edge to its relationship with Silicon Valley alongside more public signs of rapprochement.

The argument that accessing Farook’s iPhone is an isolated request is very clearly a talking point planned well out in advance, and like many efforts that have come from the White House, we’re seeing an obviously organized media blitz to sell it, to the point that they’re overplaying their hand. The Department of Justice (DOJ) responded to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s public statement warning against the FBI’s demands with a federal court filing calling his concerns an effort to protect his “brand marketing.” Apple hadn’t even responded to the court’s request yet. This was a public statement from Cook and Apple. And the DOJ responded with a court filing without even waiting to see what arguments Apple actually presented to the judge.

Cook is sticking to his guns, sending an email out to Apple employees telling them “Apple is a uniquely American company. It does not feel right to be on the opposite side of the government in a case centering on the freedoms and liberties that government is meant to protect.” He wants the government to form a tech commission to discuss the privacy implications of what the FBI wants. And he reminds everybody of the obvious that Comey is hoping we’ll ignore: That if the government is successful in forcing Apple to help them here, they can come back to the courts again and again and again to order them again and again and again. Comey’s counterargument can be best paraphrased as “No, we won’t,” even though everybody knows full well they have a mission to defeat encryption.

In some other news related to the encryption fight, Donald Trump said that people should boycott Apple, which tells you everything you need to know about what Trump thinks of civil liberties (if you didn’t already know he doesn’t give a damn about them).

It also turns out the FBI wouldn’t have needed to break into Farook’s phone at all, Apple claims, if the FBI hadn’t arranged to have Farook’s passcode reset while the phone was in custody, which cut off the ability to back up the phone’s contents to iCloud (The FBI responded that the iCloud back up doesn’t collect all phone data, and they still would have wanted access to the phone from Apple).

Find the fight confusing? Read my explanation as to why this encryption fight is bigger than one terrorist’s phone and how it could affect you here.