Category: reason

The Republicans need to put up a fight over President Obama’s eventual Supreme Court nominee, David Harsanyi argues:

A 2015 CNN poll found that 37 percent of Americans thought the Supreme Court was already too liberal—that highest percentage measured since the network began polling the question in 1993. Only 20 percent felt like the court was too conservative, and 40 percent found it just right. So in other words, 77 percent would be happy with the status quo—a 4-4 court with a convincible moderate making decisions.

But even if nothing above were true, Republicans would still have no choice. The most consequential political upside for a GOP to fight on SCOTUS is this: The party won’t survive if it doesn’t fight. Not in its present form. There’s simply no way those you can accuse the president of abusing and ignoring the Constitution for seven years and then hand him the Supreme Court for the next 20. Not in the midst of a national election featuring an insurgent front-runner whose case is predicated on the notion that the party is led by weaklings. If you do, you might as well pack it in.

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A University of Pennsylvania student told Caitlyn Jenner during a public Q and A that she just couldn’t understand why the former athlete and celebrity—a role model for the transgender community—remains a Republican. Shouldn’t Jenner hurry up and declare herself a progressive Democrat, already?

“Just because you change gender doesn’t mean you change your core beliefs,” suggested the event’s moderator, journalist Buzz Bissinger.

Jenner didn’t seem surprised by the question. “I have gotten more flak for being a conservative Republican than I have for being trans,” she said, according to billypenn.com.

Jenner has made similar claims before—presumably with reference to the liberal biases of the sorts of people she encounters in Hollywood. But the remark was even more fitting when made against the backdrop of the University of Pennsylvania. No place on earth is less tolerant of non-liberals and non-Democrats than college campuses. They are friendly toward trans people—a good thing, because trans people deserve the same rights and respect as everyone else—but aggressively hostile toward disagreement.

[Related: Transgender Activist Tells Gay Students Their Kinky Tumblr Posts Are Triggering]

Last August, John Schwarz over at The Intercept wrote a piss-take about how if the dreaded Koch brothers* really cared about corporate welfare and criminal justice reform and intervention-skepticism, instead of just cynically using those issues to make their self-interested policy atrocities go down smoother, then they would be backing the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. “The alternative to taking the Koch brothers at their word,” Schwarz wrote, “is to conclude that all the stuff they say that progressives love is just a scam — that when it’s time to get out their checkbooks to put people in office, the only thing they actually care about is whether those politicians will make them richer.” 

This kind of binary gotcha game, in which there are forever only Doors #1 and #2, and politics always counts 100 times more than decades worth of philosophically based issue advocacy, is an almost-amusing attempt at enforcing tribal norms via cheap rhetorical entertainment. (Here’s how easy it is: “The alternative to taking George Soros at his word about drug legalization, foreign policy overreach and the death penalty is to conclude that all the stuff he says that libertarians love is just a scam—or else he would have supported Ron Paul instead of Barack Obama.”) Like almost everything about two-party presidential politics, such exercises are designed to erase ideological complications, sort people into clearly delineated camps, and make us all a little bit dumber.

Complicating such efforts today is a Washington Post op-ed from Charles Koch himself, in which he spends most of it exploring areas of commonality with—yes—Bernie Sanders. Excerpt:

The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.

I agree with him. […]

[T]he United States’ next president must be willing to rethink decades of misguided policies enacted by both parties that are creating a permanent underclass.

Our criminal justice system, which is in dire need of reform, is another issue where the senator shares some of my concerns. Families and entire communities are being ripped apart by laws that unjustly destroy the lives of low-level and nonviolent offenders.

Koch goes on to explain how his policy solutions differ from those of Sanders (“History has proven that a bigger, more controlling, more complex and costlier federal government leaves the disadvantaged less likely to improve their lives”); points out that it’s “results, not intentions” that matter, and closes with a passage that reads as much as anything else like a warning shot across the bow of Republicans:

When it comes to electing our next president, we should reward those candidates, Democrat or Republican, most committed to the principles of a free society. Those principles start with the right to live your life as you see fit as long as you don’t infringe on the ability of others to do the same. They include equality before the law, free speech and free markets and treating people with dignity, respect and tolerance. In a society governed by such principles, people succeed by helping others improve their lives.

I don’t expect to agree with every position a candidate holds, but all Americans deserve a president who, on balance, can demonstrate a commitment to a set of ideas and values that will lead to peace, civility and well-being rather than conflict, contempt and division. When such a candidate emerges, he or she will have my enthusiastic support.

Those last italics are mine, to underline the not-so-veiled slap at the remaining Republican field.

Now, this rhetorical olive branch hardly means that the Kochs are suddenly going to stop focusing their vast major-party-influencing efforts on the GOP, any more than George Soros will abandon the Democrats. (I have written on the commonalities between the opposing billionaires here and here.) But it does demonstrate anew that the strenuous effort to demonize them as ultra-conservatives are as reductionist and absurd as calling the Hungarian-born Soros a socialist.

And as importantly, the generosity toward Sanders from one of his biggest targets illustrates something that the dwindling number of partisan dead-enders cannot accept during the tribalist din of a presidential campaign: that it is possible, even probable, for individual Americans to find individual candidates from opposing parties to be the best in the field on certain important issues and the worst in the field on others, and that such collections of disparate judgments can make comparative evaluations challenging. Bernie Sanders is great on pot, lousy on higher education. Ted Cruz is decent on ethanol, indecent on subjecting Supreme Court nominees to a public vote because of gay marriage. Even the thoroughly awful Donald Trump makes a good point now and then.

The point of Olympic Year politics is to make you forget all of this. The point of living, as ever, lies elsewhere.

* David Koch is on the Board of Trustees of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine and this website. Organizations connected with both brothers have donated money to the Foundation over the years. 

Carnegie Mellon University economist John Miller’s new book, A Crude Look at the Whole: The Science of Complex Systems in Business, Life, and Society, promises more than it delivers. The book’s title is taken from the observation by Nobel physics laureate Murray Gell-Mann that it is necessary to step back from the particularities of individual academic disciplines in order to get a sense of how technology, economics, demography and politics interact to create the challenges that confront humanity in the 21st century. Miller claims, but ultimately can’t establish, that there deep links between the behaviors of disparate phenomena such as bacteria, bee hives, brains, and stock markets. Still the book is studded with some interesting insights. Here are few excerpts from the review:

“We inhabit a world where even the simplest parts can interact in complex ways, and in so doing create an emerging whole that exhibits behavior seemingly disconnected from its humble origins,” observes Mr. Miller. Examples of this process include biological evolution, markets, the Internet and even human consciousness itself.

For example, consider:

In 2010, a fruit vendor, humiliated by a policewoman when he couldn’t pay her a bribe, set himself on fire in protest in the remote Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. Discontent resulting from strongman rule, pervasive corruption and a lack of opportunity for Arab youth had been building throughout the region for decades. Yet no experts would have predicted that Mohamed Bouazizi’s fiery death would trigger the Arab Spring uprisings, the consequences of which are still unfolding.

“Knowing the parts is not equivalent to knowing the whole,” could be the slogan for economist John H. Miller’s book on the science of complex systems. In “A Crude Look at the Whole,” Mr. Miller, citing the events that led up to the Arab Spring revolutions, argues that societies are complex systems in which endogenous tensions accumulate so that, finally, one relatively small event like Bouazizi’s self-immolation provokes dramatic social upheaval. …

Miller eventually gets to the notion of self-organized criticality. Like other practitioners of complexity science, he illustrates the concept using a pile of sand to which grains of sand are constantly being added. Many land and simply find a place in the pile; some grains land and cause small local avalanches, which soon come to rest; and eventually a grain lands that causes a huge avalanche that changes the shape of the whole pile. Miller analogizes societies to sand piles in which endogenous tensions accumulate so that finally one relatively small event provokes social upheaval. “At the slightest touch, our world can go from stones to sand,” declares Miller. Knowing this, however, is not much help to policymakers or citizens.

As an example of how unintended deleterious behaviors can emerge from interconnected complex systems, Mr. Miller dissects the May 6, 2010, “flash crash” in U.S. securities markets. A retrospective analysis concluded that it occurred as a result of a design flaw in a trading algorithm used by a small firm located in Shawnee Mission, Kan. The trades orchestrated by the algorithm inadvertently created a positive feedback loop that was amplified by high-frequency computer trading in the tightly connected derivatives markets. All market participants understood how each piece of the trading system was designed to work but did not foresee how their interactions could produce the flash crash.

So what lessons do we learn from this case? Mr. Miller suggests that “we might not ever be able to fully control such systems, but we may be able to mitigate their downsides through the clever introduction of metaphorical firebreaks such as the circuit breakers that are used in financial markets.” Unfortunately, readers looking for insights more concrete than “metaphorical firebreaks” will be disappointed.

Miller asserts that “effective decentralized decision making may be one of the best new old ideas to emerge from complex systems.” This observation acknowledges the plain fact that we human beings are terrible at foresight. Humanity advances economically, technologically, politically and yes, morally, only through an iterated process of trial and error. There are no trials without errors. Miller astutely quotes James Joyce who once noted that “mistakes … are the portals of discovery.”

Ultimately Miller takes readers on a rudimentary tour of what is still a young science. Complexity science as it now stands can help to diagnose problems but offers few cures.

Go here to read my whole review.

In 1970, Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on a Freak Power ticket, promising to sod the streets, put dishonest drug dealers in stocks, and change Aspen’s name to “Fat City.” His campaign caught the attention of the British TV show This Week, which sent a crew to make a documentary about it. The resulting program ignored the satiric side of Thompson’s campaign—not one of those deliberately over-the-top pledges is mentioned here—and instead presents the race as a straightfoward battle between reform-minded hippies and a conservative establishment. Add to that the English filmmakers’ faintly alien language and perspective (the narrator uses words like “goodies” and “baddies,” and at one point pauses to explain that “grass” means “marijuana”) and you get a pretty peculiar picture.

But it’s an interesting peculiar picture, capturing a moment when a previous set of settlers in the American West was starting to come to terms (or not) with a new wave of westerners with beard and long hair. (Or, in Thompson’s case, no with hair on his head at all.) And some nuances sometimes slip into the documentary’s kids-vs.-the-old-folks framing, as when a young man says he’ll be voting for the incumbent—”nobody’s getting busted here that’s not absolutely asking for it,” he says, and Thompson is a “psychotic” with “no grip on reality.” Shortly after that, a couple of older Coloradans tell the interviewer they’re backing the freak. “I like to see justice done equally to the rich and the poor, or whatever it is,” one explains.

There’s also a NSFW segment featuring some skinny-dippers getting high with a man in an Aspen police uniform. (Apparently he was actually the dogcatcher.) Oddly, the filmmakers who had no trouble showing nudity there later bleeped the word “fucked.” I assume that in the United Kingdom of the early ’70s, that seemed to make sense.

Spoiler alert: Thompson loses. But the results are much closer than you might expect.

By the way: If you’re looking for antecedents to Donald Trump’s comment that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing any votes, go to the 14:50 mark, where Thompson tells an interviewer that there’s a core group of hippies who would vote for him “if I went out there and walked through the streets naked with a bomb in each hand and drugs dripping.”

Bonus link: Thompson writes a letter to Thames TV demanding a copy of the film. My favorite sentence: “It was a horror to have those fuckers around, with all those lights & cables & other assorted garbage everywhere we went; but we figured we stood a good chance of winning, & for that reason we also thought it would be good to have the story on British TV.”

More bonus links: Matt Welch writes about Thompson here. I write about Thompson’s campaign—and the similarly cracked candidacies of Norman Mailer, Jello Biafra, and Howard Stern—here. Past editions of the Friday A/V Club are here.

On Tuesday, the Eagles of Death Metal finally returned to the Bataclan Theater in Paris, playing a sold out concert that included many of the survivors of their last performance there, in November 2015. What a ballsy move. Last November, of course, the EODM and their fans all became—suddenly, and horrifically—human targets of a brutal terrorist assault inside the Bataclan. Three jihadists armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles stormed the doors of the theater and proceeded to systematically execute people in the crowd.

That night still sits like an unshruggable weight on Jesse Hughes, the Eagles of Death Metal’s irrepressible lead singer. He keeps replaying the episode, over and over, in his head. “There’s a certain thing that’s unmistakable about impending doom, when death is on you,” Hughes recalls in a recent interview with the music site Kerrang!.

For Matt Kibbe, Bataclan was a tipping point, the moment he decided to get a gun. With the subsequent terrorist attack in San Bernardino, arming himself and his family felt more like an obligation, not just a right, he explains.

View this article.

• In the first major U.S. airstrike in Libya since November, Americans bombed a suspected ISIS training camp there Friday, killing more than 40 people. 
• The Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois has agreed to hear a case concerning Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s eligibility to serve as U.S. President. 
• Oregon lawmakers approved a plan to increase the minimum wage from $9.25 to between $12.50-$14.75, depending on location, over the next six years. 
• The South Carolinans go for Donald Trump?
• At a Democratic town hall in Las Vegas, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said he was “a strong feminist” who was made “an honorary woman many, many years ago” by Gloria Steinem. 
• Sanders also, in an interview with BET, accused Hillary Clinton of acting buddy-buddy with President Obama all of a sudden “to win support from the African-American community.”  
• Thousands of activists marched in Madison, Wisconsin, Thursday to protest immigration legislation headed to Gov. Scott Walker. 
• A Kentucky bill that just cleared the state senate creates a separate marriage-license form for same-sex couples. 
• A new exhibition at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum explores prostitution in late-19th and early 20th-century Paris through the period’s paintings.
• “Knife-wielding monkey terrorizes Brazilian bar after guzzling some rum.” 

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I’m off to Manchester, New Hampshire for The Free State Project’s annual Liberty Forum. The big draw this year is an appearance via the Internet of Edward Snowden, the national security whistleblower whose revelations continue to astonish and disturb us all.

As Anthony Fisher noted recently, FSP recently reached its goal of getting 20,000 people to commit to move to New Hampshire over the next five years. The goal of FSP is to influence politics in a libertarian direction while getting on with the business of living their lives in an atmosphere of maximal social and economic freedom.

Besides moderating the conversation with Snowden, I’ll be reporting on the scene and the vibe now that the great migration is officially underway. As Brian Doherty has written, about 2,000 FSP members are already in New Hampshire and they’ve already effected change:

Over 1,900 Free Staters already are there and we’ve reported here at Reason on some of what they’re already accomplished, from getting 15 of their brethren in the state House, challenging anti-ridehail laws, fighting in court for outre religious liberty, winning legal battles over taping cops, being mocked by Colbert for heroically paying off people’s parking meters, hosting cool anything goes festivals for libertarians, nullifying pot juries, and inducing occasional pants-wetting absurd paranoia in local statists.

.At last year’s Liberty Forum, we interviewed Overstock CEO and Bitcoin/blockchain enthusiast Patrick Byrne. Take a look/listen:

After hearing hours of passionate testimony Thursday from adult-film stars, webcam workers, public-health professors, and others, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) voted against a proposal to require condoms and other “protective barrier” use in porn. It’s a major victory not just for the adult-entertainment biz but also for personal liberty and against an overreaching nanny state.

The proposal, which I wrote about in detail yesterday, would have updated California’s workplace safety standards to say that any “recorded or live representation” of sexual activity in which people might be exposed to “sexually transmitted pathogens” would require the use of “personal protective equipment” such as condoms, dental dams, and special eyewear—i.e., picture your favorite porn star in safety goggles the next time they’re taking a load to the face. Porn performers and producers rightly complained that compliance would make their product unmarketable. And rather than abide by such measures, adult filmmakers would splinter off to other states and underground—where the robust, centralized system of testing for sexually-transmitted-infections among performers would no longer work. 

In short, performers testified yesterday, the condom proposal—part of a coordinated anti-porn effort from activist Michael Weinstein and his Aids Healthcare Foundation (AHF)—wouldn’t just cost California tons in lost revenue, it would cost them their community, their safety net, and possibly their livelihoods. 

Speakers included porn-industry veterans and notables such as Jessica Drake, Joanna Angel, James Bartholet, Jiz Lee, Dee Severe, Abella Danger, and Julia Ann, along with dozens of others—around 100 in total. 

After more than four hours of testimony before the Cal/OSHA Standards Board yesterday, the line of porn-industry folks waiting to speak out against the Weinstein proposal was still formidable. The mood among them, as evidenced by their Twitter commentary, was both proud and tense. On the one hand, how could board members refuse to listen to the reasoned, heartfelt, and intelligent testimony given all afternoon? How could they overlook the opposition of so many whose lives would be directly affected, as well as the people—a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert, a St. John’s Infirmary representative, an epidemiology professor—who knew best and still said this proposal was the worst? 

On the other hand, these were government officials we were talking about. And this was the porn industry. Rational actions from the former regarding the latter have historically been rare. 

As testimony wound down, two Cal/OSHA board members said they would like more time to review and possibly revise the proposal. One, Dave Harrison, told the crowd he was “actually more torn over this than I can ever explain.” Board member Robert Blink concurred: “I’m going through similar mental gyrations over this,” he said. A motion to postpone the vote failed, however, and the five board members went ahead with the process. Four affirmative votes were required to pass the Weinstein proposal and add a new section to the California Health Code.

Only three board members voted yes. 

Board member Patty Quinlan said the issue would be reconsidered in the future “with more input from the affected industry.”

The room erupted in cheers as the news was announced, and social media in tiny victory speeches. “I can’t believe it’s real life but…WE WON!” wrote sex columnist and adult performer Siouxsie Q on Instagram. “Fucking. Awesome. A wonderful victory, thank you to all the people who spoke today,” tweeted cam girl Alex Coal. 

“Today was a monumental win, not only for the adult industry, but for the #sexworkersrights movement as a whole,” tweeted porn trade group the Free Speech Coalition (FSC).

At a post-vote speech, FSC Executive Director Eric Paul Leue said he hopes his group can work closely with officials on the drafting of future porn-safety regulations. He also noted that a similar struggle was imminent: “The California Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act,” also sponsored by Weinstein and AHF, will put the issue of condoms in porn (along with a host of other intrusive, privacy-infringing, business-killing regulations) up for a statewide vote in November. 

“Now we face a larger battle, which would seek to replicate and amplify the worst parts of the regulations,” said Leue. “In fact, the ballot initiative, allows private citizens to sue adult performers who do not use condoms, and would drive a legal industry underground where performers would be less safe. This idea — that private citizens can sue adult performers because of actions they disapprove of is outrageous, and would not be permitted in any other sector of our society. We will fight this, and this too, we will win.”

In a press release, Weinstein said AHF is “disappointed” by Cal/OSHA’s decision and “are announcing today that we will immediately file a new petition with Cal/OSHA on this important health measure.” 

California legislators were in a rush to change a 20-year-old law and messed up. Steven Greenhut reports:

California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 215, legalizing marijuana’s use for medical purposes, back in 1996. It’s hard to understand why such measures needed to be rushed through after nearly two decades of dawdling.

The problem: The Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act included a paragraph that gave state officials full authority to license and regulate medical marijuana in any cities or counties that did not adopt specific ordinances regulating or banning marijuana cultivation by March 1. With the deadline looming, localities began hurrying through cultivation bans.

View this article.