Tag: news

I’m always skeptical when any sort of trend is directly attributed to a pop-culture happening, but you never know. In the past, plummeting undershirt sales have been attributed to Clark Gable not wearing one in It Happened One Night and Happy Days‘ auteur Garry Marshall still swears (sans evidence) that an episode in which Fonzie got a library card saved the country from the brink of mass illiteracy. Oddly, Marshall failed to note a meteoric increase in shark-jumping incidents after another, even-more-celebrated episode of Happy Days.

The latest instance has at least better timing. Red Lobster, the seafood chain, is attributing at least part of its recent 33 percent spike in receipts to what its CEO is calling a “Beyonce Bounce.” The singer, who appeared as part of the halftime show on Sunday’s Super Bowl, warbles in her new hit “Formation” that “When he fuck me good/I take his ass to Red Lobster.”

“We are absolutely delighted with what we saw over the weekend, particularly the consumer sentiment that we saw expressed,” Kim Lopdrup, CEO of Red Lobster, told CNBC. “It’s clear that Beyonce has helped create some Red Lobster fans, and we are very grateful to her for that.”

More here.

Well, maybe. As NBC News notes, other factors may be at work, too: “The restaurant traditionally experiences a spike in sales during this time of year due to their annual ‘Lobster Fest’ promotion,” a Super Bowl weeked, and the near-start of Lent (during which many Catholics abstain from meat) have also got to be thrown into the mix.

Because the media is so serious about tracking the effects of popular culture on mass behavior, we’ll check in later in the month to see if Red Lobster’s surge keeps pace with plays of “Formation” (which is approaching 18 million views on YouTube as of this writing).

And perhaps if that long-rumored Nicki Minaj track name-checking Long John Silver‘s as her preferred post-coital eatery ever comes out, we’ll be able to run a natural experiment on the whole concept once and for all.

On Shrove Tuesday (last meat, anyone?), here’s the uncensored version of “Formation” (NSFW):

In order for users to feel confident expressing themselves “freely and safely,” Twitter is debuting a new advisory group dubbed the “Trust & Safety Council.” But a quick glance at its membership roster suggests the council is almost as Orwellian as it sounds—and overwhelmingly biased in favor of speech suppression.

If you thought Milo Yiannopoulos losing his blue checkmark was the opening salvo in the next great culture war (I tended to agree with Popehat’s Ken White that the controversy was overblown), then this might be your virtual invasion of Poland.

The council includes more than 40 organizations that will be tasked with helping Twitter, “strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power.” But if the goal was really to find some middle ground between total free speech and safeguards against harassment, one might have expect Twitter to solicit some diversity of opinion. In fact, despite the press release’s claim that the council includes a “diversity of voices,” virtually none of the council members are properly classified as free speech organizations. (Full list here).

Some of the groups—such as Hollaback! and the Dangerous Speech Project—don’t think harassment should be criminalized outright. But the vast majority are certainly more concerned about allowing too much speech rather than too little. Notable members include Feminist Frequency—the blog and Youtube channel of anti-Gamer Gate activist Anita Sarkeesian—the Anti-Defamation League, and a host of suicide-and-domestic-violence prevention groups.

I sent Twitter’s head of Global Policy Outreach a tweet asking why the council’s composition is so one-sided (this seems like the best way to reach her, yes?). I did not immediately hear back.

Twitter is a private company. It is free to make whatever speech rules it wants. Forcing Twitter to permit more kinds of speech would not actually be pro-free speech—in fact, it would violate the First Amendment.

But its users are also free to complain that the platform is cracking down on speech they would like it to permit. For my part, I would feel more comfortable if the Trust & Safety Council included at least a few principled speech or tech freedom groups, like the Foundation for Individual Rights and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I hope I don’t get banned for saying that.

What happened when new research undercut the prevailing justification for the public panic about serial rapists on college campuses? Psychologists deeply invested in their discredited theory launched a crusade of retaliation against the people who proved them wrong.

“There’s been a scientific misconduct case filed against us,” Mary Koss, a professor of public health at the University of Arizona and a critic of the serial predator assumption, told Reason. “It’s frustrating.”

Last year, a team of social scientists including Koss, Georgia State University’s Kevin Swartout, and four other researchers made a startling discovery about the assumption that most campus rapists are serial perpetrators. The ubiquitous theory—constantly cited by activists, policymakers, and even the Obama White House—was false. New data just didn’t support it.

“If colleges and policymakers continue to focus on a serial rapist conceptualization, they are going to miss more than three-quarters of the rapes that happen on campus,” Koss told Reason.

Koss might have expected the originators of the serial predator theory—Dr. David Lisak and his cohorts—to accept the new research and adjust accordingly. After all, that’s how scientific progress works. Old assumptions are constantly tested against new data, and abandoned when they prove faulty.

But it’s not what happened.

View this article.

Today the Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center, a “fusion center” partly funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, responded to the controversy over a bulletin it sent to law enforcement officers last week.

The bulletin, which was first covered here at Reason, had been distributed in anticipation of last Friday’s funeral for LaVoy Finicum, the rancher killed during the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. The document warned that “[c]aravans of individuals traveling to the funeral services may be comprised of one or more armed extremists,” and it displayed several “visual indicators” that an officer might be dealing with “extremist and disaffected individuals.” These images ranged from the Gadsden flag (a popular patriotic symbol featuring a rattlesnake and the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me”) to an altered version of the skull-and-lightning-bolt logo favored by fans of the Grateful Dead.

Today the fusion center issued this statement:

The Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center released an officer safety bulletin on February 3, 2016, regarding events surrounding the funeral of LaVoy Finicum. The bulletin was intended to inform law enforcement officers of the funeral and potential safety concerns based on recent events in Oregon and Nevada.

The bulletin contains symbols that may or may not be espoused by criminal extremist individuals or groups. We understand that law-abiding citizens also espouse these symbols, and we acknowledge so in the bulletin. Public safety personnel are always expected to evaluate and utilize all information in the context of their training in Constitutional Law and rules of criminal procedure.

There was no intent to offend or single out individuals and groups who use these symbols for historical or legitimate purposes. We will attempt to articulate those distinctions clearer in the future.

A few follow-up questions come to mind:

1. Precisely how does the center intend to “attempt to articulate those distinctions clearer in the future”? It’s true that the bulletin acknowledged that “law-abiding citizens also espouse [sic] these symbols,” and we mentioned that fact in our story. It’s just that the agency’s acknowledgement consisted, in its entirety, of this poorly worded and perfunctory aside:

[T]hough some or parts of these symbols are representative of patriotic and American revolutionary themes[,] they are often associated with extremism[.]

There was no breakdown of which symbols had multiple meanings or what different contexts they might be expected to appear in. The information that was included was often extremely limited: The Gadsden flag, for example, was simply identified as an image “commonly displayed by sovereign citizen extremists.” So: What exactly do they plan to change?

2. Does the agency plan to address any other criticisms? The Utah bulletin didn’t just do a poor job of explaining what the symbols it included might mean, thus making it more likely that a driver might be mistaken for an “extremist.” It also failed to discuss what a cop should do if he does come across a bona fide “extremist.” As former FBI agent Mike German complained to me last week, “What will the officers know after reading this that they didn’t before? Here all they know is to be afraid if they see a Gadsden flag, which could result in an unnecessarily hostile encounter that would increase the chances of violence. There’s nothing here that would help them correctly identify someone who held these beliefs, understand what might trigger hostile reactions, or how to talk to them in a way that would defuse any unnecessary tension.” The statement released today does not deal with these issues.

3. Is there a larger pattern here? It would be comforting to think this was just one poorly drafted document. But fusion centers across the country have a history of producing work with similar problems, including an infamous “strategic report” in Missouri that identified the Gadsden flag as “the most common symbol displayed by militia members and organizations.” More broadly, a 2012 congressional investigation concluded that the centers’ output was “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” According to the congressional investigators, nearly a third of these reports weren’t even circulated after they were written—sometimes because they contained no useful information, sometimes because they “overstepped legal boundaries.”

Four years later, is this Finicum bulletin typical of the Utah agency’s work? Is it typical of fusion centers in general? Is any sort of review process underway?

These are among the issues I wanted to raise with the agency after I acquired its document last week, but at the time it didn’t respond to my calls and emails. And today? Sgt. Todd Royce, the public affairs officer who sent me the statement, tells me “there will be no further comment on the report.”

One would be the first woman to get the Democratic presidential nomination and, if successful, go on to become the first female president of the United States. The other is an old, white man. Yet the question of who’s more of a feminist, Hillary Clinton or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has provoked surprisingly impassioned debate and a volatile divide on the left. 

Since the Sanders campaign started, female fans have had to fend off accusations that their support is anti-feminist. Last week, women’s rights icon Gloria Steinem even suggested that young women only support Sanders to attract boys, and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright opined to Democratic voters that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” Meanwhile, Bill Clinton accused “Bernie Bros”—a term that seems to have become a derogatory catchall for Sanders supporters of any gender—of “vicious” and “profane” sexism. Since then, an array of feminists for Bernie have come out swinging, challenging the idea that XX-chromosomes a feminist candidate makes. 

“I can’t think of anything less feminist than suggesting that women should vote for a woman because of her gender alone,” writes Time Assistant Managing Editor Rana Foroohar. “It’s an outdated (and establishment) way of thinking about gender politics.”

At The Village Voice, millennial writer Holly Wood puts it more bluntly: She’d “rather go to hell than vote for Hillary.” 

Some say supporting Clinton is a radical position, notes feminist socialist Liza Featherstone, but “no one who makes this argument can articulate what, beyond her identity as a woman, qualifies Clinton as a passable candidate for socialist feminists.” And while “a Clinton presidency would be symbolically uplifting,” it would also preclude the “possibility of genuinely improving the lives of most of the world’s women.” 

At Jewish newspaper The Forward, Stefanie Iris Weiss declares that she “won’t apologize” for supporting Sanders, even it’s earned her “a hell of a lot of side eye (and worse) from people that I usually agree with.” What Weiss’ friends don’t understand, she writes, “is that I’m not for Bernie in spite of my feminism–I’m for Bernie because of my feminism.”

RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of America’s largest nurse’s union, concurs, proclaiming that she will “vote for the best feminist for president: Bernie Sanders.” Clinton’s camp “doesn’t get to define for us the appropriate way to live up to our feminist ideals,” DeMoro writes. 

Feminist fans of Clinton, however, haven’t taken this apostasy quietly. “Yes, millennials, Hillary Clinton is a feminist,” lectures Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum. “Clinton’s record on women’s rights is about as solid as it gets.” 

“I’ve always admired Sanders, but I happen to think he has more than a tin-ear on gender,” feminist politcal analyst Joan Walsh wrote last week. 

At New York magazine, Annie Lowrey makes the case that Clinton “is still a revolutionary candidate,” even if her supporters have mangled the message with too much gender and generational warfare. 

And at pop culture site Pajiba.com, Courtney Enlow writes in a largely all-caps post: “I’M NOT SAYING THERE AREN’T REASONS SOMEONE SHOULD DISLIKE HILLARY OR PREFER BERNIE. THAT IS FINE. THAT IS YOUR JOURNEY. BUT LET’S NOT PRETEND FOR A SECOND THAT THERE WOULD BE *THIS MANY* ISSUES WITH HILLARY IF SHE WAS A GODDAMN MAN.” 

The New Hampshire primary results could prove interesting for the Clinton/Sanders gender gap. While millennial women tend to break for Bernie—in Iowa, he outpaced Clinton among young women six to one, and a recent USA Today/Rock the Vote poll had him leading by 20 percentage points with the cohort—in most places Clinton still leads with women overall. But not so in New Hampshire, where not only has Sanders polled better overall going into the primary but also leads among Democratic women 50 percent to 46 percent.

As far as media cycles go, we seem to be in the midst of the kind of backlash to the backlash to the backlash that leaves all sides here asking, can’t we get along? “Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are feminists,” writes Hillary E. Crawford today at Bustle. “Instead of pitting feminists who support Clinton against feminists who support Sanders, female icons should be encouraging women to find common ground.” 

And on The Cut today, Ann Friedman implores the chattering classes to stop it with the narrative that feminist fans of Clinton and Sanders are in the midst of some grand, generational battle for the movement’s soul. 

“When narratives pit women against each other in such a direct and obvious way, that usually means it’s time to start asking deeper questions,” writes Friedman. “Why do we care what two 80-year-old women think of young women’s feminism? Why aren’t we asking young women which candidate they’re supporting and why? Why aren’t interviewers asking older women why their contemporaries aren’t exactly raging for Hillary either? Women young and old still experience sexism, and they want to end it. The difference is that some women see electing Clinton as part of how to end it, and others do not.”

Abusing the word “violent”: It’s not just for outraged college students trying to fabricate harms in order to shut down speech they don’t like.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is abusing the word “violent” to attack the bipartisan Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which would reduce mandatory minimum sentences (in some cases retroactively) for a host of drug-related crimes. Cotton is claiming the bill will, as it stands, would “lead to the release of thousands of violent felons.” His claim is not really true, but his argument seems to have traction. As Brian Doherty noted yesterday, the legislation may see cuts in a couple of areas connected to whether a criminal had a weapon during a drug offense or after having three drug or violent crime arrests.

What makes Cotton’s claim ring false? Cotton believes that drug trafficking is inherently a violent crime, and as the Washington Post notes, pretty much sees everybody potentially released by the legislation as violent criminals. Caroline Rabbitt, Cotton’s spokesperson told the Post, “It is naive to think that dealing cocaine and taking part in its import and distribution is ‘nonviolent.’ That’s a fantasy created by the bill’s supporters and no serious federal law enforcement expert would agree with it.”

Ah, but they do. In fact more than 130 “law enforcement experts” do. Republican Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa), who have hammered out this legislation, have distributed letters signed by dozens of current and former police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys and others supporting the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. Lee and Grassley will be holding a briefing this afternoon to discuss the support of the law.

Cotton’s suggestion that the reforms will result in dumping criminals out into the street is not to be treated seriously. The law does indeed reduce mandatory minimums retroactively, but it’s not automatic. Prosecutors can resist and a judge would make the call based on the circumstances of each case. Molly Gill, government affairs counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) notes that the impact of the bill would actually be fairly small as it stands, given the number of people in federal prison.

“We’re talking about 2,300 people over a period of several years, and not all those people would get reductions,” Gill says, of those who would be affected by the parts of the act that may get dropped.

She also objects to the idea that all drug traffickers are “violent.”

“I would say that I think his view is a minority a view,” she says. “It’s definitely not the view of 80 percent of the voters who think we should be eliminating mandatory minimums for drug offenders.” It’s also not an accurate analysis of who is serving federal time for drug crimes. According to a congressionally funded task force report (from the Charles Colson Task Force), almost half the people in prison for drug crimes have few if any prior convictions. A quarter have no criminal history at all. Fewer than 25 percent were sentenced for having or using a weapon for a crime.

As it stands, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act is itself a compromise from the Smarter Sentencing Act Lee had proposed, Gill notes. The Smarter Sentencing Act would have reduced mandatory minimums and changed sentences for almost all drug cases, affecting tens of thousands of people a year. This act now being considered is much more limited, at Grassley’s demand.

But if you think all drug crimes are “violent,” would you get on board for any sentencing reforms at all? Dara Lind at Vox wonders if it’s even possible to get Cotton to support any sort reduction in mandatory minimums given the language he’s using:

If you believe that every drug dealer is violent, then you’re not going to get on board with a bill reducing mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. You’re not going to get on board with a bill that allows some drug offenders currently in prison to take classes and get jobs in exchange for “good time” credits. In short, you’re not going to support the Senate bill, because that’s what the Senate bill does.

The fact that a judge would actually be in the position to decide whether or not an offender represents a threat apparently doesn’t matter (because, Cotton complains, so many of the courts are filled with “liberal Obama judges”).

I contacted Lee’s office for a reaction, and he provided a prepared statement: “We’re working to find a path forward that addresses some of the criticisms while at the same time maintaining both the core principles and significance of the bill and the broad bipartisan support that the bill has already garnered.”  Grassley and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the sentencing act’s other sponsor, have put out statements that say the same.