Indice dei contenuti per February 2016 in Reason

THERE ARE MANY different American contexts in which one might hear the bellicose patriotic warning, “The red, white, and blue is coming to get you.” A speech by a Muslim religious leader at a Brooklyn candlelight vigil is generally not one of those contexts. Yet that’s what I heard from Mohammad “Mo” Razvi, the executive director of a Muslim community group called the Council of Peoples Organization, at an interfaith ceremony in Carroll Park on November 15. It was two days after gunmen and suicide bombers ripped a bloody hole through the heart of French civil society, massacring 130 people in attacks at a rock concert, a soccer stadium, and several restaurants. We were gathered with more than 100 people in my neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, which has become the…

Police in Odessa, Ukraine, arrested a man in a Chewbacca costume for illegally campaigning for mayoral candidate Darth Vader. Three pilots at Laughlin Air Force Base have received letters of reprimand, effectively ending their careers, after texting each other song lyrics containing the word “molly,” a slang term for the drug MDMA. An investigation found no evidence they were actually using drugs. Officials held students in their classrooms at Lehman High School in Texas while they investigated an alleged gun threat. They eventually determined that a student had misheard someone asking for some gum. After Andrea Ellis cut her arm on some glass, her sister saw a Columbus, Ohio, police car passing by and ran out to flag it down. Bad decision. As the officer approached the house, he decided…

FBI Director James Comey says cops are reluctant to do their jobs because they worry that their actions will be captured on camera. Judging from the official response to the shooting of Zachary Hammond, they have little to fear. Speaking at the University of Chicago Law School in October, Comey said police officers “in today’s YouTube world” are afraid to get out of their cars, lest they face camera-wielding bystanders intent on recording them. He warned that good policing could “drift away from us in the age of viral videos” as cops refrain from confronting suspicious characters. “I spoke to officers privately in one big-city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars,” Comey…

You may have expected South Park to run out of steam. After nearly two decades on the air, showrunners Trey Parker and Matt Stone have satirized every topic under the sun, from religious fundamentalism to anti-Walmart hysteria to celebrity culture, dieting fads, and environmentalism. What was left for the show’s 19th season? By abandoning their story-aweek formula for a season-long arc built around political correctness and campus outrage culture, Parker and Stone made South Park profound again. Equally impressive, they have kept the subject matter fresh by refusing to limit their barbs to one side. One episode skewers Caitlyn Jenner as a murderously clumsy Frankenstein’s monster, the next depicts Canadian President Donald Trump being literally raped to death. This season’s best invention is new recurring character P.C. Principal, a foul-mouthed,…

In Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law (ForeEdge, 2015), Alison Bass explores prostitution in 21st-century America (and parts of the wider world), from posh brothels to city streets and from high-end hotels to jail cells. Weaving together interviews and academic research, Bass—a West Virginia University journalism professor who spent four years talking with sex workers around the country—shows our current approach to commercial sex in the U.S. is dangerous, disingenuous, and an utter failure. Anti-prostitution laws “have done little to stem the thriving industry,” she writes, while exacting “a high price on public health and safety.” Bass illustrates how ending prohibition on consensual commercial sex between adults could reduce rates of HIV and violence against women while also better serving those who are coerced or forced into selling sex.…

Deputy Managing Editor Stephanie Slade was a pollster before she came to work at reason. She puts that experience to use on page 24, telling the history of an industry that no longer quite seems up to the task of predicting elections (“Why Polls Don’t Work”). So why did Slade, 29, leave a stable career in survey research in favor of life as a magazine scribe? “What I realized was that ultimately, on policy, the politicians will go where the public is leading them,” the Florida native says. “I wanted to be a part of the conversation that’s shaping people’s views.” REECY PONTIFF is a freelance writer, a vaudeville performer, a tour guide, and, in her own words, a “professional vagabond.” The 34-year-old’s politics are just as eclectic: “Generally speaking,…

“Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?” —CNBC political correspondent John Harwood, one of the moderators of that network’s widely criticized Republican primary debate, in a question to Donald Trump, October 27 “Well, gee, after the last debate, I was told that I didn’t smile enough.” —Carly Fiorina, in a grinning in response to a question about her biggest weakness during the CNBC Republican primary debate, October 27 “I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record. The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.” —Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, after Bush criticized him for not showing up to…

IMAGINE YOU OWN a business that sells an unprofitable product. But you’ve done me favors in the past and I expect you to do me more in the future, so I decide to lend you the money your business needs to stay in operation. Should you find that you can’t pay me back, you needn’t worry, I’ll take a massive shipment of your unprofitable product instead. Of course, I’d rather not deal with that headache, so I go to great lengths to make sure that your lower-cost competition is at a disadvantage, thus ensuring a market price for your product that will be sufficient to repay my loan. Heads you win, tails you win! It may sound crazy, but that’s exactly what the Department of Agriculture (USDA) does to protect…

ON OCTOBER 7, 2015, the most famous brand in public opinion polling announced it was getting out of the horse-race survey business. Henceforth, Gallup would no longer poll Americans on whom they would vote for if the next election were held today. “We believe to put our time and money and brainpower into understanding the issues and priorities is where we can most have an impact,” Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport told Politico. Let other operations focus on predicting voter behavior, the implication went, we’re going to dig deeper into what the public thinks about current events. Still, Gallup’s move, which followed an embarrassingly inaccurate performance by the company in the 2012 elections, reinforces the perception that something has gone badly wrong in polling and that even the most…

“I DIDN’T KNOW what freedom was,” says Yeonmi Park, author of In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom. “I didn’t know the concept. I never heard of that word, ‘freedom.’ To me, the happiest thing was having food.” On March 31, 2007, Park says, she and her mother illegally crossed the frozen Yalu River in the dead of night, arriving in China with only a vague idea of where to go from there. She describes it as the beginning of a harrowing, years-long odyssey that would eventually take them across the Gobi desert and through Mongolia en route to South Korea. But things would get worse before they got better. “When I got [to China], the first thing I saw was my mother raped,” she says.…

Life in the post-apocalyptic sci-fi future portrayed in the video game Fallout 4 is tough: You’re constantly scavenging for food, weapons, and shelter, and you spend more than a little time fighting for your life. Like its recent franchise predecessors, Fallout 4 is a massive open-world role-playing game that gives players endless opportunities to explore and interact with the series’ quirky, bleak vision of America’s future. Fallout 3 was set in Washington, D.C.; 4 takes place in Boston, ensuring opportunities for plenty more warped Americana. What’s most surprising is how much the game resembles the present. The America it presents is strangely, surprisingly similar to our own: There are places to drink and socialize, towns and cities with their own complicated internal politics, and endless opportunities to work and trade,…

Season 3 of Showtime’s Ray Donovan, starring Liev Schreiber as Ray and Jon Voight as his ex-con father Mickey (released on DVD in December), follows Ray, a “fixer” from South Boston based in Los Angeles and employed by Hollywood’s elites. The show, in the modern mode of the sympathetic anti-hero, is wellexecuted L.A. noir, with few actual “good guys” but a lot of larger-than-life drama, the way Hollywood sees itself and hopes we do too. In the world of Ray Donovan, sex, drugs, and anarchy combine to produce an appealing mixture of corruption and moral complexity. Donovan represents sheer force of will, frequently actuated through hideous violence. But the show also gives its characters credit for an intelligent sense of the consequences of their brutal actions.…

Games these days can render landscapes and human beings in amazing, gorgeous detail, and they’re also capable of pushing complex stories and rule systems in front of their players. But the genre’s old ways haven’t been abandoned entirely. A bountiful crop of independently produced games draws on retro pixilated graphics, not just for nostalgia but because it also allows entire games to be produced by a small team, often no more than a couple of devoted people. Consider Toby Fox’s Undertale. It’s a riff on some of the more unusual role-playing games of the SuperNintendo era, but with more complex storytelling. The graphics look simple, but the gameplay is challenging, presenting player choices that make it possible to win without killing the monsters you encounter. The game doesn’t make it…

Speech under fire You’ve Been Warned Robby Soave FRIENDS OF free speech, despair: A majority of college students believe universities should restrict which kinds of expression are allowed on campuses, and more than six in 10 favor mandatory trigger warnings. These findings come from a new poll undertaken by McLaughlin & Associates and published in The New Criterion. While the overwhelming majority of respondents agreed in the abstract that free speech and intellectual diversity are important ingredients for healthy campus debate, they grew much more inclined toward censorship when asked about specific kinds of speech. Half said universities should prohibit other students from publishing cartoons that criticize religious or ethnic groups. Fifty-two percent said people who engage in “hate speech” should be prohibited from speaking on campus. And 72 percent…

Issue 3 would have limited commercial production to 10 sites controlled by the initiative’s motley crew of financial backers, which included: OSCAR ROBERTSON Former NBA player NICK LACHEY Ex-boy band member NANETTE LEPORE Fashion designer WOODY & DUDLEY TAFT President William Howard Taft’s great-greatgrandnephews FROSTEE RUCKER Arizona Cardinals defensive end “The advocacy against reform wasn’t, ‘marijuana is this evil weed.’ It was, ‘Don’t trust those monopolists to legalize weed.” —Douglas Berman, Ohio State law professor For sources visit reason.com/issue3vote…

Would National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden be better off had he gone through official channels to expose his employer’s questionable domestic surveillance practices? No way, says his lawyer, Jesselyn Radack of ExposeFacts.org. And she should know: The national security and human rights attorney has represented numerous other government whistleblowers and even acted as one herself. In October 2015, reason.com Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie sat down with Radack to discuss the U.S. government’s war on information. Q: You used to work at the Department of Justice during the prosecution of John Walker Lindh. How did that change your perspective? A: I was the ethics attorney for the Justice Department. Despite giving advice not to interrogate the so-called “American Taliban” without his lawyer and also not to torture him,…

“NOT TONIGHT, DEAR. It’s too damned hot.” That’s a phrase lovers are likely to hear more frequently as the climate warms, according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study. The paper’s authors looked for a causal link between heat and coital frequency using U.S. seasonal and regional temperature and birth data. Their conclusion: If people are already hot and sweaty, they’re less likely to want to get hot and sweaty. That, in turn, raises a worry about global warming’s effects on future fertility. If couples indulge in intercourse less frequently when it’s hot, economists Alan Barreca of Tulane, Melanie Guldi of the University of Central Florida, and Olivier Deschenes of the University of California, Santa Barbara reason, then they are less likely to conceive and give birth.…

HANGING A PAINTING in your living room isn’t likely to inspire a visit from the county zoning board. You may get away with a collection of garden gnomes in your front yard, especially if you live in the countryside. But start artistically upending antique trucks in your lawn or constructing a 16-story stone castle and you’re almost certain to find yourself mummified in red tape. “Art environments” like these exist all around America, created by people who have no formal training and thus are considered “grassroots,” “folk,” or “outsider” artists. And a lot of these artists have an anti-authoritarian bent—sometimes because they’re naturally inclined that way, sometimes because the local authorities just won’t leave them alone. Approaching the two stone towers of Bishop Castle that stretch above the Rocky Mountain…

The Workplace Constitution: From the New Deal to the New Right, by Sophia Z. Lee, Cambridge University Press, 401 pages, $29.99 LABOR HISTORY is a dreary field dominated by activist-scholars. If they have any knowledge of economics at all, it typically has a Marxist spin. The relentlessly politicized nature of such scholarship has made it lamentably narrow in both subject matter and perspective. Historian David Beito has shown that millions of American workers belonged to fraternal and mutual aid societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But because these societies generally existed outside of union direction or control, labor historians have shown scant interest in admitting their existence, much less studying them. For decades, meanwhile, these historians ignored or played down the fact that some of the most…

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, by Jamie Bartlett, Melville House, 308 pages, $27.95 THE MOST PARANOID fantasy about what happens in the darkest corners when humanity is unsupervised online might look something like the assassination markets described in Jamie Bartlett’s The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld. The idea, hatched by the anarchist Jim Bell, is to allow anonymous digital cash donations toward the slaying of public figures. Correctly predicting the death date wins the bettor a payoff, based on the sly presumption that the reason you got it right was that you caused the death. The idea, Bartlett explains, was to exert “a populist pressure on elected representatives to be good.” This grim technofantasy for angry dissidents has not, as far as we know, ever paid off.…