Indice dei contenuti per October 2019 in Reason

“I DON’T KNOW what the answer is,” Kacey Musgraves shouted during her set at Lollapalooza on August 7, “but obviously something has to be fucking done.” The country music star then led her fans in a chant that perfectly encapsulates the future of American politics: “Somebody fucking do something!” she screamed. “Somebody fucking do something!” the crowd screamed back. Musgraves was, understandably, upset about the horrific back-to-back mass murders that took place the first weekend of August in El Paso and Dayton. She did not offer a specific something to be done. This may have been an attempt to appear nonpartisan, it may have been honest uncertainty, or it may just have been a sensible intuition that the middle of a music festival was not the right place to workshop…

JEFF BEZOS “IS worried about me,” grinned Donald Trump back in 2016 while discussing Amazon’s bald-headed billionaire. “He thinks I would go after him for antitrust, because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much.” President Trump has continued to threaten Amazon and other tech giants with the trust-busting lash. This year, on CNBC, he informatively announced his role model: “The European Union is suing them all of the time. Well, we should be doing this. They’re our companies.” You will not be surprised to hear that Fox News talker Tucker Carlson agrees with Trump. But you might blink when told that he arrived at this agreement via a lecture delivered by Professor Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts senator has gained traction in a crowded Democratic presidential field…

U.S. drug policy is based on the premise that psychoactive substances cause addiction, which supposedly justifies using force to keep people away from them and to “treat” those who nevertheless manage to obtain politically disfavored intoxicants. In Outgrowing Addiction, psychologist Stanton Peele and child development consultant Zach Rhoads offer a radically different perspective. They argue that addiction can be understood only in light of personal and social circumstances, which can be changed without coercive intervention (or even professional help) to achieve abstinence or moderation, depending on which is more appropriate for the individual. The book combines a concise explanation of that view, which Peele has been espousing for nearly half a century, with practical tips for people who want to break bad habits or know others who do, especially parents…

Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods) and Terry Pratchett (the Discworld series) co-wrote a novel about a demon and an angel who team up to stave off the apocalypse and save creation from their respective bosses. When Pratchett died in 2015, his final wish was for Gaiman to bring Good Omens to the screen. The resulting mini-series is stylish and uplifting without being schlocky, largely due to the chemistry between Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale and David Tennant as the demon Crowley. The two have gone native after several millennia dining on crepes during the French Revolution and feeding ducks in St. James Park. When the Antichrist shows up, they begin to wonder if humanity may actually be worth keeping. The show got a boost in the form of a…

WHEN THREE TAMPA, Florida, police officers were fired for misconduct earlier this year, Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren put his newly created “conviction review unit” to work. The members pored over 225 closed cases that the officers were involved in, and Warren’s office ultimately vacated 17 convictions. It was a relatively rare move by a prosecutor’s office. In less scrupulous jurisdictions, the officers’ misconduct might have been concealed under police secrecy laws or the defendants might have been left to challenge their convictions in court, but Hillsborough County is one of the few dozen places in the United States that has a unit dedicated to rooting out bad cases. “In short, we felt that convictions cannot stand based exclusively on the testimony of discredited officers,” Warren says. CONVICTION REVIEW…

FACEBOOK HOPES ITS proposed Libra currency system will bank the world—and keep us on Facebook. Right now, it’s just an idea. While the project may change before its projected launch in 2020, the current plan has big problems. For starters, Libra will be a “permissioned system,” meaning that only a few hand-picked parties—through an independent governing body called the Libra Association—will be allowed to run the network. This is different than permissionless systems like bitcoin, where anyone can connect to validate transactions. That closed nature would leave Libra’s users vulnerable to outside influence, because permissioned validators can coordinate to block transactions for regulatory or political reasons. While Facebook’s white paper announcing Libra says it will be “open to anyone,” the paper also says Libra will innovate “on compliance and regulatory…

UNTIL THE SPRING of 2018, Jonathan Kaiman was the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Today he is living at the home of his parents in Phoenix under conditions he describes as a form of psychological house arrest. There are no visitors, and his few remaining friends rarely call. He feels unable to make new ones, because he fears the reaction of anyone who Googles him. He’s 32, unemployed, and perhaps unemployable—“ I’m radioactive,” as he puts it. And he’s still trying to find the right combination of psychotropic medication to quell the recurrent thought that ending his life may be the best way out. His concern about search engines is not paranoia. Because if you Google Jonathan Kaiman today, the results will likely lead you to conclude…

NEAL STEPHENSON IS the author of some of the most prescient and beloved science fiction of the last 30 years, including Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and Seveneves. His fiction deals heavily with economics, online culture, the history of philosophy, and the nature of money, with descriptions of bitcoin-like cryptocurrency systems appearing years before the technology’s real-world debut. His books frequently evince a skepticism of state power and an appreciation for decentralized technologies that will appeal to libertarians. He’s also worked in the tech industry, serving as an early employee at Blue Origin, the private space firm founded by Jeff Bezos, and working with the Long Now Foundation to promote optimistic science fiction explicitly intended to inspire actual technological innovation. In 2014, he took a role as the chief…

WHEN A BOOK entitled The Case Against Free Speech opens with the claim that “This book is not ANTI-FREE-SPEECH. It is ANTI-THE-CONCEPT-OF-FREE-SPEECH,” you know you’re in for some verbal gymnastics. When it offers a howler like “There is relatively little literature and philosophy on free speech,” you prepare for some pratfalls. P.E. Moskowitz (who prefers to go by they, them, and their pronouns) is unburdened by an educated understanding of free speech debates or an effort to present a new perspective on them. Moskowitz relies on the familiar illiberal view that free speech is mainly an instrument of the powerful right-wing few, irrelevant at best to the marginalized and powerless many. Wealth and social standing do, of course, facilitate the meaningful exercise of many rights, including the right to counsel,…

If you are a glutton for punishment, you might want to check out Netflix’s show Bonding. The off-beat romantic comedy follows the adventures of Tiff, a psychology grad student who moonlights as a dominatrix, and her newfound assistant Carter as they navigate the ups and downs of New York City’s BDSM scene. The show is not devoid of charm. It’s often funny and occasionally touching. Still, Bonding can’t help but beat viewers over the head with its message, making the show painfully cartoonish at times. Our protagonist Tiff is supposed to prove, contra your stereotypes, that one can be both a diligent academic and a successful sex worker. That’s fine. But the heavy-handed show demonstrates this by depicting her studying flash cards labeled “sexism” or “misogyny” while decked out in…

“I was interested in how people improvised the structures of a society when there was no law to guide them.” That’s how David Milch, creator of the HBO drama Deadwood, described the project to The New Yorker in 2005. Fourteen years later, his story has finally come to completion with a feature film. In its original three seasons, the prestige Western tracked a frontier camp’s progress, under the watchful eye of Sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and the bad influence of brothel owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), from muddy outpost to bustling village. The 2019 finale, Deadwood: The Movie, drops back in on the characters a decade after viewers left them following the show’s untimely cancelation. In the duration, much has changed. Railroads have come to South Dakota. So has…

15 YEARS AGO October 2004 “In the beginning, supporters of No Child Left Behind argued that its problems were just a matter of districts’ adjusting to the new law. But as we begin the third school year in which kids are supposed to be able to escape failing schools, a lack of meaningful choice appears to be the norm.” LISA SNELL “No Way Out” “Southern states, home to the nation’s poorest citizens yet full of dependable Democratic voters, received less New Deal spending than comparatively richer Western states, whose voters perhaps required additional persuasion to support Democratic candidates. Powell cites one study showing that states with a higher percentage of black residents and a lower per capita income received fewer New Deal dollars than richer, whiter states. Thus blacks were…

You can get five years in federal prison for selling llama poop, according to Title 7 of the United States Code, Section 8313(a)(1)(B). Title 21, Part 139 of the Code of Federal Regulations prohibits the sale of spaghetti noodles that are improperly shaped. The Swine Health Protection Act forbids feeding a pig garbage that hasn’t been cooked by a garbage cooker (requiring a garbage-cooking permit, naturally). Criminal defense attorney Mike Chase, the man behind the popular @CrimeADay Twitter feed, has a new book out titled How to Become a Federal Criminal: An Illustrated Handbook for the Aspiring Offender (Atria Books). It chronicles government power at its most arbitrary and absurd. In late May, Reason’s Todd Krainin sat down with Chase to learn the roots of his obsession with stupid laws.…

THE FIRST AMENDMENT forbids the “establishment of religion” by the government. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a 40foottall cross that has been standing on public land for more than 90 years easily passed muster under that constitutional provision. The origins of American Legion v. American Humanist Association date back to the aftermath of World War I. In 1919, a group of citizens in Prince George’s County, Maryland, decided to raise money for a private memorial in honor of the local war dead. They broke ground the same year, and the project was completed in 1925. Known as the Bladensburg Peace Cross, the towering memorial was dedicated to county residents “who lost their lives in the Great War for the liberty of the world.” But the cross stands…

WHAT KIND OF crank wants to put bayonets in steering wheels, praises political corruption as “working out rather well,” and thinks that competition can be harmful and should be discouraged? Gordon Tullock, the late George Mason University professor of law and economics, made all those arguments with a (more or less) straight face, while also helping invent the then-new discipline of sociobiology. His insights have proven to be more durable, and more sensible, than his many critics expected. To be fair, economists tend to value counterintuitive arguments, where surprising conclusions emerge from innocuous assumptions. In 2019, we will pass the 70th anniversary of the Communist takeover of China, an event that Tullock witnessed in person from the vantage point of his diplomatic post in Tientsin. That experience launched his thinking…

ON A RAINY night in 1974, Charles Umbenhauer pulled his Yamaha motorcycle into the parking lot of a hotel in New Jersey so that he and his wife could wait out the storm before finishing their ride from his hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the Jersey shore. The front desk clerk would let them stay under one condition. “If you push the motorcycle up the street there and it’s not in the parking lot, I’ll go ahead and rent you a room,” Umbenhauer recounted in 2008 to American Motorcyclist, the membership magazine of the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA). The request stung Umbenhauer, who had served two years in the Army and considered himself an upstanding citizen. He and his wife, Carol, said no thanks. Instead they found a “really crappy”…

What if politics were a strategic, underhanded, zero-sum game that was actually kind of fun? Welcome to Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game. Developed by Lafair Family Games and funded via Kickstarter, the board game is supposed to simulate the cutthroat stakes of the once-per-decade reapportionment process in which states redraw their congressional districts. In June, the Supreme Court ended a yearslong constitutionality debate by deciding that “gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” So now it’s your turn to try. Four players pick their parties—Elephants, Donkeys, Leaves, or Porcupines—and take turns drawing segments of a congressional district border that must include at least four of the 73 “counties” on the board. Each county contains a randomly assigned vote tally for one of the four parties. Once…