Table of contents for December 2016 in Reason

As the 2016 election judders to a halt, cable news and cocktail chatter seem to consist of little more than endless incredulous repetition of Donald Trump’s most quotable quotes. His 2005 hot mic comments about the appropriate way to interact with women, his preferred characterization of Islam, his views on the character of our southern neighbors as well as black citizens here at home have each come up for scrutiny. Trump, in turn, decries political correctness and shrugs “It’s just words, folks.” There’s something heartening, however, to be found in the deep awfulness of his public statements over the years: the fact that he remains a free man despite uttering them. Because in quite a few otherwise civilized countries, a good deal of what leaves the GOP presidential nominee’s mouth…

WHAT DO CRIME VICTIMS WANT FROM CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM? 1 IN 4 AMERICANS HAVE BEEN A VICTIM OF CRIME IN THE PAST 10 YEARS. crime victims prefer shorter prison sentences and more spending on prevention/rehabilitation over keeping people in prison for as long as possible. The same was true for victims of violent crimes. victims believe that prison makes people more likely to commit crimes rather than to rehabilitate them. VICTIMS WANT TO PRIORITIZE SPENDING ON THINGS OTHER THAN PRISONS & JAILS. Schools & education (by a 15−1 margin) Creating jobs (by a 10−1 margin) Crime prevention & programs for at-risk youth (by a 7−1 margin) Mental health treatment (by a 7-1 margin) Drug treatment (by a 4−1 margin) Source: “Crime Survivors Speak.” Alliance for Safety and Justice. 2016.…

In November, California voters will consider Proposition 64, a ballot initiative calling for the legalization of commercial marijuana sales in the state. Lynne Lyman, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, is among its most outspoken proponents. In August, Lyman discussed the details of the initiative live on Facebook with Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller. For a video version of the interview, visit reason.com. Q: We’ve seen commercial legalization in several states now. What does it mean for the country if California jumps on that bandwagon? A: This initiative goes further than any other initiative anywhere in the world. This is about rectifying decades of a failed war on drugs. Q: Isn’t medical marijuana already legal here? A: Marijuana is only legal for white people in California, practically. When you look…

We live in an exciting world. Sooner than you think, stuff you order online will be delivered all but instantly, cars will navigate without a driver, and everything from homes to shopping carts will be plugged in to the internet. The latest entity to nudge humanity along that path is not a tech behemoth or a university research team but, of all things, a pizza company. In New Zealand, Domino’s has started to test the delivery of food to customers via a drone called DomiCopter. “It doesn’t add up to deliver a two kilogram package in a two-ton vehicle,” Scott Bush, a general manager for Domino’s Pizza Enterprises, which is independent of the U.S. chain and operates in seven countries, told CNN Money last August. “In Auckland, we have such…

Even as the mighty Statue of Liberty beckons the world’s “poor and huddled masses” to America’s shores, Americans themselves have been ambivalent, to put it mildly, about how many newcomers ought to be welcomed and from where. To the extent that a pro-immigration consensus has existed, it was always an uneasy one. But Donald Trump’s meteoric political rise after embracing an extreme restrictionist agenda has shattered that fragile status quo, dividing pundits and public, academics and analysts throughout the 2016 election season. There’s an absence of good polling data to shine a light on how immigrants themselves feel about this issue, but it’s clear that even they don’t all agree. George J. Borjas is a celebrated Harvard University economist who emigrated from Cuba to the United States with his mother…

OpenBazaar—a blockchain-based, fully decentralized online market— makes it possible to sell anything to anyone, anywhere in the word, for free. We know what you’re probably thinking: Hasn’t that been tried before, and didn’t it land Ross Ulbricht in prison for life without the possibility of parole? But the team at OB1, the company that’s developing the OpenBazaar network, is quick to point out that their product doesn’t have the vulnerabilities of Silk Road, the online marketplace Ulbricht ran that got him busted for money laundering and conspiracy to traffic drugs. For one thing, OpenBazaar is not a website—it’s a peer-to-peer network that runs on open-source software that users download and install on their computers, similar to a BitTorrent client. The software connects people to a network where they can trade…

The much-anticipated new video game No Man’s Sky sets players loose in a massive, fullscale universe of more than 18 quintillion worlds, each roughly the size (virtually speaking) of a real-life planet. The planets and their star systems are generated procedurally, meaning they were built by an all-controlling algorithm rather than individually hand-coded. A consistent, universe-wide physics affects every object in the game’s cosmos. Calling No Man’s Sky a “game” may be a misnomer. It’s more of an interactive universe simulator. The main activities are seeing the sights, gathering resources, and moving on to the next system; it’s less about conflict and winning than traveling and learning. The algorithmically generated landscapes are frequently stunning, but there’s not much to do in this massive simulated world, which lacks the focused objectives…

Over the last decade or so, American pop culture has discovered the Krampus: a demonic Austrian counterpart to St. Nicholas who threatens kids with cruel punishments while the saint promises them rewards. In The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas (Feral House), Al Ridenour explores the Old World’s spooky, raucous Krampus festivities, with side trips that cover Yuletide witches, Yuletide werewolves, and other signs of “a deeprooted European understanding of Christmas as a time of supernatural mayhem.” In theory, Ridenour writes, the Krampus today is “an enforcer of social norms,” punishing children who misbehave. But any close look at Krampus practices reveals a rather different impulse at work as well: In these carnivalesque traditions, participants are “freed to act out” and to “create tumult wherever they go.” Over the centuries,…

The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program, by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, Simon & Schuster, 217 pages, $24.99 One summer day in 2013, NBC reporters Richard Engel and Robert Windrem unveiled a lengthy news story revealing a dark truth about America’s use of drones to fight terrorists overseas: The CIA did not really know who it was killing with strikes in Pakistan, but it was classifying them all as “other militants” anyway. Readers may be forgiven for not remembering this exposé. It was released on June 5, the same day Glenn Greenwald, in The Guardian, published the first of an explosive series of stories detailing how Western intelligence agencies were using mass surveillance systems to track and store enormous amounts of private data…

C.J. Ciaramella is reason’s criminal justice reporter. He was previously a politics editor at BuzzFeed and a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon. “I’ve always been interested, basically, in stories about the government screwing people over,” he says, “and there’s no one we give more power to over our lives than police, prosecutors, and judges.” In “How Not to Build a Jail” he takes readers through the horrific history of D.C.’s jail (page 20). When Ciaramella, 33, isn’t working, he looks for opportunities to get far, far away from the nation’s capital, where he lives. “My wife and I got scuba certified last year, and I found sharkinfested waters much more pleasant than D.C.” George J. Borjas teaches economics and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Shortly after Fidel…

England and Wales have banned zombie knives, stylized blades that are supposed to be useful in fighting the undead. Northern Ireland Justice Minister Claire Sugden wants to expand the ban to Ireland as well. The Cajun Navy, an unorganized group of private citizens with boats, is credited with saving hundreds—maybe even thousands— of people during the recent flooding in Louisiana. But Republican state Rep. Jonathan “J.P.” Perry has proposed a bill that would require them to get training before they can rescue people in the future. In Colombes, France, a halal supermarket has been ordered to either sell alcohol and pork or be shut down. The store is located on property that belongs to the housing authority, which says the owners are violating the lease, since it calls for a…

When Henry Adams wrote in the early 20th century that “politics, as a practice whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds,” there was ample reason to take him literally. The world back then was on the verge of a cataclysmic war that would kill 17 million people and help incubate both communism and fascism. Adams had come of age in London as the son of the American ambassador under President Abraham Lincoln, a man who knew all too well how political disputes can turn bloody. And Adams’ great-grandfather, the second president of the United States, was accused by Thomas Jefferson’s supporters during the famously acrimonious 1800 election of having, among many other unpleasant things, a “hideous hermaphroditical character.” So maybe the one positive of the 2016…

“Transhumanism is becoming more respectable, and transhumanism, with a small t, is rapidly emerging through conventional mainstream avenues,” Eve Herold reports in her astute new book, Beyond Human (Thomas Dunne). While Transhumanism, with a capital t, is the activist movement that advocates the use of technology to expand human capacities, lower-case transhumanism refers to the belief or theory that the human race will evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of deliberate technological interventions. As the director of public policy research and education at the Genetics Policy Institute, Herold knows these scientific, medical, and bioethical territories well. Movements attract countermovements, and Herold covers the opponents of transhuman transformation too. These bioconservatives range from moralizing neocons to egalitarian liberals who fear that new technologies somehow threaten human…

Herman Mashaba is an unlikely mayor for South Africa’s largest city. In a country that has been dominated for more than two decades by the left-wing African National Congress (ANC), no one foresaw political victory for a self-declared “capitalist crusader,” property rights zealot, and beauty products mogul who opposes the minimum wage and zoning regulations. Mashaba is an outlier even in his own party, the white-dominated centrist Democratic Alliance (D.A.). The son of a domestic worker raised by his sisters in a black township near Pretoria under apartheid, Mashaba became a self-made millionaire in a country that systematically excluded blacks from economic opportunities. Sworn into office on August 22, he must wrangle a coalition that includes the revolutionary socialist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) as he tries to implement an anti-regulation,…

The first episode of Start Up has three sex scenes and a startlingly good description of how cryptocurrency works—and the latter is actually more compelling TV. The show debuted in September on Crackle, Sony’s bid to compete with Hulu and Netflix. It follows a prickly, sexy hacker (Otmara Marrero), a pretty boy investor (Adam Brody), and a Haitian drug lord with scruples (Edi Gathegi) trying to go legit by building an entrepreneurial venture using the bitcoin competitor she invented. On their trail is the inevitable corrupt, conflicted FBI agent (Martin Freeman). The best bits are the technobabble and business speak; the show’s writers seem to have taken their industry consultants seriously, and the result is believable storytelling about server closets and boardrooms. The scenes of running, shouting, sweating, gun brandishing,…

Originally a side project for comics artist/writer Stjepan Sejic, Sunstone developed a cult following on the artist’s DeviantArt page and moved from web to print. Volume 4 of the five-part story was released by Top Cow Productions earlier this year. Ostensibly about a pair of twenty-something lesbians engaged in a BDSM relationship, the comic is far from pornography— while still portraying two women exploring their shared sexual kinks. Unlike the caricatured version of BDSM presented in 50 Shades of Grey, Ally and Lisa, Sunstone’s protagonists, are complete characters defined by more than their sexual escapades. Their sometimes goofy, sometimes heartbreaking story is marked by challenges familiar to anyone who has fallen in love, including jealousy, trust, and the blurry line between being best friends and being in a sexual relationship.…

I recently had a pleasant encounter with a great and outspoken American who, despite his libertarian leanings, supports Hillary Clinton for president. I congratulated him on making a tough call but allowed as how I was looking forward to casting my ballot for the Libertarian Party’s flag bearers, Gary Johnson and William Weld. “It will be unadulterated pleasure,” I offered, “as there is no opportunity cost.” My correspondent fired back: “Opportunity cost is Trump gets elected.” I stand by my recklessness. Here’s where the curious nature of the American Electoral College comes in handy. Even where my vote—or the votes of my 100 closest, most easily influenced “inner circle”—might swing an election, there is simply no real chance that pushing either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton over the top in…

George Stephanopoulos posed the question during a 2007 interview: “What’s success for you in this campaign?” The goal is victory, then–presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul answered. “That’s not going to happen,” Stephanopoulos replied. This was just before Paul’s campaign took off. “Within six months he would raise another $25 million for his campaign,” David Weigel detailed in the February 2009 issue of reason. “Within a year he would draw thousands of supporters to a ‘Revolution March’ in Washington....By the end of 2008, Ron Paul would be a bona fide national political figure: author of a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, subject of two quickie biographies, a frequent guest on cable news shows.” But hope fizzled just as quickly after Paul failed to post respectable vote totals in the early…

Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Tim Kaine, used the same word to describe Donald Trump’s praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “unpatriotic.” Satisfying as it may be for Democrats to deploy that adjective against the nominee of a party known for its flag-waving jingoism, it is neither accurate nor adequate in describing what’s truly alarming about Trump’s admiration of the Russian strongman. “He is really very much of a leader,” Trump told NBC’s Matt Lauer in September. “The man has very strong control over a country.” Trump, who also cited Putin’s “82 percent approval rating,” allowed that Russia has “a very different system” of government, and “I don’t happen to like the system.” Nevertheless, he said, “in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has…

Based on a true story, the feature film War Dogs (out on DVD in November) follows cocksure arms merchant Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and his “best friend” David Packouz (Miles Teller) in the world of international arms sales in the mid-2000s, after the Bush administration stopped handing out no-bid military contracts to Halliburton and other large firms and opened up the bidding process to small businesses. The movie strikes a good comedy-drama balance while rehashing the recent history of the Iraq War in a surprisingly fresh and fun, though occasionally dragging, way. “War is an economy,” Packouz explains at the beginning of the film, not a fight for freedom or anything else it’s sold as. Anyone who doesn’t admit that, he says, is either in on it or an idiot.…