Índex per October 2020 a Reason

NOBODY LIKES PRAGMATISTS. To the revolutionary, the pragmatist sounds too much like an apologist for the status quo. To those who fear rule by the angry mob, the pragmatist has granted the mob’s premise and is simply bargaining about the timeline. When absolutely everyone else is screaming, it can be hard to hear the calm, slightly nasal voice of the pragmatist explaining the procedures by which a cause might be realistically advanced. But in the cacophonous summer of 2020, with protesters in the street and a pandemic raging, it looked for a moment like practical policing reform might actually make some headway. Wonky pragmatists from across the spectrum seemed to converge on both the need for and general outlines of reform. National Review published a piece called “Reform Police Training—Why…

ONE CONSEQUENCE OF the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be a spike in drug overdose rates. The Washington Post reports that as of March 2020, combined fatal and nonfatal drug overdoses were nearly 20 percent higher than through the same month in 2019, according to data collected by the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program. The New York Times, which collected data directly from state and local health agencies, reported in July that fatal drug overdoses were up 13 percent compared to the first half of last year. Physicians and harm reduction advocates say COVID-19 has disrupted medical care for substance use disorders and imposed financial crunches on treatment centers and local health agencies. Medical examiners interviewed by the Post pointed to an increase in synthetic drugs on toxicology reports. But this…

IN THE LAST few years, a major fault line has opened up on the American political right: Call it the Great Liberalism Schism. On one side are those of us who remain committed to classical liberal norms and values such as due process, free trade, and religious freedom. On the other side is an increasingly restless group of writers and thinkers at places like First Things and the Claremont Institute who say America has tried classical liberalism—and it failed us. These “post-liberals” believe it’s time for a conservative politics that stops worrying about protecting individual liberty and starts worrying about attaining the common good. Generally speaking, that means embracing “strong rule” by a government tasked, among other things, with “enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution…

“Through a combination of specific legislative acts, departmental procedures, monopolistic default, and the general effect and aura of the laws they enforce, police have come to a point where, to one degree or another, they are above the law. Not only may (and do) and must police squash rights within the law, but, the degree depending on circumstances and motive, they may also do so outside the law.” LANNY FRIEDLANDER “THE COPS: HEROES OR VILLAINS?” NOVEMBER 1969 AS TENS OF thousands of Americans marched through the streets following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, city councils, state legislatures, and Congress all wrestled with how to address protesters’ demands for an end to police brutality. One problem is that the standards for how and when police can use force…

“We pay attention when a sports hero gets roughed up or when a video camera films a beating. What happens during the thousands of routine interactions between the police and average folks?” RICK HENDERSON “L.A., LAWLESS” MAY 1991 THERE’S AN EMERGING consensus within the broad police reform movement in the United States that the proliferation of body-worn police cameras—the most significant legacy of the last round of protests against police violence—has been more or less a failed experiment. The complaints about violent, high-handed police conduct that sent protestors into the streets in 2015 had largely not been remedied by the end of 2019, although the number of officers wearing cameras skyrocketed during the same period. Studies backed up what residents of overpoliced communities experienced anecdotally: Cops wearing expensive new cameras…

ON MAY 25, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died at the hands of Minneapolis police. Six years ago, after cops killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just 43 percent of Americans believed that such incidents indicate a systemic problem. Though police killings have remained level since 2014, 69 percent of Americans now agree that “the killing of Floyd represents a broader problem within law enforcement.” Radley Balko is a Washington Post opinion columnist and former Reason reporter who covers police abuse, the drug war, and criminal justice reform. His Reason coverage of Cory Maye—a black man who was put on Mississippi’s death row for supposedly killing a police officer during a no-knock raid in 2001—helped bring about Maye’s acquittal. His 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop (PublicAffairs) was…

When voters in Arlington, Texas, approved a 2016 referendum to replace their then-22-year-old ballpark with a new retractableroof stadium, the $1.1 billion project appeared to be more on the up-and-up than were some other recent ballparks. Around the same time, teams based in Atlanta and Miami were also getting upgraded stadiums via backroom deals and public deceit. Don’t be fooled. Throw a Billion Dollars From the Helicopter, a documentary from Michael Bertin now streaming on Amazon, reveals how city and team officials beanballed opponents of the new Arlington stadium, called Globe Life Field, to win the referendum. Arlington Mayor Jeff Williams is the prime villain. After he was elected on promises of cutting government, he transformed into the lead cheerleader for the project. Meanwhile, Rangers team owners Ray Davis and…

Former CNN bureau chief Chip Walter starts his book Immortality, Inc., an examination of the wild dreamers and wealthy financiers striving for human immortality, at Alcor. That’s where heads and bodies of the dead lie frozen, awaiting a possible future in which they can be revived. Alcor’s customers are still dead, and no magic bullet treatments have meaningfully halted or reversed the cellular and bodily decay we know as aging. The most important thing we’ve learned is that calorie restriction (or treatments that emulate its effects) seem the most promising, if not joyous, path to life extension. Like space travel, human life extension has seen loads of visionary speculation spun and cash burned with promises mostly unfulfilled. Walter ends his book convinced that Silicon Valley moneymen and their scientist partners…

ALTHOUGH THE GLOBAL media barely covered last year’s elections in Uruguay, President Luis Lacalle Pou’s victory was significant for ending 15 years of governance by the leftist Broad Front. The president from that party from 2010 to 2015 was José “Pepe” Mujica, a former member of the violent Tupamaros guerrilla group who achieved international notoriety as a plainspoken man of the people who donated 90 percent of his salary to charity. Mujica’s private austerity distracted from his reckless approach to public finances: According to Uruguayan writer Hana Fischer, his government oversaw “the largest increase in government spending since democracy was restored in Uruguay in 1985.” In a power grab overruled by the country’s highest court, Mujica sought to impose double taxation on large landholdings. He passed a “media law” that…

While 33 states have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use, the federal government recognizes no exceptions to pot prohibition. Marijuana Federalism, an essay collection edited by Case Western Reserve law professor Jonathan Adler, maps some promising pathways through this cannabis conflict. Duke law professor Ernest Young argues that the combination of limited federal resources and the anti-commandeering doctrine, which implies that Congress cannot compel state officials to enforce federal drug policies, means states can effectively nullify marijuana prohibition in most of its applications. But as University of Alabama law professor Julie Andersen Hill notes, that observation provides little reassurance to banks, which will continue to eschew marijuana money until Congress removes the threat of criminal penalties and potentially ruinous regulatory sanctions. Hastings College of Law professor Zachary Price thinks…

ACCORDING TO GUN prohibitionists, Europe is much safer than the United States, because Europe has stricter gun control. In fact, the historical record shows that excessive gun control (as in Europe) is about a hundred times more deadly than “insufficient” gun control (as, supposedly, in the U.S.). While a lone criminal with a gun can be very dangerous, a criminal government with a disarmed population is the deadliest thing on Earth. Let’s start with the data. If U.S. gun homicide rates had been as low as European rates in the 20th century, how many lives might have been saved? According to a 2018 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 1990—a bad year for violent crime in the United States—the age-adjusted U.S. firearms homicide rate was…

IF YOU WERE alive and on social media in early June, you were almost certainly swamped by scores of media and cultural organizations putting out statements, Instagram posts, and self-critical columns expressing solidarity in the fight against systemic prejudice. “We recognize that there is much work to be done, and we are committed to engaging in this work to eradicate institutional racism,” announced the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. “I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past 7 years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH,” confessed the editor in chief of Variety. The women’s lifestyle publication Refinery29, like many websites, changed its homepage color to black instead of its usual peppy pink. Within days, the heads of all those institutions were out of a job. In summer…

“One of the major obstacles standing in the way of privatizing police operations or even substituting civilians for uniformed employees in nonpatrol positions is opposition from the police unions. Although many police organizations rally behind the cry that only a police officer can do a police officer’s job, the fact is that often they are simply trying to protect ‘uniformed’ slots and create as many openings as possible for fully trained police officers.” THEODORE GAGE “COPS, INC.” NOVEMBER 1982 IN 2018, AS a gunman murdered 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Sgt. Brian Miller, a deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, hid behind his police cruiser, waiting 10 minutes to radio for help. For his failure to act, Miller was fired. The official cause…

“Critics of prohibition need to guard against the temptation to merely tinker with the drug laws.” JACOB SULLUM “THE FIXERS” DECEMBER 1991 LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, POLICE officers did a lot of things wrong when they killed Breonna Taylor, an unarmed 26-year-old EMT and aspiring nurse, during a fruitless no-knock drug raid last spring. But the litany of errors that led to Taylor’s death would be incomplete if it did not include the biggest mistake of all: the belief that violence is an appropriate response to peaceful conduct that violates no one’s rights. If politicians did not uncritically accept that premise, which underlies a war on drugs that the government has been waging for more than a century, Taylor would still be alive. The March 13 raid followed a sadly familiar pattern.…

“Through their impact on property rights, the drug forfeiture laws have already eroded fundamental freedoms. The fact that this has occurred so easily, with barely a whimper of protest from the courts and virtually no opposition from thoughtful commentators, gives real credence to [Milton] Friedman’s warnings about where the war on drugs may take us.” STEFAN B. HERPEL “UNITED STATES V. ONE ASSORTMENT OF 89 FIREARMS” MAY 1990 ELIZABETH YOUNG’S SON was arrested in 2010 after selling $90 of marijuana on the front porch of her Pennsylvania home. At the time, her son was unaware that his buyer was actually a police informant. A month after the arrest, prosecutors filed a petition to seize Young’s home and vehicle. The 75-year-old West Philadelphia grandmother hadn’t committed the offense, nor was she…

PROTESTERS WHO PULL down statues are usually not content with removing the inanimate metal or stone object from its pedestal. They berate it, ridicule it, hammer it; they try to set it on fire; when that doesn’t work, they’re liable to behead it or dump it in a river to drown. Then the authorities retrieve it, as though fishing a corpse out of the lake. They crate it up so it can do no further harm, ship it to a statue internment facility, and forget about it forever. Sympathetic accounts of the process make it sound quite rational. A statue of a Confederate general or a slave-owning president or Christopher Columbus, looming at you above the public square, might, especially if you are black or Indigenous, make you realize that…

IN MEDIA AND popular consciousness, Haiti has become identified with hunger,” Johnhenry Gonzalez observes in Maroon Nation. But in the 19th century, after the revolution that drove out the French slaveowners and before the invasion that brought in a U.S. occupation, the country saw “a free system of decentralized, small-scale agriculture that allowed for unprecedented demographic growth.” In the century that followed Haiti’s 1804 declaration of independence, the country’s population more than quintupled. This, Gonzalez tells us, was “the steepest and largest instance of demographic expansion in Caribbean history” to that point. This was not because the revolutionary state pursued enlightened policies. Slavery was formally abolished, but forced labor initially continued: Cultivators were still compelled to work the fields, were denied the right to leave without permission, and were legally…

In times of crisis, pop culture often takes on inadvertent meaning, reflecting and refracting the darkness of the times. But few works can manage the eerie prescience of RTJ4, the rowdy, angry, superbly calamitous fourth album by hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, which chronicles a chaotic world in semi-apocalyptic meltdown, beset by police abuse and racial injustice. The album was released in early June, just days after protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police turned destructive in cities across the country. Although it had been in the works for years, the music seemed like it had been willed into existence as a byproduct of the demonstrations. In the album’s haunting centerpiece, “Walking in the Snow,” Killer Mike raps about the gruesome spectacle of police violence and the…

Getting bottle service in a club surrounded by leggy, stilettoed models is sort of about sex—but it’s mostly about status, explains sociologist Ashley Mears in her new book, Very Important People. For those who don’t dabble in the Miami-Manhattan-Ibiza club circuit, Mears’ work uses ethnographic research, shadowing promoters and conducting interviews, to demystify how and why club promoters function as the link between aspiring models and wealthy clients. Mears knows this world from the inside, having embedded herself in the party circuit, trading her own attractiveness for research access. She chronicles the subtle gradations in status present in the club ecosystem: Being a “paid girl”—a sex worker or cocktail waitress whose sexual services are presumed to be for sale—is frowned upon by the uncompensated “party girls,” for instance. She also…

Published in fall 2019, Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day is set in a near-future where public gatherings have been radically limited by a global pandemic and threats of violence. Reading the book in 2020—which I did shortly after learning it had won this year’s Nebula Award—raises questions about the author’s psychic abilities. But there’s much more to recommend the novel than just its eerie prescience. The story follows the hilariously named Rosemary Laws through a series of musical speakeasies, illegal under the political regime, as she scouts new acts on behalf of her corporate virtual reality employer. But an encounter with the equally hilariously named underground rock star Luce Cannon forces her to question the rules and regulations that have driven music—and so much else that makes…

In early July, a group of linguistics researchers published an open letter calling for the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) to revoke the organization’s distinguished fellow status from linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now. The signatories, many of them graduate and undergraduate students, pointed to years-old tweets of Pinker’s that they claimed revealed his racist and sexist biases. Almost immediately, a group of established scholars leapt to his defense. “The letter shows no familiarity with Pinker’s work, and takes statements out of context in a way that, with the merest checking, are seen to be represented duplicitously,” wrote Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Academics from across the disciplinary and political spectrum…

In The Rich in Public Opinion: What We Think When We Think About Wealth, historian and sociologist Rainer Zitelmann examines attitudes about wealth and the wealthy in four industrialized Western countries: Germany, the United States, France, and Great Britain. This wide-ranging book is _ lled with never-before-seen data, rich with insights into why we view wealth the way we do and how it impacts our societies, our economies, our prejudices, and our politics. These data help contextualize many of the political debates common in the western world and highlight the differences between policy and election outcomes in the U.S. versus that of many European countries. HARDBACK AND EBOOK AVAILABLE AT ONLINE RETAILERS NATIONWIDE.…