Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2024 in Reason

“I’M JUST FLOORED and shocked,” Rankin County, Mississippi, Sheriff Bryan Bailey said last August after five of his former deputies admitted to punching, kicking, tasing, torturing, and humiliating two men during an unlawful home invasion the previous January. “This is a perfect example of why people don’t trust the police, and never in my life did I think it would happen in this department.” According to an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today, however, Bailey had plenty of reasons to think something like this would happen in his department. Similar things had been happening in Rankin County “for nearly two decades,” the Times reported in November. “Narcotics detectives and patrol officers, some [of whom] called themselves the Goon Squad, barged into homes in the middle of the…

EIGHT YEARS AFTER the Paris climate agreement, where do we stand on global emissions? The title of a new United Nations Environment Programme report sums the situation up: Broken Record: Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again). The Paris Agreement aims to hold the global average temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels. Consequently, the agreement recognizes “deep reductions in global emissions will be required in order to achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention.” Each country issues its voluntary nationally determined contribution that outlines its plans and promises to address the problem of man-made climate change. The agreement noted that adding up the projected greenhouse gas emissions in all of the 2015 promises would result in 55 gigatons (billion metric tons) of…

JAKARTA, INDONESIA—The central business district of Indonesia’s 11-million–person capital has the social contrast found in many other developing world megacities. Modern skyscrapers accommodate Indonesia’s elite, while shabby informal villages spread from the base of such buildings. I wanted to experience this latter, more common, style so one morning my translator Julya and I walked a few minutes from my upscale French hotel chain across a dirty canal and into a village. The standardized First World planning aesthetic of square buildings and engineered roadways quickly yielded to clustered huts organized along a twisty network of alleys. This village style is common in the Third World, a bastion of organic, market-oriented development that often withstands the modernization plans of city officials, even in central areas. It bears a striking resemblance to a…

THOUGH ANIMUS TOWARD tax increases was a key reason for the American Revolution, historians have not shown much interest in the topic in other contexts. One reason may be that the history of tax revolts, much like the history of mutual aid or of nonunion workers during strikes, cannot easily be subsumed under the most popular analytical categories, such as economic class. So Linda Upham-Bornstein’s “Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender”: Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law During the Great Depression is a welcome sign. Upham-Bornstein, a historian at Plymouth State University, begins in the 19th century. The taxpayer leagues of the Gilded Age charged that political corruption had produced (as one group put it) “the reckless expenditure of the people’s money.” These organizations divided sharply along regional lines.…

In 1959, a California school-teacher and blues fanatic named Chris Strachwitz got word that Lightnin’ Hopkins was living and playing in Houston. Strachwitz drove to Texas as soon as he could, loved what he heard, and returned the next year with a tape recorder. Before he knew it, he was running a music label. That company, Arhoolie, was a labor of love: Joel Selvin writes in the new book Down Home Music that a critic once “told Strachwitz that he didn’t have a record label—he had a hobby.” Whatever you call it, it was an essential resource for fans of blues, norteño, Cajun, country, and other sorts of vernacular music. Strachwitz, who died last year at age 91, took a camera on his travels. Down Home Music collects scores of…

10 YEARS AGO March 2014 “In December, when the New York City Council voted to prohibit the use of e-cigarettes in public places such as bars and restaurants, the ban’s backers conceded there is no evidence that vapor from the battery-powered devices poses a threat to bystanders. But they worried that e-cigarettes would sow confusion because they look too much like the real thing. Councilman James Gennaro, a sponsor of the ban, warned that children might mistake e-cigarettes for the conventional kind, conclude that smoking must be cool again, and proceed directly to a pack-a-day habit that would threaten their health and shorten their lives.” JACOB SULLUM “Smoked Out” 15 YEARS AGO March 2009 “For conservatives and activists who have linked their lives, reputations and fortunes to the Republican Party, it’s a…

IN 1994, COPPER Peak, a ski-flying hill located in a remote area of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, hosted its last ski-jumping competition—or so it thought. At the time, the site was $300,000 in debt and needed considerable maintenance to address erosion. There’s been no ski flying at Copper Peak for 30 years, but for $25 adults can take an “adventure ride” up the hill to see the 360-degree view. Michigan lawmakers apparently think they can bring the site back to its glory days—in March 2022, they allocated $20 million to revitalize the park in order to “attract international ski competitions and provide sports-related tourism.” Ski flying is like ski jumping but at longer distances. The largest ski-jumping hills used for Olympic competitions are typically between 120 meters and 140…

“HOLY MIAMI-DADE, BATMAN,” tweeted then–Politico reporter Tim Alberta on election night in 2020. Early returns had started rolling in, and the numbers from South Florida were not what people were expecting. President Donald Trump was dramatically exceeding his 2016 totals in the county’s majority-Hispanic precincts. Hillary Clinton had carried Miami-Dade by almost 30 percentage points four years earlier; Joe Biden took it by a mere seven percentage points en route to losing the state. “It was a bloodbath,” one former Democratic Party official would tell The Washington Post. Trump’s strong showing in Miami-Dade was an indication that something strange was happening with partisan affiliations. Like most ethnic minorities, Hispanic Americans have long been viewed as a loyal Democratic constituency. But in recent years, that trend has begun to abate. Back…

FOR RENÉ DESCARTES, minds were essentially thinking (or feeling) things. For the founding fathers of behaviorism, minds were identical with behaviors—talking, habits, dispositions to act in one way or another. More recently, minds have been imagined as a kind of computer: the software running on the hardware of the brain. For Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, minds are first and foremost prediction machines. “Instead of constantly expending large amounts of energy on processing incoming sensory signals,” he writes in The Experience Machine, “the bulk of what the brain does is learn and maintain a model of body and world.” Our mind/brain is “a kind of constantly running simulation of the world around us—or at least, the world as it…

The original, fictional show Squid Game was gripping because every character’s financial life was dire. Contestants were willing to die playing marbles or tug of war just for the chance of winning a prize. They even had the opportunity to leave once they knew they would likely die, and most of them returned to the games anyway. Making it even more harrowing were the masked, obscenely rich people watching the life-or-death struggle like it was the Super Bowl. In light of the show’s spectacular viewership—over 142 million households watched in the first month of 2021 alone—Netflix decided to make the fake reality show into a real one. In Squid Game: The Challenge, the grand prize is a reality-show record of $4.56 million (although much of that will be lost to…

The population of bison, North America’s signature charismatic mammal, went from around 60 million in 1800 to just 300 by the dawn of the 20th century. Therein lies one hell of a story, told startlingly well by Ken Burns in his two-part series The American Buffalo. Burns, North America’s signature documentarian, is famous for taking huge swings at mighty subjects: baseball, the Civil War, jazz, Vietnam, and so forth. But this time, by focusing more tightly on a smaller topic and using a lighter-than-usual interpretative touch, he lets viewers reach an infuriating conclusion on their own. This marvelous beast was hunted to extinction by the rapacious appetites of westward expansion and the Industrial Revolution, yes; but the genocide was also understood at the time as the sadly necessary cost of…

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION may take redistribution to new extremes if a policy revision floated in December comes to fruition. The White House wants to give federal agencies the right to seize some pharmaceutical patents when they deem drug prices too high. President Joe Biden claims authority to act under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which lets nonprofits and small businesses retain ownership of inventions made possible by federal contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements—so long as they patent and license these inventions. Its impetus was all the innovation languishing under government ownership. “In 1980, the federal government had approximately 30,000 patents, of which only 5% led to new or improved products,” according to the Syracuse University Office of Technology Transfer. The government simply didn’t “have the resources to develop and market…

IN DECEMBER, FORMER Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey received the Savas Award for Privatization, given annually to someone for innovation in the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. The award is given by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason. Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Ducey in December to talk about school choice, how to cut budgets, and why Arizona politicians are so weird. Q: What is it about Arizona that seems to generate heterodox or unorthodox politicians? A: Maybe the fact that we’re the youngest state in the lower 48, that we’re a place where so many people came to live. So few people that are there today were actually born there. People make that decision. There’s something about the West and…

IN DECEMBER, THE public research firm WPA Intelligence came out with a small survey with potentially huge—and widely ignored—implications for institutional media, entertainment, and government. Asking 1,000 registered voters which of eight listed media personalities they trusted, the firm found podcast iconoclast Joe Rogan—who has been serially singled out by the Joe Biden White House for COVID-19 “misinformation”—in second place with 36 percent, just edging out former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s 35 percent and Daily Wire impresario Ben Shapiro’s 33, and far ahead of the industry-respected CNN anchor Jake Tapper (23 percent). In first place, with 40 percent, including the highest ratings of the group among political independents? Comedian Bill Maher. Maher, whose 22nd season of HBO’s Real Time debuted January 19, the day before his 68th birthday, finds…

Between 2015, when a sleek and innovative nicotine delivery device known as Juul hit the market, and 2019, when that product was falsely implicated in a rash of lung injuries, its manufacturer’s reputation and financial potential plummeted. The four-part Netflix documentary Big Vape, based on Time correspondent Jamie Ducharme’s 2021 book of the same name, is a surprisingly evenhanded and fair-minded account of how that happened. As even their critics concede, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, the former smokers who founded Juul Labs, were sincerely determined to do well by doing good, offering a potentially lifesaving alternative to combustible cigarettes. Their harm-reducing zeal was widely shared within the company, which helps explain the internal dismay at tobacco giant Altria’s 2018 investment in Juul. In addition to the sin of collaborating…

In Cyberpunk 2077, a video game based on the 1988 table-top game Cyberpunk, players assumed the role of V, a technologically modified denizen of Night City, a sprawling West Coast megalopolis populated by outlaws, criminals, and corrupt politicians. Phantom Liberty, an expansion and follow-up to the original game, takes players to Dogtown, a quasi-anarchist society walled off from Night City. It’s run by a militia, and laws barely apply. In the game’s opening moments, the president of what remains of the United States crashes into militia territory. V must escort the president to safety while working with a mysterious AI and unraveling a secretive conspiracy that reaches to the top levels of government as well as to influential private military contractors. Both installments paint a dark portrait of a technologically…