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The Koch Brothers must really like raisins and free range kids then. Reason veers off on some of the most interesting tangents.

Have you read anything on this except Reason.com's takedown? Literally anything? Because this is Social Science, and they're reaction to Social Sciences tends to be heavily colored by the fact that most Scientists studying society do not actually find that Libertarianism is the One True Gospel. They're also much closer to the climate-skeptics camp then they like to admit, arguing the global-warmiong-pause,/a> is real and excoriating Di Caprio for using his Oscar Acceptance speech on the topic. Their stands on both subjects tend to be dominated by a steadfast refusal to care what their opponents are saying when they use words differently.

Pretty much the entire article that we are talking about can be summarized by the phrase "Ayn Rand didn't use the words 'gendered,' 'postcolonial,' or 'political ecology' in her books; therefore I don't know what they mean; therefore this paper's abstract is meaningless gibberish."

FYI, the abstract means she was doing some very basic research into how science emphasizes (for lack of a term a reason.com reader would understand) man shit at the expense of woman shit, and how that specifically impacts papers on glaciers and climate change. If I had access to the article I suspect the man shit would be stuff like military science implications of climate change such as terrorism, environmental effects on local livestock, other large-scale economic dislocation, etc. Whereas the woman shit would be much smaller-scale.

For example, most of Central Asian cultures near glaciers are gonna be burning stuff for heat. Maybe it's actual shit, maybe it's local plant-life. Will the local plant-life change? If they're using sheep dung, and the plants change, will post-climate-change still burn the same? How can they adapt? That's pretty fucking important in that region, and a) I'd be stunned if anyone had bothered to gather the data necessary for the paper, and b) I'd be even more stunned if it got published. The Imperialism bits are included because groups that Empress Victoria of India disliked are likely still on the bad-list of important people in the region, and thus if they use some unique heating strategy that will be screwed by climate change it's likely nobody will notice until the poor bastards start freezing to death.

Have you read anything on this except Reason.com's takedown? Literally anything? Because this is Social Science, and they're reaction to Social Sciences tends to be heavily colored by the fact that most Scientists studying society do not actually find that Libertarianism is the One True Gospel. They're also much closer to the climate-skeptics camp then they like to admit, arguing the global-warmiong-pause,/a> is real and excoriating Di Caprio for using his Oscar Acceptance speech on the topic. Their stands on both subjects tend to be dominated by a steadfast refusal to care what their opponents are saying when they use words differently.

Pretty much the entire article that we are talking about can be summarized by the phrase "Ayn Rand didn't use the words 'gendered,' 'postcolonial,' or 'political ecology' in her books; therefore I don't know what they mean; therefore this paper's abstract is meaningless gibberish."

FYI, the abstract means she was doing some very basic research into how science emphasizes (for lack of a term a reason.com reader would understand) man shit at the expense of woman shit, and how that specifically impacts papers on glaciers and climate change. If I had access to the article I suspect the man shit would be stuff like military science implications of climate change such as terrorism, environmental effects on local livestock, other large-scale economic dislocation, etc. Whereas the woman shit would be much smaller-scale.

For example, most of Central Asian cultures near glaciers are gonna be burning stuff for heat. Maybe it's actual shit, maybe it's local plant-life. Will the local plant-life change? If they're using sheep dung, and the plants change, will post-climate-change still burn the same? How can they adapt? That's pretty fucking important in that region, and a) I'd be stunned if anyone had bothered to gather the data necessary for the paper, and b) I'd be even more stunned if it got published. The Imperialism bits are included because groups that Empress Victoria of India disliked are likely still on the bad-list of important people in the region, and thus if they use some unique heating strategy that will be screwed by climate change it's likely nobody will notice until the poor bastards start freezing to death.

If you say: "Kill gays," it's hate speech, granted. But if you say: "It's a bad idea to let millions of Muslims into Europe, because their holy book instructs them to kill gays," somehow that is "hate speech" against Muslims. Even more idiotically, it's considered "racism" even though Islam is a religion and not a race.

The crackdown on "incorrect" thoughts is reaching absurdities. Criticize feminism on Twitter, and you'll get banned. They'll even suppress the protest hashtag #FreeStacy by disabling autocomplete for it. But somehow the hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen is nothing for the "Trust and Safety Council" to be concerned about.

A 15-year-old student in the UK visited the UKIP website in class. His teachers then reported him to the police, who interrogated him for hours.

If that isn't enough to frighten you, here's some research about how easily Google could game elections by skewing search results in favor of one candidate or another, and how Facebook could do the same with targeted ads and by deciding what shows up on your wall. And the leadership of both companies are Hillary fans. That doesn't mean that they'll do it, but they have the motive, means, and opportunity to do so. And how would we know if they had?

LOL you're full of crap. If Twitter wanted to prevent abuse they wouldn't have put Sarkeesian other abusers and doxers on the council. I can't imagine the level of mental gymnastics it took to overlook this.

Lets talk R.S. McCain here

https://reason.com/blog/2016/0...

https://reason.com/blog/2016/0...
A University of Texas at Austin cop issued a disorderly conduct citation to a preacher because his words were offensive to some students.

"If you really, truly mean "solely" then it is entirely fine to hire a mass murdering fugitive from justice who can code extremely well."

The function of the Brown CS department is not to detect serial killers or engage in social engineering, but to teach computer science. Same as it's nobody business at Mozilla if Brendan Eich did contribute to Prop 8. Getting him force out, a shoddy and shameful act of bullying by the SJW crowd.

What's your next guess, you tragically obvious Hillary campaign minion?

Read and learn.

-jcr

The cunt who tried to destroy Tim Hunt's career wasn't some "evil internet bogeyman", smart-ass.

Read and learn: http://reason.com/archives/201...

-jcr

Maybe the worst thing that happened to those kids (and in most cases the parents) in their entire live.

Or, ya know, an 11-year-old playing alone in his own yard unsupervised. Parents arrested on felony charges.

How misanthropic of this neighbor. Why would you denounce someone when you see a kid in danger? How about asking the kid if he is ok, ask him where his parents are and give him something to eat or access to the bathroom (if needed). And then offer to help to find the parents if they stay away for another unreasable amount of time.

You would then call the police to search the parents.

These are serious and widespread problems.

Denouncing neighbors when they violated a stupid law (by helping the wrong one) was very important for NAZI German to succeed.

This part of the law is just designed to prevent isolated municipalities from nutty interpretations of existing law.

There have been a few recent examples of private citizens reporting unaccompanied children to the police.

I don't think you appreciate the scale of this problem. Yes, only "a few recent examples" probably reached the attention of the national media, but they are indicative of a much more widespread and more common problem. This site is obviously biased in one way, but it's dedicated to tracking stories like this. It's pretty common to see some rather outrageous intervention at least every couple weeks or so... somewhere in the U.S.

Generally, the kids are walking short distances (~1 mile).

Or an 11-year-old sitting alone in a car outside a store.

Or, ya know, an 11-year-old playing alone in his own yard unsupervised. Parents arrested on felony charges. Apparently your kid doesn't even need to be walking alone.

Once the police get involved, they often feel the need to charge someone, and generally find a way to fit "leaving your 8 year old child unattended for 20 minutes" into some form of neglect or endangerment. I'm not sure if any of these have resulted in actual conviction, but they have certainly resulted in handcuffings, arrests, and (perhaps most importantly) court fees.

This shows a gross misunderstanding of the worst issue for most parents. Yes, some parents end up held in jail for a day or something, and there are court fees.

But that's the relatively mild part and only the beginning of the nightmare that often follows. In many cases, Child Protective Services removes the kids from the parents, from anywhere to a few days to weeks to months in some cases. And even when parents fight to get their kids back, they are often subjected to various indignities -- mandatory parenting classes where they are taught how "not to neglect" their kids, periodic "check-ins" by CPS services at their homes, who have been known to find ridiculously minor "violations" or "concerns" (like a cluttered living room where kids have been playing -- too messy for CPS).

Poke around a bit and read the kinds of things that can happen. Also, keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of kids are removed by CPS to foster care in the U.S. every year, statistics compiled from CPS show that in somewhere around 1/3 of cases (about 100,000 kids), investigations eventually show that there was no credible threat at all to kids. That's not even covering cases where there was an "apparent" threat that was determined not to be significant enough to warrant removal -- these are thousands and thousands of cases where CPS takes kids and later says, "My bad. Turns out the removal wasn't really necessary." (Actually, of course, they never admit it that in those words. But they basically determine whatever evidence was used to justify removal was incomplete, a misunderstanding, or just a bogus report.)

And let's not even get into the stats on abuse and neglect in foster care, which tends to happen at higher rates than in homes with parents. So CPS is often removing kids from a safe house without investigating thoroughly and putting kids in places where they are more likely to be harmed. (Obviously, CPS also takes action in many, many cases every year where there IS serious abuse, and they should be commended for that -- but tell this to any parent whose child is taken away for no apparent reason.)

Perhaps this is getting a bit off-topic from TFA, but these are related issues. We have a culture that tends to assume any child alone (and by "child," states now often mean kids up to

My wife was telling me about a story she read regarding a North Korean defector who fled across the border to China and then eventually made it to the West. The thing that convinced him he needed to leave? A soldier from the other side of the DMZ accidentally dropped nail clippers and didn't care enough to come back and get them later. When he realized that something as "incredible" as nail clippers were basically worthless to the other side's soldiers, he knew he had been lied to about how things were outside of his country.

Take it with the requisite grain of salt, but it's an interesting anecdote, nonetheless.

I wouldn't discount it in the least.

When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake

For a wider perspective:

Grocery stores are a marvel. ...

What you see is a miracle. This is the pinnacle of civilization, in its own way. No king in the history of mankind had access to riches like this. Look - here. (picks u box of special expensive gourmet crackers) This is someone's livelihood. Someone got a loan, started a business, hired people, paid someone to design this, because he or she wanted to make a special cracker, and here it is next to all the other special crackers, and this is just the special cracker department in the cheese department. There's another special cracker section in the cracker aisle. He might fail, he might win, but you can do that here, you can try. And if someone says why do we need so many cracker choices, this is why. Do you want some governing Cracker Bureau to say no, don't make crackers, make pretzels. But I don't want to make pretzels. I want to make crackers. Sorry, we have enough crackers. But I have this new taste. SORRY.

Now apply that to everything here! And the other store that has the stuff this one doesn't! And the other chain that carries a different line of speciality stuff!

And a different perspective:

Bernie Sanders: Don’t Need 23 Choices of Deodorant, 18 Choices of Sneakers When Kids Are Going Hungry

On a per-capita basis, Americans produce far more pollution than Chinese, Africans, etc.

Eh? per-capita basis? Who cares?! If your government has to close the schools in your city, and tell the old folks that they should do their morning Tai Chi at home, instead of an open park . . . your country is . . . well, let's just leave it at that.

You should try to visit China sometime . . . in a major city . . . and take a deep breath . . . I never knew that New Jersey smelled so sweet!

I'll stick to things like the smuggled-out videos of the electronics 'recycling' center there, thank you. The only places you can get away with that are ones where you're not financially responsible (even if it's merely an effective immunity) and not even the US has quite been that bad--Love Canal happened because the Niagara Falls Board of Education didn't understand why they were being told that a toxic waste dump isn't a good place to build a school. (Citation; Not the original source I heard about it from, which was a tl;dr summary of what came out long term, and put it as "Chemical company goes 'You want to do what on the toxic waste dump you are insisting on acquiring?' to school board, sells purely because the board didn't get what 'no' means.")

your first example is unmeasurable

Can't be perfectly measured, but can be estimated by interviewing people and asking questions. (Similarly, before an election, the number of votes for each candidate is unmeasurable; yet the polls accurately predicted that Barack Obama would be elected President.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use

https://reason.com/blog/2015/03/09/how-to-count-the-defensive-use-of-guns

Because of the different methods used to collect the data, estimates vary wildly. But all of the estimates agree that most of the time, a weapon is not even fired, let alone someone killed by a defensive gun use.

Maybe you are going for emotional manipulation instead of reason. Is that the case?

No, that is not the case.

I read the Gary Kleck piece and he seems to be pretty biased and actually narcissistic in his presentation.

Hmm, then I apologize for choosing a poor link to use. What I got out of that is "for two decades I have been hearing the same criticisms and none of them are invalid" and I guess what you got from it is "narcissistic".

Better then would be to read his actual book. http://www.amazon.com/Point-Blank-Guns-Violence-America/dp/020230762X The American Society of Criminology awarded Professor Kleck the Hindelang award for this book.

And the other URLs you gave are obviously from pro-gun sites so I didn't go there.

Perhaps you didn't realize it, but the Kellerman study was published in an obviously anti-gun publication.

Also, Arthur Kellerman has been a member of at least one anti-gun organization. (The latter link is to an obviously pro-gun web site, but it reproduces a letter to the editor published in a medical journal by a doctor. The doctor is an obviously pro-gun doctor, but he is providing evidence that Kellerman is an obviously anti-gun doctor, and I don't know how I would go about finding a completely unbiased source you would accept who has taken the trouble to research Kellerman and report on his membership in anti-gun organizations.)

Finally, here is a book I recommend: it thoroughly covers the statistics around violence and gun ownership. It concludes that cultural factors are much more important in violence than the number of available firearms. The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy

It's scientists trying to deal with an illness and its causes, rather than folks who started with a point and then used Polya's tactics to justify it.

Oh, really? I have provided multiple links to you showing that Kellerman's study was structurally unsound. We cannot put error bars on its conclusions, it had a small sample size, and it only counted defensive uses of a firearm if they resulted in a dead body (which drastically under-counts defensive uses). Even if you believe that it was intended as an unbiased study, its flaws render its results useless.

Also, its predictions have not been borne out in the following two decades. I have provided evidence for you that the number of guns in the USA rose dramatically since the publication of the Kellerman study, while shootings of all kinds (accidental and intentional) declined dramatically. I am not going to claim that the drastic increase in guns caused the decline in shootings; but pretty clearly if a gun is 43 times more likely to hurt you than to be a benefit, the drastic increase in guns should have been correlated with a drastic increase in harm.

Here's a reference that presents these facts. This Economist article has graphs that show firearms deaths declining drastically since the early 1990s at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA dramatically increased. (By the way, the article ends with a sentence saying that the link between guns and violence "is obvious" despite the clear evidence to the contrary presented in the article. I doubt they cherry-picked any data to try to make firearms look less dangerous.)

Finally, if it is unbiased research you want, I recommend you read the Wright/Rossi/Daly book. The Carter administration funded research into gun control, and Wright and Rossi engaged in the research expecting to prove that gun control prevents violence. Their research showed the opposite, and changed their minds on the subject.

I don't understand why people believe a single word from the (US) government

It's part of their religion.

Every time, on nearly every topic but especially security / military, what they say turns out to be not true.

Talking snakes poll even better - objective truth has little relevance.

But also consider the mental load of admitting that they're being economically and culturally ruined by these people. That would imply a moral imperative to action, which would require them to get off the couch. Technology has created the best living conditions in human history which brings comfort. They don't realize that fascistic regulations prevent that technology & comfort from being many times better. That's where the flying cars are.

As far as I can tell, all the "investigations" of the ClimateGate situation were whitewashes. "The University investigated its own global warming researchers and concluded that they are doing a great job!"

And I keep reading articles like this one where it shows that NOAA has stealth-edited the temperature data, and all the old data got pushed down and all the new data got pushed up. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/noaancdcs-new-pause-buster-paper-a-laughable-attempt-to-create-warming-by-adjusting-past-data/

Can you find me anyone prominent in the global warming community who spoke out in 2004 against the prediction that sea level rise would start drowning island countries by 2010? It's hard for me to take this stuff seriously when the most outrageous claims are never challenged, and skeptical people are hounded the way the Inquisition hounded heretics, and the computer models are all outside their 95% confidence intervals and yet everyone is doubling down on the conclusions from the models.

If you want me to take global warming seriously, start having all the global warming conferences by teleconference over the Internet to save on CO2 emissions (instead of having everyone fly to Tahiti or wherever) and start having the top guys all endorse nuclear power.

Many folks would argue about his "legacy" being thin, and they would be right.

Oh really?

Obama pulled all the troops out of Iraq before Iraq was ready to defend itself, and he publicly announced the date on which Iraq would be defenceless. Result: ISIS overrunning major cities, looting banks to buy weapons, murdering and raping. I lay this death toll squarely at Obama's feet... he inherited a pacified situation from Bush and managed to screw it all to hell. Then he denied it.

Obama signed the ironically named "Affordable Care Act" but didn't write it. He did stump for it, famously promising that "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor", promising that a family of 4 would save $2500 per year. Result: people found they couldn't keep their doctor, people found that premiums went up for everyone, and now the ACA is entering a death spiral.

Obama's "recovery" is the worst recovery since 1932.

Obama mocked Romney for identifying Russia as a strategic threat, and now Russia is making a shambles of US policy in the middle east. Obama actually started this, when he gratefully let Putin rescue him from having to actually do something when Syria crossed his "red line".

On Obama's watch, an embassy was successfully attacked and the ambassador killed, the first death of an ambassador in the line of duty in three decades. Maybe we should blame that on Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State? But she was Obama's Secretary of State. "The buck stops here."

How has the Democratic Party done with Obama as President? Not well.

I don't think Obama's "legacy" is thin at all. I think it's thick, but it's a thick legacy of failure and disaster.

Who else would you use that can see the secret information to determine if the warrant should be given?

Myself, for starters. If it can't be revealed to the public at all, it's not a legal warrant in my view.

So, stop doing the job that they are asked to do by the government? The NSA is a spying agency, sorry to burst your bubble.

Of course. Stop the job and maybe put a few people in prison after a public trial, of course.

No whistleblower has ever been harmed by the NSA. Disclosing secret and top secret information to foreign governments is not whistleblowing, it is treason. Snowden chose not to blow the whistle and instead commit treason, he is being charged with the crimes he committed.

Fuck you. This lie keeps going. You don't like how Snowden treated the NSA, then don't let the NSA treat whistleblowers like traitors.

If Snowden wanted to be a whistleblower, he should have taken his concerns to congress, not foreign governments.

His way worked. Your way didn't.

Let me put it an other "another way".

Let's suppose Fire_Wraith really thinks Jeb Bush sucks a donkey. So he wants to let everyone know that a vote for Jeb is one step toward the end of civilization. Under the constitution and federal election laws, Fire_Wraith can go out to the town square and scream at the top of his lungs on the topic all he wants. He can even publish ads in the newspaper and on TV. Or put up a web page. As much of his time and treasure as he'd like to spend on the issue, he can spend.

In this way it is just like any other issue Fire_Wraith cares about. He could be advocating for parental rights for Transgender divorcees, or anything else his heart desires. The FEC only takes note when he's dealing with a federal election in some way - and he can't coordinate his activities with those campaigns without calling it a contribution and being regulated.

Now, here's the other shoe to drop: What if I think Fire_Wraith is the smartest guy ever and I'm totally on his side. I want to join in his efforts. So I offer to pay for half of his advertizing and help write the ad copy. I'm doing the same thing that he was doing before. So is he. Only now we are doing it together.

Pre Citizen's United we suddenly were running afoul of federal law. Just because we were pooling our resources for common cause.

Even today Fire_Wraith and I would run into difficulties because of campaign laws. It happens all the time, all around the country and it has nothing to do with corporate oligarchies. Let's say instead of Bush, Fire_Wraith and I were worried about something happening in our town and we got together with a bunch of people from the neighborhood to do something about it. We put our heads and wallets together and get a bunch of yard signs printed up. Ooops. We just violated campaign finance laws. We are now a PAC and have to get ourselves all legal and regulated and stuff. So even though we were only able to scrape together $382.78 for the yard signs (and coffee and donuts for the meeting), we are required to file complicated paperwork and collect information for the regulators on all of our contributors and all of our expenditures. Even though this would cost way more than we are spending on our actual political activities, and even though we could barely muster the energy to get the yard signs deployed.

This is what campaign finance laws look like in the real world. Often a group like ours would skate under the radar and not be bothered by regulators. Unless, of course, somebody got their undies in a bunch and decided to do something about it. The example above is based on a real story - I think it was Colorado a few years back. Some neighborhood group was opposed to something the city was doing and tried to oppose it by pooling their resources. The powers on the other side used the levers of government to silence them - audits and subpoenas and prosecutors all drowned the group, costing them many, many times what they were planning to spend on stopping their government.

This can reach extremes when your political opponents happen to work for government as prosecutors or regulators. In this case a prosecutor used his power to silence (and bankrupt) someone who was raising money for the opposing party. Someone who ultimately was found to be operating perfectly legally, but was harassed and silenced for 5 years, using campaign finance laws.

There's a lot to worry about here, not just on the "corporations are evil" front.

Since there have been at least a dozen confirmed bomb threats where GG has had their talks

Confirmed? Where are the police reports?

A dozen bomb threats doesn't appear to be true, but I did find three bomb threats against GG meetings: in Miami, Melbourne, and D.C. Now, those aren't police reports, but those appear to cost money from the DC police, at least.

Sarkeesian and Quinn both got more harassment than they deserved, for sure. Sarkeesian is a shitty game critic (and has stolen other people's game footage) but she shouldn't have gotten nearly that much attention. Quinn appears to have been emotionally abusive, and may have gotten more publicity (not a review, it seems) from a relationship, but again, those don't justify harassment either. That being said, apparently GG has still been doing stuff this whole time, but the actual harassment seems to have mostly gone away.

Lots of people and organizations don't have enough money for everything they want. They have to prioritize. Maybe test some more cars instead of bullying farmers.

None of which required that he be handcuffed, fingerprinted, suspended... etc... etc...

The police were called, and they are compelled and required to investigate once called. They don't just show up and say, "Eh, whatever," and leave. I don't think they police should have been called at all, but they were. And during the course of their investigation, they choose to transport him for questioning, and handcuffs are, rightly or wrongly, standard procedure nearly any time anyone is detained or transported for any reason, even if they didn't do anything wrong.

The issue isn't whether they thought it was a bomb or not - the issue is their overreaction and it's racist overtones.

The issue is exactly that. Even if race or religion was on the mind of one or more of the people involved, you can't know that. People are using the fact this happened to him and "wouldn't happen if he was white" as proof that it has to be racism. But white kids are arrested and suspended for similarly innocent, or even more innocent, things all the time. That fact alone dismantles the position that "because this happened, it must have had a racial element." It MAY indeed have had a racial element, but the facts of the situation aren't what demonstrates that. That would be only in peoples' minds.

(As for one of the cops ALLEGEDLY saying "it's who I thought it would be", we have no way of knowing 1. whether that was even actually said, or 2. IF it was said, whether it referred to Ahmed personally (i.e., did he have any brushes before because of his interests), or because he was "brown" and Muslim -- the conclusion that everyone who desperately wants to attribute this to racism wants to rush to. And, on that point, if that was the motivation, wouldn't that cop have already felt that upon seeing his name was "Ahmed Mohamed", instead of making an allegedly racist remark right to his face, and only upon seeing him? In short, that allegation doesn't stand up to scrutiny as definitive proof that there was anything racial involved on the part of police in this case, either.)

I am ignoring the rest of your fallacious attacks that don't speak to the facts of the situation, which I have shown that you have ignored. You're the corrosive one, here, because you have already decided that this simply must be racism when the facts and evidence don't support that conclusion, and ignore all other considerations.

TL;DR: No one ever thought it was an actual bomb.

Long version:

Since no one ever actually thought it was a bomb, the fact that the school and police took no action as if it were a bomb does not somehow "prove" it's racism and/or Islamophobia. That isn't to say one or more of the people involved had something in that vein in their minds, but their lack of treating it as a bomb doesn't demonstrate it, since numerous accounts of this story indicate the school and police never thought it was an actual bomb.

Some people thought it "looked like" a bomb, and wondered why he would bring it to school, because they don't understand why kids who like things like science and electronics do what they do.

And there are laws dealing with what are called "hoax devices". Many people have gotten into trouble for such things before. Hoax device statutes have been around for many, many years, long before 9/11.

Here is the Texas statute:

http://www.statutes.legis.stat...

The only thing that matters in the hoax device statute is intent â" a feature that is not unique. For example, intent matters when someone is killed. Was it an accident? Was it negligence? Was it premeditated? That is the difference between someone having done nothing wrong, and murder. And it is interviews and investigations and evidence that determine intent.

Even in the original Dallas Morning News article that broke this story â" before it went viral and Ahmed got invited to the White House, JPL, MIT, got scholarships, and become the hero of Silicon Valley â" the only thing the police officials said was that they knew it wasn't a bomb, that Ahmed never claimed it was anything but a clock, and that they were trying to determine WHY he built and AND brought it to school. Once it was determined there was no intent to alarm, scare, or deceive, it was further determined there was no wrongdoing.

Steve Wozniak got in trouble for using a hoax device (with intent to scare), and was arrested and spent a night in jail. I got in trouble with authority figures â" school, police â" for things similar to what Ahmed did several times, when doing nothing wrong. Maybe a little borderline, maybe a little, "What on earth are you doing?" but not illegal. And frankly, some of those came down only to intent as well.

So this little trope misunderstands what happened. Could racism or Islamophobia been an element in anyone's mind? There is no way to know, as much as people desperately want to come to that conclusion. When people say, "What white kid would have gotten in trouble for doing nothing wrong?"

Plenty. Ignore the title, read the article (for those who haven't already):

https://reason.com/blog/2015/0...

His English teacher overreacted by getting the principal's office involved. The school overreacted by calling the police. The school bears almost all of the responsibility here â" not "post-9/11 America", racism, or police. If the police had not been called, none of this would ever have happened â" and Ahmed wouldn't be a celebrity, either.

When police are called for a situation where any of the parties involved are not in perfect agreement, and there is no controversy, even if nothing illegal occurred, I would submit that there are not many times that results in a more positive outcome. The police are there, in part, to investigate and to determine if there was any wrongdoing, which they did. I wish they would have simply handled it at the school, but what I really wish is that the school would not have called the police in the first place.

Socialists are the leeches, leeching from the rich and giving to the undeserving poor.

same shit since 1979... "The first Walkman weighed in at a solid 390 grams (plus 50 grams for the headphones). With its strong square lines and metallic blue finish, it was almost as streamlined as today's surge protectors. To emphasize its portability, Morito reportedly had a shirt custom-tailored with an oversized chest pocket in which to carry the 3.5 x 5.5 x 1.25 inch device." https://reason.com/archives/20...

First, we zoned minorities out of white neighborhoods. Now we're also trying to keep them out of voting booths. Is this country becoming more racist?

Falsehood 1: You can light your tap water on fire. Fox made this claim famous in the first Gasland movie when he showed a resident of Colorado striking a match as water came out of his tap; the natural gas dissolved in the water burst into flame. Yet the water was tested by the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, which reported to the resident: "There are no indications of any oil & gas related impacts to your well water." The agency concluded that the natural gas in his water supply was derived from natural sources—the water well penetrated several coal beds that had released the methane into the well.

Remember this poll worker? She insisted she did nothing wrong...

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07...

Course, all that was supposed to have happened - well, now According to the "experts".

They weren't experts in political malfeasance so they probably accurately projected out the slopes of current trends at the time - not realizing that the economy was in the process of being wrecked.

The popular expression of the common realization that this has happened is "where are the flying cars?" (thermodynamics notwithstanding).

Here is where I first read about the case with video of the expert witness creating false evidence. It references the video links but no longer seems to be hosting the video. HuffPo has a clip from the video still up.

This was a death penalty case, and the video of the examination was not unearthed until after the defendant was sentenced to death.

it's not possible for an honest person to have need of the 5th amendment

Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

Remember that next time you talk to a cop and they don't feel you were "concerned" enough about the situation and use that fact against you in a court of law: http://reason.com/blog/2014/08...

If they made it mandatory, including paying back taxes and enforced their tax laws there's no reason that they couldn't pay what they owe, given time.

If they were able to do that, would it be a good idea? These tax laws were passed without considering the consequences and Greek society has been working around them, perhaps in some cases for decades.

I am reminded here of an observation. Everyone involved is interested in their interests, but no one seems to be interested in a Greece with a future. Without substantial reforms that allow for markets and freedom to create businesses, Greece will continue its decline.

I don't see the current agreement as doing a thing to help that. As I've noted elsewhere, I see the current agreement as merely a transfer of wealth from EU taaxpayers to the holders of Greek debt. It doesn't actually force Greece to be a stable, prudent, tax paying country. They can after all revert to default at some future point when the EU money runs out again.

I too am very interested in your closely held Canadian secret to recovering from death in such a short time period. In the rest of the world we haven't even figured out how to recover from death *at all*, let alone in weeks or months like you claim is possible.

Stating that swatting isn't a big deal falls flat on both ends of the argument.

In 2008 an investigation into no-knock swat raids showed that 80% of such raids in the previous 10 years were based on factually wrong information. Of the 146 no-knock raids during that year, only 49 or about 33% resulted in any charges what so ever, and of those 49 only 2 (TWO) resulted in a conviction and prison time.

Of those two, one was due to the officers finding 50 grams of weed in the swatting victims home, while the original charges were that the person had shot hostages.
The other of those two was the famous Marvin Louis Guy case, who is in prison for shoot three of the swat officers who invaded his home and shot at him and his wife first.
The prosecution has sought the death penalty against him and is still on death row to this day.

You are essentially saying that 16 months of jail time is TOO MUCH for being directly responsible for at least 23 instances of attempted murder.
Being the direct cause of having loaded weapons pointed directly at another human being who did no harm or crime to anyone, where only the purest of chances resulted in missing, is something that should not be taken lightly.

http://reason.com/archives/200...
http://thefreethoughtproject.c...
http://xbradtc.com/2014/08/08/...
https://www.google.com/search?...

I read more than enough reports at the time, but your references aren't. They're opinion pieces, written by people saddened by the tragedy. They don't reflect the criminal realities of Aaron's case. The prosecuting attorneys were aggressive and listed every reasonable charge separately, with maximum sentences. No judge would inflict all that, and the prosecuting attorneys clearly expected him to plea bargain. But as best I can tell from the _news_ articles at the time, Aaron refused to accept _any_ felony conviction at all. He'd gotten away without conviction with the PACER abuse, seemed to think he could escape unscathed again.

In order for the articles:

                    http://thinkprogress.org/justi... [thinkprogress.org] - op end piece, compares Aaron's charges, unmodified by a judge or plea bargaining, to the convicted sentences of murderers. Ignores that prosecutors routinely start with maximum possible charges and sentences, just as patent applications list all possible uses of an idea. They do this to see what remains after a judge, jury, or plea bargaining reduce the claims, and to avoid missing anything.

                  http://reason.com/archives/201... [reason.com] - invents a strawman argument that Aaron's numerous felonies were equivalent to a simple trespass. Shows complete ignorance of the law and of Aaron's abuse. Aaron was _crashing JSTOR servers_ and getting all of MIT cut off from JSTOR, repeatedly.

                http://www.newyorker.com/news/... [newyorker.com] - lies absurdly about the difficulty of public access to JSTOR. JSTOR _makes the data available in a usable format_, organized, and for the minimum they can charge. They're very generous with free subscriptions for education and research, their fees are quite modest, and Aaron didn't "try to check too many books out of a library". He was effectively copying the whole library and planning to set up his own in direct competition, but without any way to pay the librarians to keep the books in order.

Let's be quite clear. Aaron was trying to put JSTOR out of business by republishing not only the articles, but the invaluable JSTOR indexes, and publish them "free as in beer". I've tried to think of an equivalent. The best I can manage is trying to solve the drought in California by opening up all the fire hydrants. It was ridiculous and, yes, criminal behavior.

Except that neither case received brutal punishment. Aaron was never convicted.

i stopped reading there. yeah, he was never convicted because he committed suicide you dumb fuck

and to assert that aaron swartz didn't face brutal punishment makes you either an asshole, a moron, or both

http://thinkprogress.org/justi...

http://reason.com/archives/201...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/...

read the above. educate yourself. then open your ignorant mouth

What punishment? He killed himself before he was punished, so we'll never know.

why are you commenting when you don't even understand the fucking topic?

http://thinkprogress.org/justi...

http://reason.com/archives/201...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/...

it helps to understand the bare basic facts of a topic before you open your ignorant mouth

please educate yourself first next time, then talk

There isn't a great deal of difference to me between a government or a multitude of corporations making themselves privy to an increasing share of our personal lives

Actually, the difference is vast: for a corporation to compel either you or another corporation to reveal any data, it has to win legal case — or, a least, convince a judge to issue a subpoena. The government has been gradually lowering this bar for itself over the years — recall the "National Security Letters" (and how easy they are for the government to obtain).

And that's when it bothers with the legal process at all — often it can simply just bust in and take your stuff (without warrant), seize any property on mere accusation of it being used in a crime, and confiscate bank accounts without even an accusation, only suspicion , or, as was the case with Reason.com, demand your "voluntary" cooperation or else...

But my point was not, that the government ought not to investigate legitimate threats against judges and public officials — even hard-core Libertarians would agree, that this is, actually, a proper role of the government. The point is, this particular investigation was patently illegitimate — the "threats" were bogus and hyperbolic and DoJ could not possible have hoped to ever win a conviction.

Their intention was to simply harass the dissenters by hitting them with subpoenas and giving them threatening "talking-tos". The prosecution, in other words, was malicious. That's the disgusting part.

The aspects of Libertarianism that relate to being largely left alone to pursue our lives appeal to me [...] The eagerness of Libertarians to remove regulations on corporate behavior

But there is no difference! What's good for the goose, is good for the chicken as well:

• If a corporation can not discriminate on race or age in hiring a secretary, then you can not discriminate on same in hiring a babysitter.
• If a corporation's employees can vote to obligate their employer to only hire from the same union they just joined, by what logic should your local supermarket be unable to vote itself into becoming the sole legal source of groceries for you?
• If a strip-club can not turn away a transgender entertainer, then you can not be averting your eyes from "her" either — and it would be manifestly bigoted of you to not stick your dollar-bills right next to "her" penis.

Even more obvious examples abound. For example, the EPA considers any billabong in the US to be under its control and protection — so both private citizens and corporations alike now need a Federal Government's approval to build anything on their property, if it happens to have a lake, a stream, or a swamp, however small...

Many even help them suggest a specific place (Somalia) to go.

Funny thing. Somalia apparently is a better place now than when it had its own official government.

People have been telling libertarians this all the time.

Telling someone something is not the same as that thing being true. Being forced by The Man to get a haircut and a real job is one of those comfortable myths people love to believe in.

This is certainly one of the motivations. ,This article provides a lot of good links on the topic.

By combining anti-structuring laws with asset forfeiture the feds can steal most anything they'd like. There have been a lot of stories in recent years about small businesses that make frequent deposits under 10k getting their accounts and even their business siezed.

All without even an allegation of any criminal activity other than making deposits that are below the threshold for reporting. The drug warriors thought they were playing a game of gotcha with the drug kingpins. Nice work, geniuses....

Local police too can use civil forfeiture too for their own use. If you are driving and have "too much cash" they can seize it with the excuse you are probably a drug dealer and its up to you to try to go to court to get it back. These laws are way over the top. How about banks that launder money for the drug lords? No one goes to jail because they are WEALTHY and have connections in the right places. They pay a fine admit nothing and go about their business.

This is certainly one of the motivations. ,This article provides a lot of good links on the topic.

By combining anti-structuring laws with asset forfeiture the feds can steal most anything they'd like. There have been a lot of stories in recent years about small businesses that make frequent deposits under 10k getting their accounts and even their business siezed.

All without even an allegation of any criminal activity other than making deposits that are below the threshold for reporting. The drug warriors thought they were playing a game of gotcha with the drug kingpins. Nice work, geniuses....

Those people who view one side as better than the other, because they are "less evil" are simply delusional.

There are more than two sides. Rand Paul — currently from the "Libertarian wing" of the Republican Party — may as well become a bona-fide Libertarian. At least, that would assure a Presidential nomination for him.

Whatever he does, his attempts to block the extensions of this "most unpatriotic law" gained him support from both sides of the traditional isle (as his other actions did before).

Libertarianism has been rising over the last few decades — one can see it from Slashdot's own poll as well as feel it in the increasingly shrill reaction Libertarian ideas get from Slashdot's resident Statists. Maybe, we'll have three major parties once again soon.

Bernie Sanders is a self described socialist. It means the same as in Europe. Political parties in Europe use the world socialist.

Your claim about Libertarian is nonsense. Perhaps you are too busy. You might want to slow down long enough to at least get some of the facts straight.

2.7 Labor Markets

Employment and compensation agreements between private employers and employees are outside the scope of government, and these contracts should not be encumbered by government-mandated benefits or social engineering. We support the right of private employers and employees to choose whether or not to bargain with each other through a labor union....

Is There a Libertarian Case for Organized Labor?

Unfortunately they already do this: http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/06/ancestrycom-hands-over-client-dna-test-r.

It shouldn't be ok to incite mass panic (yelling fire in a crowded venue)

It shouldn't, huh? How about statements like "President is a war-criminal" or "He is not a natural-born citizen" — can such speech not some day be banned under the same doctrine? Because it does interfere with the government's efficiency and, consequently, the entire country's quality of life, does not it? We might think this ridiculous today, but many countries — including the various worker's paradises — consider insulting the Dear Leader a felony already. Don't you recognize a slippery slope while sliding down on it?

There is a movement to ban "hate speech" already. The entire Yik Yak app is banned on many campuses and today's students are being trained to accept such a ban already, so it can not be far away, that the thought-police spills out from those institutions into the rest of our world.

For the past 7 years, the number one rebuttal to any critics of the current President was that they are "haters". Do you think, we are far away from the sitting President becoming off-limits for criticism? We aren't — and it all started, when we were sold the bogus premise of "some speech ought to be illegal"...

It is naive to think that complete, and total, freedom of speech was ever intended.

Is it naive? Then I share my naivete with Benjamin Franklin, for example — a Founding Father — who considered any abuses of the freedom of speech to be a lesser evil than entrusting anyone the power to suppress them. For example:

Those abuses of the freedom of speech are exercises of liberty. They ought to be repressed; but to whom dare we to entrust the care of doing it. An evil magistrate intrusted with power to punish for words, would be armed with a weapon the most destructive and terrible. Under pretense of pruning off the exuberant branches he would be apt to destroy the tree.

Do you honestly believe, the fine magistrates of the 21st century Virginia would've helped calm Franklin's fears of that "the most destructive and terrible" weapon?

This oldster is old enough to remember when Peter King was shilling for the IRA. Where the hell does he get off criticizing Snowden?

I don't buy this survey either. I remember the Soviets. I remember the Stazi. I remember the old movies where the guard would demand, "Your Papers." I remember when Americans and the American culture would ridicule countries that do the crap we do today.

An aside: my daughter's best friend's mother grew up in the Soviet Union. We were at their house when Ed Snowden made the news. When a story about him came on the news, her family started talking to each other excitedly in Russian. They were acting like he was the Fifth Beatle.

Exactly.

Far too often people in authority are willing to use these results as cover for their own biases - they have a gut feeling that someone is guilty, but since that's obviously not scientific they seek a way to mask their bias in pseudoscience.

Here's the story of how FBI 'profiling' was invented out of bogus results.

The problem with DNA matches(bad application of statistics) leading example being a black man and a white man who came up as the 'same' person.

Then there is the use of drug-dogs that don't detect drugs, they detect subconscious (and sometimes conscious) cues from their handlers.

Also, the latest bogus fad - micro-expressions as a form of lie detection. The TSA has spent a billion+ dollars on it with zero useful results.

Seems to me that the constant push to mechanize judgment is commendable but misguided.

I've known people who have had their car searched because a dog allegedly signaled that there were drugs in the car when there were not. They looked like stoners (long hair and tie-dyed shirts) so the cops probably thought the odds were good they would find something. When they didn't they just blamed the dog and said something along the lines of, "well, you were probably smoking pot in this vehicle at some point, and that's probably what the dog smelled."

The dog is just an excuse to violate your rights.

THIS. There are no statistics on how frequently dogs "alert" and the subsequent search finds no contraband. The police document when they do find something in such a search but don't document it when they don't, so the statistics make it appear that dogs are extremely effective. When confronted with double-blind tests they don't perform nearly as well. They also generate a lot of false positives, when training the dog almost always encounters what it is looking for so when they get in the field they tend to generate a lot of false positives. The police are fine with this as it gives them probably cause to perform a search. I'm glad the SC is finally pushing back on this issue.

The undercover operation, titled "Operation Glass House," spanned a few months and included undercover officers in three area high schools: Chaparral, Temecula Valley, and Rancho Vista Continuation. The officers posed as regular high school students and would ask other students for drugs. Twenty-two students were arrested - the majority of them are reported to be special needs students like the Snodgrass' son..........His new friend, who went under the name of Daniel Briggs, was known as "Deputy Dan" to many students because it was so apparent to them that he was an undercover officer. However, to their son, whose disabilities make it hard for him to gauge social cues, Dan was his only real friend.

http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/10/09/riverside-cop-tricks-autistic-teen-into

Erm...

1) Somalia is cut off from global trade networks. Cutting off trade substantially hurts a country's economy.

2) Somalia is not libertarian, it is anarchic (with the end result that the guy with the biggest gun gets to be a fascist)

3) Reason (publication in TFA) actually published an article about economic freedom in Somalia recently. Perhaps you should go and read what they have to say before throwing around straw men. (tl;dr: western interventionism prolongs war delivers nothing for most residents of Somalia, Somali traditional social structure provides the most effective economic and judicial systems in the country)

4) While Al Shabaab are certainly not libertarians, they're not quite an IS-style anarchic group either.

To conclude: A country where you can bomb, maim and murder without consequence is not libertarian.