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Florida Ballot Issues Endorsements: No on Amendment 3


Nothing herein shall be deemed to limit the right of the Legislature to exercise its authority through general law to restrict, regulate, or tax any gaming or gambling activities. In addition, nothing herein shall be construed to limit the ability of the state or Native American tribes to negotiate gaming compacts pursuant to the Federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act for the conduct of casino gambling on tribal lands, or to affect any existing gambling on tribal lands pursuant to compacts executed by the state and Native American tribes pursuant to IGRA.

In short, under Amendment 3 only the voters (not the legislature) can allow non-Indian casinos, but the legislature can still do things that make casinos more difficult and expensive to open or operate.

Who, I wonder, could be behind such an idea? Well, the top three donors to "Voters in Charge," the group pushing the amendment, are:

The "purpose" of Amendment 3 may be to put "voters in charge" of whether or not to allow casino gambling, but the goal of Amendment 3 is to make sure casino gambling isn't allowed.

My preferred casino gambling amendment to Florida's constitution would look something like this:

Don't want to own, operate, or patronize a casino? Don't own, operate, or patronize a casino. Don't want others to own, operate, or patronize casinos? Well, feel free to try to talk them out of doing so if that floats your boat, but it's not your decision to make for them. Things would probably just be much better all around if you minded your own f**king business.

That option not being on the menu, I intend to vote no on Amendment 3 and encourage others to do likewise. Not because I trust the legislature to mind its own f**king business, but because legislators at least might have some incentives (increased tax revenues, perhaps some expensive meals paid for by lobbyists, etc.) to possibly at least allow these businesses to operate.

Yes, there are competing incentives (I'm sure Disney, the Seminoles, and the evangelical obsessives or whoever is behind No Casinos Inc., can lay out a great prime rib and crab leg buffet too, as well as contribute to pols who toe their line and to opponents of pols who don't), but the prohibitionists wouldn't be behind this if they didn't think it was going to be, at least in the long run, a more effective and less expensive way of protecting their business interests through government force and/or running everyone else's lives through same.

Posted by Thomas Knapp at 5:46 PM View Comments Links to this post 
Two Things the Kavanaugh Fiasco Did Damage to "From the Right"

Thing One: "Presumption of Innocence"

No. It is not that way. It's never been that way. It's never going to be that way. And it shouldn't be that way.

"Presumption of innocence" in the absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is a standard/threshold for formally (through e.g. a criminal court proceeding) penalizing someone for a crime he or she is accused of committing. That's all it is, and demanding that its application be expanded to social interactions in general isn't just silly, it's dangerous.

If you think you saw me put something in your drink, you don't have to give me the benefit of doubt and consume the drink in the absence of video footage confirming that I did, witnesses credibly testifying that I did, and a jury of my peers unanimously concluding that I did.

Thing Two: "Due Process"

Brett Kavanaugh was being considered for appointment to the Supreme Court, not being tried for sexual assault. Vis a vis the sexual assault allegations, some people managed to convince themselves that in order for him to not get the job, "due process" required that he be "convicted" of those allegations by a reasonable doubt standard after a thorough criminal trial style proceeding.

"Due process" for a SCOTUS position is as follows: Presidential appointment and the "Advice and Consent of the Senate." That's it. That's all. There's nothing else.

On the "advice" end, presumably the Senate might send the president a list of people they think would be good for the position. On the "consent" end, there's absolutely, positively no standard whatsoever concerning how Senators may or may not vote. A Senator can vote yes because he likes the the nominee's hair color. A Senator can vote no because she doesn't like the nominee's shoes. Or, more to the likely end, a Senator can vote yes or no based on the nominee's perceived political affiliations.

Posted by Thomas Knapp at 5:28 AM View Comments Links to this post 
More Medical Meh

Tomorrow morning, first an echo cardiogram and then a radioactive isotope/heart-rate-increasing drug injection.

Then, Wednesday night, I have a tentative date scheduled with Hurricane Michael. Hopefully that won't turn medical.

Posted by Thomas Knapp at 11:27 AM View Comments Links to this post 
All Aboard -- or Maybe Not

The latest episode is part two of a three-part series on "The LP and the Enduring Importance of the Statement of Principles." Caryn Ann is doing some groundbreaking historical preservation work, both with the podcast and with other efforts. I don't always agree with her conclusions, but she's doing something most of us have done little or nothing like, which is finding source documents to support those conclusions.

I do want to take issue with one thing in this latest episode. It's not an historical claim I'm interested in disputing, but a common metaphor that I consider inadequately explored. Here's Caryn Ann's version of the metaphor, with one alternative to the usual understanding:

This legitimate disagreement [between anarchists, minarchists, classical liberals, et al.] is actually so tiny and so far off, the differences are so trivial when it comes to the ultimate goal of all human interactions being voluntary and peaceful, that absolute cooperation between us makes perfect sense. And this is where the metaphor ... comes into play... that is that we are on the same train head headed northward. Some of us will get off sooner than others. But this ... idea is disturbingly being denied by some within the party. It is claimed that no, it's like one train is going to New York from Florida and one is going to California from Florida and we can't travel together because our destinations are so different.

But, there is another way to look at the train metaphor, and that is that some of us are on a train chugging slowly in the right direction, while others among us remain back in Florida building a rocket ship for which we don't yet have a working engine or sufficient fuel.

In fact, we don't even know what the engine will look like or what the fuel will be. But we don't think the train is ever going to get where it's going (in fact, we expect it to end up a lot like the coal-powered locomotive that tries to make it through a long tunnel in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged), and we hope that circumstances -- political disintegration and revolution -- will provide the engine and the fuel at some time and in some manner which we can't venture to predict. At which we will leap-frog the train, land in the ruins, and build the free society.

Or something like that. Obviously there are variants, e.g. "build the newworld in the shell of the old." What those variants have in common are that they don't take for granted a linear, measured progression from Point A (where we are) to Point B (where we want to go), a progression with stops along the way where people can get off when they decided they've had enough of the progression and are right where they want to be.

That mindset makes involvement in electoral politics generally and the Libertarian Party specifically somewhat tricky. Should the LP be chipping away incrementally "in the right direction," or should it be more or less monkeywrenching stuff in order to bring about the desired collapse so that the real work can get started?

My opinion on that is that the LP's own structure and its situation within electoral politics dictates the former. Not because I think the "train" metaphor is correct versus the "rocket ship" metaphor, but because electoral politics as such is based on slow trains ... and big tents.

The LP does need to be right both on the whole (its vision/goal) and in detail (its actions vis a vis specific issues of the moment). But it needn't abandon train in favor of rocket ship, and in fact it wouldn't make sense for it to do so.

Anyway, that's my "making a mountain out of a molehill" contribution to the latest episode of The Big L Podcast. The rest of the podcast is much more fun, interesting, and informative than the part I chose to nitpick. You should listen to it. 
Kavanaugh and the Midterms, Part 2

West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin is breaking the Democratic line to vote for confirmation too. Not really surprising. He might well have done so even if it was clear that Kavanaugh was going down. Manchin looks like he's in good shape for re-election -- Real Clear Politics has him up by an average of 9.4% over GOP horse Patrick Morrissey -- but as the RCP updates on the polling note, there are lots of undecideds out there. A no vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation could turn the race into, well, a race.

Flake isn't running for re-election. He's campaigning for some as yet unannounced position -- a Trump appointment in the executive branch (ambassador to South Africa, perhaps), or president in 2020 or 2024, or whatever. He's trying to cut this baby in half, Solomon-style. He conditioned his Judiciary Committee vote on a half-assed FBI "investigation" (pleasing Democrats, enraging Republicans) and is now pretending that an actual investigation took place and exonerated Kavanaugh so that he can vote to confirm (pleasing Republicans, enraging Democrats). Will that work out to his benefit? Who knows?

As far as Kavanaugh getting onto the court, my own feelings are mixed. In the short term, his big-government, anti-freedom, screw-the-constitution orientation seems likely to produce ugly results that will affect me as much as any other American, so I can't say I'm happy about it. On the other hand, his mere presence on the bench will tend lower the court's reputation even further and call its credibility into question even more. As an anarchist, I'm certainly OK with that.

Posted by Thomas Knapp at 7:52 AM View Comments Links to this post 
Kavanaugh and the Midterms

My general prediction for the midterm elections has been:

I made those predictions before Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court became a much uglier thing than I expected. So here's an update on my predictions:

In fact, on that last point, I think some Republican pols may be hoping like hell that Kavanaugh goes down by a vote or two. Not badly enough to vote against him themselves, but badly enough to hope that e.g. Collins falls on her sword and votes no on confirmation (after which they will promptly blame the Democrats, not e.g. Collins).

That outcome probably wouldn't produce a "red wave," but most of them would trade one SCOTUS pick's misfortune for a likely Senate seat gain seven days a week and twice on Sunday.

Posted by Thomas Knapp at 12:44 PM View Comments Links to this post 
Bar Fights: Normal or Abnormal?

Sullum cites an online survey by Esquire in which 74% of respondents say they've never been involved a bar fight. If 26% of people have done something, can it really be that abnormal? I can think of a lot of things that fewer than 26% of people do that I wouldn't consider violations of social norms. Just as an example, buying a Taylor Swift album. OK, well, maybe a bad example.

Anyway, I'd say that my own bar fight history deserves to be divided into two categories.

Category 1: The Marine Corps

How many military bar fights was I in? Enough that I'm not equipped to offer an accurate count. Enough that at least three in particular stick out in my mind (my first, which also involved crawling across a base in ditches to avoid the base military police; another in which the MPs turned dogs loose on the crowd; and a third which started at an e-club on an Army base with a large Special Forces presence, when a Marine stood up on his chair and sang "one hundred Marines/took a shit today/and wiped their ass/with a green beret"). So definitely more than three.

Category 2: Not the Marine Corps

I can only think of three.

In the first one, I was not yet 21 and was confined to an upstairs "under-age" area of a nightclub/music venue. The exit happened to coincide with the exit from the bar area. A college-age drunk noticed my earring and called me a name. I just answered "f--k off" and was willing to leave it at that. But he took exception and broke my nose. I, taking similar exception, picked him up by his shirt, and used him to put a dent in the open metal door to the bar area, and his friends carried him away (to be fair, they were already mostly carrying him anyway). That dent was still in the door last time I saw the bar, years later (I worked there as doorman/bouncer for a couple of years after turning 21 -- I think maybe the club owner remembered that little dust-up; I only ever had to bounce one guy, and he didn't have any fight in him).

In the second one, I was at a different bar, hanging out with the doorman, Tiny (so-called for being maybe 7 feet tall and 350 pounds). A gentleman in line to enter, already either drunk or high, decided to slap his date around right there. Tiny told him to leave. The gentleman decided to fight instead. So Tiny heaved him through the plate glass door to the bar. The gentleman still wanted to fight, so Tiny obliged. The gentleman's date wanted to fight too, so I got scratched up a little (by her fingernails and by shattered glass) trying to keep her off Tiny's back while he banged the gentleman's head against the sidewalk every time the gentleman tried to get up to fight some more, until the police arrived.

I'm open to the idea that bar fights are abnormal. But looking back, I'd have to say that they weren't abnormal for me between the ages of, say, 19 or so and 30 or so. 
So, Just Now ... Why the Simulation Hypothesis Isn't and Can't be a Bona Fide Scientific Assertion

So far as I can tell, the logic checks out, and my money is on (3).

But I keep seeing pieces that go like this one:

Now scientists are searching for ways to put the simulation hypothesis to the test. Bostrom is eager to see more concrete developments of his idea. Experiments that could distinguish physical reality from a simulation “are what would be needed for it to be a bona fide scientific assertion,” he told MACH.

The difference between a hypothesis/conjecture and a "bona fide scientific assertion" is that the latter is falsifiable. That is, it is possible to show that it is false (if it is, in fact, false).

The Simulation Hypothesis is not falsifiable because if it is true, the creators, programmers, or administrators who created the simulation we live in could have coded rules into that simulation that return experimental results reflecting what they want us to know or not know -- for example, false falsifications -- rather than returning experimental results reflecting the truth. In extremis, they could even re-start the simulation or run it back in time if we conduct an experiment that gets around such rules, and add some new factor to make sure that doesn't happen "again."

Going back to the first paragraph, I find it interesting that attempting to scientifically test the Simulation Hypothesis is not just the equivalent of attempting to scientifically prove the existence or non-existence of God, it is attempting to scientifically prove the existence or non-existence of God.

Posted by Thomas Knapp at 1:03 PM View Comments Links to this post 
Jim Geraghty is the Sucker

Geraghty, writing at National Review:

The sucker assumption isn't Flake's, it's Geraghty's. It's naive to assume that Flake assumed -- or thought he needed to assume -- anything at all about the Democrats, or that if he did make any such assumptions they were anything other than the obvious one: That, like the Republicans, the Democrats are throwing whatever elbows they can get bent in the right direction at any given moment, for the purpose of scoring political points.

Flake's leaving the US Senate -- walking out of the ring on his own rather than being carried out after an election defeat. So it kind of looks like he's got nothing to prove, no voters to satisfy, etc. Complete freedom to "do what he thinks is right." I suppose we could leave it at that.

But you know me. I'm cynical.

Not running for re-election to the US Senate doesn't mean he's stopped being a politician.

Speaking in March in (ahem) New Hampshire, he took a far from Shermanesque line: "It has not been in my plans to run for president, but I have not ruled it out." And even if he never runs for anything again, there are always possible future cabinet positions, think tank gigs, what have you.

He throws Democrats a bone by making it clear he'll vote no in the full Senate unless there's an FBI investigation.

Check out Flake's big bipartisanship on Brett!

If he votes yes, he's back to being a Republican hero with his past anti-Trump transgressions forgotten.

If he votes no, he inherits the title of another (recently deceased) US Senator from Arizona: "Democrats' Favorite Republican."

The ambassadorship to South Africa seems to be vacant (Patrick Gaspard left in December 2016 and so far as I can tell the show there is now being run by a charge d'affaires, Jessye Lapenn) ...

If he votes yes on confirmation, perhaps President Trump suddenly notices the vacancy and Flake's qualifications for the position. If he votes no, then perhaps a Democrat elected in 2020 or 2024 decides that "Democrats' Favorite Republican" is the man to make the new administration look suitably bipartisan.

Or whatever. Flake's no sucker. He's playing politics. And he seems to be good at it.

Posted by Thomas Knapp at 10:29 AM View Comments Links to this post A Book Deal You Won't Want to Miss

Get the Amazon Kindle edition of Basics of Resistance: Book I of The Practical Freedomista -- from Claire Wolfe and Kit Perez -- for 99 cents today, $1.99 tomorrow, or $2.99 Wednesday. After that, it's still a steal at its regular price of $3.99. Posted by Thomas Knapp at 7:48 AM View Comments Links to this post