The Reason Roundtable

On February 12, 2018, Emily Horowitz debated Marci Hamilton about whether we should abolish the registry for convicted sex offenders. Horowitz is chair of the sociology and criminal justice department at St. Francis College, and Hamilton is the author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children.

The debate took place at the Soho Forum, which runs Oxford-style debates in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event. The side that gains more ground is victorious. ​In this case, Horowitz—who argued for abolition—won overwhelmingly by convincing 33 percent of the audience to switch over to her side.

The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, has a twofold mission: to provide an arena for intellectual adversaries to talk in paragraphs as opposed to 140 characters, and "to enhance social and professional ties within New York City's libertarian community." It's held at the Subculture Theater at 45 Bleecker Street in Manhattan, and after the debate wraps there's always free food and a cash bar. Doors open at 5:45, and the event convenes at 6:30—at which point the party has already begun.

Shot and edited by Micah Garen.

Video games have become one of our most impactful, popular, and creative forms of media. Last year, the industry generated almost 150 billion dollars in revenue worldwide, rivaling books and films and dwarfing music.

Gamers spend over three billion hours a week in the virtual worlds of their choosing. And, more so than other contemporary forms of media, video games explore the themes of freedom and personal agency, allowing players to go where they want and do what they please—as long as they're prepared to bear the consequences. Two of the three best selling video games of all time are Grand Theft Auto 5 and Minecraft, polar opposites in terms of violence and target audience, but both of which were designed to offer players the opportunity to make their own destinies.

But it's the Assassin's Creed series published by Ubisoft that makes the philosophical conflict between liberty and authority central to its plots, characters and the alternate history in which they are set. Reason takes a look at the series' narrative merits, and the titular creed.

Written and edited by Ian Keyser. Read by Andrew Heaton. Gameplay footage by Sean Keyser.

"Plague" by Kai Engel is used under CC BY 4.0.

"The whole premise of the war on drugs is that if you focus on the supply side, you'll solve all of the U.S.'s problems with problematic drug use," says Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. But "no matter how much money you put into fighting organized crime, there are always going to be new leaders ready to step into the shoes of those who've been arrested."

The failure of that supply-side approach is an overarching theme in McFarland's new book, There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia. It recounts the bloody aftermath of cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar's death, when the Colombian military, surviving drug lords, left-wing terrorists, and paramilitary groups vied for power. Focusing on three individuals who helped expose the atrocities and win justice, the book examines the impact of U.S. intervention in Colombia's drug trade.

Before joining the Drug Policy Alliance last September, McFarland spent over a decade as a drug policy analyst at Human Rights Watch.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with McFarland recently in New York City

Edited by Mark McDaniel.

Music: Modem by Kai Engel. All music licensed under Creative Commons. (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US.)

"Life is poker, not chess," says Annie Duke, a former professional poker player and the author of a new book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. Chess is a game of skill with "very little luck involved," while in poker good decisions and good outcomes often don't go together.

Duke cites Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll's decision in the 2015 Super Bowl to call for a pass play that was intercepted. Since the interception rate in situation like this is about one or two percent, it was a good decision that didn't work out. In football, like life, humans are prone to draw the wrong conclusions from situations involving bad luck.

"We go around and we change our decision making because we've evaluated the quality of a decision based on one outcome," says Duke. "Try and cordon yourself off from the outcome [and] recognize the uncertainty of the future."

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Duke to discuss life, chess, poker, football, and why we can all benefit from exposure to dissenting opinions.

Edited by Austin Bragg.

Is it OK to punch a Nazi?

It was a hotly debated question for months after video of white nationalist Richard Spencer getting punched in the middle of an interview on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration went viral and inspired countless remixes.

But the question was never really just about Nazis. It is about the acceptability of political violence. And in the following year the question came up and again and again as several high-profile political protests turn violent, including at UC Berkeley, often considered the birthplace of the free speech movement in the 60s.

We visited Berkeley about a year after that protest-turned-riot to ask students whether punching Nazis, or other deplorables, is ever OK.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello.

Camera by Paul Detrick and Monticello.

Music by Krackatoa, Kai Engel, and Teehoteeho available at http://freemusicarchive.org.

Donald Trump tends to call whatever he dislikes "fake news," from inconvenient facts to unfavorable reporting. Even though the President himself is less a font of truth and more a spigot of self-serving exaggeration and insults.

But Trump isn't all wrong when he labels reporting against him as fictitious or slanted. Reporters have become so enraged with the President that in their hurry to lambast him, they sometimes forget about fact checking and standard quality controls.

The result is that actual "fake news" is slipping into major news outlets. When hit pieces turn out to be false, they bolster Trump's claims about the media and discredit journalists in the eyes of his supporters.

In the latest "Mostly Weekly" Andrew Heaton explains the relationship between "Trump Derangement Syndrome," fake news, and a solution for the media.

Congress is "spending us into oblivion," Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in a blistering speech on the senate floor yesterday.

This morning, President Trump signed a massive new spending bill that will increase the discretionary budget by about $400 billion.

In memoriam: The GOP once actually pretended to care about fiscal restraint.

Produced by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

In 2015, Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the massively popular comic strip Dilbert, boldly predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election.

Adams sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie in front of a live audience in San Francisco to talk about his book, his "extreme liberal" views, the popularity of his live broadcasts with followers via Twitter, and why Trump is a "master persuader."

Edited by Ian Keyser.

"Gun control is not dead, gun control is undead," explains Cody Wilson, the director of Defense Distributed. "We just keep killing it but it keeps coming back."

Wilson, a crypto-anarchist and serial "troublemaker," helped launch the age of the digital gun when he published files showing how to make the Liberator, a 3D-printed pistol, in 2013. It set off a panic in the media and in anti-gun political circles, and the State Department demanded Defense Distributed remove the files from their website.

But five years after the Liberator debut, the technological limitations of homemade firearms have started disappearing. In late 2017, Defense Distributed released files that allow the Ghost Gunner to mill out unfinished metal handgun frames. Wilson says the new focus on handguns is in part a legal strategy based on the 2008 supreme court case, District of Columbia v. Heller, that affirmed the right to own a handgun for self defense.

Produced and edited by Mark McDaniel. Additional footage by Todd Krainin.

Music by Kai Engel and Nine Inch Nails.

"Trump is a refreshing reminder that the guy that's in the White House is another human being," says Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired and author of the new book Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet.

In 2013, Rossetto was the co-recipient of Reason's very first Lanny Friedlander Prize, an award named after the magazine's founder that's handed out annually to an individual or group who has created a publication, medium, or distribution platform that vastly expands human freedom.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Rossetto to talk about his new book (the paper version was lavishly designed and crowdfunded on Kickstarter), the 1990s tech boom, and why Trump "diminishes the power of the state" in our heads.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, Zach Weissmueller.

Machinery by Kai Engel is used under a Creative Commons license.