Quick Read
A skeptical reader can find many things worthy of comment in David McRaney’s How Minds Change even beyond the author’s central objective of training people how to manipulate others psychologically to implement radical policies. Not wanting to write a book in response, I’ll probably just bring them up as they become relevant. One side point…
It’s “climate change,” of course; that’s the easy go-to answer for anything having to do with the natural environment. Even when there’s a more proximate explanation, the global bogeyman has to be tacked on, as the Boston Globe’s Dharna Noor does in this case: The culprit behind all those dead trees: Drought, which hit New England…
I know, I know… put something else on the list why don’t you? Well, this is an area that cannot be forgotten: Progressives have spent decades deliberately invading institutions with an eye toward turning them politically to their favor, which mean first making them political. I’m not among those on the other side who believes…
At the moment, it appears to be simply talk, but this is a concerning idea for Democrat Rhode Island Senate President Dominick Ruggerio to float: Ruggerio floated an outside-the-box idea for the state takeover of Providence schools: He wants to work with the Rhode Island Foundation, the state’s largest philanthropic organization, to see if it…
That’s the question that comes to mind when I see an historical anecdote such as this from Jean-Marie Valheur (via Instapundit): You will often hear about his great speeches, wonderful quotes, witty little anecdotes here and there. Or insights into his complex marriage. His mental health issues and how he overcame them and carried on…
I’m midway through reading a book about the psychology of changing your mind, and the author apparently sees understanding the subject as an important tool in overcoming our polarization. I’ll have much more to say about the book, no doubt, not least to suggest that increasingly subtle psychological manipulation may be causing the polarization. After all,…
Although the core political story in Rhode Island is inevitably Democrat, this isn’t a partisan post. The one detail I recall from Amity Shlaes’s book, Coolidge, that detracted from the 30th President’s story was an anecdote from when he was the Republican president of the Massachusetts Senate. A lobbyist persuaded him to go one way on…
A peculiar aspect of the mental abuse promulgated by progressives in Rhode Island (and the labor union activists who control them and the state) is the predicament in which they forbid honest discussion about issues like school reform, thus condemning students to substandard education, while casting aspersions at those who seek better for their own…
A scorecard of tech giants would take some work to develop, but Apple is a shameful enterprise, whether it’s better or worse than its alternatives: Tucker Carlson blasts Apple after the company limited the AirDrop feature in China: “Apple is now an active collaborator with China’s murderous police state. When tanks roll into a Chinese…
Ed Driscoll points to a great post by Scott Alexander that investigates the aesthetic gap between the classic and the modern. Alexander starts with architecture and a “conspiracy theory”: Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers –…