I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it characterized as “doubling down” before when a party to a lawsuit has appealed to a higher court, but here’s Sarah Doiron on WPRI:
Several parents who are challenging the state’s school mask mandate are doubling down on their efforts by appealing a Rhode Island Superior Court judge’s decision last week to uphold it.
As lead plaintiff Richard Southwell suggests, the court did suggest children are being harmed, only finding that the government’s interests were overriding. However one feels about that balance, it’s a legal question that should be answered, and that requires the highest available court.
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At the risk of expressing a forbidden opinion, this is not a healthy perspective:
Even if Indigenous people spend Thanksgiving with family and festivities, [Tomaquag Museum executive director Lorén Spears] said, “They still know that this isn’t always a happy time for us because it reminds us of all the trauma and loss that our communities have felt due to the conquest that took place here and how it still affects us today economically: Health disparities, educational disparities, the list goes on.”
We should absolutely learn about and remember the past, but reifying it for decades or centuries — making it a tangible thing in the here and now — only prolongs its effects, affecting health and, certainly, education. Just so are surveys finding younger sexual minorities’ false reification of past discrimination is having harmful effects on their health and success now.
We can observe a similar principle in our personal lives. Unfortunate things have happened to all of us, whether physical, mental, professional, or interpersonal, but those things are part of the path that brought us to where we are, which can conceivably be better than where we otherwise would have been.
After all, Spears is appearing on a podcast on the Internet, sharing her ideas with many more people than would have been possible just a few decades ago, let alone the centuries before Europeans traveled to the Americas. Yes, the life expectancy of Native Americans is lower than for non-Hispanic whites (78.4 years, versus 80.6 years), but that is up from a gap of nearly 30 years since 1968, when the numbers were 44 years for Native Americans and 70 years for the overall population, as illustrated by the chart in this post’s featured image. A chart comparing whites and blacks suggests this trend goes back much farther.
It is a tragic note of history that humanity was so slow to value human life and foster a sense of the common cause of all humanity, and we shouldn’t hide that reality, but valorizing the harms humanity’s moral lethargy did to our ancestors can only slow down continued progress.
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Nicole Solas and Jon Riches of the Goldwater Institute talked to Rich Lowry of National Review about Nicole’s ongoing battle against the South Kingstown School Department.
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If history repeated with a twist, would you notice? I’ve wondered that often, over the years, and have marveled how difficult it seems for people to spot trends and recognize analogies.
A recent example came courtesy of Paul Dion when he commented, “Absolutely disgusting,” while sharing a tweet by “they/them” California techy Chad Loder:
In Kansas, anti-vaxxers are showing up to municipal meetings wearing yellow stars, portraying themselves as having equal footing with Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Note that the people pictured in the featured image of this post would probably be more-accurately termed “anti-mandaters.” Note also that it is unjustifiably tendentious to say they’re claiming to have “equal footing with Jewish victims of the Holocaust.” This is true, first, because a warning about an extreme is not a statement of equivalence and, second, because the yellow-star patch was a warning about how marking and othering people can lead to atrocities, not a claim of atrocity underway.
Loder — a man of such apparent integrity that he blocked me shortly after Dion and I exchanged a few measured points in dialogue — proceeds to insist that “these people… need consequences for their dangerous, hateful, antisocial behavior. Name them and shame them and banish them from polite society.” He then shared a link for the purchase of bear spray, suggesting that readers should “protect yourself and your family from these animals.” (Which, to be clear, Dion explicitly disavowed when I pointed it out to him.)
I pause in this writing to marvel at the sheer zealotry and blindness of Loder’s thread. He is calling for the banishment and chemical spraying of people because, in speaking up to defend their rights (as they see them), they are making a direct reference to a disfavored minority who were “named, shamed, and banished from polite society” before being killed, often using chemical sprays.
Who is the dangerous fascist in this scenario?
Writing for American Thinker, Andrea Widburg lists some of the ways in which people who aren’t vaccinated against COVID are being cut off from services and freedom around the planet, including from medical care. Her closing paragraph is especially relevant to the point that history is always analogous, not precisely cyclical:
… We have become a world of extraordinary cowards, so isolated from risk that even a statistically minor risk turns us into quivering masses of fear who will hand over every vestige of liberty to people who have proven, over the last almost two years, incapable of keeping us safe.
Back in 2004, thinking through the rhetoric with which advocates were promoting research to “cure death,” I suggested that the rewards of victory might not be what the advocates expected. Indeed, they might look more like consequences: “When one can tally infinite years in a currency of pills, the barrel of a gun or, for that matter, blockage of the medication will see a rise in premium.” That is, the more control we gained over common, natural causes of death, the more frightened we would become of that which could still kill us, leaving us vulnerable.
Geopolitical events and economic challenges had left Germans vulnerable to those who would whip them into an oppressive frenzy. A similar frenzy can certainly arise when the perceived vulnerability is to a virus.
The Devil is not so foolish as to take the stage wearing the same costume twice, but by his works, we may know him. When people warn us of a familiar, sulfurous smell, we do better to wonder what their noses are picking up than to be the forces who make their warnings come true.
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Transgenderism in schools is one of those strange issues that is simply so odd many people will just not process it, to the point of denial, while others will insist on seeing it as completely normal advancement in human interactions, but that is going to determine answers to profound questions, whether we acknowledge the issue or not.
And so, parents in Wisconsin are suing their local schools for going against their judgement as parents, and even lying to them:
[Open full post]Several parents have filed a suit against a Wisconsin school district challenging a policy that allows teachers and school officials to refer to children by different names and gender pronouns without parental consent or knowledge.
Represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the parents are arguing that a Kettle Moraine School District policy takes away their right to make decisions about what is best for their children.
With that question, I mean Woonsocket as representative of municipal governments generally.
The city is in the midst of the process of figuring out how to spend the $36 million dollars the federal government will send its way as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). You’ll recall that the purpose of the act is to “deliver immediate economic relief.” When it comes to municipalities, the goal is ” to remedy this mismatch between rising costs and falling revenues.”
Of course, the money is moving at the speed of government and is therefore arriving well after it was actually needed. Thus, Woonsocket finds it makes sense to spend $250,000 for “an ice skating rink with synthetic ice” and $53,000 for “ergonomic chairs in the city council chambers.”
In short, Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats transformed a once-in-a-lifetime calamity for the people our country into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for government officials to buy themselves goodwill and future favors. Do what we may, the money is going to arrive, so the best that can be done is to spend it wisely in a way that pays it back to the people whose progeny will have to pay off the debt, but that doesn’t mean the whole transaction should have been started in the first place.
The debate in Woonsocket is helpful also in the degree to which it shows that the stakes are actually much higher:
Many of the people who spoke at Monday night’s council meeting want to see a portion of the city’s share of federal coronavirus relief funding go towards affordable housing and helping the city’s homeless, something not included in the proposal.
“What would you do if that was you, where would you turn? Because the city you’re living in is turning its back on you,” said another speaker during the public comment portion of the meeting.
Keep in mind that the ARPA included billions of dollars given directly to individuals and families, along with billions more in rental assistance. Again, the money to municipalities is specifically intended to shore them up during budgetary hardship (although the risk has arguably long since passed, by now). It shouldn’t be treated simply as a one-time windfall for general spending across political demands.
Helping people who have stumbled over some obstacle in our society or economy is desperately important, but a city government isn’t able to give them what they really need. Furthermore, using government’s “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to give it central responsibility for their housing changes the relationship between the people and public officials. The best way for Woonsocket to help those struggling to find housing is by addressing the causative obstacles, which include (among other things) infrastructure, taxation, and regulation.
Like the dye a patient drinks before undergoing a medical imaging procedure, ARPA funds are showing how incredibly inadequate our local civic systems are to make these decisions. All the players react mainly to that which is most obviously in front of them, and none have incentive to address non-flashy, fundamental imbalances or to resolve challenges in a way that reduce their own importance.
Featured image by Matt Collamer on Unsplash.
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Even before it goes into effect, a new rent-control law in St. Paul, Minnesota, is backfiring:
“Less than 24 hours after St. Paul voters approved one of the country’s most stringent rent control policies, Nicolle Goodman’s phone started to ring,” the Star-Tribune reports. “Developers were calling to tell the city’s director of planning and economic development they were placing projects on hold, putting hundreds of new housing units at risk.”
“We, like everybody else, are re-evaluating what — if any — future business activity we’ll be doing in St. Paul,” major developer Jim Stolpestad told the newspaper.
When you want more of something (e.g., affordable housing), you have to make it easier and more profitable to create, not harder and less profitable. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to address these challenges at their root (where the solutions will often conflict with progressive ideology) than to impose mandates on the effects.
The thing is — emphasizing that this became law by popular referendum — you can vote yourself stuff from other people, but ultimately, you can’t force them to work in order to pay for it.
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This is an amazing incident, in which YouTube cut the streams of several of its most successful, home-grown channels because they were utilizing a public video stream and were overshadowing mainstream media sources:
The Rekieta Law channel, which features multiple lawyers doing real-time analysis of the trial, often beat the number of people watching the PBS stream. The PBS stream is one of the more reliable ones available to YouTube users and was being used by several outlets.
The ability for anybody to reach a wide audience is the core selling point for YouTube as a business. It’s literally the idea behind the company’s name!
So, is YouTube scared of the legacy powers or do its managers want to join the legacy, not overcome it?
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Something is going on over there, and in addition to providing a red flag for Coventry, it illustrates a problem of catastrophic import that we all should investigate. The details, as Sam LaFrance reports them for WLNE, appear to be as follows:
- While in the hallway between classes on Monday, a male student at Coventry High School spoke the sentence, “He’s got a gun.”
- A staff member heard the student speak this sentence and informed the school principal.
- The principal locked the school down and called the police.
- Multiple agencies of law enforcement responded, with upwards of fifty officers, and searched the entire school (including students’ lockers and backpacks) twice with dogs.
- Students were finally permitted to leave (styled as “evacuation”) by 4:00 p.m.
- There was a police presence on the campus Tuesday.
- And the student who spoke the sentence was arrested, despite having no weapons or even access to firearms.
This is madness, but at least we can draw two lessons of much larger significance.
The first is the similarity to COVID-mandate madness. Although important details may be missing, it looks as if government employees dramatically overreacted across the board, causing great and unnecessary expense and distress. In that context, the arrest of the student for speaking a sentence that was overheard and (perhaps) misunderstood by a single staff member looks like an attempt to give the government employees an excuse. If he did something wrong, then they can’t be blamed for their overreaction.
Just so, the irrational demand that everybody must be vaccinated, down to the last kindergartener, carries the narrative of danger down to an obvious finishing point to cover the overreaction of public health authorities.
The second lesson that we can draw from the spoken gun incident at Coventry High relates to the attempts of critical theorists to make us unable to cope with civilization. Immediately on the surface is the message that even grown adults trained in the education and management of teenagers are incapable of addressing an overheard word without the presence of dozens of armed personnel. How dangerous a world and how inadequate the individual must be to the challenge of life! The message to students is, “We cannot handle the world, so obviously you’ll never be able to, either.”
More insidiously, this principle is reinforced by the additional message that the student at the center of the incident brought all this trouble down on his school and on himself unknowingly, with a casual slip of a phrase. A world in which that can happen is one in which it must be impossible to function without strict guidance from the collective.
Whether this is part of a neo-Marxist plot to destroy Western civilization or is merely the organic effect of shifts in our society, it’s existentially serious, and we ought to treat it as such. One way or another, this increasing tendency must be halted and reversed without delay.
Featured image by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash.
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Putting aside the insinuation of bad faith on the part of people with whom she disagrees, Providence English teacher Valrie Ranglin-Brown — sister of Rhode Island Representative Marcia Ranglin-Vassell (D, Providence) — makes a point well worth considering:
The John Hopkins Report on Providence Schools is truly not reflective of our schools. Its goal was to paint a negative and dismal picture and it succeeded leading to State taking over our schools …
Who cares that our students are also working to put food on the family’s table and keep a roof over their heads. I care when my Ss works night loses a patient (s) in the nursing home. “GM Miss , I have more bad news another of my patient died.” Who can tell me we are failing?
In a recent episode of his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell raises just this point when exploring the U.S. News and World Report ranking of historically Black college or university (HBCU) Dillard University. Dillard doesn’t rank very highly, even though its outcomes for the population it seeks to serve are arguably better than that population’s outcomes at the most elite institutions. The university fails only in that it hasn’t cultivated a reputation for eliteness, but it succeeds by tailoring education to its actual students, in a way very much in line with Ranglin-Brown’s priorities for handling her own students.
That said, the Johns Hopkins report and, similarly, standardized test scores are not U.S. News and World Report rankings. The report was an in-person analysis of a specific school system, and the scores are straightforward assessments of what we expect students to learn in school.
Maybe they’re both missing something important or emphasizing something not so important, but that’s a case that has to be made descriptively. Simply taking the word of people professionally vested in the status quo that there’s something nobody else understands would be a travesty of deliberate ignorance. If every attempt at an objective measure screams for dramatic reform, voices against reform have to come up with more than complaints and conspiracy theories.
Stepping back a bit, though, Ranglin-Brown’s testimony actually supports the call for major change. Her point is that Providence schools are not failing, but rather, that they are forced to grapple with unique challenges. Fair enough, and true. But that means the solution is to redirect public resources away from schools that can’t address the problem and toward services and programs that can.
This won’t be done in Rhode Island, however, because the most powerful special interests in the state will not accept any solution that is calls for “different” rather than “more.” We shouldn’t question the concern expressed by people who devote their lives to educating disadvantaged children, but we can’t ignore their own interests, which lie in protecting a system that cannot succeed.
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