Amidst all the other happenings in Rhode Islanders’ lives, it’s worth a moment to consider that we’ve reached the point that the General Assembly is delving into such levels of micromanagement as housing setbacks and in-law apartments in local zoning. That’s a sign that we’re doing things wrong.
In the mania of the day (or simply because Borg-like progressives increasingly dominate conversations), I’m seeing people mention it less frequently, but one of Rhode Island’s most-endearing qualities is the heterogeneity of neighborhoods across the state. The genuine diversity of living possibilities in the Ocean State is incredibly attractive, intrinsically characteristic, and worthy of preservation. These are propositions that should enjoy agreement across the political spectrum… unless it is unthinkingly swamped by moral sloganeering and simplistic economic thinking.
Here’s a straightforward point that only seems counterintuitive because our society has gone utterly insane: You don’t get diversity from the top down. You get diversity when people are free to pursue their unique preferences. Genuine diversity is unavoidably organic. It’s a balance of completely atomized individualism with natural group formation. Complete diffusion is salvaged by the human need for community so that unique communities form.
Think of it in terms of neighborhoods. If every resident pursues the extreme of individualism, the block looks like an incoherent mess. If people with compatibly unique personalities congregate, the neighborhood gets character. Every time the top of the Rhode Island power structure decides We the People cannot be trusted to make community decisions, it is implicitly demanding greater conformity.
The practical politics and incentives are easy to understand. Because it’s difficult to win over majorities across dozens of communities, special interests move up the ladder (backed by a relatively small group of noisy do-gooders) and make it in the interest of state-level politicians to tell Rhode Islanders how they ought to live. You can buy a Speaker of the House or a few dozen legislators more cheaply than you can buy majorities of local councils and boards across the state.
In this reality, we see the importance of maintaining a baseline shared truism among the broader population that such matters are not the business of those fungible officials. No law of the universe says housing has to increase in a particular area. I don’t like protectionism or tight local zoning, either, but the value of freedom and self-determination is so immense that we should insist that advocates do the work of persuading the people, rather than buying off a handful of powerful politicians to impose tyranny with the hope that it might do some good for some people in the short term.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s State of the State
- Forcing Johnston to use a back door to keep residents safe
- Amore invites voter fraud with same-day, immediate-residency proposal
- The cost of the soccer stadium
- “Rumors” about a new Washington Bridge
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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Such information as this, tweeted by Gregory Conley, is important to keep within your awareness:
Such exploration is valuable, but we need strong personal and cultural safeguards against abuse. Earlier this week, the Dall-E 3 AI (via ChatGPT) I use for many of the images on this site refused to add the Confederate flag on top of the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard. Even putting aside errors and the sci-fi talk of AI’s developing its own hostile intentions, we have to wonder what medical AI will refuse to do or, conversely, insist on doing.
On the human level, talk about how “using a human [for medical treatment] *at all* is costing lives” is a plea to shift diagnosis away from a human being in whose eyes you can look to other human beings who may have no interpersonal medical experience at all.
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Over the course of several tweets, John Hayward provides an explanation of why the Left uses tactics that seem sure to bother people rather than win them over, starting here:
In brief, these are the shock troops so their slightly more socially legitimate allies can promise to make the disruptions go away for a political price. The deceit is that the disruptions never go away; there’s always another cause.
The biggest mistake normal folks make is to think the purpose is persuasion. It’s not. It’s power, pure and simple. The activists want to assert power to disrupt your life so you’ll exchange political power for relief.
For this reason, it would not be the sort of gotcha question that journalists typically direct at Republicans to ask Democrats whether they support these tactics, and then to remove from office any who will not actively oppose them. If they don’t oppose them, they implicitly support them.
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By political design (one suspects), discussion of American history has lost something recently. People commonly suggest it’s been “dumbed down,” but that’s not the definitive change. Rather, it has lost the principles of liberty and mutual respect. I have in mind this tweet from one-time Anchor Rising contributor Patrick Laverty:
Knowing and respecting Patrick, I’d insist it would be too easy to conclude that he’s being disingenuous with his first point. Nonetheless, follow the link and watch the video clip. Haley didn’t say it wasn’t her job to decide whether the Confederacy was wrong in its time. She was saying that, in her time as South Carolina governor a century and a half later, a large portion of the people whom she was elected to represent “saw the Confederate flag as heritage and tradition.”
You can like it or not, but symbols change over time. For an illustration of this fact, spend some time tracing common sayings and symbols back to their origin and then listen for them in casual conversation. You’re bound to overhear soccer moms with children at their knees using phrases they’d never utter in front of minors if anybody still associated them with the gross or offensive images they once represented. Just imagine the hysteria of a basket case thinking a circle jerk was a cake walk.
By the time people of my age and Patrick’s turned on the TV to watch The Dukes of Hazzard, the Confederate flag was had been diluted to merely a symbol of the countrified rebelliousness of the good ol’ American South. Maybe it was wrong for the country to allow that to happen, but happen it did. If viewed with respect for fellow citizens, Haley’s differentiation was between those who, when contemplating the Confederate flag, thought of their nearest of kin and local communities of the mid-to-late 1900s, and those for whom it still represented the enslavement and brutal war of the mid-1800s. It’s not fair of Patrick to call the former “anti-US” and “pro-Confederacy,” in its original sense. Consider how many people respectful of the Confederate flag volunteered to fight for the United States in its wars of the Twentieth Century.
Actually, something more than “not fair” is going on, here. To Patrick — who, I’ve no doubt, is simply stating a shared sentiment of his Northeastern social cohort — all those people are simply disqualified from being represented by politicians who share their views. If you’re searching for “un-American” sentiments, that ought to be pretty high on the board. Even respecting the rubes’ views enough to give them consideration is “disqualifying” in the eyes of comfortable Northeasterners.
At the risk of being declared a “disgrace to humanity,” I’ll admit my opinion that we’ve lost something by so utterly rejecting the symbol that the Confederate flag had become by the time I was a child. Maybe our culture has since forgotten, but by the 1980s, the flag had become tied into Americans’ sense of themselves as rebellious believers in liberty, representative government, and voluntary association. Yes, that transformation brought with it more than a little irony, but culture and symbols don’t have to maintain everything in strict consistency (and history isn’t so straightforward, anyway).
When the British Empire became oppressive to the interests of the colonists, we rebelled and formed our own government, which permitted the voluntary association of territories, and in a strict sense, the Confederacy rebelled in that spirit. Nonetheless, by our historical understanding of ourselves, Americans collectively determined that this right of self-governance was overbalanced by the evil of slavery and the right of individuals to have voluntary control over their own lives, and so the Civil War came to a righteous end. Through the tension of these principles, we sharpened our understanding of freedom and honed the balance between a community’s right to live according to its own beliefs and the individual’s right to remain free within its boundaries.
In such terms, the notion of Southerners as “traitors” is a category error. You’re not a traitor for wanting your community to leave a voluntary civic union, anymore than expatriates are traitors for exchanging American citizenship for that of another country. If the United States were to leave the United Nations, as I wish we would, supporters of that decision wouldn’t be treason. Advocates for Brexit weren’t traitors against the European Union. There are better and worse reasons for doing such things, but leaving isn’t treason to anybody but dictators. To the contrary, treason consists of pretending continued support while intentionally acting against the group’s interests.
Unfortunately, this is an increasingly foreign idea in New England, where progressives prove by their every policy that they don’t believe in liberty and representation. All that you have — all that you are — is theirs for the regulation. Disagreement is inherently disqualifying, because it is treason against their morally superior march. If your beliefs fall outside of the narrow boundaries of what they find acceptable, you aren’t permitted a substantive vote, whether on issues or on candidates.
Thus does irony rear its head, again: Those who insist the Confederate flag must always and everywhere represent the evil of slavery wind up with a political philosophy that disenfranchises their countrymen.
ADDENDUM (10:25 a.m., 17Jan2024):
The context of the clip of Haley from above is worth highlighting. As governor of South Carolina, Haley removed the Confederate flag from the Capitol. So, what makes her statement “disqualifying” in Patrick’s view is that she gave people who disagreed with her tradition any consideration at all. This is dangerous territory.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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I earmarked this Boston Globe article, which John DePetro and I discussed last week, for one additional point related to this:
“A great scoop can come from anywhere,” said Brian Stelter, a media reporter who previously hosted CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “Right wing media historically has talked about others reporting, but done very little reporting on its own.”
That’s just not accurate. “Right-wing media” has done a whole lot of reporting at every market, from local to national. The likes of CNN simply ignore it as if it can’t be of real interest. That’s one of the ways they’ve controlled the social narrative over the past however-many decades.
The reality is that the story of the Harvard president’s plagiarism was just too much for the media to ignore, as much as they would have liked to.
Perhaps if mainstream outlets (including the Boston Globe) were to open their minds to different outlets, different stories, and different journalists, they’d discover a wide world of content they didn’t even imagine existed. Unfortunately, I don’t think they want to imagine it because they fear they’ll bring it into being… or at least to the attention of the voters they live to manipulate.
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Fortunately, this trial balloon has already been deflated, but do not doubt for a moment that the horizon is full of others like it:
They (the bureaucrats, progressives, and, sadly, Democrats) believe a rootless country will be easier to subdue and control with permanent power. I think they’re wrong, but they’ll destroy the country in the experiment.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Miguel Sanchez’s dehumanization of Mark Patinkin
- Neronha’s social media turn on Newmakers
- Shipping in the homeless on palettes
- RI education’s fiscal cliff
- RI labor band goes to the White House
- Fenton-Fung looks for dynasty in Cranston
- RIGOP signature problems
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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Considering how frequently I criticize professional journalists, I may too infrequently convey how powerful I think their role can (and should) be. A recent Johnson Sunrise article by Rory Schuler, about the resignation/retirement of Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) Executive Directo Joseph Reposa, is an excellent example of what we’re losing. Without making a gooey statement so unctuous you can’t miss it, his selection of details conveys the sense of a more-important-than-most-realize public meeting (and the implicit corruption) so well the implication is unmistakable:
Chairman Michael F. Sabitoni, of Johnston, a local labor leader and union official, arrived. He was shortly followed by fellow governance committee member Diana Ducharme, of Cranston, meeting the quorum requirement of two.
Ducharme lost her voice and whispered when required to speak.
The morning’s two-member governance committee voted to go into executive session to discuss Reposa’s “annual Job Performance Review.” Reposa had the option to have his review in public session, but chose to have it behind closed-doors. …
Rodio, Ursillo’s law partner, doubled his reading speed, firing off the motion, almost approaching an auctioneer’s cadence.
“Following a thorough review of the executive director’s performance, and achieving the performance metrics as outlined in his contract, and finding that he excelled therein, the committee recommends that the board authorizes the award for his performance compensation in the amount of $25,000,” Rodio said. “In furthermore that the board authorizes the chairman to negotiate and execute a consulting agreement with the executive director on mutually acceptable terms.”
The motion carried unanimously.
Currently, the bedtime-story book I’m reading to my youngest is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, so I’m primed to see Schuler’s presentation as Twainesque. (Ol’ Mark would have done better than “almost approaching an auctioneer’s cadence,” but such are the differences between admirable practitioner and master.) Literary allusions aside, the salient factors are clear. Tiny quorum… big budgets… crucial infrastructure. The way in which Rhode Island manages its basic services is worthy of parody. Sadly, we’re short of parodists, these days.
One can’t blame the characters for playing their roles. Mr. Reposa was making “at least” $245,000 at this quasi-public organization and walks away with a completely discretionary, union-approved $25,000 bonus, even as he stays on as a consultant to help with the organizational hand-off to the next director, who’ll probably work there for less than a decade, too, and rely for his parting bonus on how well he satisfies the workers he oversees. Some folks might wonder why it isn’t basic integrity to have a successor prepared as part of a chief executive’s ongoing duties, but never mind. The more-salient problem for Rhode Island, given the condition of our political scene, is that mere competence carries a justifiable salary premium in our government operations.
Short of parodists we most certainly are, but our deficit is even greater on the ledger of citizens with an ear for parody. Perhaps this is why no market exists for good journalism. We’ve reached the point that our local society is indistinguishable from the casually ignorant racists lampooned at the end of The Adventures of Huck Finn — and our journalists not only cater to that crowd, but they are its chief representatives.
Alackaday. As the curtain closes, give the article linked above a read. We need more like it, but like more than not, we can only hope to wish goodbye to the world that was.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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News that the Rhode Island Republican Party is struggling to hit the qualification requirements to place any presidential candidates on the primary ballot points to a deep problem in our state’s political landscape. This is true even if we put to the side (for now) rumors that some large number of signatures were inexplicably invalidated.
At all levels of government, in Rhode Island, I’ve noticed a general sense that our political system is eternal and self-generating. Local factions seem to believe that, no matter what they do, the “loyal opposition” will continue to help out and, well, be loyal. State-level Democrats, including mainstream journalists, evince a belief that the Republican Party exists as a distinct entity that people are inherently motivated to maintain. This is an error of understanding.
One of the research findings to which (with his college professor habits) Jordan Peterson refers regularly on his podcast concerns young rats at play. If a large rat does not allow his smaller playmate to win wrestling bouts some percentage of the time, then the smaller rat won’t play anymore. I offer this not to imply that Democrats ought to permit Republicans to win, but they’ve rigged the game so strongly in their favor as to make it impossible. We’re beyond plain (and ethical) fairness. Corrupt insiders and partisans will naturally seek such advantages, but others ought to take note at the consequences of the system that we’ve permitted to develop in the Ocean State.
Rhode Islanders who incline toward Republican policies (if they haven’t already left the state) have little reason to participate. Likewise, national groups and politicians have little reason to concern themselves with our interests. Our politics are mindlessly partisan and corrupt. Ours is a failed state, merely being carried forward by history’s momentum, and one of the signatures of such failure is that nobody has both the ability and willingness to stop the decline. In this regard, we have reason to fear Rhode apathy has been so amplified because national Democrats — who gave themselves license for a by-any-means-necessary approach to Donald Trump — have set the United States of America on the same course.
Whatever his shortcomings, President Trump played a hugely important role as a finger in the eye of the establishment and a reminder that the people have the power. Insiders didn’t receive the lesson well and turned our shared government and political institutions into a pure expression of their own power, as if to show Americans who’s boss.
If Rhode Island Republicans do manage to place presidential (or any other) candidates on the November ballot, we should ponder Rhode Island’s example as we choose among them. Politics isn’t some established competition in which we all agree on the value of the game, as a game, and will therefore maintain the rules and infrastructure of the league. When one team goes crazy, as the Democrats have, no referee exists to step in. No commissioner can levy fines to maintain decorum and stability. The players and the fans have to value sanity more than their partisan advantage.
In a recent article about the presidential preferences of local members of the GOP, none articulated this obvious point, and this omission suggests that their mindset remains politics as usual. To the contrary, politics as usual is a state of affairs to which we must return, and we can market that intention to the electorate as our platform. Surely, a large majority of voters fall to the right of leftist insanity, and our decision is to balance our opportunity for extremity against a decisive, message-sending victory in favor of the normal.
Our local political scene is set for an adult to step onto the field and insist that the time for games is over. We need competence and mutual respect, but with the candid honesty to point to corruption and error. That not a single presidential candidate has such a champion to collect signatures in our state — from the brawling Trump to the understated Haley — is strong evidence that such a person does not exist, at least with the willingness to enter the political spotlight.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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