I believe in humanity’s ability to adapt and recover, but it typically comes at the expense of a lot of waste and pain. I’m increasingly worried that we’ve cheated younger generations of the ability to think. Not only are schools failing to teach it, but our emphasis on schooling has drawn many children and young adults away from the work that would once have taught them the same lessons outside of school.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Sanchez comes under fire for revolutionary march.
- CD1 shows the problem with a GOP that never gets to practice winning.
- Spin on education continues as usual in RI.
- WPRI and WJAR show different willingness to report on progressives.
- RI pols’ childish spin on state-to-state migration.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The uncovered antisemitism of anti-Israel rallies
- The discouraging new face of Rhode Island’s labor movement
- The attorney general’s unclear criteria for muting people he calls “trolls” on Twitter
- Diossa moves Rhode Island more deeply into pension-problem amnesia
- Multi-language learning students proliferate, sparking demands for more taxpayer money
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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Providence Democrat City Councilor Miguel Sanchez has been catching some deserved flack for marching with the anti-Israel rally in Providence over the weekend (although the criticism is coming from people who don’t exist within the awareness of Rhode Island power):
If local journalists weren’t so intent on not paying attention to the wrong people, they might think to ask Mr. Sanchez whether he heard the rally leaders chanting something about how Jews have to go. This conspicuous silence aside, it would be no surprise if Sanchez had chanted along.
The day of Hamas’s barbaric sneak-attack on peaceful Israelis in their homes, which (if it needs noting) was prior to Israel’s military response, Sanchez commended a statement by Texas congressional candidate Pervez Agwan redirecting blame:
“The images coming out of Palestine-Israel this morning are horrifying. It is unconscionable that the Netanyahu regime has ignited a powder-keg in the region by locking the Palestinian people in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip and throwing away the key. The Israeli government must respect Palestinian human rights instead of committing the heinous crime of apartheid.”
Agwan goes on to put blame on the foreign policy of the United States, as well. He’s too clever by half, asserting that he “unequivocally condemn[s] all attacks on civilians,” while writing his statement in such a way that a reader would think that Israel had performed the massacre with U.S. assistance. To consolidate the problem into a single observation: He doesn’t mention Hamas once. Simply consider that it’s a “statement on violence in Palestine-Israel.” He’s being deliberately (and evilly) dishonest.
Anybody inclined to ignore these statements from Agwan and Sanchez as mere talk from inconsequential political figures should rethink. Such radicals as these are on the political upswing, and it wouldn’t be fear mongering to say they are intent on overthrowing the United States as it exists. The donate button on Agwan’s campaign site says he’s engaged in revolution, which, if nothing else, exposes the talk about January 6 and “insurrection” as so much partisan nonsense. The same media personalities who’ve hyperventilated about that day are uninterested in or supportive of candidates and elected officials who proclaim revolution.
Americans are especially vulnerable to this rhetoric because revolution is in our founding story, so we can be slow to understand that the socialists among us use words to mean different things altogether. The “open-air prison” of Palestine, for example, doesn’t mean some walled off pen that Palestinians aren’t permitted to leave. It means a limited boundary beyond which Israel exists. When the radicals say “democracy,” what they mean is a condition in which they win without fail. When they talk of “racism and oppression,” what they mean is that their political opposition is refusing to surrender to the Marxist revolution.
When one of their chant leaders slips in the comment that Jews have to go, the crowd accepts it because they understand “Jews” to mean white people whose society has succeeded. That is, they think all of us have to go. If nobody pushes back, they’ll soon be referencing the “open-air prison” of being a minority in the United States and blaming non-revolutionaries for fostering the “powder-keg” that leaves the revolutionaries no choice but to decapitate our babies and murder us on a calm Sunday morning.
Featured image by Jose Clemente Orozko on WikiArt.
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When you chant “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea,” what those within Israel or externally supportive of the country hear is similar to what you would hear if a large group of conservatives marched in the street chanting: “White people will be free, from Bar Harbor to San D.”
You would infer an insinuation that “freedom” in this context means expulsion of the Other and that this prohibition must span from one border of a region (i.e., the United States) to the other. And you’d be correct to object to a group’s shouting chants that ignore the reality of representative democracy and the rule of law.
I suspect many progressives’ thought process is that Hamas’s recent atrocities were horrific, but the solution is to allow Palestinians, more broadly than Hamas, their area of autonomy. I’d be surprised if most don’t think “the river to the sea” means the borders of Gaza. Alternately, they may be using the apartheid framing, imagining that non-Jews are oppressed in Israel, in which case “freedom” means their enfranchisement throughout the country.
They should learn that those responses are not captured by the “river to the sea slogan.” Rather, the people chanting it are responding to the terroristic slaughter of Jews in Israel by endorsing their expungement from the region, which the rest of us understand as genocide, indeed.
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Step 1: Construct a simplistic narrative with obvious good guys and bad guys and a conclusion with which nobody reasonable could disagree.
Step 2: Ensure that the “bad guys” can’t actually harm the people protesting.
Step 3: Provide singsong, rhythmic slogans that sound innocuous, but that the intended opposition will understand as threatening.
Step 4: Cultivate a supportive environment with quick dopamine rewards for easy actions and peer reinforcement.
Step 5: Guarantee no (or nominal) consequences for ostensibly rebellious behavior.
Step 6: Repeat to the point of violence or absolute control.
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Hamas executed a brutal sneak attack with no declaration of war against innocent people in their homes and at a music festival. The big complaint against Israel’s response, recently, has been that one day was not enough warning for people to evacuate an area they were planning to attack after a declaration of war.
Which of those seems more likely to blow up a hospital or the vehicles of those attempting to evacuate and blame it on the enemy?
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Dan McGowan notes that new standardized test scores are out for Rhode Island public schools, and they’re not good.
Elsewhere, he finds a silver lining in the fact that English-language learners do better at English and are nearly caught up in math, but it seems like an indication of how poorly the schools are doing that native English speakers can’t keep up with those who are new to the language. In both subjects, in fact, we should question whether it’s a success that numbers are so low even those with language challenges are able to match them.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Hints (but not much more) of surprise at the monster progressives have created
- The media’s inability to find a difference between Leonard and Amo on Israel
- The sense that progressives are fine with Hamas-style decolonization (in Israel and maybe here)
- A podcaster activist
- Unhinged prices for political appointees
- Polisena’s familiar McKee retort
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3, with inspiration from a frighteningly relevant 2001 short story.
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Nonetheless, it’s worth noting this mild corrective from Brown University’s Dr. Ashish Jha on Newsmakers, as summarized in a recent “Nesi’s Notes” column:
“I think we all in public health could have done a better job of communicating with more humility about what we knew and didn’t know. There was a desire by some people to act more certain than they were.” But he also thinks major damage was done by the decision to effectively impose a nationwide lockdown in the spring of 2020, which he blames in large part on a lack of visibility caused by the botched rollout of testing. “The virus was in big numbers here in Rhode Island, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C.,” he recalled. “There was almost none in Mississippi, almost none in Montana. And because we did not know that, we had to do a nationwide lockdown. And people in Mississippi rightly said, ‘Wait, you’re doing all these public health measures — our hospitals are empty, I don’t know anybody who’s got COVID, no one’s getting sick, this makes no sense.’ And that very blunt response actually I think was the basis for a lot of people losing faith in the public-health response.”
Notice two major omissions, though. The first is from Jha, who doesn’t elaborate on how the overreactors will be held accountable. As always, the experts get an unlimited “oops” card.
The corresponding second omission is from Nesi and the rest of the media. Some folks had it right at the time. A healthy media system would be rewarding them for that, now.
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