Social media provide a strange, unprecedented venue for public interactions. On one hand, these platforms promise the degree of connectivity and access that has characterized the Internet from its early popularization. On the other hand, a bit of space between our raw personalities and our in-print public personas is healthy.
So, what to make of the fact that Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha has “muted” me on Twitter, and with pitiful excuse? One is tempted to say that people show their true colors in such places, but who could survive the immediate codification of his or her extemporaneous responses in casual conversation?
The quick summary is that Neronha posted, without link or context, that he mutes “troll accounts.” He and I had a bit of back-and-forth about public officials’ preventing the public from interacting with them evenly on social media. When I pressed for the criteria for his muting people, he simply asserted that I was “beyond the bounds,” and that was it.
Honestly, my first reaction is that this impetuous immaturity on his part is illustrative of disqualifying inadequacies that ought to keep him from further public office. If I were to file a legal complaint, related to government transparency or otherwise, and it came before him, I wouldn’t trust his office to handle it fairly. I was hardly harassing him on his Twitter account, so if my mild behavior put me beyond the pale of his awareness on social media, then how could anybody who shares my views, generally, be confident we’re not beyond the pale of his responsibilities in office?
The fair counterbalance I’ll offer is that I don’t expect the attorney general to hand me his cell phone number, give me the passcode to his home security, or invite me along to all of his professional or political meetings. After all, he didn’t block me, as (say) WPRI reporter Ted Nesi did after I asked whether a politician’s doing him a favor in his role as a journalism professor might create a conflict, so I can still heckle Neronha from the sidelines if I so choose; he just doesn’t have to hear me.
Still, Rhode Islanders must be able to trust the AG to conduct himself with a fairness well beyond the standards of a thin-skinned journalist. If I’d actually been trolling Neronha, by any reasonable definition, then muting would be a measured response. But the question nags: why was it such a bother to him that I wanted to know the standards for defining a Rhode Islander as a “troll”? His reaction makes one wonder how easily we lowly citizens might be dehumanized and deprived of our rights in his estimation.
The most frightening thought that follows is that he might be the best of them (meaning Rhode Island Democrats), which suggests principles of due process may not carry much weight in the Ocean State.
ADDENDUM (September 27, 2023, 7:14 a.m.
Having apparently read this post, Attorney General Neronha responded on Twitter to a direct question of mine from September 12, stating that he hadn’t muted me. Providing no facial expressions or body language, social media presents a new category of challenges. Of course, we act with nearly as little information as we have when attempting to interpret people’s thoughts behind their skulls. After all, one receives no notification of having been muted or unmuted, and others can choose to see individual posts of people they’ve muted. In any event, I’m glad Mr. Neronha has not crossed the line I thought he’d crossed (or, in any event, stepped back across it in the other direction).
Featured image from Shutterstock, with background adjusted using AI.
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Is the idea to consolidate as much power as possible — both incorporating all areas of society and expanding across geographies — and then put it in the hands of the incompetent and corrupt? That sure seems to be what’s happening at every level of government.
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Among the many reasons for growing distrust of mainstream journalism is its apparently incessant need to make everything an indication of impending doom. (This is true, at least, when mass hysteria is seen to serve Democrats, as with the climate. On matters that point in the other political direction, like illegal immigration and the economy, only good news, if it can be found, squeezes through the guard.)
So, we get articles like Alex Kuffner’s in the Providence Journal, confirming that, “Yes, downpours are getting heavier, and more frequent in RI.” The article purports to supply the numbers to substantiate this claim, although the cited source does not appear to make them readily available to the public. One gets the sense, anyway, that the reader is meant simply to acknowledge that numbers are given and accept that they support the claim being stated on their basis without giving them much thought. Consider this paragraph from Kuffner:
Since 1905, the average number of days per year in the Providence area with more than 1 inch of rain has increased from eight to 14, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University. Last year, there were 12 such days. This year, there have been 10 so far.
If the average (over some unspecified time period) is 14 and last year saw 12, it may be that the curve is headed down. In any event, water is life, and if we can get our acts together, surely we can benefit from this flow of life rather than cowering from it.
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Excellent work by Jim Hummel of the Hummel Report with this investigative report, published on the front page of yesterday’s Providence Journal, pertaining to a state mandate that 25% of its vehicles be electric; i.e., zero emission.
The goal was to make one quarter of the state’s light duty vehicle fleet EV’s by 2025. So already excluded from that calculation is all of the state’s medium and heavy duty vehicles – plow trucks, dump trucks, etc. Seems like a reasonable, even modest, goal.
Apparently not. From Hummel’s investigative report:
The state has struggled to reach zero-emission goals for its own fleet of vehicles, as cost, supply and unwillingness by some departments to purchase all-electric and hybrid vehicles have left Rhode Island significantly short of hitting its initial target.
Accordingly,
McKee quietly issued a new executive order in May giving the state five more years to reach the 25% goal, although the administration insists it wasn’t moving the goalposts
Interesting. So it turns out that it isn’t just the private sector who finds electric cars costly and impractical. In fact, it came to light a couple of weeks ago that even US Energy Secretary Granholm couldn’t make one work for a summer road trip without a staffer in a fossil fuel vehicle acting as an advance team at the next charging station(s).
No criticism of McKee here. The initiative that mandated the state’s fleet be 25% EV, called “Lead by Example” (gosh, its name is sure turning out to be inadvertently prescient), is not Governor McKee’s but his predecessor’s, Governor Gina Raimondo, via an Executive Order that she signed in 2015.
The push from certain isolated quarters to change from fossil fueled to electric vehicles is a huge proposition and one that is fraught with … um, challenges, to put it mildly. As we are seeing in real time, you cannot ignore the reality of those challenges and make it happen by rigid, blind order – even a modest one.
In pushing the goal back, Governor McKee simply took action that is grounded in reality; in stark contrast with the basis of Governor Raimondo’s 2015 Executive Order.
The fact that a state government, with all of its power and resources, could not achieve even a 25% change-over to electric vehicles in a ten year timeframe speaks volumes about the practicality of the proposal.
Rhode Island via the Department of Environmental Management will soon hold hearings on new “clean air” regulations, Advanced Clean Cars II (ACCII) and Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT), that would effectively phase out the sale of all new fossil fuel cars and 75% of fossil fuel trucks in Rhode Island by 2035.
Nowhere in the draft regulation does it guarantee that manufacturers will have adequate inventory to supply the state. Nowhere in the draft regulation does it explain how Rhode Islander consumers and businesses will be able to pay for an EV, notoriously more expensive than fossil fueled ones.
In short, the draft ACCII and ACT regulation has no more grounding in reality than Governor Raimondo’s 2015 “Lead by Example”.
The infrastructure, production and affordability of electric vehicles is nowhere close to real world applicability. Issuance of another government mandate based in fantasy is not going to bring that about, as we are seeing play out in real time with the prior governor’s Executive Order.
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Two implications of this recent tweet from Nicole Solas illustrate the danger that begins to fester when the institutions of a state become wholly partisan.
The first implication is that it will be very surprising if the attorney general or anybody else in Rhode Island law enforcement turns up the heat on a Democrat threatening a blacklisted conservative.
The second is, if anything, more disturbing. As somebody on the upper end of paying attention to happenings in Rhode Island, I’m surprised that I didn’t know about an assault on a sitting state senator that resulted in a probation. Searches on both Google and Bing produce zero results and, in fact, point instead to the incident in which Rogers knocked out an intruder in his home.
We’re not getting the news, in Rhode Island, and we therefore cannot be said to be making informed decisions during elections. Deepening the peculiarity is that controversies should be of interest to our fading news media. It’s like they’d rather destroy their business model then question the Party.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Providence schools continue to fail and nobody asks the right questions
- Magaziner jumps right into the partisan spokesman role
- Leonard lets the election pass him by (without a base)
- Illegal immigration simmers at the edge of mainstream awareness
- Curious incuriosity in the media about mail ballots
Featured image by Justin Katz using Firefly.
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Rhode Island investment expert Michael Riley tweeted a chart recently that rewards closer analysis:
Notice a common theme dividing everything above and below “food and beverage”? Actually, everything from “housing” up is heavily subsidized, in one way or another, by government, while everything below is not. Basic economics should lead us to expect that subsidizing things increases the price.
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I know of at least one Massachusetts town where these new residents are about to enter an understaffed school system en masse. Even more, they are getting free preschool and free transportation to preschool, which for residents is an additional cost that some are deciding is too expensive.
We need to understand — and explain to our neighbors as they begin to wonder what’s going on — that Northeastern governments (led by Democrats) don’t think they need us, and they therefor do not represent us. They want to import clients for their services for which they can then seek to bill other people.
This scheme may have worked for a very small number of cities (like Lawrence, MA), but when whole states are scrounging around for people to pay for the services to which officials have committed, people will begin to say “no” in one way or another.
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Doublespeak such as that used by Democrat Congressman Seth Magaziner in the following tweet has become so common that we hardly notice it. He (or a staffer who wrote the post) may not even realize the problem with the word choice (which would make it doublethink, I suppose):
If government supports journalism, it is by definition not independent. That word, “independent,” may still have a salutary ring in Americans’ ears, but one suspects what Rhode Island’s all-Democrat delegation actually wants is a local media that handles them favorably, or at least carefully, because they are its benefactors.
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As is increasingly required, Nicole Solas has gone outside of Rhode Island to bring attention to a problem within the state, writing in Daily Caller:
I pay my pediatrician for check-ups and throat cultures, not ideological finger-wagging about sex education in kindergarten. But at that moment I realized that gender ideology in medicine and education was not about the health and safety of children. It is about people abusing their positions of power to tell parents how to raise their children. It is about authoritarianism.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island offers “safe zone training” for healthcare providers, and these stickers identify compliant providers. Critics argue these stickers are mere reassurances of “inclusion,” but my former pediatrician told me the stickers are meant to start conversations with children about gender ideology.
This is straightforward ideological capture of crucial service institutions. Cult-like ideologues take over key corporate departments, government agencies, and independent associations and push their beliefs down to practitioners.
Nobody should doubt that progressives, even quite mainstream and “moderate” ones, will talk themselves into believing the suffering, and even death, of some children is justified in the service of “inclusion,” which has rapidly come to mean “exclusion of noncompliant people.”
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