Artsy people’s complaining about gauche wealth-culture is nothing new, but something about this complaint by progressive podcaster and musician Bill Bartholomew struck me as oblivious of the obvious:
Working late on Friday to frame out a roof on Ocean Drive 15 years ago, while watching BMWs roll by, I had similar thoughts. But I also appreciated the consistent and interesting work available to me as a carpenter, as well as the beauty of location and architecture around me. The same qualities attract many tourists each year.
Note, however, Bartholomew’s snobbish juxtaposition of “hooting and hollering” from people he looks down on and the “vibrant” lives of people he prefers. His artist’s view might move toward my artisan’s perspective if the funding structure of the arts hadn’t shifted so dramatically from the patronage of the wealthy to the dole of the government.
Progressives and socialists (if there’s a difference, at this point) fall into the trap of thinking that government control will change the aspects of society they want changed while preserving those they value. They can be surprisingly reactionary about the latter, tightly gripping the false beliefs that (1) their views will guide government (which they won’t, even if politicians’ ape their slogans) and (2) that government is capable of nuanced and fine-tuned control of progress. It isn’t. Government is a blunt tool.
The trends in Newport and across the state are the consequence of the choices Rhode Islanders have made through their government, but the ability to imagine an outcome does not mean it’s really available. You cannot have the past back. You cannot freeze the present. The city is going to change one way or another. If government seeks to preserve its architectural character, then the prices will go up. If activists demand housing prices freeze or go down, the city must change.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: A crucial element of Rhode Island’s charm is its diversity of neighborhoods — the unique character of small areas. That doesn’t happen with planning; it happens with freedom, and freedom brings change, leaving us only the choice to adapt.
Maybe the entirety of Newport will become AirBnBtown, but then workers will be able to demand a premium for their travel there. (More economic liberty might produce innovative ways to get them to work and reduce the traffic.) Or maybe the economics of property value will make lower-cost housing profitable for developers in ways that will make the trust funders complain.
My prediction is that if we stop trying to control everything and let niches develop, taking enjoyment from the excitement of watching the future unfold, our attitude will change as a community. Sure, everybody gripes a bit as things change, but if they can carve out a place, even the things they gripe about gather a familiar warmth around them. And if the change is fundamentally incompatible with any given person’s preferences, maybe Newport isn’t the place for him or her. Why should we entertain such people’s demand that everybody else accommodate their tastes?
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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As an undergrad, back when the Internet was still brand new, I decompressed by reading through Stephen King books borrowed from the Carnegie Mellon library and noticed something. One of his recurring techniques was to imagine the familiar as the monster. Cujo was a dog. Christine was a cool car. Firestarter was a little girl. The title character in Cycle of the Werewolf, which became the movie, Silver Bullet, was the local priest.
As a non-King movie, Child’s Play, showed, the idea caught on, and naturally, artists’ explored the opposite: heroes whose appearances or identities are typically associated with villains.
One of the defining peculiarities of the present day is that this species of literary device has become written into our society and is affecting our ability to assess reality. Consider this headline: “‘Drag Mom’ Who Mentored 11-Year-Old At Satan-Themed Pub Sentenced For 11 Child Sex Felonies.”
At this point, we’re being encouraged to actively suspend our common sense and long social experience to avoid harm before it’s done. What do we think is going to happen?
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Jeann Lugo was acquitted in November of simple assault against Jennifer Rourke at the State House melee last June. The other criminal charge against Lugo, disorderly conduct, had been dismissed in August.
Now a three member panel of police officers, in a process arising out of LEOBOR, has unanimously voted to set aside the firing of Officer Lugo ordered by then-Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements. Current Providence Police Chief Colonel Oscar Perez has indicated he will abide by the panel’s decision.
Heartfelt thanks to both Judge Joseph Terence Houlihan (especially Judge Houlihan) and to the three members of the panel for wisely looking at all of the evidence and delivering justice to a falsely accused man.
Two matters stand out for me.
> Now that Jeann Lugo has been held to account, Jennifer Rourke needs to be held to account for her actions of both that night and the aftermath. She is clearly seen (major credit to WPRO’s Tom Quinlan for posting this full video) assaulting both Lugo and another man by violently shoving him. And she lied under oath twice about her actions to investigators.
> Jean Lugo should unquestionably sue Bill Bartholomew for defamation including maximum damages. None of this – a mob ginned up against Lugo leading to his being criminally charged; former Police Chief Hugh Clements rushing to order the termination of Lugo; the criminal trial of Lugo; the baseless damage to his reputation – would have happened had Bartholomew not created and released a very short video of the incident that was so extremely edited that it was a palpable lie.
A video that deliberately cut out what preceded Lugo’s actions in using an open-handed defensive technique against Rourke.
A video that cut out Rourke repeatedly laying hands on Lugo and physically restrained him from trying to defend Josh Mello, who had just been sucker-punched.
A video that conveyed the completely false story that a man had struck a woman; a white cop had struck a black person; a male candidate for public office struck his female opponent – out of the blue, for no reason.
I contend, in fact, that Lugo actually has an obligation to file a defamation suit against Bartholomew because such litigation is a righteous and powerful way of discouraging the future creation of similarly false, harmful videos by people hungry for clicks and attention and, specifically in this case, by someone who has reached for stepped up credibility by conferring on himself the title of “Journalist” – something that, remarkably, Bill Bartholomew has done.
[Featured Image Credit: screenshot from Tom Quinlan’s video of the melee.]
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Sometimes the cognitive dissonance from special-interest ideologues’ commentary is so strong it’s difficult to know whether they’re brainwashing, trolling, or both. Consider this tweet from Rhode Island labor union executive and progressive activist Patrick Crowley:
Before Crowley moved up the union-organizer ranks and was still specifically with the National Education Association of Rhode Island, I had occasion to argue policy with him from time to time, and he was not shy about deploying the standard talking points. Ask a professional union advocate why super-effective teachers shouldn’t be paid more than mediocre or marginal ones, and they’ll give you some variation of: “We advocate for an excellent teacher in every classroom.”
In short, they respond with a dream in which all professionals in an occupation can be standardized at the very highest level, evading the fact that a standardized, one-size-fits-all contract will be more attractive to those who are below the average than above it.
Interesting arguments can be had about this topic, but notice the contrast with Crowley’s tweet. Why couldn’t supporters of standardized testing just say: “We advocate for excellent results for all students.” They do say such things, and the NEA’s response isn’t about the complexities of testing, evaluation, and accountability, but is a propagandistic appeal to emotion: “there is no such thing as a standardized student.”
I’m no fan of a system that relies on standardized tests as more than one of many datapoints, but the way the public school system is structured at the moment, such tests are the only option for accountability. Naturally, the teacher unions oppose any measure that might begin to expose (1) the ineffectiveness of the system that treats them so well and (2) either the differential effectiveness of teachers or the irrelevance of teacher effectiveness.
A better approach would be to move away from standardization altogether — including standardization of teacher compensation as well as standardization of enrollment, by which I mean assigning children to schools based on where they live.
Schools that operate according to standardized contracts and enrollment will find it easy to come up with non-standardized reasons that every child is benefiting from their services, but the parents and the public can have no trust in their proclamations. The alternative is to allow schools to manage their teachers according to the non-standardized measures of effectiveness that any organization can develop and then allow families to assess and choose schools according to their own non-standardized priorities.
Featured image by Niamat Ullah on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Twitter and tension between McGowan and Neronha.
- Will Pawtucket soccer be the next multi-million-dollar loss for the lead investor?
- The progressives’ attack on Regunberg.
- The latest episode of the Providence crime drama.
- Cranston and WJAR show a proper response to homeless encampments.
- Is shunning Mota more important than housing people?
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Guest: Steve Frias, Republican National Committeeman
Host: Richard August
Description: Frias offers a different perspective on affordable housing in Rhode Island. The dominant approach is too limited and does not take into consideration the realities in various communities. Frias suggest that our view of what is affordable housing is must take into consideration the many variations of what is actually affordable to different people of different means and preferences and where they wish to live and work. Guest and Host also speculate about the next presidential election and various outcomes.
Justin Roias — the Providence City Councilor for the ward covering the North End — doesn’t like self-storage facilities. That’s fine, but his response and reasoning raise crucial points of organization and problem solving:
I came across Roias’s tweet via Rachel Miller, who is participating in “the effort to update our zoning laws to prohibit new self storage facilities in Providence.”
Rhode Islanders must come to understand (and soon) that this sort of thinking lunges into a downward spiral. Even if we go along with the premise that “the self-storage industry is exploitative,” such businesses do not create the “times of disruption and desperation” to which they’re responding. We could also say that flies are exploitative of festering wounds, but the appropriate response isn’t to spend time batting away flies; it’s to tend to the wounds.
Personally, I’d go farther and insist that progressive policies are to blame for the disruption and desperation, which is why progressives spend so much time chasing down the symptoms as a means of denying the illness. If I’m too extreme in this, however, bans are still not the best solution. Create opportunity for individuals and for businesses in the city, and self-storage will cease to be the most profitable use of the land. It’s that simple.
If Rhode Island progressives can’t bring themselves to support pro-growth policies, even then they should recognize a fundamental truth: the need for people to downsize and the belongings that they are therefore looking to store do not simply disappear when the city makes their lives more difficult and expensive by banning nearby storage facilities. To the extent it doesn’t result in even-worse outcomes like street dumping, Roias’s apparent approach will make self-storage facilities more valuable and able to be more exploitative.
We must stop accepting governance by those who don’t see people as autonomous beings trying to make rational decisions in the exchange of services, but as exploiters and victims who all just need to be told what to do by enlightened politicians.
Featured image by Joshua Coleman on Unsplash.
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It remains to be seen whether progressives have taken their radicalism a bridge too far with the aggressive push on the trans issue. Sentiments like the following tweet from Sam Bell, a far-left Democrat state senator from Providence, probably read like commentary from a bizarro world to most parents (or anybody with a tendency to think things through):
First, let’s get some context. At the end of the thread of links is an article by radical writer Steve Ahlquist (who does not have children of his own, I don’t believe) objecting to a proposal in the Smithfield School Committee that would curtail the district’s policy of lying to parents when their minor children express doubts about their sexual identities. (Even the notion of small children talking about a “sexual identity” will strike many ears as odd.) Ahlquist correctly notes that this adjustment would be contrary to the state Department of Education’s encouragement of schools to have policies of deception. This statewide guidance, alone, ought to be enough to persuade parents of the danger of entrusting their children to government-run schools.
Naturally, when I expressed a contrary opinion, one of Bell’s followers took the accusatory tack of implying that any parents who don’t go along with the radicalism must be suspicious on the grounds that their children find them untrustworthy. Such responses expose two important problems with this entire way of conceptualizing schools and parental rights.
Primarily, it’s simplistic, aggressive, and manipulative. Good parents want to know when important and, especially, unexpected behaviors crop up in their children, and the progressives’ view could apply to anything. If your child is getting bad grades, showing evidence of getting involved with drugs, or anything else that kids tend to hide from their parents, the radicals could just as easily blame the parents for the insinuated lack of trust in that area. Schools are supposed to work collaboratively with parents to catch and correct such developments, and schools are supposed to take a subsidiary place to them. It is parents’ role to determine whether the other adults with whom their children interact are trustworthy, not the other way around.
Even parents who believe their children will trust them with every secret should reevaluate their views if they think schools should have the authority to lie to other parents of whom they don’t approve. The radicals’ policies lump all parents under a cloud of suspicion characterized by the worst parent they can imagine; you’re not exempt from that condemnation just because you think you’re a good person.
A more-practical point too often missed is that it is insufficient simply to assert that some parents might not react the way well-meaning people would prefer when they receive information about their children. We have to evaluate the alternative. In this case, the alternative is moving the school to the primary position of authority, empowered to evaluate the parents. This can’t be done in the abstract, and it can’t posit the ideal schoolteacher and administration as the hypothetical alternative to the worst possible parent.
Indeed, if we promote policies that give school employees a maximal amount of trust — giving them social approval and legal support to lie to parents about matters of sexuality — we’re creating a gigantic magnet for precisely the sort of predators from whom we should protect children. Ideological predators belong on the watchlist in addition to sexual predators.
As with everything involving public schools, take careful note of the lack in accountability. What safeguards are there for these lie-to-parents policies? What consequences are there for teachers, counsellors, and administrators who make calamitous decisions in these sensitive areas? None and none. Intrinsically, parents can have no ability to appeal or seek other opinions when the government agency is actively hiding the truth from them.
We can tell the motivation isn’t ultimately the well-being of children because of the vagueness and carelessness of the plans. If the radicals were serious, they’d propose comprehensive safeguards, with many levels of approval and outside review. They’d include strong consequences for any of the professionals who negligently make mistakes. They don’t even attempt it. The radicals aren’t serious; they’re just radical.
Thus, we can conclude that they don’t care how many children or families they harm. The issue isn’t the issue; the revolution is the issue.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Observing that a significant majority of Americans now believe the COVID lab-leak theory despite the idea’s having recently been banned on “Big Tech platforms,” Glenn Greenwald recalls a 2021 Pew Research finding that over a mere three-year span the percentage of Democrats who support big-tech censorship had grown from 60% to 76%, and (worse, in my book) their support for government censorship had increased from 40% to 65%.
This relates to a p0int I’ve been making frequently over the past few years, particularly with reference to local news media: Journalists and others have given themselves permission to deliberately ignore views that conflict with their own, which generally means those that conflict with radical progressivism.
To see my impression reflected in the data, scroll down to Pew’s table of results for different demographic groups. Arguably the most shocking trend in the data is the increase of support for censorship among those with at least a college degree. They went from the least likely to support censorship to the most. When it comes to big-tech censorship, this group went from 53% support for censorship to 61%, 2018 to 2021. And terrifyingly, support for government censorship among the college educated jumped from 30% to 51%.
This trend, if it isn’t a quirk of the unusual COVID-Trump period, is a massive red flag warning of the end of our civilization. Not only does it indicate systemic indoctrination of American youth, but the particular form of that indoctrination is particularly toxic. The people who should be the most comfortable analyzing information believe one of two propositions, or both: Either they, for all their education, do not think they can determine when they can trust the information they find, but that experts in the government can do that work for them, or they do not trust their fellow Americans to make up their own minds and feel it is government’s role to manipulate them.
Well-meaningly, of course.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- An education plan that fails to go beyond the slogan.
- How under-delivering is on brand for the governor.
- How not to react when the media is on your cul-de-sac.
- The campus revolution infiltrates Bud Light.
- Magaziner’s inability to read graphs.
- McKee drawn by the smoke and fire.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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