No sooner do I resolve to take the summer off from social media than the Lieutenant Governor of the State of Rhode Island, Sabina Matos, decides it’s politically advantageous to involve me in her primary campaign to retain her seat. According to her press release:
The Ocean State Current and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity gave a platform for years to Justin Katz and others who have proven time and again to be vitriolically anti-choice, casually homophobic, and unconscionably sympathetic to white supremacy.
As evidence of my iniquity, Matos (through her PR hack, Evan England) links to a tweet reply of mine to Democrat Governor Dan McKee. When a small group of far-right cosplayers conducted a pathetic few-minute protest of a reading of Communist doctrine by a pathetic handful of committed Socialists in Providence, the Governor of the State of Rhode Island made an issue of it, asking Rhode Islanders to report any wrongthink if they had “information related to this incident.” I asked him his position on the First Amendment, which (for progressives who have lost track) is the one recognizing Americans’ right to free speech.
The tweet is actually more relevant than Matos and England might realize. The point of the press release is that Matos is refusing to participate in a forum with her primary opponent, Deborah Ruggerio, because it is hosted by people with whom she disagrees politically. A transparently convenient excuse, that. Take note that the lieutenant governor only represents people who share her politics.
Matos, through England, insists that my tweet “defend[ed] the indefensible rhetoric of white supremacists.” In point of fact, unlike the governor, I defended the right of American citizens to express their opinion. If he and she are not willing to do the same, they have no business at all holding public office.
Predictably, a politician at sea on large issues is adrift on small ones, too. Rhode Islanders should demand that top elected officials with influence on the expenditure of billions of their dollars should up their game. Matos must have no case at all for her reelection if she has to look to my Twitter feed — not to mention rejection of the First Amendment — for justification.
Featured image downloaded from Sabina Matos’s campaign site.
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This is probably a strange question to pose, but nonetheless, one wonders. As the state government moves toward spending big money on suicide barriers that will inevitably change the aesthetic character of the bridges on which they’re installed, what is the belief system underlying our local culture? Where do supporters for such things stand on, say, physician-assisted suicide?
I ask only because my sense is that our society is deeply confused exactly in the way that would spend money to stop people from killing themselves by jumping off bridges while also spending money for doctors to pull the fatal chemical trigger upon request.
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The idea of “reasonable” and “common sense” gun control laws is becoming an obvious sham. Reasonable people acting according to common sense differentiate between policies in different states and balance facts such as how frequently a particular type of weapon has been used in crimes in the state where gun-control legislation is proposed and what the circumstances tend to surround actual shootings. A state that already has relatively strict gun laws in which no high-capacity magazines have contributed to mass shootings and where increases in gun violence appear to be associated with increasing gang violence is not a place where common sense dictates a need to ban such magazines, particularly when doing so further reinforces the common wisdom that Rhode Island is not a good place to invest your life’s effort:
“It’s devastating,” said Jeff Goyette, owner of Pocasset Arms LLC. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” …
“I’ve got my life invested in this shop right now, and I haven’t even finished it,” he said. …
“In the past few years that I’ve been stocking up, trying to get them into my retail store, probably over $250,000 worth of firearms,” Goyette said. “Eighty percent of those probably hold more than 10 rounds.”
The state’s message to Goyette, and those whose investments have been limited only to guns they’ve already bought, is, “You do not matter in this state.” The people pushing these changes are not acting according to reason and common sense; they’re acting according to ideology and emotion, and the end goal (certainly of those who are manipulating the unreasonable) is not a balance of rights and safety, but control and the removal of all rights from people with whom they disagree.
Featured image by Jose Clement Orozco on WikiArt.
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The political commentary crew on CNN pretty uniformly believes Democrats will experience a “trouncing” come November. Well, look. That’s what happens when you install a senile old man through questionable means, selling him (to the extent you bother to make the case at all) as a reasonable centrist even though the people who make decisions on his behalf are hardcore Marxists. The truth is that a “trouncing” is too soft. If we had a healthy civic society, the Democrat Party would be utterly wiped from the face of American politics… and quickly replaced by a new opposition to Republicans.
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Stories like this, by Kavontae Smalls in the Atlanta Black Star, should be a more prominent part of local news, giving us all an opportunity to acknowledge and admire the achievements of those with whom we share a corner of the world. Woonsocket sophomore Mariam Kaba has been awarded a $25,000 scholarship and given $1 million to spend helping people in her community. Except… the award has been served up with divisive rhetoric and false talking points, contributing to a harm that is potentially much greater than whatever hardship $1 million can alleviate in the short term:
Kaba says she experienced the disparity in resources firsthand when she attended a predominantly white high school in Cumberland, Rhode Island, where the median household income exceeds $96,000 according to census data.
“Cumberland is predominantly a white city, and their city is so clean and furnished, their education is like a hundred steps ahead of us, so me coming back here is like, Woonsocket is a low-income city, we’re a predominantly minorities, look at our education, look at what we’re learning, we’re so behind,” Kaba said.
The story can’t simply be that different communities have different resources, and we should work to minimize the effects of disparity on the children of each. No. It has to be framed as white people versus non-white people. Implicit racism must be implied. Naturally, in finding the cause so easily, advocates allow themselves never to address deeper problems that affect education and income.
Even within the article, readers have reason to question the narrative. Scroll up from Kaba’s assertion about Woonsocket’s being “predominantly minorities” and you’ll find this:
Woonsocket mirrors the state’s population demographics with a Black population around 8% and more than 80% white.
The narrative relies on word games. Racism must be the cause of disparities, so “low income” must be synonymous with “predominantly minorities,” and so all the white people of Woonsocket simply have to evaporate. They cannot exist. (They certainly cannot be given any special advantages that might help them close “wealth, employment and education gaps,” because every poor white person who gains wealth makes it more difficult to achieve racial equity.)
To be fair, Smalls’s numbers may be out of date. The latest Census numbers put Woonsocket at 70% white. That is a smaller majority than Cumberland’s 88%, to be sure, but it’s still substantial. “Predominant,” one might say.
To be even more fair, Anchor Rising’s People’s Data Armory shows that the racial difference between Woonsocket and Cumberland is larger at the school level. Cumberland’s white students continue to account for a 74% majority, whereas Woonsocket’s are only the largest minority (in the statistical sense), with 42%. However, the charts show that this is a relatively recent change, while the wealth difference between the towns is not. The difference in percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunch (FRL) has not tracked with racial makeup.
The story we are being told, even in feel-good stories about student achievement, is false and malicious.
Featured image from the U.S. Census.
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To live in the shoreline suburbs of Rhode Island is periodically to encounter raw evidence that progressivism has gained its purchase here, at least in part, as a way for some of the most privileged people in human history to feel themselves even more superior while assuaging their own guilt by accusing those who are slightly (or even significantly) less privileged of holding the incorrect views, all in the name of “tolerance” and support for the disadvantaged.
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An episode of the High Noon podcast featuring Oren Cass brought to mind a point relevant to my break from social media.
Cass is, in some respects, a contrarian in conservative circles, expressing some healthy skepticism against the free-market bent of the Right (a bent, to be clear, toward which I definitively incline). The assumptions of free market economics, he suggests, are not always correct, especially to the extent that free-marketers assume their philosophy will be to the benefit of all (or to the degree that they studiously avoid concentrating on those whom it does not benefit).
In this regard, the same category error affects both sides of the debate. Free market economics should not be mistaken for a comprehensive philosophy. Like science, math, altruism, and any other consideration, it describes a system of thought within defined boundaries. Just so, self-improvement books tend to totalize specific areas of focus that may or may not be relevant to a particular person in a particular set of circumstances. Some describe the “ought” of what we should pursue, while some describe the “does” of how things work, and all must be understood within their own limits.
Free-market economics are much more within the “does” category than the “ought” category, and we go wrong when we blur the lines.
The above-mentioned podcast raises a point (incidentally and tangentially, to be sure) that should be valuable to both sides of the ideological divide. The key point, to my mind, when it comes to the evolution of the market and the loss of traditional ways of doing, is that we need to be aware of what is and what is changing.
In the past, technology and the capacity for transportation imposed restrictions that no longer apply, and sometimes those natural limitations benefited the human sociological system overall. A wise progress will seek to understand what is being lost to change and look for ways, not to maintain the limitations, but to preserve (conserve) that which is valuable.
There is a value to looking people in the eye. There is a value to interacting with people who share your geography rather than your ideology. We lose these things as our lives turn virtual or unbounded by location. We need to think about that value, and like a person who places sticky notes everywhere to remind him or herself of things, we need to find ways to keep them in our awareness.
Featured image by Theodore Gericault on Unsplash.
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Sometimes the commentary on social media gives one the impression of an alternate reality.
At the highest level, social media is a world of information, which means it can be entirely abstract. You can say or imagine anything, and the more you live apart from tangible reality, the less what you say and imagine has to conform with anything real.
Sure, at the next level, we’re drawn toward each other, and people don’t want to live in realities in which others won’t join them. This only means, however, that the crowd must move away from reality more slowly than the individual can. Over time, the bar of convincing others to move their reality toward your own is not very high, particularly if you’re participating in an ideological project with powerful forces behind you.
To be sure, enough people still prefer to form their opinions about reality based on facts, but for these folks, social media can create information tunnels that downplay facts that might keep them from moving with the crowd while amplifying those that usher them along. Often, a widely shared delusion serves the same function as a “fact,” whether it has to do with specific claims that a black man was kneeling with his hands up saying “don’t shoot” when police shot him or broader claims about riots, viruses, elections, politics, or the economy. And again, the more we live in an information virtual reality, the more plausible it becomes for others to construct evidence that falsehoods are actually true.
In the past month or two, particularly as Democrats have revved up their outrage machine to scare up as many votes as possible (no matter the truth or damage to our society) and as progressives have hardened their grip in Rhode Island (with a hapless, desperate “moderate” governor attempting to achieve reelection by jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon), social media has become a fever swamp. This state of affairs is healthy neither for our community nor for the mental health of those who participate.
At the same time, I’ve been taking a class on information technology, and it’s cast my mind back to the time before — before social media, before blogs, before email, before an easily searchable Internet. I’ve managed to thrive, to a degree, in the digital world, but at the loss of what perspective, I cannot say.
So, for the summer at least, I’m moving back one step to the time before social media, in order to recall a life of forming ideas away from the constant chatter. The experiment is not without cost, inasmuch as many people, including long-time readers of Anchor Rising, have fallen out of the habit of visiting websites to see what content may be there, relying instead on their social media streams to waft information past their eyes. Traffic has taken an instant hit as people who still want what we provide are not reminded that it’s here several times a day.
If you have more fortitude than I do and continue to wade into the waters of Twitter, Facebook, and other streams, please don’t be shy about offering those reminders on our behalf. Maybe we can start to break newly formed habits. Not long ago, blogs provided the discourse and sense of human connection, without disconnecting from facts and reality, that social media has turned into an unhealthy drug. All it takes is participation.
Featured image by Mahdis Mousavi on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The old politics fail with gun bills
- Voting bill on the path to destroying RI elections
- The ticking time bomb of Providence’s pension obligation bond
- The same old game of the soccer stadium
- The car tax elimination as a cheap payoff to taxpayers as a special interest
Featured image by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash.
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The totalitarian Communist language of administrators in the Foster-Glocester school district is reason for concern about the direction in which our country is headed:
Several students at Ponaganset High School brought “anti-tolerant” flags to school following a celebration of Pride Month.
In an emailed statement to The Journal, district leaders said there had been an “isolated incident” following the kickoff of Pride Month last week.
A day after the celebration, an administrator noticed some students had flags “symbolizing anti-tolerance culture, which is against core values of our district,” read the statement, signed by Foster Supt. Michael Barnes, Glocester Supt. Renee Palazzo and Ponaganset High School Principal Amanda Grundel.
This report, from Linda Borg in the Providence Journal, cites “a Confederate flag and a flag that directed an obscenity at President Joe Biden.” Elsewhere, a self-acknowledged activist mentions “‘Don’t Tread on Me’ capes” and “‘2024 Trump Returns’ shirts.”
I haven’t been able to find the images quickly, so I can’t report what the prominence and balance of the different messages and symbols was. However, the message from administrators makes that less relevant. When authorities talk about “anti-tolerance culture,” they aren’t condemning particular language or contentious symbols from the ugly parts of the nation’s past. They’re condemning a subculture within their community.
Vulgarity on school grounds is open for restriction (“Let’s Go Brandon” would have been preferable), and the Confederate flag, at the very least, justifies discussion about the bearer’s intent. But these “educators” are not offering nuanced critiques or working to balance freedom with community. Their language is all about stamping out disagreement with their preferred ideology:
Our district condemns any and all hate speech in all forms, and we will not tolerate any behavior by any member of our school community who behaves contrary to that principle.
“Any and all hate speech in all forms.” What does that deliberately (and redundantly) broad condemnation include and not include? We can’t know. And what does it mean to “behave contrary to that principle”? Is it enough to tolerate — on First Amendment grounds — students’ expression of ideas the administration doesn’t like? This sounds a lot more like “anti-tolerance culture” than anything I’ve read about the students.
Of course, redefining words to mean their opposite as a method of thought control is a standard Marxist technique. Students are on notice; they must be tolerant of who and what authorities tell them to be tolerant of and intolerant of anything that so much as questions the diktat.
Don’t let this story slip by, because it’s much more relevant than just a school administration cracking down on some contentious teens.
Featured image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.
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