When I returned to college in 1996, after two years of difficult, low-paying labor, I pledged a fraternity, and one of the brothers asked another pledge and me to remove a triangle rainbow sticker that somebody had slapped on the rear bumper of his truck. I had to ask what the sticker meant, and the answer — that it had something to do with homosexuality — seemed incongruous.
Back then, the Rainbow Coalition was about race (that is, people of different colors), and the rainbow as a set of colors was mostly associated with childhood and innocence. Being irreligious, back then, I did not know that the rainbow was also a sign of God’s covenant with Noah not to wipe out sinful humanity again. In the years since, the rainbow has become almost entirely coopted for activism around the many variations of sexuality that can emerge when sex becomes wholly a matter of pleasure and self-expression, rather than the biological propagation of the species. Subtle stickers have become waving flags.
To some, they appear as conquering flags, proclaiming that an organization or institution has been captured by an ideology that takes full advantage of the fact that (so far) God has remained true to His covenant in order to ignore His corresponding emphasis on humanity’s fertility.
It’s a clever marketing scheme that steals a number of intellectual bases. Adult themes are wrapped in a cloak of youthful innocence. Symbolism of diversity becomes a tool of intolerance. Just so, the mainstream in Rhode Island has been simmering in controversy over the decision of the Little Compton Town Council not to fly a “Pride flag” (note the incorporation of one of the Seven Deadly Sins in the marketing) on a government flagpole.
As is apparent everywhere in our society, these days, the revolution must always be churning. Local governments can’t simply strive to accommodate the community needs of the people and help us work together where interaction cannot be avoided. Where once progressives might have won support for the argument that flying a Christian flag was a source of discomfort for non-Christians, who should feel included in their local government, they now demand that the flag of another belief system be flown so that anybody in the community who disagrees will feel receive the message that their beliefs are done and fading.
One council member explained the “no” vote by pointing to the multiplicity of “Pride flags,” which might leave some identity group out if not included. The point captures the mechanism of the scheme. The rainbow implicitly includes the full spectrum of colors in light: ROYGBIV. The symbol’s emphasis in its modern usage, however, is that every band remains distinct. Red is not orange is not yellow is not green is not indigo is not violet. The challenge, then is to have the social leverage and political power to have your chosen color included on the symbol, not so that it represents everybody as a unitary whole, but so that each identity group can point to its own representation on the flag.
If you’re not included, you’re not fully human, and your rights are not covered by the covenant as you’re subsumed by the social flood.
Featured image by Mick DePaola on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Especially when done with calculation for political gain.
When our nation experiences another school shooting, advocates — right up to the White House, at this point — refuse to give us so much as a day to process the emotions and gather information. They insist that they have the solutions, that they’re easy and obvious, and that anybody who does not immediately advocate for them is simply looking the other way, probably deliberately and probably with evil intent.
We can see what a ghoulish, ugly impulse this is by imagining how those advocates might behave differently if they were genuinely affected by such incidents and did not dehumanize their opposition and belittle their rights. Typically, people with that sort of attitude don’t demand that their allies rally and ram through the policy they want. Rather, they recognize that it isn’t merely fifty Senators and a lobby group standing in the way, but a very sizable percentage of their fellow citizens, and they ask themselves what it is those people see differently. Their goal shifts from bullying to persuading, and in the process, they can’t help but form a better understanding of different views.
Human nature being what it is, this has always been a challenge, but without question the mechanism of social media has catalyzed the noxious fumes of progressivism throughout our society into a dangerous, volatile atmosphere.
The news out of Texas, yesterday, was horrifying, but the impulse we should elevate isn’t the one to divide and agitate for political advantage. Rather, the impulse we should elevate is the one to hug our own children. We should expand its application to our neighbors and our communities. If we put our emphasis on getting to know those around us and better understand them, we might spot those in crisis; we would certainly foster an environment in which they’d be less inclined to extreme action and more likely to seek and to receive help.
And where our embrace of our communities must be political, we would recognize that the purpose of politics is to draw us into debate and toward compromise, not to impose our simplistic solutions on others through raw power.
In short, we’d act very differently than the way we’re acting now.
Featured image by Gary Bendig on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Over the course of a day, readers of Twitter brush off many such tweets, but in this case, the writer is Ross Cheit, a political science professor at Brown University who was, until recently, the chairman of the state Ethics Commission:
I imagine that anything that a GOP operative has in their possession can also be obtained some other way, if that’s your question.
Anyway, I don’t recall ever seeing a story where a partisan is credited like that. Still seems very strange.
Cheit is referring to a Providence Journal article in which Katherine Gregg credits Steve Frias, “a lawyer, state GOP delegate to the Republican National Committee and historian,” for the contribution of his political-historical research to her summary of balloting history in Rhode Island.
Pause to allow the significance of Cheit’s comment to sink in. Gathering historical information takes work. Frias does that work out of his own interest and offers it as a contribution to public discourse and information, and journalists frequently make use of it. His political priors are transparent and well known, and to my knowledge, in decades of reviewing his research, not one journalist (or Democrat, for that matter) has found (or even claimed) that the historical information he provides is not accurate.
Meanwhile, Cheit is a political science professor at an Ivy League University. If any role in our society should be filled by somebody who appreciates the work of gathering information and has full perspective on people’s political engagement versus their personal and professional interests, that role is it. Yet, here, he ignorantly attempts to discredit Frias and chastises one of the state’s top political journalists for utilizing his work and giving him credit, while she’s careful to inform readers about his political bias. Worse, Cheit is implying that ordinary people going about their lives can’t become engaged in the political process, themselves, without being written off in their other work… at least if they’re Republicans.
Take particular note that Cheit does not suggest the history Gregg provides is colored by Frias’s political leanings. He simply doesn’t like that a Republican should be treated as a legitimate participant in the process of information gathering.
Finding that a Brown professor is basically a Democrat ideologue wouldn’t be as disturbing if we could assume that he was offset by an equally ideological Republican on the Brown political science faculty. Unfortunately, his own attitude suggests that we can make no such assumption. Sharing a department with somebody like that would surely provide Cheit with the perspective he so obviously lacks.
The absence of such perspective is yet more evidence that Brown University is less about education and more about maintaining an ideologically pure aristocracy. Be warned when you see its name listed as a credential, particularly in political science.
Featured image by Rudolf von Alt on WikiArt.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Who rigged the Census?
- What is does polling say about the electoral landscape?
- How many illegal immigrants are in Providence?
- Will other districts follow Central Falls in masking students again?
Featured image by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
There is no question that this young man, who is apparently on his way to a cushy six-figure job in the near future, has learned how to leverage his power and privilege to muster a defense of his personal honor:
The Graduate Center Bar apologized on April 27 for removing three black students who were roughhousing in line, after one of the students, Okezie Okoro, confronted the bouncer who told them to knock it off. The confrontation took place on April 7 and occurred after the bouncer let them inside. When Okoro gave the bouncer grief for reprimanding his friends, an argument ensued, culminating in the students’ ejection from the bar.
A week later, Okoro posted on social media a 2,000-word denunciation of the bar, replete with a “content warning” and a list of demands. The post accused the bouncer of racism and attacked the bar’s manager, Susan Yund, for dismissing that accusation.
Let’s summarize the incident, distilled from the Ivy League student’s linguistic obfuscation. A few college kids were horsing around while in line in a narrow hallway. A bouncer attempted to keep order, and one of the privileged students decided to make an issue of it. The bouncer asserted his authority in the situation, and now Okezie Okoro has leveraged his influence, prompting a boycott, to hit the working people where it hurts in order to prove who’s the master.
By all appearances, it’s a disgusting display that a truly reasonable institution would be ashamed to have facilitated. Don’t miss the distilled essence of the story:
The bouncer’s reaction, [Okoro] said, “was a manifestation of respectability politics and shows how black people often have to withhold from expression in order to comfort and conform.”
Translation: Enforcing rules against black people (at least highly privileged Ivy League black people) is an assertion of white supremacy, so they must be permitted to behave however they want if they assert that it is a genuine expression of their identity.
Reality: This is a long-running scam taken to the level of absurdity. If you enroll or take a job at Brown University, or if you hire one of its graduates, you have been warned. The students are armed with all the latest jargon that money can buy, and they will deploy it in ways entirely disproportionate to the situation in order to force you to bow before them. No doubt, there are good, smart students continuing to graduate from the university, but you’re better off not taking the risk. Your odds of actually finding a good, smart young adult are probably better with other sources.
[Open full post]
Guest: Bud Cicilline, Mental Health Practictioner-Retired, bud@cicliilne.onmicrosoft.com
Host: Darlene D’Arezzo Time: 30 minutes
Description: Following a brief review of past changes in mental health practices in R.I.,Cicilline discuss current matters facing Rhode Islanders. The discussion includes changes in process at the Eleanor Slater Hospital and mental health issues and concerns facing law enforcement and other first responders. The latter addresses the Policeman’s Bill of Rights; the different circumstances where police are called to respond; changing expectations of police; mental health first aide training; mental health care for police and fire personnel; crisis intervention training; further development of risk team and crisis intervention for first responders along with increasing sensitivity training for these.
Naomi Wolf talks about across-the-aisle investigation of the “biggest corporate coverup of all time and a crime against humanity” in COVID vaccines; Cox Communications talks about Get Started RI; and Zarina Chambers and Kasim Yarn discuss veterans affairs.
Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Is anybody surprised by news of a problem with the U.S. Census finalized under the leadership of Secretary Gina Raimondo and her boss, Joe Biden, that appears to have erroneously salvaged one of Rhode Island’s Congressional seats and a bunch of federal funding? The imbalance of the results is not, let’s say, what one would expect from a random sample:
- The five states with the highest overcounts all have Democrat governors:
- Hawaii (6.79% over)
- Delaware (5.45%)
- Rhode Island (5.05%)
- Minnesota (3.84%)
- New York (3.44%)
- With the exception of Illinois, which has a large gap in the percentage from the others, the five states with the highest undercounts have Republican governors:
- Arkansas (5.04%)
- Tennessee (4.78%)
- Mississippi (4.11%)
- Florida (3.48%)
- Illinois (1.97%)
It’s worth remembering that some of the same states (and those next on the list) were among those that stood out a year ago with Census revisions in the same partisan direction just after the Biden administration took the White House. Hawaii, Rhode Island, New York, and others had surprising upward revisions, apparently (at least in part) because they were being overcounted. Meanwhile, the same revisions kept Florida and Texas (also now thought to have been undercounted) from gaining as many Congressional seats as expected.
Featured image by Thomas Dumortier on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
The attitude that Westerly middle school English teacher Erica DeVoe displays toward parents in this TikTok video, which is also targeted toward her students, is disturbing:
Here you go… pic.twitter.com/wUzw67h5xJ
— Robert Chiaradio (@bchiaradio14) May 6, 2022
One can gather from her commentary that she’s had a practice of making TikTok videos with her students, but that a change in policy after complaints from parents has prevented her doing so any longer. The portion of the message directed at parents is like an adolescent thumbing of the nose at people whose authority she rejects. That a teacher would take this tone in a video made to be viewed by students is completely inappropriate, and a healthy education system would, at the least, put Ms. DeVoe under probationary watch for a while. She is actively modeling the behavior of disrespecting their parents based on a different opinion on the TikTok practice in the classroom, which parents are entirely within their rights to assert.
While teaching students to use technology for communicating, making videos, and such things is certainly within bounds, bringing mass-communication platforms like social media into the classroom arguably crosses the line. It isn’t at all clear that having teachers endorse the use of TikTok, going so far as to draw students into it, has much benefit, and it certainly comes with risks. To be sure, many (maybe most) of the students may already be active on the platform, but it makes a difference when a teacher incorporates it in this way, not the least because it expands her own relationship with the students beyond the academic setting. That may be fine in individual circumstances, but as a general matter, some distance should be maintained.
DeVoe’s message, itself, reinforces this suggestion. Apart from the fact that she leverages this connection to communicate with students disrespectfully about their parents, she defends her practice not on pedagogical grounds — that the TikTok videos further some academic goal. Such a defense would keep her firmly in her place as a professional hired to teach children subject matter and open the door for comparative analyses of the multiple ways she can accomplish the goals that she (presumably) shares with the children’s families. Rather, she defends the practice on the grounds that it is fun and that she likes how it puts her on an even relationship plane with the kids in the hallway.
We shouldn’t ignore the reality that this is classic groomer posturing: the authorities in your life are preventing us from having fun together. Implying anything more aggressive than what’s already on display would go too far, although another video with a rap and dance move making reference to drinking wine shows how easily lines can blur with such activities. However, the fact that DeVoe’s posture is similar to that of people with far worse intent ought to be a sign of its inappropriateness.
[Open full post]
Having just finished a graduate course in ethics, I found my mind keenly tuned to a question when Quillette editor Claire Lehmann raised it during a conversation with Jordan Peterson. Lehmann said she found herself offended, once, when asked in an ethics-related class whether she would smother her own baby to death so as to prevent his or her crying and bringing torture and death to a group of people with whom she was hiding.
The philosophy tested in the example is Utilitarianism, whereby one tallies up the benefits and detriments of a given decision and does whatever creates the greater net benefit or smaller net detriment. In those terms, the expected short answer on your ethics exam is that you must smother your baby so as to save the many more lives in the group.
My experience of Ivory Tower debates is too limited for me to declare it to be standard, but my experience has been that people arguing against such reasoning shift frames and turn to different moral standards. That is, they salvage their intuition about what ought to be by disclaiming the validity of Utilitarianism. I’m not sure that’s necessary or appropriate, however. Rather, one need only adjust the width of the frame.
After all, the circumstances in which a mother might genuinely feel compelled to kill her baby in order to save others are very limited, which means that the greater good may very well be (I’d say, would certainly be) served by the principle that mothers ought never to kill their children. We’re even better off if fathers are included in the rule, too. Humanity writ large benefits when it is taken as an incontestable truth that everybody should have at least two people — the two responsible for raising them and preparing them for life — who will treat their intrinsic value as above all else.
One suspects such a world would be one in which it would be even less likely that a group of people would find themselves huddling in hiding away from certain torture and death.
Featured image by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash.
[Open full post]