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.
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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.
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Rhode Island has real problems, and an unavoidable consequence of reality is that those who most need a healthy, vibrant society under their feet will face the greatest risk of tragedy in an unhealthy, sclerotic one. The wise approach, then, when one observes suffering in the community is to look for fundamental causes and solutions that benefit all rather than to focus on symptoms and solutions that alleviate them for the few. This is not to say that — case in point — we should not help the homeless, but that our solutions must be carefully considered to emphasize underlying causes while minimizing the sort of subsidization that tends to generate more unhealthy behavior all around.
Such an approach is not, however, in the interests of people who make their living in advocacy (because they might actually resolve the problem). It is also not helpful to politicians and special interests, who meet suffering with asserted solutions in order to harness the leverage that the sufferers bring to gain and expand their own power.
Consider the opening paragraphs of two separate articles about a protest at the Rhode Island State House demanding action on housing. Presumably these were written entirely without mutual reference, not as a group exercise. First, Amy Russo of the Providence Journal:
Luz Arroyo has been sleeping in her car since January. That’s around the time she was evicted from her Pawtucket apartment, following the death of her husband.
On Thursday, standing outside Gov. Dan McKee’s office, she had a message for him: “Please help us to get more affordable apartments for people that are out here in danger … It’s hard. Very difficult,” she said.
And here’s Edward Fitzpatrick of the Boston Globe:
Luz Arroyo choked back tears as she stood outside Governor Daniel J. McKee’s office on Thursday, talking about how she was evicted from her apartment in Pawtucket after her husband died and now sleeps in a car. “I don’t have anywhere to go,” she said.
She called for state government to “help not only me but other people that are homeless,” saying, “I know how these people are suffering out here, just like I am suffering.”
This issue shows the powerful formula that has been chipping away at our system of government. Non-profits and activist groups — often luxuriously funded, at least to the extent that many of them can be reasonably secure, financially, if not enriched individually — find suffering people looking for a way out and package stories for journalists and politicians who are both ideologically sympathetic and keyed to look for the emotional ingredients of a story. In this way, they create a narrative to move the public that is carefully packaged alongside solutions that always involve the growth of government and an increase of revenue to special interests, while rarely solving the problem.
Such challenges will never be solved, if only because the definition of “solved” will move in proportion to the solution, but improvements can definitely be made. The key is to take suffering as a symptoms alerting us to something more basic that needs fixing. We need economic growth, increased emphasis on personal bonds and mutual responsibility, and policies that attract those who will contribute to, rather than rely upon, our shared society. Unfortunately, the fatal flaw of this strategy is that it doesn’t create (or fund) a movement with incentive to agitate for it.
Featured image by Matt Collamer on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Rigging the vote
- Polling the races
- Leveraging the “state rep” label for personal advantage
- Going through the progressive sales-pitch motions
- Taking advantage of the homeless for political gain
Featured image by Charles Unitus on Unsplash.
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Three things come immediately to the eye of anybody who carefully reads Sarah Doiron’s WPRI article, “Dems urge crackdown on price gouging as gas skyrockets.”
First, the article contains not a single number or specific instance of price gouging. Politicians (Democrats all) simply note that prices are up, assert that there is “price gouging” and blame it on “corporate greed” (David Cicilline), insist that companies are “using inflation as cover to expand their profits” (Elizabeth Warren), and scream that corporations are “exploiting the disruption in the pandemic economy to jack up prices” (Sheldon Whitehouse). So, again, without a single bit of data, members of a political party whose policies are wreaking havoc on our economy spin in a few uncontested paragraphs a world in which faceless corporations are, out of greed, taking the pandemic as an excuse to raise prices and cause inflation, which they then use as cover for expanded profits.
Second, Doiron makes absolutely no effort to determine whether any of the above is true or to explore other factors that might be increasing prices (like massive subsidies to people who aren’t working, out-of-control government spending and debt, or Joe Biden’s destruction of America’s energy industry). Not a single alternative perspective is offered, making this pure propaganda.
Third, the public service portion of the article, supposedly informing readers about what they can “do to protect themselves from price gouging” muddies the water so profoundly as to make the term meaningless. Not being charged an advertised price and not getting the amount of gas you’ve paid for aren’t indications of “price gouging”; they’re indications of fraud. This is the same technique RI labor unions are using to redefine a trend toward independent contracting as “wage theft.” Again, pure propaganda, and the news media is doing nothing to clarify it for the public.
Political decisions caused inflation, and now with the help of a friendly media, the very same politicians are passing the blame on to one of their all-purpose “others.” Our democracy cannot function like this, with the most powerful institution, government, further empowered to distract and dissimulate. Indeed, it’s a malicious cycle. The Democrats take the opportunity of their policies’ ill effects to give themselves more power, as they will if this “price gouging” legislation passes and the government can begin dragging executives in front of cameras to demand proof of necessity.
If you want to know where this goes, take a look at Rhode Island’s health insurance market. This toxic mix of political demagoguery and micromanagement by people who are incompetent, ill-intended, or both is what has brought us to the point that the state has to cancel its bidding process because none of the insurers are capable of applying for the job.
Featured image by York County SC on Twitter.
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A free people ought to reject some policies completely on principle, no matter what the practical arguments for them might be in the moment. The Chinese Communists’ social credit system is one such policy, whereby the government leverages its power to grant rewards or impose demerits in order to control the population.
The American spirit may yet be sufficiently alive to reject such a thing if anybody proposed it in whole, but our politicians are certainly edging us in that direction. Consider legislation from Democrat Representative Carlos Tobon (Pawtucket):
To incentivize [green housing], the proposal will charge the state’s public utility commission to issue annual reports on the utility costs and carbon emissions of housing projects. Housing projects that are found to have reduced their carbon footprint below a set cut-off will then be rewarded with the state’s digital currency called “Green coin.”
“Any reduction amount of utility costs attributable to any housing construction project pursuant to this chapter shall be assigned a credit amount which credit shall be eligible for redemption in byway of crypto currency in the form of a green coin to be issued by the department to the property owner,” the bill said.
It remains unclear which blockchain the novel green coin will be issued on, but the bill states that the state will own about 25% of any revenue that accrues from the exchange of the carbon credit incentive.
Expect more such legislation, attempting to increase governments’ ability to control finances and manipulate people.
Another lesson that may not be explicitly involved in this case ought to be remembered, nonetheless. Progressives are well practiced at changing the landscape subtly in ways that seem unobjectionable, or at least tolerable, while they’re doing it. Then they break open an unforeseen dam, and the whole area floods into a swamp.
The uber example is, of course, tolerance, which seemed like a positive social advancement but flipped to become a tool of suppression. In education, we allowed priorities to expand to include concepts like emotional well-being when we thought we all agreed on the priorities, boundaries, and general definition of a healthy psychology. Suddenly, those who control the system have, from the inside, begun supplying their own ideology as the virus delivered via social-emotional learning (SEL).
When somebody comes to your door selling a product or service that seems too good to be true, most of us know to decline because we sense a catch and because the salesperson has an imbalanced advantage in information. (After all, we hadn’t been researching, or even thinking about, the product or service until the moment the person on the step began talking.) We ought to take the same view of most legislation, particular that seeking innovative ways to enforce the government’s bidding.
Featured image by Andrew Wise on Unsplash.
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Barrington resident William Jacobson has an update on his Legal Insurrection site about the growing pushback of parents against the school department’s decision to reduce academic opportunities for advanced students. The content is somewhat encouraging. Jacobson notes the national attention the story is attracting, provides video from a school committee meeting that shows more than the handful of parents who were engaged just a couple months ago, and notes that 500 residents have signed a letter against the move to “de-level” the schools.
The underlying issue is neatly summed up in these two paragraphs from a Fox News article quoting Jacobson:
As of 2022, Barrington High School’s U.S. News ranking plummeted to #308 on a list among the top high schools in the country, down many notches from 189th in 2019.
Bill Jacobson, a long-time Barrington resident and founder of Legal Insurrection, said, “De-leveling is part of an agenda of equalizing outcomes. This equal-results approach stems from critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion, which posit that unequal outcomes are the result of systemic bias and discrimination. ‘Equity’ in particular is the codeword for bringing high achievers down to equalize outcomes,” Jacobson said. “‘Equity’ has become an unhealthy obsession, and parents are seeing the impact.”
Actions such as the school department is taking are a perfect illustration of the progressive habit of derailing institutions from the purpose for which they were formed in order to make them ideological machines. With progressives in control, a school is not primarily to educate, a business is not primarily to produce goods and services, and a government is not primarily to mediate inevitable differences in citizens’ interests. All institutions are retooled to push woke progressivism. Everything becomes political, which is also why people have begun to lose their careers over political donations and non-work-related statements on private social media accounts.
In the long run, this will destroy our civilization, but as Barrington is already learning, it doesn’t take the long run for progressivism to destroy an institution.
As much as we might want to be encouraging of the opposition in Barrington, optimism is difficult to muster. Even evidence that the woke distraction is negatively affecting education in the school district will not matter. Direct testimony from parents about the worrying experiences of their children will not matter. The defining objective of the progressives in town government is to advance their fashionable ideology, not to serve children or the community. Those things are relevant only to the extent that letting things slide will cost them the power to continue pushing their agenda.
All the eloquent and impassioned appeals of well-educated Barrington parents is useless, because the people in power are not amenable to persuasion. Public feedback is something they permit in order to let pressure out of the system, not a civic exercise to understand the desires of the community.
At the very core of the progressive ideology is the belief that the only reasons people oppose them are bigotry and greed, so opposition is simply invalid, and their purpose is to defeat, not to resolve conflict for the good of the community. They’re on a religious crusade, and they will push as far as they can until they are replaced in office. Then, they’ll moderate their rhetoric and vilify their opposition, suddenly caring about children and the broader community again until they are back in power.
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A tweet from an apparent Matt Brown supporter shines an unmistakable light on two realities of progressive politics:
Matt Brown, a wealthy man, himself, is precisely the sort of politician observers warned us about at the founding of our country, a huckster willing to capitalize on the ability of people to vote themselves other people’s money in a democracy. He gives no hint that he sees government as a shared institution to help us resolve our disputes peacefully and balance our interests. To Brown and his fellow progressives, the purpose of government is to use its authority to tax and imprison in order to take money from some people and give it to supporters. The policies on which he receives a nice green check all cater to narrow special interests; he would be the archetypal us-versus-them governor, and we should expect Rhode Island’s decline to accelerate.
Even apart from the ideological warfare, though, how cavalier about (or ignorant of) consequences must one be to support such a platform?
- Capping rent increases ignores the underlying causes of increased costs, ensuring greater shortages of housing and more upward pressure on rents.
- The tax-the-rich attitude will lead to less investment in our state, both in a business sense and in a civic sense.
- Forcing up the minimum wage will increase prices, reduce employment, and put businesses out of business.
- While LEOBOR definitely needs reform, the Left’s “defund the police” movement would increase crime and instability.
- And making Rhode Island an abortion hub would kill children, reduce respect for life generally, and contribute to our baby shortage.
That isn’t to say there aren’t arguments to be made across their platform, but modern progressives support lunacy. That was tolerable when they were mainly a performative minority, but as they take office, they are doing real harm, and we should worry that our state’s lethargy and the enthusiasm of those bought off by the handouts will make it difficult or impossible to stop the excesses.
Featured image from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist from the British Library.
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Alexa Gagosz’s recent article promoting subsidized abortion in the Boston Globe ought to be shocking in its superficiality. Gagosz incorporates zero moral complexity and glosses over the biology of abortions. The article presents the reader with a medical procedure that disadvantaged women can sometimes not manage to afford or procure for reasons of transportation. Activists are given the full article to give voice to any unsubstantiated worry about any policy that might not make abortion as free and casual as it can possibly be.
The article, itself, mentions in passing that Rhode Island is (to our shame) likely to become a destination state for women seeking abortions. Yet, even this, is insufficient for the Boston Globe, which gives the article the headline, “The barriers to getting an abortion in Rhode Island.”
Something sinister and sick oozes out from between the words in such advocacy, and an ethical society would insist that the gaps be filled with moral consideration. This shouldn’t be difficult; look at the first paragraph:
Dr. Beth Cronin had a patient come into her practice recently with an unplanned pregnancy. The couple already had children, and were not in any financial position to have another, but could not afford to pay for an abortion, which can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Let’s enter at the level of language. Observe that the patient (not a “woman”) enters the practice “with an unplanned pregnancy” — as if pregnancy is some thing separate from the body, some potentially malign thing that somehow attaches to a woman as she goes about her life. The patient wishes to “pay for an abortion,” as if it, too, is some thing — like a simple transaction conducted at any store. You go up to the counter, and you pay for the thing, and you leave. The language is conspicuously distant from the reality of its content.
Turning to the substance, what is going on in the anecdote, objectively put?
A fertile couple has conceived another child whom they’ve decided they cannot afford. What “afford” means can differ from family to family. Are both parents already working full schedules? Are they fully engaging their extended family for support? Do they vacation? Smoke? Go out for dinner often? These are all decisions that ought to be left to families and individuals to make, but in this case, they are relevant because, first, we’re talking about ending a human life and, second, the policy for which Gagosz’s article advocates would require others to pay for the procedure in multiple ways. Those others — whose money is the financial expression of the value of their own labor — have a right to know whether they’re saving the family from bankruptcy and dissolution or just from having to work full schedules or to skip a vacation in any year that a pregnancy attaches itself to mom.
So, having decided that they cannot afford to provide their other children with the joy of an additional sibling, the parents in the anecdote are choosing to kill him or her. That sentence only seems contentious because the abortion debate is so mired in obfuscation. Biologically, the infamous “clump of cells” is an independent human organism who will develop into a baby, be born, and grow up to live a fully human life unless nature, an abortionist, a murderer, or some tragic accident interferes. This is simple biology.
From that point, we can debate existential questions about when a “person” exists with access to rights (the right to life at a minimum), about the obligation parents have to the human beings whom they create (especially when the action to create them was entirely knowing and willful), and about the obligations the rest of us have to those parents and children (as well as the economic system that best fulfills our obligations). These are some of the most challenging ethical questions of the human experience. Apparently, Gagosz and the doctors whom she quotes have an attenuated sense of the interplay of biology and ethics.
Finally, we come to the target of their advocacy. Even if the moral conclusion of Gagosz and the abortionists is justified, one can hardly miss the fact that many people disagree. Indeed, this moral question is one of the major stories of the past fifty years, at least, in our country. Let alone failing to live up to the promise of modern journalism, such articles do an active disservice to readers by excluding the very core of the controversy.
In this, Gagosz is precisely in line with what mainstream journalism has become, and the consequence shows in younger generations. In story after story, the reason for the protagonists’ circumstances is minimized or excluded entirely, leaving no explanation but that a wicked patriarchy is oppressing others simply for oppression’s sake.
How does a celebrity host of a political/social talk show like Bill Maher reach his mid-sixties not knowing that the United States’ abortion law is among the most radical on the planet? Because he has wrongly believed that his news sources inform him about the world. If they ever did, they don’t any longer. They convey the particular beliefs of a particular class and a particular ideology to further the power of a particular political party.
Featured image by Dev Asangbam on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The gubernatorial candidates battle for least noteworthy
- Progressives try to make lemonade from SCOTUS lemons
Featured image by Jullliia on Unsplash.
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