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.
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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.
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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.
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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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