Culture
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…
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…
For the growing “our elites are insane” file, WPRI gives this propagandistic headline to an AP article: “Early transgender identity tends to endure, study suggests.” See, the editor is implying, it’s not just a faddish thing that fades quickly. But think objectively about what precisely the study found: The research involved 317 youngsters who were 3…
As Anchor Rising readers know, last week a Providence Journal headline proclaimed, “RI’s record-shattering baby shortage could spell trouble for state’s economy.” This week, Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos proclaimed her aspiration for the Ocean State to kill more: I’m confident RI can become a national leader for reproductive rights at a time when these rights are coming…
Culture and history are funny things. Over the centuries, our civilization learns things about human life and codes them in cultural norms that everybody can know without having to be able to explain. They’re just how we do things — lessons learned over centuries, sometimes through painful experience. No doubt, our ancestors coded the wrong…
It is remarkable that Paul Edward Parker’s Providence Journal article about the “record-shattering baby shortage” in the Ocean State goes on as long as it does without making the key, irreducible point. … The number being born in the Ocean State has ebbed to its lowest point in more than a century. The phenomenon has been so…
A theme of progressive politics is coming into sharp clarity, exposing how the ideology brings about totalitarian ends while using the language of freedom, democracy, individualism, civil rights, and so on. Many on the right have observed that the progressive dictionary is simply different from standard English — they use words to mean things that…
Something about creating an acronym out of technical jargon for life experiences gives it a dangerously dehumanizing feel. I have in mind this pair of tweets from Democrat state representative Marcia Ranglin: What are Adverse Childhood Experiences? CDC indicates that ACEs can have Traumatic experiences in childhood and the teenage years may put children at…
One bit of trivia that marks a step on road to full assimilation into the Ocean State when one learns it is that the State House dome is the fourth largest self-supporting marble dome on the planet. The list goes St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Minnesota State Capitol, the Taj Mahal, then Rhode Island’s…
Sometimes it isn’t clear whether progressive activists are warning about what they genuinely believe their nemeses will do or explaining what they will do once they have the power. Such is the case, here: “When we react to [legislation in Florida],” Equality Florida Nadine Smith apparently tells Disney employees in a virtual meeting, according to a…
