Political Thought
John the Baptist’s suggestion to Roman soldiers in today’s Gospel reading at Roman Catholic Mass has always left me feeling as I was missing some historical context: And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none.…
Ed Driscol draws our attention to an essay on Tablet in which Liel Leibovitz, which definitely deserves the “read the whole thing” tag: You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant…
Attitudes like this, from former Providence Journal reporter and University of Connecticut journalism professor Mike Stanton fascinate me. Commenting on Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee’s hesitance to impose a statewide mask mandate, Stanton writes: Yes, poor leadership. Because it’s contrary to what the doctors & experts recommend. I went to PPAC the other night; they required…
Just about every hot topic these days has something surreal about it — something that’s obviously not true or at least certain, that is affecting how hundreds of millions of people are having to live their lives. An early revelation for me, when I first moved from creative writing toward essay writing, was that an…
The very obscure reference of my subject line is to Jonathan Coulton’s song, “I Crush Everything.” Spoiler alert: It’s about a lonely sea monster that has banished itself to the bottom of the sea because everything it tries to get close to and hug it crushes. The chorus came to mind as I read Dennis…
Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan. In drug trials, researchers give a control group of participants a placebo (or a pill with no medical effect) because it is understood that just doing something can have an effect on people’s symptoms, or at least their perception of their symptoms. In most cases, the effect is small, which is why…
Wherever you look to find your bogeymen or whether you support some individual or organization or oppose it, modern society absolutely requires you to keep an eye out for the nudging that Joel Kotkin describes: Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge.…
An observer doesn’t have to be cynical to wonder why the Huffington Post published its extensive article warning of the RI Political Co-Op’s division of Ocean State progressives yesterday. After all, the article was fueled in large part by “a left-wing Rhode Island activist who requested anonymity to protect professional relationships.” Anonymous sourcing in a case…
When I worked with the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, we would periodically get tips from people about problems or corruption in our state, but the tipsters would very rarely volunteer to step forward. They feared, with good reason, audits, safety reviews, property inspections, and other forms of government harassment. Silence and toleration has…
Don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful that the New York Times is raising any questions at all about why Democrat strongholds aren’t the utopias that voters were promised and to challenge the obviously facile talking point that evil Republicans are to blame, even where the GOP has almost no power. That said, Johnny Harris and Binyamin…