Political Thought
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,…
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…
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…
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…
This, from Mark Tapscott in The Epoch Times seems like exactly the sort of thing we’d be hearing a lot about if those tasked with promulgating and debating information were truly committed to the American project of freedom and experimentation: There were 78.3 million employed individuals in the [right-to-work (RTW)] states in February 2020, when the…
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…
There isn’t anything redeeming about Democrat Representative from Cranston and Warwick Joe McNamara’s highly inappropriate abuse of his position as Chairman of the House Education Committee to posture politically over legislation from Republican Representative Patricia Morgan (West Warwick, Coventry, Warwick), captured in this video clip: On first pass, the unprecedented attempt to give Morgan “the…
Socialist Rhode Island state senator Sam Bell (Democrat, Providence) has gotten a good deal of richly deserved negative pushback over truly terrible legislation he submitted in the state General Assembly (which is not to say that some of the correspondence he’s received hasn’t gone too far). As the cosigners on Bell’s legislation back away from…
To begin with, let’s focus on the word that caught Republicans’ eye and drew out the label, “woke”: Last month, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana) sat down on his office couch and recorded a video explaining that he’d be voting against a $1.5-trillion government spending bill that included $13.5 billion in aid for Ukraine. “There are…
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…
