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Reviewing the details of school shootings, the other day for an online conversation, I was struck by how clearly banning a particular style of gun or access-related regulations will not solve the problem. They may or may not be justified on their merits, but to treat such policies as if they are obvious fixes is…
The problem is that they’re not founded in reason, but emotion. I’m not interested in developing solutions to our problems through the method of emoting alongside others. Emotion supplies motivation; it is not the process for finding answers. Yet, without fail, when progressives (or “moderates,” for that matter) articulate their emotions in the guise of…
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…
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,…
Over the course of a day, readers of Twitter brush off many such tweets, but in this case, the writer is Ross Cheit, a political science professor at Brown University who was, until recently, the chairman of the state Ethics Commission: I imagine that anything that a GOP operative has in their possession can also…
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…
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…
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,…
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…