At the Center, we believe that public workers deserve to know that they now have full freedom to decide whether or not it is in their best interest to pay union dues. That if they choose not to pay, these employees cannot be recriminated against by corrupt union officials.
However we feel about Joe Trillo or his recent behavior, the story of his 1975 altercation raises questions about the kind of society that we want to be.
The madness of our time may result from the general public’s “whoa, there” response to progressives who’ve forgotten the keys of their incremental strategy.
On the American campus, Catholics are forced out of their jobs in the name of presenting a diversity of ideas while hoax papers are published because academics really do believe that identity politics can tell us about the physical universe.
As part of the recent Providence Journal sponsored “Publick Occurrences” panel discussion at RI College, I’d like to share some thoughts I prepared, but did not have the chance to put forth. The event’s premise – “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” and the polarization of public discourse – leaves us two factors to consider:
We’re in surreal times and should not allow the political fight of the moment to erode the gray areas that allow us to be human.
On the surface, this looks like a great thing:
New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track. The result is a U.S. divorce rate that dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to an analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen.
The problem is that the improving divorce rate results from a shrinking denominator:
Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to marry at all. They’re living together, and often raising kids together, without tying the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable than they used to be.
The article leaves no way to know the ultimate result, but it could be that more couples in a marriage-like situation, including with children, are separating. They just aren’t filling out all the paperwork their elders did, and children are the ones who’ll suffer.
As I’ve been arguing for years, marriage was an institution in which responsible couples invested their expectations for the benefit of less-responsible couples. Our society brushed that responsibility aside, and we’re seeing the results all around us (public turmoil, suicides, opioid overdoses, inequality, and so on). What the lower divorce rate indicates, therefore, may be that those “poorer and less educated Americans” have learned an unfortunate lesson from those who have more resources.
Unfortunately, having fewer resources makes it more difficult to deal with the consequences.
Think about this controversy out of Fall River:
A banner recently erected on Plymouth Avenue containing a possible pro-life connotation caught the attention of some residents and was taken down shortly after the company in charge of the program and the administration began receiving protests.
The banners which started popping up around the city a few weeks ago are part of the city’s new initiative to promote the logo “Make It Here,” its designation as an All American City and local businesses.
Then one appeared on the light pole near the Flat Iron Building with the dark, bold lettering “Choose Life” under the “Make It Here” logo and “Welcome to Fall River.”
A list of the 118 organizations that have signed up for banners shows no other slogans, so this one appears to have been an exception to the general rule. Still, the idea that this slogan does create controversy indicates something unhealthy in our society. Yes, yes, “choose life” can be taken as a slogan supporting one side, politically, which government rightly strives to avoid for unifying projects like these banners, but that only amplifies questions about whether this matter should actually have sides. Are we to “choose death,” or be ambivalent about the choice between life and death? Would a “Be Happy” or “Help Others” banner have been removed because of controversy?
Some might rebut that “choose life” can be painful to women who feel that keeping a child alive really wasn’t a choice for them, but that applies to other hypothetical slogans, as well. People are out there right now feeling guilty that they weren’t able to help somebody else in some circumstance. And we know the admonition to “be happy” can grind salt in the wounds of somebody who just is not able to comply.
If our society is too on edge to accept a banner promoting life, we’re clearly overdue for an examination of our collective conscience.
A female governor who discriminates against school boys for an official contest is fundraising off her unsubstantiated belief in a 50-something-year-old woman’s unsubstantiated claims about an incident from high school
Who defines what counts as sexual harassment, and does it have to be a single standard for every environment?
Want some more evidence that our society has gone mad?
The relaxed new dress code at public schools in the small city of Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco, is intentionally specific: Midriff-baring shirts are acceptable attire, so are tank tops with spaghetti straps and other once-banned items like micro-mini skirts and short shorts. …
The new policy amounts to a sweeping reversal of the modern school dress code and makes Alameda the latest school district in the country to adopt a more permissive policy it says is less sexist.
Students who initiated the change say many of the old rules that barred too much skin disproportionately targeted girls, while language calling such attire “distracting” sent the wrong message.
Got that? A policy that limits the degree to which schoolboys think “sex” when they look at their female classmates is supposedly sexist. Not allowing girls to dress in a way that draws attention to their bodies (as opposed to their minds or personalities) is somehow demeaning of them. This is crazy.
The strongest response to my assertion would be that we should teach boys not to look at girls any differently no matter what they wear to school rather than limit what they can wear, but that’s simple fantasy. Young men are hardwired with a sex drive that is natural and part of their healthy development. We can and should guide them toward better control of those feelings and help them channel their drives in a healthy direction, but one of the ways we accomplish that goal is through gradually changing standards for the environments in which we place them.
Note this paragraph, later in the article:
Students in Alameda, Portland and Evanston have freedom to wear mostly anything as long as it includes a bottom, top, shoes, covers private parts and does not contain violent images, hate speech, profanity or pornography.
Objectively, how can one claim that it is sexist to place limits on girls’ clothing in order to avoid discomfort among boys and also ban various images and words that others might find discomfiting? Why can’t we all abide by limits for the good of other people, especially if we’re going to expect young men to be exquisitely sensitive about the way young women might interpret their looks and remarks?
The Pew Research Center has published survey results relevant to the #MeToo moment, and this part is telling about the project’s biases:
The survey also finds that 59% of women and 27% of men say they have personally received unwanted sexual advances or verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature, whether in or outside of a work context. Among women who say they have been sexually harassed, more than half (55%) say it has happened both in and outside of work settings.
Note what happens within that paragraph. Pew mentions three distinct things at the beginning:
In the next sentence, they are all lumped together as “sexually harassed.” A review of what’s available of the survey instrument shows no evidence that “unwanted sexual advances” is ever defined. That means it could be anything from “you look nice today” to “would you like to catch a movie Friday” to something that would be a clearly inappropriate sexual comment. If the researchers were interested to know what sort of behavior is going on, wouldn’t it be important to differentiate between these things?
Arguably, what the survey is actually finding is the propensity of women to claim that they’ve been harassed. Along that line, consider the difference that education level makes for women stating that they have been harassed (including unwanted advances). Women with college degrees answer “yes” 70% of the time, but women with no more than a high school diploma answer “yes” only 46% of the time. Does this mean women who’ve gone through college entered a more-boorish world than those with less education? Or does it mean that they’ve learned to interpret things as “unwanted sexual advances” and harassment that they wouldn’t have called such if they hadn’t been taught to do so?
The fact that white women, who can, on average, be presumed to be wealthier, say “yes” at a rate of 63%, while only 50% of black and Hispanic women say “yes” raises similar questions. Are white women really more likely to be victimized, or again, are they just more likely to interpret men’s behavior in this way?
If #MeToo is going to define our era, with career-ending consequences for those who run afoul of the shifting rules, shouldn’t we be clear about definitions, boundaries, and the interpretation of behavior?
With the United States continuing to accelerate into insanity, take a moment for some unifying relief by reading Mark Patinkin’s latest article:
[Providence Police Officer Mike Matracia] first noticed something was wrong while playing basketball in 1994. A few times, he fell while running down the court. But he dismissed it — he was 30ish and in great shape.
He kept brushing off the falls. But then came other signs, like being off balance. …
Seven years later, he began using the chair. That’s when a higher-up told him he should come to work in street clothes instead of his uniform.
It devastated him.
“Obviously policemen can’t chase down bad guys in a wheelchair,” he says. But he was still a cop putting in a productive day on the job.
So, Matracia strove for permission to wear his uniform to work, and he’s stayed on the job rather than finding some disability-funded way out.
Now, it’s entirely possible Matracia might credit a labor union for his continued employment and oppose everything the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity stands for when it comes to public-sector labor, or maybe he’d be interested in MyPayMySay. It’s also possible that at some point in his past as far back as high school he treated a girl or woman in a way that would bring him condemnation and rejection if he ever tried for some prominent position in the public eye. Maybe he thinks North Smithfield was right to boycott Nike for its elevation of Colin Kaepernick, wearer of pig-cop socks. Or maybe he’s sympathetic to the self-proclaimed anti-fascist progressives who see it as their duty to intimidate and silence people with whom they disagree.
I don’t know whether any of these apply. I list them only because they’ve all been in today’s tide of headlines, posts, and emails.
I do know that Matracia is a human being out there busily being human in a way we can all admire, and that’s one aspect of news stories that we seem to be losing sight of, recently.
Wesley Smith catches more evidence of our society’s descent into madness:
When I read Jane Robbins’ piece in The Federalist reporting that doctors were actually performing mastectomies on girls as young as 13 who identify as boys, I couldn’t believe my eyes. But sure enough. Not only is it happening, but a medical study published in JAMA Pediatrics recommends that children not be precluded from such radical body-altering surgery based simply on their youth …
A doctor need not be a religionist or disagree with the concept of gender dysphoria generally to be morally opposed to cutting off the healthy breasts of adolescents (or inhibiting the onset of a child’s normal puberty) as a form of “doing harm” in violation of Hippocratic ideals. But if Emanuel and his ilk have their way, in the not too distant future, a surgeon approached to perform a mastectomy on a girl who identifies as a boy could be forced into a terrible conundrum: either remove the child’s healthy body parts–or risk being charged with transphobic discrimination, investigated by medical authorities, and possibly forced out of the profession.
Now factor in the fact that “guidance” in public education generally takes the tone that teachers and school administrators should help students move in this direction — even to the point of conspiring to deceive their parents if they might have a different view. What’s coming into shape is a culture that encourages children to experiment with their sense of identity, which experimentation is then hustled along from youthful exploration to physical expression through the school system and then solidified into irreversible medical steps through drugs or surgery.
Smith makes an important point when he brings into the discussion the silencing of Brown University researcher Lisa Littman, who found evidence that transgenderism spreads faddishly among peer groups. Based on public outcry, the university disappeared the study and apologized for it. As Smith suggests, this episode illustrates that the medical consensus on which we’re being told to base radical child-abusing policies cannot be taken as trustworthy on its face, but is very probably contaminated with ideology.
The persistence of that old 9/11 feeling and a reminder of long-ago friends raises thoughts about balancing what is there now with what used to be.
On Thursday, August 30, 2018, the Ocean State Current sat down with the Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence, Thomas Tobin, to ask about controversies in the Church at the state, national, and international levels. This portion of the interview addresses the environment for parish priests in this challenging environment.
For years, we’ve heard how much attention must be paid to the Millennial generation, because its members would soon change the face of society and politics. They may very well do that, as a large generation, but a tidbit from Ian Donnis’s latest Friday column reminds us that Millennials are human, too:
Which generation has the greatest increase in voter registration in Rhode Island from 2014 to 2018? Would you believe the Silent Generation (people born between 1928-45), which had a 39 percent bump, from 996 to 1,381 over the last four years, according to Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea’s office. Boomer (born 1945-64) registrations jumped 30 percent, from 4,163 to 5,423, while Xers (1965-1980) climbed 20 percent, from 5,055 to 6,060. Generation Z (1997-) is up 9 percent, 3,290 to 3,574, while Millennial (1981-1996) registrations dropped 11 percent, from 12,275 to 10,892.
So why would the number of voter registrations among Millennials drop as we head toward elections that the mainstream media has been hyping as their chance to save humanity? An answer would take more digging than I’ve time for at the moment, but I think we can return to my old thesis about the “productive class.”
Over the last four years, the youngest Millennials have moved on from college, or whatever they were doing as they transitioned into their 20s, and the oldest Millennials moved into their late 30s and (gasp!) middle age. As I’ve been saying since even the oldest Millennials were still in their 20s, the people who tend to leave Rhode Island are those in the “meaty, motivated segment on the cusp of the middle class” — people who want to cash in their talents and labor to build their lives. That transaction remains much more difficult in Rhode Island than elsewhere.
The harder question may be who remains behind. Some Millennials in their still-idealistic (read: naive) youth, probably. However, the non-Millennial cohort could surprise us. Will they be defined by newly wizened GenXers who have too much experience to fall for socialist promises or seniors too far removed from their careers and too reliant on other people to resist the lure of big government?
We’ll see. In the meantime, perhaps we should take the lesson that demographics are not destiny and at least some people can change their minds… or move.
On Thursday, August 30, 2018, the Ocean State Current sat down with the Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence, Thomas Tobin, to ask about controversies over his statement to local news media that sexual abuse issues in Pittsburgh were not within the scope of his official responsibilities.
Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin has called on Pope Francis to actively resolve internal conflicts among the church hierarchy with an investigation of allegations against high ranking prelates, including the pope, himself.
We’d do well to develop social standards for how we handle indiscretions online and whether we help fights to deescalate or whip them up into a violent frenzy.
I have big news. We’ve launched a major new campaign designed to inform public servants of their recently restored First Amendment rights, as ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Janus v AFSCME case. You can see our new website at MyPayMySayRI.com. As a consistent champion of constitutional rights for all citizens, we believe that public employees deserve to know that they now have full freedom when it comes to deciding whether or not it is in their best interest to pay union dues.
If you follow or read conservatives online, you’ve probably heard, over the past week, of strange goings on with Facebook. Apparently, my friend and former Anchor Rising co-contributor Don Hawthorne was caught up in it:
Yesterday morning, Facebook took down all five of my posts, declaring each time that “We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn’t follow our Community Standards.” …
Many Facebook friends have had the same experience yesterday, with no explanations.
Each time I got the message, I clicked on the “This Isn’t Spam” response option. Facebook replied, saying they needed to review the article to confirm it met Facebook Community Standards. They then came back and, each time, said it did meet standards and would be reposted.
After which, Facebook deleted several of my newly-reposted articles.
Don puts this in the context of the increasingly apparent online censorship of conservatives across platforms, noting:
There are escalating information asymmetries, enabled by technology companies.
Indeed, we have justification for worrying that the “personal social score” that China has begun applying to its people is something of a model. However, while I agree with Don that “our culture war is now fully out in the open,” crossing “the line from a voluntary civil society to a coercive political society,” I’m not so sure about this part:
The Left’s outsourcing of censorship to Silicon Valley technology companies leaves only one imperfect, time-sensitive solution—government-enforced deregulation—until there are more responsible leaders.
That “de” is probably not justifiably inserted in front of “regulation,” because regulation is what Don is after. He’s not alone in thinking maybe the tech giants should face something resembling the breakup of a cartel, but I’m skeptical. Ultimately, the solution is to get off of these platforms. Put your genuine content somewhere else — on some conservative site or on your own site — and use social media only to draw people away from social media.
The tech giants are selling us an addiction to little fixes of attention and affirmation. If we lower our doses just a little and use technology to build stronger, less manipulated relationships that require minimally more engagement with the actual world, we’ll find ourselves healthier for it, and freer.
The College Fix reports on what appears to be an implicitly self contradictory (which is to say, dishonest) attack on masculinity at Brown University:
A program at the Ivy League institution provides “safe spaces for men to unpack all of the things they have learned about masculinity and what it means to be a man,” according to its website.
“Rigid definitions of masculinity are toxic to men’s health,” campus officials state online under the heading: “Unlearning Toxic Masculinity.”
“Men will often resort to violence to resolve conflict because anger is the only emotion that they have been socialized to express,” the website states. “Unfortunately, the way that young men are conditioned to view sex and their need to be dominant and have power over others also contribute to instances of sexual assault and other forms of interpersonal violence on college campuses.”
It’s been a while since I was part of a campus community, so maybe I’m missing the nuances of “safe spaces,” but I’m not sure how the term could cover a space in which one is explicitly identified as “toxic.” Are the safe spaces provided to other identity groups similarly characterized by the safety to talk about what’s wrong with members of the group? That seems more like a “hostile space.”
Indeed, spend some time clicking through the texts and videos associated with this program, and you’ll be hard pressed to find anybody who exhibits a sense of safety in acknowledging something like, “I’m strong and competitive, and all of these other guys talking about how masculinity means being cold, calculating, and distant just aren’t describing a reality that matches the society that I’ve experienced.” Even a video of a young woman (who appears to present as a young man) tells the story of her toxic masculinity when she hit her brother for telling her she looked pretty.
In other words, it’s all play acting and virtue signaling, and there’s nothing really new, here. The lesson that is pushed ad nauseam is basically: People shouldn’t be jerks, and “jerk” and “masculine man” are basically synonyms.
By that definition, the most masculine people in the world would have to be the authorities pushing this nonsense on young impressionable men and women, and that clearly isn’t correct.
When his child misgenders him, a New York Times contributor proclaims the secondary status of fathers, proving that his social milieu doesn’t understand their society.
Twitter targeting conservatives is only a small problem compared with the mainstream Left’s decision that they’ve had enough of the rest of us.
I want to share with you an outstanding piece of reporting done by our Ocean State Current on a violent politically-motivated assault of a veteran by an alleged member of Antifa last Saturday. The Current broke this important story, and brought Rhode Islanders the real message of what was happening.
For my weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, this week, about the governor’s race, political poll results, and Rhode Islanders’ (lack of concern) for the PawSox Worcester overtures.
The prickly question of whether social media platforms should be treated as common carriers can be avoided if we break their leash and return to the ethos of blogging.
Samson Racioppi, an Army veteran and libertarian, was allegedly struck on the back of his neck by a member of Antifa with a bike lock following a protest in front of the Rhode Island State House on Saturday. Alexander Carrion was arrested by Providence Police for the violent attack.
So many of the foundations of our society seem to be wobbling, lately, and it isn’t clear how we come to trust and agreement again.
