Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
Just in case you needed any further evidence that climate change is real and that Sheldon Whitehouse is one of hippest people on The Hill, Rhode Island’s junior senator authors a listicle on Buzzfeed called, “9 Reasons I Care About Climate Change – And You Should Too.”
Complete with animated gif’s like this one that show what the Capital City will look like when the sea level rises:
A Facebook friend of mine posted this piece of crap BuzzFeed list apparently sponsored by Mini USA purporting to be “11 Awesome Facts You Never Knew About Rhode Island”. Of course, there’s tons of cool stuff here, but whoever is in Mini USA’s research department couldn’t be bothered to even correctly pull facts off of our Wikipedia page.
I figured since I actually live here and actually LOVE my state, I could do better. So here’s 11 Actually Awesome Facts About Rhode Island. We know most of them, but this is for non-Rhode Islanders.
1. The Narragansett language is the origin of words like “moose”, “squash” and “pow-wow”. You can thank them yourself for having such great words if you’re ever in the area.
2. RI has a state drink, and it’s coffee milk (suck it, Indiana). It’s made like chocolate milk, you mix syrup into the milk. We have multiple brands of coffee syrup. You can try Autocrat and Eclipse by Autocrat, or try Dave’s Coffee Syrup.*
3. The shore is publicly-owned for all Rhode Islanders, according to our constitution. The shore in this case goes up to the “mean high water line” although there’s a debate about that. In short, in RI, you can’t own the ocean.
4. One of our governors invented sideburns. They’re named after him. But backwards.
5. Pell Grants are named after Sen. Claiborne Pell, who was the primary sponsor in the U.S. Senate. So millions of Americans can read BuzzFeed articles like Mini USA’s about RI and go “do they not know what ‘awesome’ means?” thanks to Sen. Pell.
6. The RI State House has the fourth largest self-supporting dome in the whole world; after St. Peter’s Basilica, the Minnesota State Capitol, and the Taj Mahal.* The dome was the third largest when it was completed, but by then, Minnesota had already got jealous.
7. We have the First Baptist Church in America. Like, it’s literally the first. So you can go to your first Baptist church in wherever you live in not-Rhode Island, and while it might be the first in your area, it’s not The First. Also, first synagogue in America as well.
8. Thomas Dorr, the guy who led a rebellion against our actual government? We count him as our 16th governor. He’s even got a special governor decoration on his grave.
9. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations isn’t just a quirky, longest name for a state. It also describes the first two areas under British rule in the state. Rhode Island (now called Aquidneck Island to distinguish it; yes, Rhode Island is an island) and Providence Plantations (now a number of towns and cities in the northern part of the state). For a long time, we couldn’t agree on a capital, and just swapped it between the two places, until 1901.
10. Rhode Islanders burned a British warship and shot one of its officers in 1772, over a year and a half before Bostonians were inspired to toss tea into harbors.
11. If you confuse Rhode Island with Long Island, a good Rhode Islander will ruthlessly lead you on as though Long Island is a new state. Virtually every Rhode Islander has a story like this.
*EDITS: An earlier version forgot about Dave’s Coffee Syrup, and incorrectly stated that there were only two brands of coffee syrup. Thanks to Kathy DiPina for the catch! And RI Grad also points out that I wrote unsupported instead of self-supported.
That’s my takeaway from the Netroots Nation panel Intervention, Isolation, and the Future of Progressive Security Policy (watch the full panel in that link), which was moderated by Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones; and featured Tom Perriello (fmr. U.S. Representative for VA-5 and now president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund), Dr. Kristin Lord (here on her own behalf, but from the Center for a New American Security), Ali Gharib (of ThinkProgress), and Michael Hastings (a reporter for BuzzFeed and contributing editor for Rolling Stone whose coverage of Afghanistan forced the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal). Like the Occupy Our Homes panel, this was a last-minute decision
Mr. Weinstein opened up with a question about what a progressive foreign policy looks like if President Obama wins a second term. To which nearly all the panelists argued that the President had not pursued a foreign policy based on progressive grounds but on realist grounds. However, they mainly argued for intervention on humanitarian grounds. At which point Mr. Hastings was given a chance to speak, and said: “I didn’t know there was a progressive security policy.” He made the point that to be included in the national security conversation, you have to be either a neocon or a liberal hawk, and folks like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich see their views sidelined by establishment thinking.
There was quite a lot of talk about “humane intervention”. When do we do it, when don’t we. Mr. Gharib pointed out that the Libyan intervention, and the pursuit of such wars via air strike avoid the responsibility for post-war order. Dr. Lord thought that the Libyan intervention had turned out to be the right call, though she was opposed at the time. Mr. Hastings said that the problem with “humane intervention” is that it’s only deployed when the principles align with strategic interests; witness the reluctance with Syria versus the active response against Libya. Mr. Perriello said that ultimately a large military interest will always trump a humanitarian interest.
The problem to me with the “humane intervention” argument is that it essentially ignores the views of the American people: 76% of Americans would cut the national defense budget. It’s pretty clear that Americans are consistently tired of focusing on military intervention. And yet, even as we have claimed that our military is advancing democracy around the world, our own government has been hesitant to advance democracy through other means: the Arab Spring caught us almost completely by surprise. I can think of no statement about Tunisia. I do remember the pathetic response to crackdown on the Egyptian Revolution by Hosni Mubarak. Instead of threatening to remove military support, the United States called for cellphone and internet service to be turned back on. Instead of saying we supported democracy, we said we supported “stability.”
Progressives have been incredibly acquiescent to the whims of a president who has a kill list, has assassinated American citizens while expanding the definition of “militant” to include anyone who happens to be shot, expanded a secret drone war, and who threw more troops into Afghanistan with no real purpose. When Mr. Hastings says he wasn’t aware there was a progressive security policy, it’s not because he hasn’t looked hard enough. It’s because when you scratch the surface, there’s nothing there.
