Revised Rules

Jack Dorsey has them for his Twitter. In response to the blowup over his (and Mark Zuckerberg’s over at Facebook) decision to censor the New York Post‘s reporting on emails found on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and seeming to indicate connections among Hunter, his business efforts in Ukraine and the People’s Republic of China, and his father Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden—or more likely in response to the pending subpoena compelling his sworn testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee next week regarding his censorship—Dorsey had his legal, policy and trust & safety lead, Vijaya Gadde, announce some unspecified changes. Dorsey also said through her, though, that

All other Twitter Rules will still apply to the posting of or linking to hack materials, such as our rules against posting…synthetic and manipulated media….

In other words, Dorsey still will censor obvious satire and political ads because he’s too lazy to think about what he’s actually looking at. Or because he assumes his customers are too droolingly imbecilic to understand what they’re looking at.

After this, Dorsey claimed to have withdrawn all blocks; he would simply attach a “context” label to the tweets and retweets.

That “changes” turn out to be untrue. The New York Post still is locked out of its own account unless and until it withdraws—withdraws—its tweets regarding its prior two articles.

Racism in K-12 Schools

It’s rampant in the San Diego Unified School District, even as it claims to be “combatting racism.”

Students will no longer be graded based on a yearly average, or on how late they turn in assignments. …
… Board members say the changes are part of a larger effort to combat racism.

Because most of the poor grades went to minority students, and figuring out why that might be and fixing the underlying problem(s) isn’t something for an educational institution to concern itself with.

Things like turning work in on time and classroom behavior will now instead count towards a student’s citizenship grade, not their academic grade.

Because academic discipline has no relationship with academics. Nor does any other sort of discipline. Nor is there any interest in figuring out why there might be poor discipline and addressing those underlying problems. (Aside: There also seems to be no interest in the poor grammar of journalists.)

Nor are any consequences or rewards associated with feel-good ratings like “citizenship.” Especially in a public school system that doesn’t teach the civics of citizenship.

This is nonsense.

This is a matter of the school system deciding to not do the work of bringing minority children up to speed so they can compete.

This is a matter of San Diego thinking either that minority children are inherently inferior and simply can’t compete, and their deficiency must be papered over, or of San Diego thinking minority children just aren’t worth the effort, and the district’s laziness must be papered over.

This is the bigotry (I don’t agree that it’s in any way soft) of low expectations at its most insidious.