Tag Archives: responsibilities

Eviction Moratoriums

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Recall that the CDC has issued a ban on evicting tenants during the present Wuhan Virus situation, saying that the ban is needed to curb the spread of the virus. Landlords, of both the apartment and house variety, are suing over that.

Luke Wake, of the Pacific Legal Foundation, claims

It’s unconstitutional[.]

He and his landlord clients will need a stronger argument than that. Good policy, bad, or indifferent, the concept of temporary bars against tenant evictions is a long-established concept. Iowa, for instance, bars tenant evictions during the winter months. Every winter.

Revised Rules

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After this, Dorsey claimed to have withdrawn all blocks; he would simply attach a “context” label to the tweets and retweets.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

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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.

QOTD

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Or maybe it’s the quote of the week. Or the month. Or the year.

It seems that

[a]t least 44 schools in San Francisco could see their names changed, as officials believe some were named after those with potential connections to slavery, genocide, and colonization, according to a report on Thursday.
The San Francisco School Names Advisory Committee researched school names and identified certain ones for renaming.

The move isn’t sitting well with the folks and their children who will have to live with the outcome of this move. Here’s one concerned parent:

Principals are devoting resources to this. We’re not actually helping disadvantaged children by changing the name of the school they can’t attend.

Unfortunately, though, this is typical of the vapidly saccharine pseudo-policies of the virtue-signaling Left. Worse, it’s all the Left seems to have; there’s nothing substantive or practical to their claims.

Divisiveness

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It’s not from the Right, nor even from the extremists on the Right or the Left.

No, the Mainstream Left and it’s carried through politically by the Left’s Progressive-Democratic Party; they have a virtual monopoly on divisiveness.  Here are just a few examples, provided by Jim DeMint in a slightly different, but related context. DeMint suggests these are from the radical Left, but he’s mistaken in that. The Left and Party have moved so far left that these positions are, in fact, their mainstream.

Pro-Life? You hate women.
Religious traditionalist? Homophobe.
Dislike illegal immigration? Racist.
Support welfare reform? Racist, again, and you hate the poor.
Do you like the Senate or the Electoral College, or stand during the national anthem? Probably a white supremacist.
Believe there are two sexes, corresponding to one’s genetics? Hate speech.
Believe the United States was founded in 1776? White nationalist.
Believe, like the World Health Organization itself, that we can reopen schools, safely, while managing the risks of COVID-19? Child abuser.
Believe we can mitigate the risks of climate change through technological innovation? You might as well believe the earth is flat.
To too many on the left today, religion is hate. Superstition is science. Freedom is oppression. Lies are truth. The Rule of Law is bigotry. The Constitution is evil. And America is irredeemably racist.

There’s more. Recall the following in our very recent history.

Ex-President Barack Obama: the Cambridge police acted stupidly, which he said about a Cambridge University policeman, responding to a call, arrested a man the caller had said was behaving suspiciously, the man resisted questioning, and then turned out to be the resident of the abode at which door he was arrested. Which Obama said, mind you, right after he said he knew nothing about the matter.

Then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: talking about Americans who didn’t support her candidacy, they’re all irredeemable, deplorable, misogynistic, homophobic, racist.

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden: blacks not supporting him aren’t really black, and 15% of Americans are just no good.