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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31639 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.

Black pill- the people studying this do not see it as a problem. The goal is to legally comply with the text and preserve any bureaucracy from accountability. It is not to protect either the institution or the students- schools don’t care about large financial liabilities, they’ll just raise taxes to cover it, and no one in this bureaucracy is at any point incentivized to care about the kids.

In the sense that the school administration and board didn't see it as a problem in that way, yes, and indeed the grand jury report spells it out, if perhaps in circumspect terms:

... throughout this investigation we have learned LCPS as an organization tends to avoid managing difficult situations by not addressing them fully.

In the sense that the grand jury recommendations are couched in terms of policies that would preserve the school bureaucracy from accountability, kinda. There's actually a pretty serious indictment of the school system's near-complete abdication of responsibility -- literally, that LCPS "bears the brunt of the blame" -- as well as individual actors. And yet, those bad actors are named only by role, not by name; the efforts toward encouraging the bureaucracy to be better couched entirely within the assumption that the school administration would remain consumed by and for administrators above students. Nor could the administration be above individual people; quite a lot of the obfuscation from the LCPS legal counsel seems focused on covering the individual reputations of bad actors even at the expense of the school's reputation.

We don't know the members of the grand jury, but they were appointed by a local Republican for whatever that matters. And yet they don't seem to be willing to burn down the administration or to encourage putting safety above Goodharting, even as they say the only reason they did not deliver an indictment was a lack of sufficiently close statute. If they too are captured, there's a fun question first of how, but also of what capture means when it can be so broad as to include them.

To be honest, there’s lots and lots of republicans that do boring work like this(and yes, no matter how juicy the situation originating the investigation, this is a lot of boring work) who are extremely literal-textualist in outlook and so will do things like not recommend charges for gross negligence because there isn’t a sufficiently close statute.

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