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‘Asinine’: Rutgers alters grammar rules for nonwhite students to ‘stand’ with Black Lives Matter movement

Rutgers University’s English department declared that proper grammar is racist.

“This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar [and] sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, nonstandard, ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” department chairwoman Rebecca Walkowitz said. “Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them [with] regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”

The school’s English department will alter its grammar standards to “stand with and respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The department head said that the program will hold “workshops on social justice and writing,” will increase the “focus on graduate student life,” and incorporate “‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy” in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting calls to end racism and police brutality.

Walkowitz added that the New Jersey school’s graduate writing program will emphasize “social justice” and “critical grammar” in its courses, which will include more reading on subjects related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and “systemic discrimination.”

Some have denounced the move as “insulting” and racist because it assumes minority students can’t understand correct grammar.

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Vietnam orders evacuation of 80,000 people from city after three positive coronavirus tests

Vietnam has ordered the evacuation of 80,000 people from the coastal city of Danang after three residents there tested positive for coronavirus.

The government said the evacuation would take four days and involve flights chartered to 11 different Vietnamese cities.

Vietnam, which has been praised for its pandemic response after reporting just 400 cases and no deaths, went back on high alert at the weekend as it confirmed its first local infections since April, all in the popular tourism destination of Danang.

An aggressive and widespread testing regime, plus a strict quarantine had helped the southeast Asian country almost eradicate Covid-19 within its borders, but the authorities are now grappling with its first internal infections for months.

Although foreign tourists are still barred from entering the nation, there has been a surge of domestic travel as the Vietnamese take advantage of discounted flights and hotel deals.

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The Bloodless Political Class and Its Lack of Empathy

Why watch COVID press conferences and briefings by politicians? They are just upsetting. These people seem to have no clue about why the virus is ignoring them. They keep issuing strange and arbitrary rules that they make up, change by the day, all enforced by intimidation and compulsion. They posture in this silly way as if their edicts have this virus under control when they clearly do not. 

Even worse, and what chills me to the bone, is the strange absence of normal human emotion in their public performances. With day-to-day human communication in the presence of uncertainty, there would be some admission of the possibility of being wrong, of mistakes made, of the difficulty of knowing, of the limits of information to make informed decisions, of the pain wrought through such disruptive governance. 

You don’t see any of this in these governor’s announcements. Despite all evidence, they act as if they have got this under control. They don’t admit error. They don’t admit ignorance. They stare straight at the cameras and issue edicts, without even an apology for all the lives they have ruined and continue to ruin. They talk down to us. Condescension in every word. 

You are welcome to watch a typical case here, but no need since you know exactly what I’m talking about. 

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