It’s more that, and I don’t mean this in a “burn it down” anti-civic sense, sometimes a situation is so dumb it’s better to move to the forensics/recovery phase.

I wish all the board, and Boyd for that matter, health and love and happiness, but smearing/rehabilitating them is a misapplication of everyone’s energy.

I’d love a full outside accounting of what happened, and laws/bylaws enacted to prevent similar issues in the future.

No what I mean is no one cares about them personally

Public servants are necessarily expendable. Sounds like all these people kinda suck in their public capacities. Because waves hands around

I’d like you to entertain the idea that you may be well intentioned, perhaps even 100% right, but the style and form of your writing exemplifies the lawyer adage of “when you have the facts, pounds the facts. When you have the law, pound the law, if neither, pound the table”

It’s quite unsubtle, paints people in extremes, and leans heavily on manipulating the emotions of your readers. Like just rhetorically. I am not even accusing you of doing this on purpose or meanly.

Nearly no one here particularly cares about Boyd or the CA board except for “are they doing their jobs transparently?” We already know one entity hasn’t (doesn’t matter which). You are just demonstrating the other didn’t too.

Assuming you are doing this in good faith, hire an editor. Make sure you aren’t being used to get around confidentiality rules others are held to.

Trust that if the facts are on your side, that a dispassionate accounting is sufficient.

Yeah. Boyd could be satan incarnate but this NY Post quality tabloid prose doesn’t fly in HoCo/Columbia.

The all caps “EXPOSED” begs to differ

Ok, what I read is all these dummies need to get new jobs, and we need a new set of dummies who amend the bylaws so that a CA President can’t act unilaterally.

The dog owners are bad but the deer owners are something else.

You realize even hypothetical “People’s republic of North Badguyistan” is populated primarily by women and children, right?

I think any idiot adult who tries to make this about groomer nonsense is not prepared for and is underestimating our kids, much less choosing to stomp on one of the more highly educated cohorts of parents around.

Perhaps I should sign up, read up and comment.

Ouch. Just pay the fine. It sucks, but going into court with “yeah, I could have potentially mowed down some kids, buuuuut” is not a great look.

I suggest Lakey Boyd

Yeah. I found out by accident that our internal antenna which sucks inside actually works pretty well outside even with imprecise aiming.

Some rich person in New York City is going to just let it sit until someone agrees to pay more in rent than they can hope to get in revenue

So a little inside baseball about this. Everyone stereotypes, everyone has or will have racist thoughts at some point. What matters is what you do, and how you meaningfully atone (not perform atonement). Someone going around being like “I’m not racist” or “how dare you call me racist” what they are really doing is just identifying themselves as “not getting it”

What they are not getting is there is still work to do. That’s all. So I am unconcerned with people being hurt by the ugly word “racism” like I am unconcerned with when my kids say me telling them to cleaning their room (or whatever) isn’t fair. It’s not that I don’t know how to clean a room, or that I have a need to force them. It’s ultimately they’ll benefit from knowing how to do the work, and they are just saying “I don’t get that this is something I need to ultimately do to grow, for my benefit”

Lots of people who “get it” are called racist and their internal response is “well, ok. Probably not but hey, let’s listen and see why I make someone feel that way. Maybe I need to adjust how I am doing things here”

It’s a sort of “no one who is king has to announce they are king” kind of thing.

Even less so if we are saying maybe the way things are built benefits me more than my neighbor. It’s a weird hill to die on to be like “I am personally offended that you think this big collection of people I am not the boss of, maybe set things up unfairly before I was an adult.”

I’m a middle age white male btw. I’ll have to work a bit to give you more examples of systemic racism, but man could I give you examples of banks falling over to give me mortgages and instances of me getting way too much deference at work.

I think you are getting a little too “someone is wrong on the internet” about this - the emphasis was on pointing out there is low rates of overt racism, using the fact we have issues places full of well meaning but not entirely fully self reflective white people do as contrast.

Over emphasis of the lack of overt individualized hate is usually a sign we are missing structural stuff or hand waving it away. I like it here. I moved here intentionally. I think Columbia can ride to the occasion and has a head start compared to most of the country. Idiot racists made a lot of laws in the 1950s and 60s and I dunno if we’ve examined them all.

I used to live in Manhattan which has got to be one of the least racist and most racist places in America, so I guess I am at peace with the ambiguity of having pride in our town but also knowing it’s probably fucked up too.

Systemic doesn’t mean widespread or pervasive in this context, but rather built into the systems.

The place is an hoa, large focus on keeping housing prices up, a lot of the redistricting conversation is based on maintaining or at least not losing some of the advantage for our kids, missing out on how the eastern edge is underserved and less economically well off. Dues are based on property, not income and we inherit some regressive tax policy from the state.

Perhaps I should have used structural racism instead. I am not talking about the content of people’s hearts or their final destination in the afterlife. Just the (hopefully) unintended side effects of how things have worked. Behaviors, incentives, rules that are enforced or not, decisions we made vs how they could have been made differently.

For example, “I moved here so my kid could go to this exact highschool, why does he have to bus to another?” That’s a valid question. Makes some assumptions about how easy it is or not to pick where you buy a house, glosses over the experience of the kids who are bussing already, and doesn’t examine why we have to have fewer high schools than middle schools. How are we weighing needs? Am I personally ignoring someone else’s valid concern? Do neighboring non Columbia areas have a disadvantage in advocating for themselves due to fewer or less powerful local organizations? In this case the systemic racism would arise from people over simplifying the question through the lens of the collective experience of the majority. We potentially reinforce problems by seeking easiest path for us.

Think of Columbia as a weird place where the religious right takeover of the republicans never happened and the southern strategy did not take hold.

The republicans are democrats and the democrats are also democrats. There are some actual republicans but they are for the most part also democrats. There are progressives who kind of can’t stand democrats. They call themselves democrats. There is not much overt racism directed at individuals but there is a lot of accidental or systemic racism via the nimby thing. By in large I get the impression that people here largely want to do good, disagree on the details, mostly want to be welcoming but also kind like green space between buildings and wooded spaces. Re: protesting we’d go to DC for that.

It seems sometimes that surrounding areas are all trumpy and redneck (parts of jessup, out west on 32) but whenever I go somewhere that is actually like that I realize even the less (D) parts of MD are not full on crazy.

There are still isolated crazies occasionally running for school board.

White dude here, i moved to Columbia because it is diverse and not white male dominated. I basically wanted NYC but in suburb form. She’s right on. The board should reflect that. The only old thing white guys know better than other people is like… model train layouts and which cpap machines are the best, otherwise we are just like everyone else. Oh, we are also good at being wrong and stubborn.

Did they ever recover from the double whammy of covid and black mold?

I go rarely and I heavily heavily prioritize not smelling like a damp nicotine rag when I am done, so bowlero off of Snowden. I am sure it costs too much. I know you can’t smoke in bowling alleys anymore, but you can never get that smell out.

Wait what. That would be insane

Edit: they did for a bit during covid. I just had some Costco sheet cake at a party this weekend

Costco chocolate cake is insane

Don’t.

$20?

The grocery store, barely.

Woodcraft of Rockville is a bit of a hike but it’s great