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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.

There are many purposes, but yes, the idea is to encourage self deportation, and discourage illegal crossings, by making the environment not feel overwhelmingly pro-illegal as it has for most of the past 30 years.

This is a good target for that, but it also just seems like an insanely flagrant violation that couldn't be ignored once anyone at ICE got a whiff of it. This is one of the highest paid public employees in a swing state.

Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.

As an aside, it's actually crazy how much school district admins get paid, especially considering that what they mostly do is make things worse.

Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.

You need to excuse the olds.

There job is to make sure the district is eligible for funding and doesn’t get sued. These are much more important functions to the district than educating the children.

Much more important to the district's union, the district is best off when someone comes in and burns everything down.

Making sure you have funding is still an important function. And I'm not sure it's actually better for the district to have a principal who makes a courageous stand against bad policy as opposed to one who secures funding. If nothing else, the district already pays taxes; if the school district is better described as babysitting than an educational organization, at least there's the befit of getting the babysitting you pay for.

In theory yes, in practice nearly every superintendent wants to make their “impact” and so tosses any program affiliated with a predecessor and replaces it with their own shiny new toy that they obligate teachers to drop everything and follow. And yes, it’s horribly inefficient.

Well yes, and as someone not employed by the district I take this as evidence that district bureaucrats should be shot and district functions sold to vendors, pour encourager les-autres.