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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Setting aside any journalistic bias (though I do wonder if ProPublica is as credible here as on abortion)

I'm a little cautious about stating anything too specific given ProPublica's involvement (and, more notably, that Biden shows up twice in an article about an award in 2022, while Trump shows up seven times). That said...

... these are embarrassing. Inexcusable.

The macroscale industrial problems look pretty bad and I can't come up with an alternative explanation, but a lot of the individual stuff -- especially conveyors, but maybe the smaller fires and interlock failures -- could be pretty plausible teething issues... if they were small number incidents. Absolutely unacceptable in a final assembly plant, but you'd be amazed how easily shit gets everywhere in these environments; it's very much an exercise in directing it.

Of course, they might have been repeated and recurring, given that the timeline looks like several months or issues.

People lose their jobs over less. They might well have lost some here; I don’t think we’d hear about it below Gezen’s level.

There's a couple stop-work orders, and given the scale and timeline involved that's usually in the tens of jobs, albeit probably lower on the totem pole.