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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc.

masks for children and not adults

Roman Empire demographic screed

The Venn diagram overlap of “could better benefit kids” and “the fault of pet culture” contains almost none of these things. Maybe choosing to build a dog park over a playground. The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.

Every DINK with a pet are two votes that should been a pro-child vote balancing out the other forces in politics, but instead they are absent from the fray. When you have so many adults in their prime ages of energy raising pets instead of children, it changes as a whole what the culture values.

The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.

In my city, libraries have been basically non-functional since the pandemic. The official hours are ridiculously limited, but every time I actually go during those hours, it has been closed. They have rules requiring at least 4 staff members be on site all the time, so if one staff member calls in sick, and they are below the number, the entire thing closes. This is despite staffers admit they spend most of their time doing nothing. They are having trouble hiring, but despite shelving books being a task many people could do, only people with the official sheepskin are allowed to be hired, which is generally a union thing to create barriers of entry and higher pay. Of course, the library workers job can itself suck, because they are lower priority than the rule "always accommodate vagrants lest we get publicized doing something that creates bad optics."

Wow, that’s absolutely ridiculous about the libraries. I had no idea. Thank you for clarifying.

demographic screed

Do you have arguments against the parents thesis, or do you think labeling a text you disagree with a "screed" is sufficient disproof?

I don’t think the parent presented much of a thesis at all. If he wanted to say “demographics is destiny”, he could have ditched the first half of the post.

Nothing wrong with his quotes.