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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Who are the "takers"? Both tribes would contend that their own are valuable hard workers and the other side are parasites taking more value than they contribute.

The takers are public sector unions, HR and DEI, management and bureaucracy in general.

Would they? They talk a lot about being the ones to "equitably distribute" value to people according to their needs, not producing it. Like I worked in the nonprofit sector for years, nobody ever talked proudly about creating value.

Working in academia, the predominant perspective is closer to saying that everything of value is produced by the blue tribe anyway, so they should have the right to choose how the surplus is redistributed as well.

Yes, that's the sort of thing, but in our case nobody even thought about where all the grant money came from. It was just "our due"

Couldn't that just be because "creating value" is not a general blue-tribe value? They could believe that all value is produced by their tribe without particularly feeling compelled to brag about it or try to claim personal credit for part of the process.