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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31370 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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One of the themes of Patrick McKenzie's legendary essay The Story of VaccinateCA is that the government is perfectly willing to let private citizens assist with emergency relief efforts if the government is allowed to take credit for it. Tweets like this are a declaration of war in that context. If you go into a disaster area with the intention of undermining the legitimacy of the official response, you are going to have a bad time.

The Story of VaccinateCA

One interesting passage that ties in to the anti-union post downthread:

One reason was that, while governmental actors could collaborate with volunteer-based organizations, they could not use the work of volunteers directly, due to a raft of considerations. One mentioned to me was union-negotiated labor rules. There is no one employed by the government whose job is calling pharmacists to get this information, true, but if that person hypothetically existed they would be a union member, which means that a volunteer doing that job is nonunion labor competing with them. Unions are extremely predictable in what they think of their employers using nonunion labor.

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