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Thomas L. Hutcheson's avatar

The fact that AOC commented on and was know to have commented on Uvaldes's budget is a huge problem for Democrats. We are NOT a small, ideologically coherent party and candidates need to be able to appeal to the median voter of their districts. For the Republican candidate for Congress that represents Uvalde to be able to run against AOC [In fact he'll run against some Muslim Atheist Communist caricature that is even worse than AOC :)] instead of the local Democrat is a big advantage.

We do ourselves no favors by nationalizing issues unnecessarily.

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Aaron Erickson's avatar

During the pandemic, we learned that teacher unions would happily outsource the entire education portion of their jobs to parents and the kids themselves if you let them. In SF, Chicago, and other big cities, the teacher unions were happy to have teachers on zoom pretending to teach, fighting against vaccine mandates, and otherwise abandoning their job.

Public school is de facto public daycare for kids 4-18, with actual education as a nice to have side effect. They are basically “cops for kids”. There are exceptions of course, usually outliers where a good PTA in a wealthier community demands better. But most schools are abysmal at their core functions.

Not unlike police who fight things like automated traffic enforcement because taking away that function would mean they have to do the actual job of solving crimes v handing out tickets.

Both are noble occupations that systemically drive out ambitious well meaning people, leaving behind mediocre rule followers who are willing to stay for a moderately well paying union gig.

The slow boring solution is a popular grand bargain: defund the teacher *and* police unions, on the premise that, like the military, those functions are too important to let a union fuck them up.

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