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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Whoever does that would need to spend the rest of their life in something like a witness protection program, and probably their family too, maybe even out to cousins and so on. The incentives are not aligned to solve the problem.

I don't believe in surrendering civilizational order to thugs. If longshoremen come around and start to break kneecaps, shoot them until they are dead. It's worked in the past and will again. Violence is a deterrence to violence.

The government is on their side and has been since the foundation of the NLRB.

since the foundation of the NLRB.

As we discussed below, the 5th Circuit is working on that problem.

Doesn't matter, the Robed 9 aren't going to allow anything radical. Roberts will always nerf it somehow. Only abortion was an exception.

I'm talk about what a well-run state would do, not predicting what ours will do. I agree with the prediction of Luddite victory. I'm just saying it doesn't necessarily have to be so.

Well, you seemed to be proposing a solution, and my point is that it wasn't a valid one.

Every mafia is breakable. The Sicilians are much less powerful than a generation ago because both the US and Italy did what was necessary to destroy them. It didn’t make a difference when it came to drug distribution because the ndrangheta took over, but certainly the influence of the Italian mob in the northeast in many parts of construction, shipping, catering, waste and other businesses has significantly weakened in the last 30 years.

Mob violence is much harder to effect in the US than it was in the 70s for legal, technical and demographic reasons (Irish and Italian extended families are much smaller, more atomized and more widely geographically distributed, with less influence in law enforcement). They might succeed in threatening or even killing an official or two, but everyone involved will be off to prison for decades pretty soon thereafter and that will be that.

"Valid" in what sense? One that the correct government can take given its social constraints? Sure. But there's a whole universe of solutions inaccessible to our hamstrung political machine and a whole class of "coup complete" problems that cannot be solved within these constraints. It's fair to talk about them.