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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   33027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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It's one of the biggest libertarian "viral moments" I can remember. Not only is it terribly authoritarian, it's a ridiculous inversion of priorities and waste of resources. We can start talking about euthanizing squirrels over "rabies" concerns after the government has successfully euthanized every rat in NYC. And treating a squirrel as some kind of dangerous exotic pet makes zero sense. There's a long American tradition of owning pet squirrels; Warren Harding had one named Pete living with him in the Whitehouse. This whole thing is just quintessentially un-American.

He deserved to have his feral disease ridden animals taken because he is a degenerate pornstar and vain social media publicity seeker. This non story is total brain melting slop.

I'm sure every animal department has stupid policies where they needlessly kill tame housebroken foxes and let feral pitbulls continue to eat toddlers: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/

  • -20

This comment is bad. It contains no insight, analysis, information, or content except the fact that you evidently don't like the guy and don't care about dead squirrels and wanted to express it in a belligerent fashion. You could have just not commented on a story you don't care about, or you could have put some minimal effort into explaining why you don't think it's a story worthy of discussion (though generally we take a dim view of telling other posters what they should or shouldn't be talking about, since obviously plenty of people did think it was worth discussing), or you could have added some content (like details, with links, about this individual and why you think he's unworthy of sympathy and therefore no one should care about his squirrel). Instead you just decided to uncork and spew. We do not like it when people do this. You have a history of doing this. Stop it.

I think he is making an argument. It's a bad argument in my view, but it's an argument accompanied by some sort of reasoning. Not going to win a quality contribution award, but not in violation of the rules either IMO. He is inviting a discussion and responding.

A plain reading of my comment is clearly that this policy is eminently reasonable, these things happen frequently and are mundane, and this story's notoriety is unrelated to its merit, but the man involved is flooding social media for personal gain. That's not enough analysis for a reply to a thread?

Your link suggests sarcasm, though this showed up in my filter feed.

Even if the owner murders babies I don't see how that justifies killing the squirrel. Seems like an unrelated issue.

Animals are property.

This guy says law enforcement spent five hours ransacking his property. And destroyed some of it such as his pet squirrel. That's the problem here. The anarchotyranny of a government with no time or resources to deal with shoplifting and car break ins, but apparently lots of law enforcement resources to crack down on unregistered squirrel owners.

So should we burn down murderers' houses? What's the point of destroying property as punishment for a "crime" (which in this case is not actually a crime and which no one has been convicted of yet)?

The squirrel bit a guy I think. If a murderer built a house that tries to punch your balls every time you walked by I'd probably want to demolish it.

it apparently bit an officer when they were in the process of seizing it. The same as incarcerating someone for resisting arrest without any other charge raised.

If the cops show up to my house for some stupid reason and want me to go sit in the squad car while they do whatever, and I thrash and kick and headbutt one of them like a BLM protester then yes, I do think it is fine to punish me for that, even if the original reason they were there didn't pan out. If you're more libertarian and completely disagree that the state and its agents should have some good faith wiggle room for mistakes or best practices that fine, but there's no sense in us spending 8 comments to reach that impasse.

wouldn't it be necessary for the cops to have a court order to ransack your home? I would assume that includes potential charges.

"If you're more libertarian and completely disagree that the state and its agents should have some good faith wiggle room for mistakes or best practices that fine,..."

I just find it hard to consider the killing of pets without recourse from the owner as a mistake.

The squirrel bit a guy who was trying to take the squirrel away. If there was a car that could punch your balls when you tried to steal it, a lot of people would probably want one.

The squirrel only bit the guy after they entered the house and tried to take the squirrel, which should have never happened to begin with.

So what is the reasoning behind infringing on this guy's property, then?

Probably that the animals spread disease and rabies and are more likely to bite their owners and have to be put down sooner or later anyway. Not sure though, the justification might begin with the negation that he was the right to own this specific property.

the animals spread disease and rabies

Source? Evidently the state does not know that, they killed it to test it for rabies in the first place.

There were so many other ways to address the issue available, and they availed themselves of none but the most direct and violent one.

If there's a violation of the law, send the guy a notice to appear or otherwise drag him into court unless he gets paperwork in order. I understand the government can't 'ignore' a well-documented violation of the law but we'd expect them to use the lightest hand possible when enforcing said law unless there was some massive public interest at stake.

To make an absurd comparison, its like burning down the Branch Davidian compound rather than arresting David Koresh while he's out on a jog.

To make an absurd comparison, its like burning down the Branch Davidian compound rather than arresting David Koresh while he's out on a jog.

I think the true absurditity is that this is not a particularly absurd comparison, this is just Democrats and the deep-state playing to type.

Speaking of playing to type, the director of enforcement for the Department of Environmental Conservation who ordered the hit is apparently named Karen Przyklek.

Karen Przyklek

It's a squirrel. If it was beaver there may have been some mercy in her soul.

The government regularly ignores well-documented violations of the law, particularly where those violations are non-violent (e.g. speeding, immigration, drugs). Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.

I think it says a lot about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the PMC in general and the Democratic party in particular that armed insurrection, and the burning of minority nieghborhoods can be dismissed as "inconsequential" or "the cost of doing buisiness" while possession of an unlicensed rodent is somehow a bridge to far.

I'll clarify that in this case "well-documented" means "the guy was literally an influencer and published his videos to millions upon millions of views."

So in a sense, this is like if some person kept posting videos of themselves speeding at 10 mph over the limit and posting them for all to see. If the state ignores that they're almost condoning the behavior.

And yet the ATF is not breaking into the houses of children with glock switches.

Driving safely while going 10mph over the speed limit is a behavior the state should condone.

If you can drive safely at 10mph over the speed limit, then the bastards posted too low a limit. (Uncontested freeways are arguably an exception - although the Germans have demonstrated that German drivers driving German cars don’t need speed limits)

Fine, 15, 20, I'm just saying, if somebody is consistently flouting the law to thousands of viewers, it isn't surprising the state is going to get involved.

The judgment call is making sure the intervention is proportional, I guess.

Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.

No, this isn't how it works. Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore violations which will take a lot of time and resources to remedy and focus instead on easy ones. This is why we get anarcho-tyranny - people trying to get away with laziness and justifying it with moneyball-esque "efficiency" metrics.

It "makes sense" from the government's perspective to do what you're describing. It "makes sense" from society's perspective to do what I'm describing.

Unfortunately "society" has little oversight over how government actually functions on a day to day basis, as things are currently constituted. I wish it were different, but I feel that it's important to recognize where incentives and structures pull actual day-to-day functions away from their idealized/theorized function.

At the risk of being tedious, what would make even more sense is to just not make laws about things that you're actually willing to ignore the vast majority of the time. Perhaps Squirrel Law isn't actually something that needs to be on the books at all.

I completely agree. Laws ultimately rest on the threat of violence and there should be as few of them as possible.

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