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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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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.