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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32899 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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The whole thing ws wild to me because I used to run a Twitter blog for an anthropomorphic squirrel character for a board game IP I was developing. Crazy squirrel memes were my bread and butter, but not enough bread or butter to see the game to market.

Anyway all these memes popped up on my substack feed and I felt like I had truly missed my moment.

A conservative Substacker (John Carter Warlord of Mars) who I take with much salt, pointed out that aside from the real tragedy of euthanizing peoples' pets (this has happened before) is that this type of government action reveals the depths to which safety-ism will take us while simultaneously whistling past the graveyard of Big Problems. The border is a mess, but there's always time to activate half of a town's civil resources, kick down their door, harass their wife and kill their pets because...something, something rabies. (Squirrels don't get rabies and if they do they don't pass them to humans--research from the game dev, 'natch).

It's unfortunate this happened and even more unfortunate it happened now because it's a case egregious enough that most should note it as over-reach. Instead it's, "just those crazy conservative screwballs taking things too far again." RIP Peanut. #NeverForget

While raiding the house might have been dumb, and tbh probably was, I’m pretty sure that the euthanasia was due to some kind of standard policy for animals that bite an officer, and this is a facially reasonable policy that probably shouldn’t apply to squirrels but nobody drafting it considered that the animal biting an officer would one day be a squirrel.

I wouldn't take that bet, because these rules are written with coons, rats, bats, sacks of ferrets, angry geese, and other troublemakers in mind. The weird cases are heavily overrepresented in scenarios where you end up saying "today didn't go at all well, we'd better make a department policy about purse-carried mongooses"

I suspect that a large majority of officer-biting animals are dogs, and so squirrels are a weird edge case of something common enough to have a policy over.

Yeah. You don't get weird new policies added for dog-bites-man stories, even when it might be a good idea. But you get a horngry weasel down your pants one time and suddenly you're in an OSHA brief.

While raiding the house might have been dumb Kind glossing over the important part. Why rip apart hus house for hours? Why grill his wife over her immigration status (especially in ny)?

This seems personal and very heavy handed, and should be investigated.

Why try to hand wave it away?

Then why the raccoon? There was also a case where something similar happened to lady with alpacas (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/geronimo-post-mortem-results-alpaca-b1916386.html granted in the UK...but basically the same mindset). I also think that there are many cases where officers are bitten by dogs and cats where the animals are not euthanized. The problem is that the policy of euthanasia is running cover for the deliberate mishandling of the animals. It looks and smells like Molochian malice to this homo.

Edit: I suppose you may choose not to euthanize a registered pet who's up-to-date on their shots. So maybe the law is enforced judiciously.

There’s probably a specific carve-out for licensed and registered pets with documented vaccines, if there’s any exclusions at all. I would actually expect that a huge majority of dogs which bite police officers in the process of serving a warrant are shot on-site, and nobody cares very much because they’re dangerous ill trained dogs owned by criminals. People who license and register their pets and keep documentation of rabies vaccines, as a rule, don’t have police in their business.

I think this case is more of an exception due to the victim being oddly sympathetic than to the state being abnormally vicious.

and nobody cares very much because they’re dangerous ill trained dogs owned by criminals.

Dogs who bite people who attack their owners are well-trained dogs.

And people do care, at least to the extent that they make fun of the police, when the police shoot a chihuahua because they were "in fear for their life".

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