That's how I was viewing it.
Not the snapback, yet, but a shitload of tension just got put on the line.
It will be forgotten in a week, just as you say, on to fresh outrages, but yeah, I think another step has been taken.
https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1853089493026283864
{Devon Eriksen
@Devon_Eriksen_ | 03 November 2024}
The function of agencies is to reduce your agency.
That's the connection between killing an innocent squirrel and the unraveling of civilization itself. One may be trivial, and the other apocalyptic, but they are driven by the same impulse.
The impulse to regulate. Agencies regulate things. It means, literally, from its roots, "to make regular".
It's not regular to have a squirrel as a pet.
Make no mistake. That's what this is about.
Oh, there will be plenty of legal quibbling from the statists over who did, or didn't, or should have had, a special license to keep wildlife, which is apparently a sort of permission slip from the government that they want you to get before you do stuff.
But none of that mattered. Because the real reason, the real reason we have silly agencies, and silly laws, and silly bureaucracy, is that if governments confined themselves to doing what was needful, they wouldn't have much to do, and then people would start asking uncomfortable questions, like where exactly that full third of every paycheck is going.
So you have a bunch of agencies knocking about looking for things to do. To justify their jobs, and their budgets.
And what they end up doing is ... meddling. They have a bias towards action, because inaction doesn't give them power or money. And they have a bias towards NO, because YES doesn't give them power or money.
Can I launch a rocket?
NO, it might upset a seal. Or hit a shark on the way down.
Can I paint my house purple?
NO, it might affect other people's property values.
Can I create a bank account under my authorial pseudonym?
NO, you might use it to evade taxes.
Can I care for an abandoned baby squirrel?
NO, it might might have rabies.
And the reasons are always nothing more than thin coat of excuse, painted over the desire for more control.
When you have enough government agencies regulating aspects of life, you are only allowed to do what is regular.
What everyone else does.
This is insufferable, of course, and Patrick Henry would have been stacking bodies by now. So should we.
But it gets worse.
It's not just high-handed.
It's not just dystopian.
It's not just tyrannical.
It's not just miserable and petty and small-minded.
It's civilization-destroying.
Why?
Because civilization and technological progress are a very specialized things, requiring a unique set of conditions.
This is why most societies, throughout history, haven't had any progress. They've just spent generation after generation whacking at the dirt with a stick to grow taro root.
Civilizational progress, that rare jewel that only a few societies have achieved, depends upon a whole bunch of factors adding up to an environment where trying new things is easy and frictionless.
New things.
Novel things.
Innovative things.
Things that haven't been tried before.
Things that aren't normal.
Things that aren't regular.
Things that you can't do when everything is made regular.
Things you can't do when everything is regulated.
It's not regular to keep a pet squirrel.
It's also not regular to shine high-frequency radiation through people and take pictures with it.
Or to put up metal rods to attract lightning and see what you can do with it.
Or to treat diseases with bread mold.
Or to attach kite stuff to a bicycle and try to fly.
Every innovation that separates us from famine, poverty, disease, and squalor started out as an abnormal behavior that made other people uncomfortable.
This is why liberty leads to technology, to wealth, to civilization, to quality of life, to... everything.
And this is why bureaucracy takes it all away.
And this time, in the process, it killed a small, harmless, innocent, loving animal.
No not killed.
Murdered.
Because it did so with premeditation and malice aforethought.
Peanut was happy.
Peanut had never known anything from a human being but love.
Peanut hadn't a drop of malice in his soul.
Peanut didn't understand why he was being taken from the only home he had ever known, to a place of execution, to be killed.
Peanut didn't understand what he had done wrong.
Peanut died confused, alone, and terrified.
Peanut died so that a small collection of petty, spiteful, officious "human beings" could have jobs and feel important.
The harm they did, while small in the universe, was not small in Peanut's universe.
And it can never be put right.
So I say it's time for ordinary decent human beings who do not delight in the misery of others to stop being so goddamn polite and orderly.
Because it's not squirrels who need killing.
It's bureaucrats.
