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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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But shouldn't everyone else oppose them? The sooner the public can trust that all the pink VW Beetles on the road are proven to not be kidnappers, the better!

What if the authorities had a track record of previously discriminating against pink VW Beetle owners, would you still expect the owners to trust the authorities to use their powers for good? Perhaps they were only allowed to live among other pink VW Beetle owners and prior to that Pink VW Beetle drivers were forced to entertain people by re-enacting a pinker version of Herbie the Love Bug without recompense for many years. And those that fled were apprehended, returned, and perhaps even had their Beetle destroyed. They also had to drive their Beetles in parades in order to claim rights other car owners already had. Sure, maybe they would use their power to only arrest the pedo pink VW Beetle driver, but how sure would you feel that it would never be turned against the rest?

Perhaps you could combat this by enacting policies to recruit pink VW Beetle owners into positions of power, to give them more of a say in governance, and success but non pink VW drivers may think this is favoritism, and some other pink VW Beetle owners may think those taking this opportunity have sold out, and are now working for big Mercedes.

We can draw this across to gun control too, many 2A people I know say that even if there was an idea they think might be useful (say around mental health checks and guns being taken while being carried out, as most gunnies in rural PA seem to have some story of someone they know shooting themselves), they couldn't trust the government to not use this power to simply try and confiscate guns more broadly as part of a ratcheting approach.

In other words you can't evaluate the responses to what might seem like perfectly sensible laws, without looking at the history, because people are not perfectly optimized decision making machines, they decide on feelings and those are informed by what has gone before, and what they have personally experienced. If your grandfather was arrested for parking his pink VW Beetle in a blue Camry only spot, would you really feel confident that new laws targeting Pink VW Beetle drivers would be fair?