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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Look, all I'm saying is that my experience dealing with people at the level of customer-facing public service is that the edge cases happen a lot more often than you think. It'd be great if the DMV could just take the name that random person who rocks up to the window gives them with no possible bad consequences, but that is not the world we currently experience. You're probably correct on all the points of law! But there's a reason for the DMV being stubborn about this, is all I'm trying to say.

When Biggus Dickus, the uninsured hooligan who happens to have recently changed his name, destroys my vehicle in a collision he caused,

  1. What specific good is that court order going to do me?

  2. How much of that good would not be got just as well from an Alabama DS-60 clone?

You keep vaguely rambling about how the DMV has some "reason" for treating a common law name change as a boogeyman, a reason that's supposedly so good as to be worth breaking the law to stop, yet have refused to give me any model of why it's any more of a boogeyman than a court-ordered name change.