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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Yeah, I don't know what is wrong with the Reflecting Pool or how it happened, but I don't think "well this is already broken, let me rip it to bits" is acceptable. If he did what is claimed, then it is vandalism. It doesn't matter if the lining was already torn, he made things worse.

Imagine your car is stopped with a flat tyre. A passer-by then breaks in a window. "What, this vehicle was already not functional, I didn't do anything wrong!" Would anyone accept that?

Is breaking a window of a car with a flat tire the right comparison? Pulling up a bit of lining that was already torn seems more like walking by a house that's already collapsed, and picking up a handful of rubble on a whim. You could uncharitably describe the latter as "pulling bricks right out of the wall", but vandalism seems a stretch.

Picking up a bit of broken-off lining is not what he's supposed to have done, though. He was yanking it up and didn't stop when instructed to do so.

I'm not saying what he did was, on any theory, lawful (nor was it a nice thing to do). But it seems to me that the salient quality of vandalism is deliberately ruining something that was fine before you got there, or at least, fine in whatever aspect you decided to wreck. Breaking the window of a car with a flat tire - sure, that's vandalism. Poking another hole in the already-flat tire… I dunno. I guess I sort of think of "vandalism", in its vernacular if not its legal sense, as requiring an intent to deface which is moot if you're only worsening damage to something that already visibly needed replacing.

How is it not vandalism to rip off a piece of a national monument? You have to reach into the pool to grab a piece, it's not just laying on the sidewalk raking with the leaves.

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