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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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I don’t think you need anything that dramatic. You just need to coordinate society such that people who are rude and do disrespectful things are shunned. If he’d lost friends for doing that he wouldn’t be doing it. And as long as it’s tolerated it continues to get worse. My guess is, based on observation, that this isn’t the first time he’s done that. More than likely he’s been pushing on social norms for a long time and not getting any negative results. And if we stop tolerating it, it stops.

You just need to coordinate society such that

"Just"? Pardon me, but you might as well say that to lift mount Everest you just need to push up very hard.

Hmm? My suggestion was to call for and vote for politicans, DAs, and the police to just do their jobs. Hopefully that's not considered that dramatic in ${CurrentYear}, but Cthulhu swims left...

I don’t think anything he did amounts to a crime in most jurisdictions. The DA can’t do anything if it’s not illegal to bang on a door.

Banging on a door for the purpose of threatening the occupant is absolutely a crime in most jurisdictions. (In England and Wales, it is legally an assault).

But even that isn't necessary. The point of banging on the door is to claim escalation dominance by sending a credible signal that if she escalates to calling for a tow he can counter-escalate to a beatdown. The appropriate response by the authorities is to send a cop to the guy's house to politely inform illegal parking guy that actually the Westphalian State has escalation dominance round here and that if he escalates to a beatdown the cops will counter-escalate to a jail term, felony record etc. If that threat is credible, then it doesn't need to be followed up. And if the cops tell the unfortunate lady what they have done, then she now has escalation dominance in the original dispute. This is easy police work that a rookie cop could handle.

In a place with minimally effective policing (which, for example, included 95% of the UK in the nineties and 99% of the UK in the noughties, and in the present non-ghetto neighbourhoods of most Continental European or Australian cities, and all of 1st-world Asia) a threat of a beatdown by one adult neighbour against another is empty. I haven't seen the Reddit post that the OP is referring to, so it isn't clear to me if this was a case of a place where there is no effective policing (far too much of the US because the US is, for reasons that are not clear to me as a Brit, shockingly bad at basic police work) or whether this was a case of a woman scared into submission by an empty threat (in which case someone who knew the local situation should have told her to call the cops).

Who is we?