Aren't you a former Ivy league kid? Are you thinking of pitching in for the war effort by enlisting? Are your kids or nephews?

I think that public shaming is difficult to do and unevenly applied. But social stigma associated with specific behavior, such as that associated with smoking, is a good approach.

It's true, Water Pig's water can be cut off, without resorting to having LEO shoot him. But what about SUV drivers? If the government won't sanction tighter fuel economy standards, then how does public shame work, without enforcement? And if people refuse to comply, ultimately there has to be the gun (or, like Andrew Meyer, the taser). This is what you advocate?

To quote Gore Vidal, "it is dangerous to play with such fire in so dry a season."

There was a time in this society when people who were disgraces or had disgraced themselves were shunned by polite society…at least until they had redemmed themselves, if they ever did.

Kicking people out of the larger society in their environs works wonders as punishment and as a preventive.

Deny people like the waterpig and Gonazles any social acceptence…ones who have no regard for the rest of society shouldn't be included in it. Let them be outcast. They interact with and use their water and money for company instead.

"Respect for another's property is respect for that other person. Private property is a means for the person to defend himself from encroachment on the part of the state.

Person and state: the former is fallible, the latter, never perfect. And here is a famous passage taken from the "Philosophy of Politics":

"Perfectionism – meaning the system that believes it is possible to achieve perfection in human affairs, and sacrifices present goods for imagined future perfection – is a result of ignorance. It consists of an arrogant prejudice that judges human nature too favorably, basing itself upon pure conjecture, upon a postulate that cannot be granted, and with an absolute lack of reflection upon natural limitations."

Perfectionism ignores the great principle of the limitations of things; it does not consider that society is not composed of "angels confirmed in grace," but rather of "fallible men"; and it forgets that every government "is made up of persons who, being men, are all fallible."

The perfectionist neither uses nor abuses reason. And those who are most intoxicated by the malignant idea of perfectionism are the utopians. These "prophets of boundless happiness," with the promise of an earthly paradise, work busily to build quite serviceable hells for their fellow men.

Utopia, Rosmini asserts, is "the tomb of all true liberalism" and "far from making men happy, it digs an abyss of misery; far from ennobling them, it renders them as ignoble as beasts; far from pacifying them, it introduces universal war, substituting power for law; far from distributing wealth, it concentrates it; far from moderating the power of the government, it makes this absolute; far from opening competition to all in all areas, it destroys all competition; far from expanding industry, agriculture, art, and commerce, it deprives them of any incentives, blocking private initiative and spontaneous activity; far from spurring minds to great invention and hearts to great virtue, it smothers and crushes any vitality of the soul, rendering impossible any noble effort, any magnanimity, any heroism; virtue itself is prohibited, and even faith in virtue is destroyed."

How true. Just look around you. The very forces of "imminentism" and utopianism that conservatives used to denounce when they were wielded by the totalitarians of the Soviet Union, of Mao and of Hitler, are now embraced by the vile neo-cons. State-corporate fascism is their watchword, the sine qua non of their dread movement.

Today a man on Muir beach was arrested for trying to clean up after the oil spill. This is what we have become, in relegating to the state and the state alone the pursuit of Utopia.

—————–

"No good deed goes unpunished.

At least that's how Muir Beach resident Sigward Moser felt Friday after he says he was threatened with a Taser gun, forced to the ground and handcuffed by a National Park Service ranger for refusing to stop cleaning up the oily beach beneath his home.

Moser, a 45-year-old communications consultant, said he was forced to sprawl handcuffed on the wet sand for an hour before he was released and given two misdemeanor citations, one for entering an emergency area and another for refusing a lawful order."

http://www.marinij.com//ci_7430910