The law is a not a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting away society’s ills. It’s an axe.<\/p>\n
So, on the spectrum of morally good, past acceptable and tolerable, politically incorrect, unacceptable through to downright evil, the law can only really pick off acts on the extreme end. There is much that is socially unacceptable and morally wrong that is not illegal.<\/p>\n
Another way of looking at things is statistically. If you were to do something that might inconvenience others – such as, say, making a loud noise – the number of people you would inconvenience depends on your location and the time of day. If you were to make a loud noise at 3am in a built-up area, you might wake dozens of people. At 3pm, you might only wake two or three. At what point should the law cut in and say it is unacceptable?<\/p>\n
Around here, the law-makers have conservatively drawn a line in the sand. Before 7:30am, people operating loud machinery in a built-up area are breaking the law. They will be swarmed by police, pepper-sprayed, cuffed and dragged into the cells to be brought before a judge at a more reasonable time of the morning. (I’m pretty sure that’s how it works; I have never done any act nearly so horrendous.)<\/p>\n
After 7:30am, the law-makers have reasonably declared that they won’t act, for fear of mistreating someone who is less morally culpable. But that doesn’t make it acceptable<\/em> to make noise at 7:30am. That is just the beginning of the gray zone that extends at least up to 9am, and still has traces visible up to 10am.<\/p>\n So, this is a message to people with power tools, who wait until exactly 7:30am to fire them up: you may be law-abiding, but you are also evil.<\/p>\n There is another subclass of people – those who apparently are so anxious to start that they consider how long it would take for the SWAT team to arrive, and actually start just a few minutes before the deadline.<\/p>\n So, this is a message to the guy who fired up his hedge-trimmer outside my bedroom window at 7:27am this morning. You are an arsehole.<\/p>\n Sorry if this isn’t as clearly written as normal. I didn’t get much sleep last night for some reason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The law is a not a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting away society’s ills. It’s an axe. So, on the spectrum of morally good, past acceptable and tolerable, politically incorrect, unacceptable through to downright evil, the law can only really pick off acts on the extreme end. There is much that is socially unacceptable and morally wrong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,29,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cathartic-rant","category-influencing-others","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1634,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions\/1634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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