When Government Is Endlessly Intrusive and Omnipresent, and Also Not There At All

Adding to my last post about covering language that masks the massive expansion of government behind performative language about limiting government: The most Los Angeles thing I have ever seen happened behind the Yoshinoya Beef Bowl.

See the alley between the Yoshinoya and the pharmacy? As I drove by on Wilshire, two extremely alert LAPD officers on motorcycles were sitting at the edge of that parking lot, postures tight and poised for action, urgently scanning the street. It was like watching a gunfighter movie, in the scene when the camera closes in on the gunfighter’s eyes, watching his opponent for the draw. These dudes were ready. If you did 38 in the 30 MPH zone, then brother, you were dead-ass done, nailed up in the trophy case.

Also, no more than thirty feet away from them, a little gaggle of filthy human zombies was passing a glass pipe around the circle, throwing up clouds of smoke, at the top end of an alley wall-to-wall full of open drug use and not terribly subtle drug dealing (and probably the prostitution that pays for the drugs, but I didn’t wander into the alley to look). But California made the possession and use of heroin, meth, and cocaine a misdemeanor, and the DA at the time was very proud that he wouldn’t allow his office to file most misdemeanor cases, because misdemeanors are lifestyle crimes that punish people for being poor, or for being “individuals experiencing homelessness.” So that alley full of people Hunter Bidening all day out in the open weren’t doing anything that could lead to prosecution, but your expired registration tags would bring down an immediate police response in you happened to roll by them.

Grand Guignol human depravity and ruin: no big deal. Minor traffic offenses: front and center.

This is Blue Zone governance, full stop, the thing people describe as anarcho-tyranny. Common San Francisco business owner experience: Police don’t intervene in the constant vandalism and tagging that degrades business property, but the highly alert army of code enforcement officers fine business owners for failing to clean up the damage that the city hasn’t prevented.

I forget who recently suggested this on I-still-call-it-Twitter, but go to Yelp and read some reviews for gas stations in Oakland:

But don’t worry, because this city is, again, very aggressive about…fining businesses for the disorder that the city allows:

No law for favored classes, relentless and punishing legal harassment for the normies. See also, for an older example, the decline of business in Detroit behind an endless flood of fees and fines in a largely ungoverned city.

So of course poor Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a wonderful gentle immigrant with a thinly coded reference to MS-13 tattooed across his knuckles, lived in Maryland but was stopped in Tennessee driving a car with “eight other people and no luggage,” but the FBI refused the call from state police asking them to open a human trafficking investigation, and told the Tennessee cops to drop it. That poor man, being harrassed like that!

Par for the course. The Tennessee cops are lucky they weren’t punished for their mean xenophobia.