Thread by @owenbroadcast

walking a dog in a small town / suburban area manifests a perfect [government / community / social practice] though experiment. everyone walks their dogs. the dogs all need to use the bathroom somewhere. yet, all property is owned by specific individuals. [...]

you can try and have your dog just go at your own house but realistically at some point on walks the dog needs to go to the bathroom somewhere. this is an unavoidable problem. yet, there is really no social protocol for what to do here. its a grey area. [...]

would a random person mind if my dog happened to pee on their lawn? i wouldnt really care if someone did that on my lawn. i feel like, it happens, i get it. yet, im not totally confident that others feel this way also. i guess it would be reasonable if they didnt. its their lawn.

so one is forced to behave as though no one is cool with it. so, what do you do then? we’re all walking these dogs, i guess we all just pretend this doesnt happen and develop a weird subculture of hoping no one is looking to deal with this inevitable problem.

and then, to further this illustrative issue, that is real, but is also a good analogy for many things, the only “open” spaces are a few churches. that feels worse, almost. obviously im not going to go there, to do that, for a variety of reasons. so, what is to be done.

theoretically a tight knit community could reach some reasonable compromise. like, maybe the first foot of your lawn, its right next to the road, that seems reasonable. no gardens. certainly not letting the dog go much further in than a foot, we could have some rules here.

but some people dont have dogs and could object to this entirely. u could really illuminate your own cohesive theory of government and community by addressing this problem. i see the people, with their dogs, far from home. what are they doing, in the shadows of the neighborhood.

i cant bank on any random person not being offended if they happen to see my dog doing this on their property. i cannot bank on us having shared values with regards to this topic. this is a cohesive microcosm of the collapse of a shared normal society with set standards.

https://twitter.com/activeogre/status/1409672087447347200

https://twitter.com/irishdevilfish1/status/1409673323433189376

already gotten dms from people saying both they would be very angry to see a dog peeing on their lawn + people saying 100% no one cares. thus i feel confirmed in suspecting this is a perfect node of what happens in a liminal social space with no set standard (anarchy, breakdown)

the people need rules to have harmony

confucius moment