Malicious Compliance

I found myself in an argument on Facebook today with someone who apparently thought that -- since I had posted a perfectly good link to a .gov site to refute one of his claims -- I was now obligated to conduct any number of Google searches that he might want me to do for him. I chose not to do so, since it was pretty clear that I could link to a video of God handing me the information on stone tablets and that he would declare it to be not relevant.

In an attempt to steer the argument somewhere else, he alleged that there were disfavored (by him) politicians who were arguing in favor of doing something that I would agree was dirt stupid. Not only did I agree that particular something was dirt stupid, but I decided to turn my Google talents to good by checking to see whether anyone had actually argued in favor of doing this dirt stupid thing.

I was not surprised to discover that some disfavored politicians had passed a law requiring "X". The people in some places that were in charge of *implementing* X seem to have said "We'll show them. Not only will we implement X, but we will implement all of the letters from A through Z to show just how evil this policy is." What we have here is a case of malicious compliance. No one had asked for letter "A" to be implemented, but "A" had indeed been implemented and people from all walks of life were showing up in the news talking about how terrible it was that this law had resulted in "A", when it was pretty clear that "A" hadn't been on the table at all.

Well, pretty clear to anyone not engaged in malicious compliance, anyway.

The moral of our story is that I should not argue with idiots on Facebook and that I should write more songs.

Or something like that.