Had some friends who love to try out new places to eat. They pulled into a standard country pub on a roadtrip, nothing unusual about it to make it seem any different to any country Aussie pub. They ordered a standard pub lunch. The big hairy dude behind the bar grumbled at them and then went out to the kitchen. 20 minutes later they are served the worst meal of their lives and 5 minutes after that a large amount of motorcycles pulls into the parking lot.

They left soon after. The place was a biker gang front and all the locals knew to avoid it.

On a related note, there’s a $2 junk shop in my town where you can sit at the bus stop out front in the morning and watch every tweaker in town walk in, spend 2 mins inside, and then walk out looking much happier, 10 seconds later, carrying nothing.

It is so obviously an over-the-counter methamphetamine dealership that the entire bus stop is known as ‘Meth Corner’ to everyone in town.

I don’t know that there’s any irony there. In my reading, the passage is actually advocating against such laws. And is aimed at the kind of thinking that leads to such laws.

I don’t think he is condoning or advocating for such thinking in that passage - more saying that, if you do want these kind of laws (while he lists some contemporary examples) you have to realise that it won’t actually work and will have other, negative consequences. That’s not him necessarily condoning the thinking or actual moral standing of those examples. Just pointing out what he sees are the realities of such laws.

There was one study I vaguely remember reading of, where tagged birds of a certain species were seen as more desirable mates. So the scientists had to change their tagging style. They’d accidentally invented a new bird fashion.