Shithouse, Spencer Iowa, 1936. Photo by Lee Russell, FSA photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public goods are underprovided, and easily lost if we aren’t careful.

There’s a tactic in football (what we Americans refer to as “soccer”) called “shithousery.” It’s a style of norm-breaking behavior – constant stoppages, niggling fouls, feigning injury – that completely disrupts the flow of the game. It can involve bending or breaking rules, and one of its main goals is to disorient the opponent, piss them off, trigger them. Purists hate it, but it often works.

This may be a good framework for thinking about what the new leadership in our nation’s capital did last week at Kaweah and Success reservoirs in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, dumping a bunch water into a river for a photo/tweet-op. Lois Henry at SJV Water has the goods on the specifics, which defy explanation other than these people are fucking idiots and we just handed them the keys to the bus in which we all must ride. (One of my young internet-native friends suggested that I experiment with shitposting, how’m’I doing? Not my strong suit.)

My water policy community friends and I have been pretty focused in the last few weeks on the language of executive orders, running through how the rules work, where the federal authorities are, how the ESA “god squad” actually functions and might be employed, stuff like that. “Keep your eyes on the process,” I wrote last week.

But is that maybe the wrong frame? Is this shithousery? I was going to write “just” shithousery, but as my trans friends and family will attest, there is real harm here.

Tyler Cowen this morning offered a helpful hypothesis:

Flood the zone.  That is how you have an impact in an internet-intensive, attention-at-a-premium world.

Cohen is making an argument that goes beyond the shithousery itself to the shithousery’s goal of moving policy by moving culture. It is not about each specific crazy thing on offer, it’s shithousery aimed at changing the entire game. His post is worth a read.

Clearly the rules don’t matter to these people, which is a bit of a setback to someone who has spent long years trying to master them. But shithousery has earned an enduring place in the beautiful game for a reason.