kpozin.net Projects & Musings by Konstantin Pozin

Let's say you have a house, and right beside it, there is a wooded area that was recently infested by rodents, and now has a number of teeming rats' nests. Having menaced the woods' other inhabitants into quiet submission, the rats aggressively move outward, constantly damaging your property, attacking and biting your kids and your pets. Everyone in your family has to get rabies shots regularly, you wake up every morning to find another finger bitten and infected, another piece of furniture chewed, another room besmirched.

So you decide to go after the rats - you enter the woods. You get on your hands and knees, chin at ground level, and go crawling around, facing each rat face to face, trying to scratch it and bite it to death. Meanwhile, your face and hands get mangled and bloody, and your efforts do nothing to keep the rats out of the house.

That would be the "proportionate response."

This sounds like a terrific idea, of course, but only if you're rooting for the rats.