Some Big Boys Made Me Do It
Apparently, and this may be news to you, littering isn’t a moral shortcoming of the people actually dropping the litter:
Which seems awfully convenient, for a certain kind of person, if not entirely convincing.
Litter – and its inegalitarian distribution – is a topic we’ve touched on before. From which, this came to mind:
But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.
The report that Mr Matthews cites, supposedly as evidence of unfairness, actually states that council cleaning resources are “skewed towards deprived neighbourhoods” – with councils spending up to five times more on those areas than they spend on cleaning more respectable neighbourhoods. And yet even this is insufficient to overcome the locals’ antisocial behaviour.
A regular visit by a council cleaning team, even one equipped with military hardware, won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering among both children and their parents. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”
And Mr Matthews, our Urban Studies lecturer, is educating teenagers. Telling them how it is.
Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
‘Communist’ is just a mask for being a shitty human being.
Well, I think it’s fair to say that Mr, um, Chloddy isn’t dealing with demurral particularly well. He seems very keen on dismissing contrary arguments, unanswered, in favour of insults, name-calling and repeated use of the words “right wing.” As if that were some kind of mic drop.
He also has thoughts of this kind. The meaning of which I leave to the reader.
Whether communists are human beings is open to debate.
Mr Chloddy is now limiting any reproduction of his claims, hence the replacement of the embed with a screengrab.
There is a lot of racism in America. But it’s not among the group leftists point to.
Wanye, you cannot expect a good faith argument from someone whose bio says “bullshit femboy”.
Theodore Dalrymple wrote an entire book on the subject.
[ Note to self: Always take screengrabs. ]
No one is above the law . . .
I’m only astounded they didn’t suggest ‘right wing’ litterbugs came in under cover of darkness to litter in ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods…
That old Christian standby . . .
As I said in the original thread,
I remember wondering how someone could literally wade through garbage every time they walked to and from their own front door. As if this were perfectly normal. And the thing is, while modest, the neighbourhood itself – the physical structures – wouldn’t have been such an utter shithole if better people were living there.
Chloddy should travel more. Japan doesn’t have many public trashcans. You are expected to carry your trash until you find a disposal point.
Exactly. I’ve been doing that my entire life…why can’t others?
From the Wanye Burkett thread:
Becoming a parent would, I think, make quite a few modish political conceits much harder to sustain.
Argh! When walking around Tokyo any urban American is going to be struck by clean streets AND the absence of garbage barrels on these streets.
What, they have hordes of “municipal waste services and street cleaning” people out picking things up 24/7?
No. It is the culture in Japan that one takes responsibility for their own garbage and takes it home (or at least to bins located inside of train/subway stations near the immaculately clean restrooms). Indeed, the thoughtful tourist reads up on stuff like “how to behave and not annoy the locals in Japan” to know that you do NOT stuff your face with food as you’re walking down the street and you never ever litter.
This is also the complaint I have when certain people go into national or state parks and trash the campgrounds and picnic areas. One of the first rules of wilderness etiquette is you ‘take out what you brought in’ – closely followed by ‘leave your campsite cleaner than how you found it’.
… is it too early for day drinking?
[ Considers merits of a gin and tonic. ]
[ Chops wedge of lime. ]
[ Checks clock. ]
[ Slurping. ]
And the law is whatever the people who do the law say it is. It’s turtles all the way up.
These are not serious people.
Addendum.
Look at photos of the National Mall after Earth Day events.
It’s covered in trash, including mountsins of plastic water bottles.
After Tea Party events it was cleaner after than before.
The military hardware will probably be needed either way at this point. Sinking the Windrush would have been the kindest choice over the long term.
Let’s give nose rings to the rest of them.
Blue Denim: invented in Europe and as early as the 1600s (IIRC) paintings of peasants and workmen can be found wearing demin pants and coveralls.
I know it hardly needs saying but in my suburban neighborhood in the US, a street cleaner comes precisely once per year to pick up the mashed leaves that the leaf pickup people could not get. Once. And yet trash is not strewn everywhere. I know, it’s a miracle. The cultural lack of agency is very detrimental.
Commies like Bernie love to cite studies of hunger in America to prove how bad it is, but these studies asked people if they had missed a meal in the past week and cited that as “hunger”….my wife misses several meals per week because of a crazy work schedule, not lack of money. Kids go to school hungry because their parents are disorganized or because the school offers a free breakfast. FFS lying liars.
Also: Many of those “food bank” NGO’s that ask us to give $$$ to help hungry people are highly politicized, full of Bernie bros and other varieties of commie.
If you haven’t an immune system you shan’t have to live long with that surgical mutilation.
It can’t be any worse than British tea.
Try brandy and soda.
“Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door.”
I live in close proximity to student housing at an urban university campus. On the main parts of campus, it is someone’s job to pick up the trash. On the side streets with university property bordering the campus, also, but less frequently. So the photo op campus brochure places look clean, and the side streets are absolute trash piles, and it is mainly fast food/take-out containers, even though there are trashcans in the dorms and outside the dorms.
There is no austerity or grinding poverty on a modern college campus – these kids have the money to buy the fast food, or the blunts, or whatever it is littering the street and my front yard. They just have no culture of throwing trash into a bin. It goes on the ground. I regularly come home from work and spend a few minutes picking up the worst of it from my front lawn, because I do not wish to attract rodents to my home. And it just looks bad, but I guess that’s my privilege showing.
Probably the same way people can’t hear the low battery chirp of a smoke alarm, or see water dripping down a wall or something – I can’t imagine how they can live like that, but it is done all over the world.
OK…real curious…did that quote spontaneously occur to you just now or had you seen it pop up somewhere recently? I ask because I saw it somewhat recently, maybe a month or two ago. It was vaguely familiar then as it being something I ran across many years (decades?) ago. What is doubly disturbing is the more recent appearance was in a dismissal of Trump or MAGA supporters.
It’s from the end of _The Camp of the Saints._
I am old enough to remember when it was customary to toss all your wrappers and bags out the window while driving. You go to the drive-thru, get burgers and fries, then when you were done, you’d toss them out the window, as if that would cause the paper to evaporate.
The bottom of the off-ramps from interstates was the worst. People would stop, then toss everything out.
This was the late 60s.
Then there was a huge anti-littering push, and people got it into their heads that tossing trash out the window was pretty stupid.
That it’s a mural of the constellations, a map of the stars, is almost too on the nose. And that’s before we get to the fact he’s also “taking a picture,” inevitably featuring himself. His TikTok channel is pretty much a testament to self-involvement, morony and low-level obnoxiousness.
‘…an unglamorous “social” housing estate, where the amount of litter was striking. On the street, in gardens, in lifts and walkways, pretty much everywhere…’
A reletively modern phenomenon. On my local Facebook group, people often put up old pictures of the are yo show how they’ve changed since. It’s a council estate in east London. and the most remarkable thing about the pictures (from the 50s and 60s mostly( is the neatness of the gardens and the complete and total absence of any litter. Despite the fact there’s no visible evidence of any street furniture such as litterbins (except in the images of the parks)
And since I nees to replace some kitchen equipment… TO THE AMAZON LINK!
Bless you, madam. May your earbuds be free of waxy secretions and therefore charge as intended.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it seems apposite:
It was one of those really-obvious-thing-not-being-mentioned moments.
There is a tendency among some to avoid any acknowledgement of the, shall we say, variation in quality of human beings and their differing levels of civilisation. By which I mean, there are people who very much resist any reminder of obvious everyday realities, and who take great exception to those who won’t pretend not to notice.
Mr Matthews, mentioned above, and the documentary makers, also mentioned above, are obvious examples, but they are far from alone.
The Guardian‘s Zoe Williams comes to mind – a woman whose ability to pretend things that are obviously untrue, and whose resentment of those who do not pretend those things – and who would rather not live next door to violent, thieving morons – is quite pronounced.
Re the above, and from one of the subsequent threads:
But who pretend they don’t.
Multiculturalism!
The word unworthy came to mind, among others. One might almost wonder why they don’t leave to enrich somewhere else, somewhere they might find more congenial. But as someone says in reply, “They come for the pre-built civilisation, and free stuff. That’s it.”
Needless to say, this is not a model for fragrant, harmonious living.
I actually am on my tea break from working in “Street Cleansing” in a major northern city. The more we do, the worse it gets. And you’ll be shocked to know it’s not the native population causing certain postcodes to be complete and utter shitholes 24/7/365…
The poster child for AWFLs. I mean, despicably AWFL.
I thought Atlanta was the “city too busy to hate”. Ah, but that’s all in the past.
I’m finding the wicked bitch’s body language irritating enough.
It dawned on me as I was watching, it’s not unlike one of my tip-jar blessings.
This poor chap had his dream taken away from him.