This was inspired by a post I saw the other day.
In my city, there’s a fast food restaurant where people regularly use the drive through, park in a nearby neighborhood to eat, and when they’re done just toss their trash out the window.
What’s to be done about this in an ideal world? My initial thought is that “police” should stake it out and hand out littering tickets to those doing this.
Of course, these police would be unarmed, properly trained in deescalation, and maybe not even part of a greater police department (supposing such department even exists).
But I’m worried that this is just a super lib response, and wondering what your thoughts are. I’m a bit troubled by handing out these fines - these are potentially hundreds of dollars to people who can’t afford it. And an alternative sentence of community service to clean up trash, while there seems to be a sense of proportionate justice to it, is of course forced labor and would be unconstitutional under the 13th amendment but for that exception that people on this website love to quote and dunk on. Moreover, this is a deterrence-based approach which opens its own can of worms.
Littering is a consequence of a production problem that puts the responsibility for packaging and waste entirely on "consumers" that now have a chore to do - or often fail to do. You can make that chore easier (enough bins), you can enforce the chore (cops, some kind of social engineering), or deal with the production problem to eliminate the chore.
The latter is far superior to any of the others but is precluded by capitalist interests: making waste your problem and not theirs improves short-term profits, i.e. it's an "externality", and they've run and continue to support a society-wide PR campaign premised on nagging consumers to "do their part" and it is now part of a wider social norm that only understands such problems in terms of consumer responsibility.
As an alternative, imagine if the packaging was already fully biodegradable. Or was part of a truly circular path with glass recycling you were paid to do. Or better yet, adopting a practice of reusable containers that are properly washed and distributed and easy to return anywhere (or were just part of getting food). Or even just not having containers or restaurants that require any kind of to-go container or a car to get to, if we're really reimagining.
Wouldn't it be easier to pay people to pick up litter than to pay people to watch everyone to make sure people don't litter?
Yup. Complete brainworms to even think in these terms at all. Full on lib "revenge is justice" brain. Start thinking about how to solve problems rather than how to hurt people you don't like
Even in our current world it would probably be easier and cheaper. Fire cops, hire more garbage people - there's a liberal science based solution.
The proper solution is to eliminate drive throughs. It's just more automotive infrastructure that should not exist.
most police should be unarmed deescalation guys, but the fast food literring cops should be posted up on a nearby ridge with anti-materiel rifles. my non-joke answer is that, while a lot of the "crime will just disappear under communism" stuff is idealist new soviet man nonsense, in a just society people are far more likely to actually give a shit about the people around them. amount of trash produced is gonna go way down when most people just bring a cup and a plate rather than relying on mass manufactured plastic ones, too
"in an ideal world" is always a tricky hypothetical. in an ideal world we would not have drivethrus. cars wouldn't be a requirement for functioning in society and society wouldn't be designed to accommodate cars. food wouldn't be wrapped in disposable paper and plastic so it can be unwrapped and discarded 5 minutes later. the point at which we feel we need an agent of the state to force people to be prosocial is so far downstream of so many decisions that produce antisociality in the first place.
but that's just one anarchist's opinion.
Instead of police giving tickets, why not have the business ban litterers from drive through and offenders have to dine in or fucking go without? And why not make the business responsible to prevent littering but then the "customer is always right" has to go and good riddance. Business should be made to uphold the norms of the community even if it impacts their precious profit, fuck 'em.
And how do you expect to uphold any of these laws without some kind of police force? The fact is if there was some kind of leftist overthrow of the US government there would need to be some sort of police force, nobody that is currently is a cop or is white should be allowed to be apart of this of course, but the state must have the monopoly on violence because the party should control the state. Anarchists think that humanity is capable of governing itself without a higher force, their efforts to abolish the American police force is useful to us, but eventually we would have to implement red cops. Anyways violence is cool when we do it.
I didn't mean abolish all organized law enforcement. I guess what I meant is that any police force should hold business accountable and the law should also state as much. The notion that supplying people with litter to throw is on business. Same with single use plastics etc. I feel like shuffling police duties and behaviors around without addressing who is the criminal in littering isn't a complete analysis. Capitalism assigns the responsibility to the powerless constantly.
So great start
As a boomer who realized I was left (and that I disn't understand why I hated libs as much as I did conservatives) only after supporting Bernie in 2016, I appreciate the encouragement. God knows I didn't get any in the McCarthy=>Regan era so better late than never. Just happy to be here. :hexbear-retro:
I sympathise on the parents score.
Mine were born in the 30's so their childhood was spent absorbing WW2 propaganda like reddit does Iraq war or Hong Kong or Russia propaganda. When they came of age the war was over, but they were so bamboozled that the Korean war was their chance to be Americans or whatever and the McCarthy shit embedded in their brains makes them rage to this day if you mention socialism or communism.
I've given up but I forgive them because I learned to see the brainwashing and I just slide around it and direct what conversations I have with them to family stuff. That and I moved a state away so I could think for myself without abuse.
The boomers I grew up with were mostly shoulder shrug libs, the chuds whose parents were rich or local business owners and officials and a handful of outcasts (whether willingly or unwillingly). There were a few leftists in the outcast class and a few in the arts groups. But the hard sciences and athletes and shop geeks were all chuds. Mostly products of their families TBH.
So when people look at boomers and see the mainstream propaganda picture of "hippies", it would be wise to remember that every generation is created by the system we live in still. Reddit is proof that nothing much has changed as far as American culture. I see hippies as the primal keening of the cultural left as it was systematically destroyed, a last hurrah. Life went on.
The only difference I see now is that material conditions are getting bad enough to warrant thinking a thought, unless the TV got there first and then it's pretty sad. I've said since before the second Bush that this country needs to hit rock bottom before anything gets better.
Thinking is the answer in my opinion. Get someone to think, even a little. I have a Trump supporting neighbor and he swaggered up to me last summer and we lamented over the current problems. He wanted to tell me about "Conservative values" and I looked him right in the eye and said "You mean American values?" and he hasn't spoken to me about politics since. The contradictions inherent in distancing himself from his nationalism or from his tribalism left his brain sparking. Lucky head shot I guess.
And let this be a lesson that you should never engage with anyone near or over 60 as they start going on and on forever and won't shut up. :)
I wonder if I will know if I become demented and continue to pollute the forums with nonsense and not knowing it is? I hope not.
I don't know if you're going to be able to have a coherent conversation about that topic here comrade. There are a lot of comrades who haven't really thought through the position of hating police but wanting a community to be able to have laws that might benefit everybody and have them enforced.
Anyways there's nothing really wrong with a bylaw ticket in this case if other reasonable alternatives are provided for people, it's just profoundly immoral to not have the cost of such a ticket scale with the wealth of the offender.
The problem with pigs in general isn't that they enforce laws that a community might pass like an anti-littering bylaw, or an anti-poaching law, or age of consent or whatever. It's that they principally enforce capitalist property relations, that they are militarized, jackbooted thugs with no oversight, and that the laws they enforce are not democratically written. If you are able to address those things there really is no reason a cop has to be an enemy of society.
I think the best way to solve social ills to to best consider why anybody is acting on said ills in the first place. Back before plumbing, people shit into chamber pots and threw those pots out of the window because it was a socially acceptable way to dispose of waste. If I were to do that today, people would look at me as if I was either mentally ill or playing an extremely cruel "prank"; there would be immense social pressure for me to not do that.
When people litter, they do so because it's easy and there is not enough social pressure for them to not do that, and it therefore becomes acceptable. Exactly how we go about changing social norms for the better is really up for debate and I honestly don't know enough to suggest how to do that
A small town in Spain was tired of people leaving dog poop everywhere and instituted a policy where instead of a cash fine or jail, they would identify the homeowner and just... mail it back. In a box. There are a lot of procedural flaws with this exact implementation, like the rather large amount of surveillance required to actually do it, but it seemed to have worked. Perhaps the best way is to keep people as aware as possible about the negative externalities of their actions by directly presenting it to them
A ticket or warning by a person is a start for a presumed one off issue. The ticket/warning is to help find/create patterns.
A real solution requires answering questions Why are people parking there ? Why do they throw trash there?
Community action maybe?
Get some neighborhood watch/patrol thing going. Harass people for parking where the trash gets dumped if they are there just to eat. Maybe, give them the trash back.
If there is any need/desire to involve civil authority, collect license plate info, maybe a photo/video of the trash being tossed from the vehicle. Fine levied against owner of the plates, added to property taxes, taxes then used to pay for community clean up of the area. Signs set up in the target areas informing everybody of this.
A bit on the iffy side as far as collecting information goes but :shrug:shrug-outta-hecks: without knowing what the community in question can or wants to do we're all flying blind here.
I figure that once in a blue moon you'd need some juggernaut of control to come out and shoot people's dogs because there's an honest to God hostage situation. But your city sitting in the presence of justice would need like 3 of them and you'd use like 2 of them a month
