I’m one. I live here and have eyes. I fully deny that utter nonsense. That view of my surroundings does not reflect reality even vaguely. I consider myself a perfect authority on what I live and see.
Interesting. What neighborhood do you live in? I don’t need to know the street or anything. I’m just trying to figure out if your experience is actually typical. Have you ever living in social housing? Do you know anyone living in social housing? is there any public drunkenness in your neighborhood on a Friday or Saturday night? Is there any issue with littering in you neighborhood? Have you every attended a football match for a major club?
Are you even familiar with a single UK neighborhood? How does that information help you?
I know people who live in council flats (man, the fact that you use the phrase “social housing” proves you’ve never been here, let alone have the faintest clue about the place). Drunkenness and alcohol are not viewed the same way ad in your country - I’ve been drunk in public hundreds and hundreds of time and never mugged anyone. There is more litter here, admittedly, but it doesn’t cause me fear. I have attended both national and domestic football matches. Honestly, I find them a bit boring, but they’re pretty friendly.
Does that answer your questions?
Tell you what - why not visit somewhere before you tell people what it’s like? The very concept of you arguing with people as to the nature of their own environment from 3000 miles away is ludicrous, no matter how many bizarre newspaper articles you’ve read.
Yup, I’m afraid to leave my home because of the littering.
Sorry, this is just preposterous. Will you refuse to accept that one obstreperous 60-something is not representative of how people in the UK feel until every single one of us shows up here and tells you we’re not afraid to leave our homes?
The fundamental question of this thread is so stupid that I broke my years-long taboo on posting here and registered just to ask what in the fuck.
I mean, seriously, freedom of what?! It’s impossible to define freedom as some neutral entity like health or income or even happiness. My freedom of burning coal to electrify my farm is interfering with your freedom to breath clean air. My freedom to enjoy a quiet night is taking away your freedom to enjoy your music. My freedom to say whatever the hell I want in public is interfering with your freedom to not feel trivialized or victimized by, say, your sexual preferences.
If you mean freedom as in quality of life then you need to lay down some criteria (life expectancy, income mobility, education rates, etc…) and explain why it enhances or downgrades quality of life. And then you can crow about how the U.S. or Western Europe is better or whatever if you want. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that happiness can be inductively measured to some degree of accurately (and will one day will be directly measured), but measuring freedom?
You can’t measure ‘freedom’. Freedom is a buzzword. It doesn’t mean shit.
You never heard of Google Street View? A friend of mine moved back to Japan and I was giving her directions in her own neighborhood and asking if the trains keep her awake since they ran 30 meters from her apartment. We can get together on Skype and look around. The most remarkable thing I saw was hundreds of bicycles left on the street, but I never saw a single bicycle lock.
Yes. Thank you very much. Your answers were quite illuminating.
Thank you, but I’m too fat to ride in couch anymore.
I’m afraid I didn’t explain that littering is short hand for a breakdown of social norms. I might have also talked about graffiti or turnstile jumping or broken windows. In another place, I mentioned the absence of bicycle locks in Japan as indicating strong social norms.
I think, I haven’t communicated the idea that the government is the only people that can take your freedom away. Criminals can take your freedom away. Without some degree of order, the other freedoms are meaningless.
LOL. The USA doesn’t even have a functioning democracy any more. Some hope ‘personal freedom’.
I don’t know much more, but mere possession of even a small quantity of drug, including weed, is in itself a crime worth 1 year of jail. You can judge by your own rather typical experience how this is enforced.
Man, why do you have to savage your own arguments and credibility all by yourself? Can’t you let us have some fun?
You’re right, Google map is exactly the same as travelling to said country (just as reading a book about a place you clearly dont know in the slightest enables to lecture the locals on the nature of their country), and your incredible sense of detail picking means you get insights nobody else get.
Well, something here is certainly meaningless.
Public drunkenness in the streets in the UK, on the weekend no less! Say it aint so. I’m so glad that doesn’t happen here.
I’m sorry, I just…don’t understand what you’re getting at. Candyman74 asserted that he was not scared to leave his house, and my experience as a British person is the same.
Perhaps you mean that small violations of the social contract, such as littering, are indicative of a wider disrespect for civil society? That’s possible, of course, and my own personal perception is that there is less litter on the streets of American cities than British ones. And fewer drunks, too - American drunks are more likely to be in their cars, where they can’t possibly cause any harm.
On the other hand, there are gangs of armed maniacs with tattoos occupying every major American urban area. I know this is true, so don’t bother to deny it - I get my information from one (very reliable) newspaper writer.
:dubious: Or was there just some kind of whooshing sound above my head?
Jumbo jet sized 
IIRC, the US has the world’s second highest rate of alcohol related fatalities per capita. Let me see if I can find the cite.
Frankly I concluded that Candyman74 has more in common with the people that the people who are afraid to leave their homes at night are afraid of. I was trying to determine if he lived in a low crime neighborhood and got a lot more information than I bargained for. His own description of his conduct is consistent with it and the ageism is his comments about doddering old tits is consistent with a drunk that would beat up an old person who complained him throwing his empty liquor bottles in his yard.
I’m certainly not to argue that drunk driving isn’t a serious problem in the U.S. The situation has vastly improved since the seventies, but there are still serious problems. I don’t think we will totally get rid of the problem until we outlaw manually driven automobiles, but that is going to take decades. I was considering an idea that would require bars to make patrons check the car keys when they come in and they have to pass a breath analyzer to get then back. The responsible alcoholics I know drink at home. It’s cheaper and a lot safer.
You need to give me a time frame. The tattoos are a growing problem, but most of the armed maniacs are pulling long prison terms.
Or they’re first term congressmen.
Wow. That’s not only so wrong, it’s also hideously offensive.
And… uh… when did I mention “doddering old tits”? Are you now just inventing stuff to somehow make your fictional version of somewhere you’ve never been a reality? Cos I never said that.
Your implication that I’m a drunk who would beat up anybody, let alone throwing liquor bottles into peoples’ back yard, is not only insulting but utterly untrue. I’ve never been in any kind of violent situation in my life, and when I finish a drink the pub staff tend to whip away the glass before I have time to turn it unto a random projectile directed at other peoples’ houses (not that they’d let people walk off with pint glasses anyway). Certainly nobody has ever been afraid of me in my life (and besides, it’s too far for me to walk home after I’ve been out - I call a cab; or is it the cab drivers who are deathly afraid of me?)
Man, your comments have gone from plain wrong to frankly offensive.
Am I supposed to take this line of argument seriously? The reason Candyman74 is not afraid to leave his home is that he’s a thug who terrorises his neighbourhood? And your evidence to support this assertion is that he called AM Daniels a “doddering old tit”?
Well, actually, I think it might have been Really Not All That Bright who first used that phrase, but that’s just a small detail - I don’t think it matters all that much who said it. After all, the man is a doddering old tit.