I was confused by the throwaway “socialist” comment as well.
Mmmmmmmaybe, if “public littering” specifically meant “littering on public land.” The jackwagons who are throwing beer bottles / McDonald’s bags / cigarette packages out their car windows, and onto my yard, are committing public littering, but that litter winds up on private property (mine).
In the 21 years that I’ve lived there, the village has yet to send out a public employee to clean up that litter, and the private contractor who winds up doing it (i.e., me) has yet to be paid for his efforts. 
I’ll include several businesses in this group of litterers:
The distributors of the local yellow pages that throw their tome in my yard twice a year.
The publisher of the local paper, which I do not subscribe to, that throws promotional advertising papers (Neighborhood Round-Up or Directional Times) in my yard sporadically.
The leaflet advertiser that hires people to stick flyers in your front door handle, which normally blow away and end up in my yard.
My email box is where spam is supposed to go, not my front yard!
When sitting at a stoplight and the person in the car in front of me drops a cigarette butt out the window, I’ve often thought of getting out, picking it up, and handing it back to them saying “Here, you dropped this.” Except I really don’t want to be picking up something that’s been in a stranger’s mouth.
Sounds like you hung out with some real assholes. Though it’s not clear what you mean by “socialist”. It makes it sound like you have a deeper agenda than just asking about littering.
Anyway, littering is stupid and I never do it yadda yadda yadda. EXCEPT for when my wife leaves cig butts in the car (I don’t smoke and they are repulsive) and i don’t have time to nag her to clean it up, I WILL dump them next to the curb in front of my house. Why? because I’ve paid enough god damn money in street sweeping fines from parking in front of my own house that I damn well am gonna get something out of it. I wouldn’t do it anywhere else tho.
When I lived in the city, litter was everywhere. Eventually, I put a garbage can out front by the sidewalk. It was somehow full of discarded chip bags, soda cups, empty cans and bottles, etc. every single week. I don’t know how much it lessened the amount of litter on our block though. (Not much, I’m sure, as we were three houses from the corner where the drain for the gutter was and we’d clean that out periodically and fill at least 2 huge leaf bags full of trash.) It’s not so bad where I am now–even though I’m on a busy street, it’s semi-rural and it’s mostly cigarette butts (nasty).
Personally, it drives me crazy to see litter and although I might toss food (apple core, end of bread) into the bushes (for rabbits, squirrels, birds, etc.) I could not bring myself to toss anything else.
Here in Oklahoma what astounds me is people pulling into a gas station, or about to leave one, and opening their car door and dumping out what must be an old soft drink, coffee, or whatever–right where others will be parking and entering and leaving the store. And they donn’t care if anyone sees them do it or not!
So, it was you!!! shakes fist
Do you know what chewing gum + hot pavement + bike tires equal? Sticky, hard-to-clean frame and wisps of gum all over my legs. :mad:
They were office workers (Civil Servants) so I assumed they wouldn’t do that sort of thing. I thought it was just low life scally types. One of those who argued most strongly for throwing litter, later ducked out of chipping in for the meal on a Christmas night out, but didn’t admit to it (it only dawned upon me many months later that it was he - and he’d left by then). One can only wonder what other things he got up to.
I actually pick up other people’s litter. And I don’t vote for any scum.
We finished a rewatch of* Mad Men* a few weeks ago and one of the “wow, how things have changed!” moments was when they left all the detritus from a family picnic in a park and merrily drove off.
Of course, not everyone got the memo about the change. Just yesterday an asspig driver in front of me dropped her cigarette butt in the road; I wanted to chuck something heavy and sharp through her rear window – I mean, besides the basic pigness do people not equate “dropping fiery stick = forest/house/vehicle fluid leak INFERNO?” I don’t give a shit if you smoke, just keep your nasty butts in your nasty-ass car ashtray.
We also get a lot of crap in our front yard. We have some college-age renters
in the area and their party-animal friends tend to chuck out their empties before driving away (yay!)
The weirdness of the week: on Wednesday morning someone left a shopping bag with nine frozen salisbury steak TV dinners in it. My theory is that someone set it on the curb whilst warming up his or her car before work and forgot about the bag. The dinners were DELISH! (Just kidding, I was squicked out just walking the sack to my garbage can).
I’m an occasional bio-litterer. Mom taught us that the yardstick for chucking it out the window was “would a squirrel eat it?” Given, squirrels probably eat most anything, but in my mind it allows me to chuck out apple cores because I’m feeding cute lil fluffy-tailed beasties.
I remember even as a little kid seeing a “No Littering $1000 Fine” sign and thinking “Wait, they have to tell people not to litter and threaten to fine them if they do? What kind of messed up world are we living in?”
What do you mean, you don’t vote for any scum?
I was expecting quite a number of people admitting they litter.
I have old-fashioned conservative relatives and modern liberal friends. The one thing they agree on is littering. The conservative folks grew up with “leave nothing but your footprints” and when they go camping they pack all their unburnable trash out with them. My Dad once made a hiking companion wade into the stream to pick up an empty beer bottle he’d blithely thrown there after drinking it. The liberal folks care about the environment and consider it a social sin to litter.
Count me with the ones who don’t understand anyone who litters.
What I will never understand is people who litter when there’s a garbage can a few feet away.
The State of Washington has these signs: Litter and it will hurt.
Spankings? Floggings? The Rack?
I have no use for people that litter ! I hate when people go a park and litter it up with cans or small liquor bottles . If I have an extra poop bag I will pick up littler and other people dogs shit . People litter at my condo and I wish I saw the person doing it , I did tell one guy to pick his cigarette butt he threw onto your driveway .
We had a small fire b/c jackass toss his butt onto the mulch right next to the wooden deck ! :smack:
I remember that scene but was skeptical. I’m Bobby Draper’s age, we lived in NY. It’s harder to exactly equate class background*. But even if Don came from a low class background Betty was apparently pretty upper; my parents both came from class backgrounds in between those two. Anyway we’d never have done that and people like us weren’t any more likely to do it then than now IME. Of course it’s possible any given person or couple of any given background would do that then, or now. But the way MM presented that, implying this behavior was typical, did not ring true to me.
*there’s a definite social class correlation to littering IME; if somebody chimes in with all the upper middle class people they know who litter constantly that’s fine but isn’t going to change what I’ve seen in general all my life in NY, and the show was depicting NY.
OK but I don’t see how that creates the basis for the original claim that ‘conservatives’ might favor littering because it ‘creates jobs’. Either it makes the govt bigger (ie. the village does hire people to come out and pick it up, as it arguably should since came from public property) and makes the taxpayer pay for that or the individual does it themselves or pays themselves for somebody else to do it. Still seems to be you have to be more brain dead to argue there’s any positive to littering from a free market conservative POV than you do from a liberal/collectivist POV, and I’ve never heard it from a conservative POV.
From a left/collectivist POV you can plausibly argue that the need to employ more people at public expense to pick up litter, and pay them above market wages and benefits as is typical for low skilled public employees, is an opportunity to create those well paying jobs, and reduce inequality, without the political resistant to and negative side effects of paying people to do nothing to reduce inequality. The need for those clean up people is at least a silver lining to the negative of littering, from that POV. There’s no silver lining from a free market conservative POV.