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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Go on. Make the case for Puerto Rico being better than the mainland, and for those who come to the mainland being better than the ones already here with regards to litter.

and for those who come to the mainland being better than the ones already here with regards to litter.

And now I'm reminded of a forum post I was once linked to — I think it was referenced by a commenter on a Steve Sailer post — by a puertoriqueño New Yorker complaining about how "the Jews" obviously control New York City, or at least its sanitation department. His argument? That the streets in the "Jewish neighborhoods" were always so much cleaner — free of litter, and especially empty/broken beer bottles — than those of his own, predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. This, he concluded, could only be because the Jews were using their control of the city government to have the sanitation department focus on constantly cleaning the litter and beer bottles from the streets of their own neighborhoods, and less on cleaning everyone else's streets. That maybe different groups litter at different rates, and that the inhabitants of predominantly-Jewish neighborhoods simply don't toss empty beer bottles into the street to begin with, never crossed his mind. (What's that old quote, from a Roman author IIRC, about people mistaking their particular cultural norms for universal laws?)

Its quite obvious where I live that there is a gradient from one side of the neighborhood (which neighbors a primarily mexican one) to the other (which borders a primarily white yuppie one). You go from frequent corona and modelo bottles to fewer, to on the other side your problem being that the trash cans are overloaded by then end of a 3 day weekend because those people can't help but use the cans, and the city refuses to install enough cans. Also people write on their own private cans "private use only" because otherwise these litter-adverse folks will simply seek out the closest available can rather than utilize a sidewalk once the official cans are spent.