SF Libertarian Examiner Wants to Tell You Something

Belgland, why do you feel entitled to deprive me of my opinion? I mean, who the hell are you?

Belgland, why do you feel entitled to deprive me of my opinion? I mean, who the hell are you?

How do you reconcile such an irrational contradiction?

I was saying that he is obviously trolling. Don't feed the trolls.

The Examiner tags are unwarranted here. This is from another site called Examiner.com that is completely unrelated to the SF Examiner. Though from the equally poor quality of writing I can see how someone could be confused.

Not so fast there. The examiner.com domain always belonged to the SF Examiner, and went with the paper to the Fangs, who later sold both the paper and the rights to the domain to Philip Anschutz.

Anschutz has launched a number of Examiner newspapers and websites since then. More here.

Somalia is not the model of libertarianism. Only kooks and hardcore libertarians argue for anarchy.

Somalia = Galt's Gulch. The inevitable end result of any society in which government has been abandoned for an unfettered marketplace is total and complete anarchy. Why? Greed and the inevitable short sightedness that results. One of Jon Galt's industrialist cronies would eventually do something sneaky and underhanded for a couple extra bucks/increase in status/destruction of a competitor, people would perceive themselves injured, factions would erupt, and without government, mobs would take to the Thomas Kincade looking streets of Galt's Gulch, burning cottages, destroying static electricity collecting machines, ravishing that railroad broad, etc. Another utopian experiment crumbles into dust. Sorry for you.

See, the problem with retarded modernist ideologies like libertarianism/objectivism, communism, and fascism, is that they only deal in idealized virtual people that do not and can not exist. Ayn Rand held up her husband as proof that the assholes she wrote about can and do exist. He ended up dying a broken down, demoralized soak after she sucked all the life out of him and used his backside as a doormat. Somehow, I don't think that his end state was what she had in mind when she earlier described him in such glowing, Appolonian terms...

The fact of the matter is that government is good for providing essential services that benefit the entire community. You have to maintain a balance between too little government and too much government.

Duh.

Apparently this is completely opaque to you given your black and white world mentality, which you've made patently obvious.

*rolling my eyes*

I'm under no illusion that libertarianism is the ideal form of government. I'm not even a libertarian. The original reason I responded to you is that you seem to dismiss the entire ideology out of hand. Any philosophy has its faults if followed to the letter. It's through the balance of libertarian and socialist ideas that we get some kind of compromise that somewhat works. Neither works on the large scale on its own.

He's making a poorly worded and badly thought-out slippery slope argument. Basically he's saying that if you allow the government to tell you what to do with your trash then you're tacitly supporting the same reasoning that would say the government is allowed to tell you who we're at war with and that you have to fight. Both coming from the ability of the government to exert force on others to do as they say.

The original article (which itself isn't particularly well-written or conceived either) seems to also be fairly well mired in the Vietnam war and specifically the draft. Thus he conflated "telling you what to do with your trash" and "telling you you're going to kill whomever we say you will" as both are examples of the state telling you what to do. It seems like Justin failed to take this part into full consideration and just latched onto how it dealt with talking about garbage policy.

You still didn't seemingly make much of an attempt to understand his argument compared to the time you just spent mocking him and whining about how much you dislike flip-flops (not that I'm going to disagree with you there, but it's hardly relevant). Basically you took what could have been a serious discussion and decided "I don't get this and I think this guy's spewing crazy nonsense... but I find it to be amusing nonsense so I'll just post it so everyone else can laugh at how crazy it is". It doesn't contribute anything of value, comedic or otherwise and has only the vaguest relationship to SF. One which you don't even bother to consider relevant enough to discuss.

My complaint is basically that you're treating this like your personal blog and think it's just a place for whatever you find vaguely funny and your opinion on what you think is ugly or tacky. As opposed to, y'know, "a website about San Francisco."

Put another way, for people to live in cities without killing each other out of frustration or epidemics of disease, government must necessarily take a more active role than it does with people who live in low-density or even off-grid situations.

Someone in my neighborhood canceled their trash collection, and they now leave their garbage bags at the corner next to the city trash can. More often than not, animals come and rummage through it in the night, spreading rotten contaminated garbage around for the rest of us to clean up. This is what causes infestations of rats and cockroaches. There are laws about trash collection for a reason: public health.

Perhaps there is a slippery slope involved with extending trash collection laws to recycling, but considering the long-term impacts of not recycling (more expensive disposal at new dump locations that are not nearby, raw material cost increases, global warming, etc. etc.), I don't have a problem with government taking the long view and forcing us to do the smart thing, not least because I already recycle.

I believe the nineteenth amendment to the constitution is freedom from unwanted smells. I shall fight to defend that right good sir!

XIX established the right of women to vote. I can't wait to see us arguing about that one.

Women should not be allowed to vote because they have tiny, feeble minds and are easily distracted by ponies and princesses.

And also, if you let us vote, eventually you end up with Margaret Thatcher.

It's not always a matter of choice. I mean, I save my CRV recycling to go and cash in (I paid for it to begin with, hell if I'm not getting my money back if all I have to do is walk a few blocks over to Kezar), but my landlord doesn't have a compost bin because, as he puts it, there isn't enough room in the trash room. Which, in all fairness, is true. He has tons of other random crap stuffed in there so there isn't any room to put one in.

That's why they care so much about recycling "thieves". Because they're taking their potential profit. The only reason that they take recycling and compost is because they can get you to give it to them for free and then turn around and sell it for a profit.

If anything you ought to get a kickback for providing them with it. A rate increase would just be punishing those who don't want to help them turn a greater profit. As with most things positive reinforcement generally works much better than negative. You want people to recycle more? Offer them a cut of the profit.

Aside from the fact that they would never want to part with the money this would likely never happen because it would slow down trash collection. They'd either have to weigh your cans and then mark down who they took them from each week or find some other means of telling if you had the bin filled with enough recycling to justify a payback.

The simplest answer is to charge a flat rate and give a rebate at the end of the year based on the amount of money that Sunset gets from compost and recycling. It's sort of the opposite of the tragedy of the commons theory. The worst recyclers get the same amount of rebate as the best recyclers, but it's not like there is a finite amount that people fight to abuse - there is nothing and people get as much as they collectively earn.

I had a medical insurance plan that worked this way. Nobody refused treatment to get an extra half a cent down the line, but people did think about non-relevant treatment.

It can be optimized slightly by providing no rebates for anyone who doesn't even bother.