> The "culturewar fodder" in this article is so distractingly dumb and laughably factually wrong that I couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs. Whatever the author's point was supposed to be, they're going to have a tough time reaching any audience that hasn't already drunk the kool-aid.
Ok. In that case there are 29 other threads on HN's front page to look at, and perhaps have curious conversation about.
"Dumb", "laughably wrong", "couldn't make it past the first few", "whatever the point was supposed to be", "going to have a tough time reaching any", "drunk the koolaid", "I certainly wouldn't trust", and "completely indifferent to correctness" are all markers of the kind of conversation we're trying to avoid here.
You seem really defensive of this article. People leave these sorts of comments on other articles on this site all the time with no comment from you or other HN admins. This one seems to have struck a nerve though. Why is that?
Randomness I suppose? Snarky/dismissive/flamebait comments are pretty much always bad for HN.
When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
In the case of the current article I was being proactive because it seemed to me interesting enough to deserve a frontpage discussion but also at obvious risk for turning into the usual nasty mush. That's why I did the pin-the-admonition-to-the-top thing.
Your comment made me go have a look. I must confess, the first few paragraphs seem fine to me. I’m with dang. It would be helpful if you explained what you find objectionable.
The author leads by claiming that San Francisco has made it "illegal not to compost your food scraps" (completely false) and condones people doing meth at playgrounds (also completely false, though it would be nice if SF police were more responsive and helpful), then he starts apologizing for rape and demanding that sex workers and anyone possessing a hypodermic needle be charged with crimes, because if they aren't it "verges on criminal negligence" (without any apparent consideration of why such failed laws were changed). After that preface he gets to his main point, a weird fantasy ramble of a cultural-ethnic-origin "explanation" of how this is supposed to have come about, something about Puritans representing state control and Scots-Irish representing individual freedom or something (while apparently ignoring the groups who actually settled in California). I gave up at that point.
The author is apparently living in a weird Newsmax/Infowars (?) media bubble combined with occasional off-topic nonfiction books and doesn't seem capable of critically evaluating information before mashing it together and hyperbolically passing it to readers.
> San Francisco forces people to compost their food scraps (completely false)
In place since 2009,
> The San Francisco Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance (No. 100-09) is a local municipal ordinance requiring all persons located in San Francisco to separate their recyclables, compostables and landfilled trash and to participate in recycling and composting programs.
This requires that residents have access to regularly collected trash, recycling, and compost bins, which they are encouraged to use by means of making larger sizes of compost/recycle bins cheaper than larger sizes of landfill trash bins. Grocery stores, restaurants, and events are also required to provide separate bins for patrons to use, and employers are required to provide sufficient ashtrays for cigarette butts. (The main opposition to this policy comes from owners of large multi-unit properties who were annoyed because they didn't want to make space for the bins or pay for collection.)
There is no enforcement of people using the bins fastidiously, and people constantly dump their food scraps and recycling into their ordinary trash bins. (Not to mention plenty of dumping of incorrect stuff into the other bins, which is also not ordinarily enforced against.) If a resident throws all of their food scraps into the trash bin, nobody is going to do anything about it. In theory if someone starts dumping car batteries in the compost or something the city can come fine them.
Characterizing this policy as making it "illegal not to compost your food scraps" is at best a significant exaggeration which is grossly misleading to readers.
(As an aside: I would personally recommend people compost their food scraps, either on their own property or using a collected bin: dumping organic material in a landfill creates a lot of methane, landfill space is not unlimited, the resulting compost is a useful by-product, and separating most food scraps from general garbage is easy.)
The ordinance states: "All persons in San Francisco must source separate their refuse into recyclables, compostables, and trash, and place each type of refuse in a separate container designated for disposal of that type of refuse. No person may mix recyclables, compostables or trash, or deposit refuse of one type in a collection container designated for another type of refuse, except as otherwise provided in this Chapter." When the law requires you to behave a certain way, and you don't, you're doing something illegal; that's what "illegal" means. It's entirely irrelevant whether or not you get away with it, and your conflation of illegality with (your perception of) enforcement is what's grossly misleading.
When put side by side with the comment about meth at playgrounds (note: definitely illegal, though again, police in SF are generally fairly unresponsive), it is clear that your reach of a pedantic defense is not how the author intends readers to interpret this passage. The implication is that SF is a dystopian nightmare where some woke enforcement squad is coming to arrest you for putting your banana peels in the garbage while applauding the drug addicts threatening your children.
The whole thing is a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish intended to provoke a knee-jerk fear/anger response among an audience previously primed by right-wing media but entirely personally unfamiliar with San Franciso, not a careful discussion of the benefits and harms or even the ideological underpinnings of various local ordinances.
Leading with "culture war" nonsense likely to provoke pointless arguments like this one is why this article is a poor fit for HN which people would be better served by skipping.
> dang, if it weren't for your top-level comment I would have just moved on without comment here. It wouldn't be hard to go point by point through the parts of the first few paragraphs of this article that are laughable, but it's really not worth the trouble. Instead people should just skip the whole thing and move along to the next topic, optionally flagging the topic
Perhaps it's not worth your trouble to discuss the article substantively, and that's fine—but please don't post shallow dismissals, name-calling, or snark as an alternative. The site guidelines ask commenters to avoid all of those.
