BiS gives us:
I think it’s because they feel a certain ownership for public spaces. It’s remarkably common to see shopkeepers sweeping the pavement outside their shop. Even washing it. A lot of householders do the same thing.
And, of course, where they’re starting from.
….France? Paris. It is dog poo country. But then again the Poo Patrol. Guy on a bright green motorbike. Freezes it solid with liquid nitrogen, scoops it up into a bin on the back. (Lille had one as well. So did Bordeaux.) Dunno what it’s like now though. Since the Hiidalgo vache’s been running it. Pretty bad I’m told. Socialist of course. French villages are usually spotless & shit free. Ownership of public spaces again.
So, the Bloke in Spain test for where socialism might work. Not full on Murphism, but just a more general consideration of the public and not the private. Where there is already a more general consideration of the public and less of the private.
Fortunately this is simple to test for. Where the pavements are strewn with dog shit then municipal socialism will not work. Where folk clean up that public space as there’s that ownership of the public space then it could work.
We can test this well enough – those small French villages and towns, with the Mairie (??) subject to the Bjorns Beer Effect work pretty well in their local governance and bureaucracy.
So, there’s merit to the idea at least.
So, I propose the “BiS Dog Shit Test”. Check for dog shit. The absence of tells us that more socialism could – could – work. The presence that it would not.
There is, of course, one significant problem with the implication of the test. Which is that if we’ve already got that private ownership of the public space which leads to the lack of dogshit then what the fuck is the need for socialism?
The theory could be extended to explain human shit and San Francisco.
That’s the opposite of socialism. Real socialism is my parents’ advice: that you should always drop your litter in the street, because it provides a job for someone to clear it up.
Funnily enough my job is cleaning up one one of the (alledgedly) most deprived area of England, never mind my home town…believe you me, the inhabitants aren’t doing it to provide work. They’re horrible, inbred, ingrates from various sh*t holes around the globe. They don’t work, they don’t speak the lingo, they don’t pay anything unless they’re trying to bribe anyone on the Council…
BUT at least I’ll never be out of a job and a massive pension!
This is mostly a thing about being rooted, having community (in the truest sense). Cities are more atomised and rootless. People live in a place for 6 months and move on. Barely know their neighbours. Their social capital doesn’t depend on the people who walk past their door and see dogshit.
It’s why the argument about poverty and vandalism never quite works. You can go to poor rural places and there’s none of it. Trowbridge is full of chavs and not much graffiti. Because if you tag a building everyone is going to know about it that knows you.
There’s an opportunity here for some interesting research.
Investigate the population size of towns against the amount of dog shit in public areas and see the if there’s an inflection point when population gets to a certain size. At that point we know civic responsibility breaks down.
Another test might be snow on the street. We didn’t get much snow where I grew up but when there was some, people – householders, shopkeepers – tended to sweep it off the pavements outside their premises. Do people still do that? if so, where?
I don’t do it now partly because I am old and buggered. Also because when I did do it I seemed to be the only one who did, which made it rather pointless.
Interesting points. I clear the weeds in the lane behind my house because I don’t like living in a tip, but I admit there a little bit of “he’s the local councillor, and look at the shit he lives in”.
The dog thing is also interesting. Hereabouts there’s been BiD’s inflection point where it went from no dogshit to everybody complaining about dogshit, and it does seem to be an inflection point. There didn’t seem to be any gradual increase. And, digging into the “Bjorn’s Beer” thing, the town is increasingly populated by outsiders who didn’t grow up here, and/or buy up all the property as holiday cottages.
Paris was quirky, beautiful, smelly, and magical. But I hear it’s gone forever now, sad to say, unless it’s the smells and pickpockets of Araby one hankers after. I’m not planning on finding out for myself.
Being something of a reactionary, I’m starting to have doubts about cities, or even roads.
Roads: what do they really want? Who builds them? And who puts the funny speed suggestions on the side of these so-called “roads”?
My theory is that roads were a conspiracy to tax us. That sneaky little bastard Zacchaeus? Avid road user, that one. Roads were built so HMRC’s army of Zacchaeuses could come and nick your stuff.
Only they’ve got your electronic bank account details now, so that’s why the roads are crumbling into lunar regolith.
Anyway, I am not planning on being herded into an eco-pod in one of those 15 minute cities you’re not allowed to leave (unless you have extra carbon chits) and I think I’ll skip the mandatory state-enforced homosexuality of the New New Labour government, so I’m afraid it’s the cities that will have to go. (Presumably after a brutal-but-hilarious civil war in which every noodle-armed, Brexit-hating Jonty or Jools in SW1 is immolated by Jim Davidson)
Au revoir, gay Paris.
You may be dead,
But you are still
Gay.
Le Fin x
Steve,
“Being something of a reactionary, I’m starting to have doubts about cities, or even roads.”
The benefits are unwinding. Remember going to Hamley’s as a kid? How it was the best toyshop anywhere? Or that London got films first and you were crazy jealous at your mate seeing Star Wars? Or to get cheap hifi on Tottenham Court Road. Or DJ records in Soho? It’s all online now. You can be in Kettering and get all this. And work from home doing office work. And if you’re doing factory work, you are living somewhere cheap now because anyone making something in London is slapping “craft” at the start of it and charging 3 times the price to hipsters.
I have this vision of a domino effect with London, that a few people look at the Nathan Barleys, the moped crimes, the *vibrancy*, the huge numbers of people on housing benefit, the tourist kitsch, the redundant old buildings and start to leave and it snowballs into a mass exodus of the last remaining productive people, and becomes like Old Detroit in Robocop, only that Khan isn’t as much fun as Clarence Boddicker.
“Anyway, I am not planning on being herded into an eco-pod in one of those 15 minute cities you’re not allowed to leave (unless you have extra carbon chits) and I think I’ll skip the mandatory state-enforced homosexuality of the New New Labour government, so I’m afraid it’s the cities that will have to go. (Presumably after a brutal-but-hilarious civil war in which every noodle-armed, Brexit-hating Jonty or Jools in SW1 is immolated by Jim Davidson)”
The simplest way to find a good place to live is to find wherever has the most branches of Greggs and JD Wetherspoons per capita. To Jontys, these are like Fat Man and Little Boy going off, and they want to avoid being within 20 miles. Live in these places and you’re never going to be bothered by people talking about the Local Pound, knocking down statues of beloved fathers of the city, retired geography teachers blocking the road or bike wankers.
BonM4. We will have another Greggs in my town later this year. Population 57,000 and that’ll be two within 500 metres of each other, plus two Costa’s, a Starbucks (also later this year), CO-OP Coffeelink and another coffee shop I can’t remember the name of in the same area. Then there is Favorite Chicken, two fish and chip shops, 5 kebab shops, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, two independant Pizza places and a Wimpy Bar. Plus a few Indians and Chinky’s.
Only one ‘Spoons though.
I wonder why I have a weight problem……..
When it snows around here (which isn’t often) I will clear the pavement outside my house, and up as far as my neighbours’ gates too.
Once when I was doing that a woman (25ish I guess) complained at me. I suggested she walk back along the pavement the next day after a semi-thaw+refreeze cycle and the snow had turned to solid ice, and see which part of the pavement she preferred to walk on. I’ve no idea if she did so and even maybe obtained a little more enlightenment, but I doubt either happened.
It’s the increasing infantilisation of society that is the root cause of the rot. ‘Someone else should fix it as I am too immature to’. Add the pathologisation of any minor setback as ‘trauma’, as in ‘someone asked me where I was from given I was dressed as if I were from Africa and now I’m traumatised’, and we have a recipe for disaster.
We’ve now two generations mostly of whom were never told ‘no’ or ‘take ownership of your life’. Anyone suggesting personal responsibility, such as Jordan Peterson or Kathryn Birblesingh (sp?) is hounded and accused of all sorts of imagined crimes which create ‘trauma’ again.
Maybe you need another word, Tim. Communialism might cover it.
I was in Torremolinos on Monday. The rough bit tourists never see. Top (5th) floor flat of the mother of an amiga, assemble some IKEA for her. She’s partially disabled. Result of humping a box of cold drinks along the beach every day for 40 years, flogging them to tourists. The entrance to that block & the stairs (no lift) were spotless. Not a bit of graffiti. The ground floor level’s got a little bar/cafe the residents frequent. Friendly place, makes a decent cup of coffee & snacks. There’s half a dozen blocks in the development, built in the 70’s I’d guess. It’s all very clean & tidy. Little litter. Anywhere you could park a car is available for parking.
OF course, all of this is owned not municipal. (If they have municipal in this country I haven’t the vaguest idea where it is. Never heard of any) I could buy one of these flats for 40k€. Not a bad place to live. Everybody knows everybody else. The community president’s a Brit oddly enough. You can leave your car without worrying about it. Probably a bike without having it nicked. A lot of Spain’s like this. I can’t say I’ve ever found anywhere in this country I feel unsafe wandering around in. Apart from some of the tourist areas & I avoid Brits as I would lepers.
What’s with this Greggs thing? First made acquaintance with them during a brief UK sojourn a few years back. The only actual baker’s shop apart from a faux French one would sell you a pretty authentic baguette for over £3 (France 1:20€) in the ghastly stockbroker built dormitory town I was exiled in. Greggs is unutterably foul. WTF’s “tiger bread”? Certainly doesn’t resemble bread. Nor do their “baguettes” resemble baguettes. Their cakes are vile & the cornish pasties a joke. Another Brit achievement. Take bakery out of a bakery & try & flog you what’s left.
Andrew Again,
“‘Someone else should fix it as I am too immature to’. Add the pathologisation of any minor setback as ‘trauma’, as in ‘someone asked me where I was from given I was dressed as if I were from Africa and now I’m traumatised’, and we have a recipe for disaster.”
I’m not really sure this is “society” so much as certain groups of people. There is the real world and there is clownworld. A woman dressed in an African outfit meeting the King is pure, 100% clownworld. He’s not really a king, he’s cosplaying as a king. The state opening of parliament, he gets given a thing to read, which has already been emailled to everyone. And she’s there, dressed in some African outfit because she’s grifted into some charity, of which no-one knows if it does any good, but she’s like the token black person that someone wants in the picture just so no-one thinks they’re racist.
Someone putting on a play about wacism and only allowing black people in? Clownworld. 5000 people are ever going to see it. 100 million people go and see the non-woke Top Gun:Maverick. That’s the real world. Tweeters going on about JK Rowling being transphobic, but the first Harry Potter was the biggest selling audiobook on Audible last year. People at Oxford University complaining about statues are people doing the wanky irrelevant degrees like history. This stuff doesn’t get into the science departments. People calling Brexiteers racist. You don’t get that in Swindon. People disagreed about Brexit, but we were polite and reasonable about it.
And the media amplify all of this, to a point where it’s hard to ignore and distorts judgement. A whole lot of awful Hollywood movies have been made and lost a ton of money because people took too much notice of them.
Something to discuss:
Communitarianism is people voluntarily negotiating a way of living alongside each other in harmony. It’s a market based solution.
Socialism is an intellectual’s attempt at the above. Except the intellectual designs the way according to intellectual’s preferences & then wants to impose it on the community.
The first doesn’t scale well. At a certain point of growth it gets captured by “leaders”, out of touch with the community they’re supposed to be serving & it mutates into the second.
“At a certain point of growth it gets captured by “leaders”,”
yup. That’s always the problem. Captured by trots at the top and hollowed out by free-loaders at the bottom.
Those Torremolinos blocks. The flats are three-bed. Rabbit hutches by Spanish standard but des-res by London metrics. Say average, 4 persons per flat. 16 per block so under 400 for the entire community. That’s comparative to the size of a lot of French villages. I seem to remember reading somewhere that 600 is around the number of people a person will personally know.
So maybe that’s the point where the dog shit starts appearing. Where it stops being regarded as the owner’s responsibility & becomes somebody else’s.
BoM4: “…because she’s grifted into some charity, of which no-one knows if it does any good…”
They do NOW, though. It doesn’t.
Once the daft grifter moaned in Public, the spotlight turned her way (as she wanted) and – as spotlights do – lit up some uncomfortable litter (as she didn’t). Uncomfortable for her, that is.
Then again, I hold out little hope of the Charities Commission doing much about it.
“This stuff doesn’t get into the science departments.”
If only.
Yes, M. I posted a few days ago a link to a Nature article about a Durham (UK) Professor of Maths and his desire to ‘decolonise’ the subject.
“ So, I propose the “BiS Dog Shit Test”. Check for dog shit. The absence of tells us that more socialism could – could – work. The presence that it would not.”
Absence of dog-shit would be indicative of Socialism, as all the dogs would have been killed and eaten by the starving population.