Two points. First, when you read Q's original Atlantic piece, you get important details about the nature of the "safety" that broken-window policing was intended to ensure. It was never described as a panacea.

Secondly, his more recent thoughts on other facets of comity deserve consideration as well, especially in California in 2008.

First off, as for that experiment with the flyers on the bikes, I'd have been in the littering group no matter what*. It's not my damn trash!

This is a pet peeve of mine, like flyers on under my car wipers. I always throw them on the road, even though I never litter otherwise.

Unless it was a pizza coupon - totally different story, or a turkey!
As God is my witness, I though turkeys could fly.

This is a pet peeve of mine, like flyers on under my car wipers. I always throw them on the road, even though I never litter otherwise.

I'm amazed by that. The result is a really ugly world. I'm annoyed by flyers on my windshield, but I bring them into my car and throw them away later. Likewise, I'll pick up a plate somebody left outside at my favorite cafe and bring it inside because I know the people who work there won't know it's outside, because few people sit outside in the front. I just did this the other day.

This is a pet peeve of mine, like flyers on under my car wipers. I always throw them on the road, even though I never litter otherwise.

Wow, what a fucking asshole. I don't like it either, but that doesn't mean I just toss it on the ground for someone else to clean up or everyone else to just walk over. It's all fine and good to get annoyed at the asshole that shoved the flier under your windshield wiper, or on the handlebars of your bike, but what the fuck gives you the right to force the rest of us to deal with your trash on the ground?

Unless it was a pizza coupon...

An asshole and a hypocrite to boot. So you hate it when people put shit under your wipers, enough that you think it makes it Ok to piss everyone else off, by throwing it on the ground - thus sharing your irritation with others. Unless of course it's a flier that you like.

Did it ever occur to you, that just as you like to get the pizza coupon fliers under your wipers, others might like to get some of the fliers that anger you so much? Of course not, because you're a sanctimonious, self-righteous hypocrite. And selfish to boot.

> I'm amazed by that. The result
> is a really ugly world.

> Of course not, because you're a
> sanctimonious, self-righteous
> hypocrite. And selfish to boot.

In troubled times, the holiday spirit comes late to the blogosphere....

Well, I don't throw the flyers on the ground either, but if I saw the guy passing them out, I'd call his license plate number into "800-CUT-SMOG."

I can't litter. If someone ahead of me drops something on the grounds, I will pick it up compulsively. I am not a super neat person at home or in organization, but I can't stand just dropping trash into nature or the street from pure laziness.

I think it's also peer pressure and culture that encourage the following of the certain laws. When my mom survived a violent car crash in the deep south everyone was surprised that she was wearing a seatbelt. Neighborhoods have small subcultures, and everyone who has lived in a certain neighborhood knows how to get around the more annoying laws (if they wanted to). Parking in Long Beach is terrible, so some of the parking solutions that I've seen acceptable there (that are in no way legal) would make me want to scream at someone in any other town, but I find myself accepting others doing it when I visit there.

This is another of those things I think shouldn't be a surprise. The first thing they hand you at boot camp after you get your uniform is a mop.

If you clean your car, you drive it more carefully than when it is dirty. You won't, for instance, drive it across a muddy field to go play softball or something.

One of the most hideous social effects there is, is in effect at Savannah River Site: when you can go home at the end of the day and forget about work, that means you don't have to care about work so much. Especially after somebody points out you get paid the same if things don't work.

If you throw the vacuum cleaner bags away, you don't have to vacuum. You can sit idle on the taxpayer's dime.

I toss them on the ground too. Why?

Because if enough people do it, then those who pay people to assault my car will get cited and fined, and they will lose more than they gained from their failed enterprise, and it will stop.

I'm willing to accept a little temporary ugly to end spam, in all its forms, as we know it.

Does there have to be a law for everything? Do really think letting things get a little shabby will make the state change anything, assuming that they could. I think looking at institutions like our schools should show you what they can do when situations start getting down in the dumps.

I can't speak for proof, but I believe it anyway. I've just never understood people who sh*it where they sleep. Like the asshats in my neighborhood who graffiti the parks and tear down the neighborhood signs. Even rats don't do that to their own homes.

I toss the fliers down too. I refuse to accept more work from someone handing me their trash. Much like I don't subscribe to the newspaper (besides the fact that it's filled with drivel). I refuse to pay someone to deliver trash to my house for me to dispose of, and I won't accept it at my car either. I will, however, pick up and toss trash at the park.

Wow, this thread amazes me. Several folks here think that it is ok to throw litter down on the ground in a public place simply because it was put on their car by a disrepectful person. Same folks that will pick up liter thrown down by some other disrespectful person in a park on on their street or some other place, because they care about that place.

Does this not prove the 'broken window' point? We tend to take care of things where we care, and throw off our values in a place where people don't seem to care. Why not take the paper home and put it in your recycle bin, or take further pro-active action if it pisses you off to the point of littering?

Thing is, once you give up taking care of a place, or given up being a good example...you have given up. And throwing something on the ground simply because someone put it on your car, thinking that will make a point to the person managing the place is at best just juvenile. Just think about how many times the attitude of "that will show them" has worked out well for you.

How about being a good example? Pick up the flyer that someone else tossed off and yours on you windshield and take it in the store and ask for the manager to tell the folks to quit putting them out there. I have done that before, not about flyers but some other things in the parking lot for stores, and other people standing around have chimed in and said that they thought about going to another store because of the bother. That has only happened at grocery stores, and it's a much smaller market than like at a mall or something, but you get the bottom line attention when folks chime in and say they consider going elsewhere.

Everyone has their own comfort zone on this, but I still stand by the point that being the change you want to see in the world in no way includes throwing down trash that someone passed on to you.

The idea that tossing a flyer on the ground gets that advertiser in hot water is pretty damned hilarious. I worked with a landscaping crew in an earlier life and WE were the ones to pick up the heinous shit you people throw on the ground, not "management" or anyone else who might possibly give a rip about who was the originator of the trash.

My "favorite" thing to clean up in parking lots was the entire pile of cigarette butts where someone had opened their car door and dumped their ashtray.
People who litter are breaking the social compact, period.

Ang - it's already illegal for these ass-clowns to put the thing on my car. It's also already litter, it just happens to be blocking my view until I lift my wiper blade.

There was one of those clowns going through the lot one time as I was parking, and as he headed toward my car, I gave him the look of "fuck with my ride, and you die." He walked around my car.

So they KNOW that what they are doing is wrong. It's the fault of the people who actually RESPOND to these ads that it keeps happening.

Brian, didn't your mother teach you that two wrongs don't make a right?

They don't. You know that.

If the flyer was on your car in your driveway, you'd put it in the trash, because you won't litter your own yard.

But it's OK with you to litter somewhere else, that's all. You're not being complex or mysterious at all.

Clearly, if the flyers are really illegal and you wanted to make a difference, you could stop them, but you just wanted gratification, and throwing their product away delivers that, albeit in a small way.

You can't even pretend to be doing the right thing, though I suppose you can claim to be doing the same thing as others.

But where's the nobility in that?

Rad, I don't give a fuck about nobility or right any more. All I care about is making the people who piss me off angrier than I already am.

Case in point, some cock decides he has to race up the disappearing right lane to cut in front of me where there isn't enough room for his full-size pickup in the first place. Then he forces his way in, and flips me off. So I took a picture of his license plate. I think he thought I was reaching for a gun, since he gunned it to get away.

I hope he spends the rest of the day pissed off.

Thank you Brian for the "it's already litter' point. Exactly right. We didn't put it there. The people who did should have to pick it up.

Drs in war zones have this issue. They can't save someone, and they feel they let them die. Uh, no, the enemy killed them, not you. The enemy littered, not me. I refuse, white skin or no, to accept guilt for actions I'm not guilty of.

You were paid, on that landscaping maintanence crew, were you not? to maintain the grounds? You should have complained to every company you picked up a flier from.

Oh my fucking gods you people are dense. Do you honestly think that the person who put it in your fucking windshield gives a shit that you throw it on the ground? Do you think that the person who paid that person to put it on your windshield really gives a shit that you throw it on the ground? The only people you're actually sticking it to, are the people who have to put up with yet another piece of trash on the ground.

Them, and the poor sap who actually has to pick it up and dispose of it. Pathetic pieces of shit, all of you.