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What's the deal with recycling, really?
As a 'soft' environmentalist (e.g., generally support/favor pro environmental action by government and citizens, but I don't go to meetings or read mailing lists about it) I feel exhausted trying to figure out what can and can't be recycled and under what circumstances. Is there an easy button way to mostly stay onside without getting a Master's in the thousands of permutations of recycling labels? Are there certain materials that are more important to recycle than others?
I also periodically encounter right wing-ish suggestions that the whole enterprise is basically a scam (e.g., everything just goes into a landfill anyway, it gets shipped overseas to be dumped in the ocean, etc.). I assume these not true, but I don't know enough about the process to refute them conclusively and would benefit from a Slow-Boring piece detailing the intricacies of the matter.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/04/14/what-differentiates-political-left-and-right/
Ilya Somin responds to Matt's defense of the left/right dimension article. Highlights:
"Let's take Yglesias' religion/hierarchy theory first. If religion is right-wing, it's hard to explain explicitly leftist religious movements such as Liberation Theology, which combines Catholicism and Marxism. Worse, it's hard to explain the position of the mainstream Catholic Church!
Pope Francis is socially conservative on issues like abortion. But he also takes positions usually considered left-wing on economic regulation, the rights of migrants, the welfare state, and environmental policy. While the present pope has taken some of the Church's "left" positions further than his recent predecessors, the general idea of combining interventionist positions on economic issues with social conservatism is one the Catholic Church has held for a long time.
If your religion-focused theory of left and right has grave difficulty accounting for the leadership of the world's largest religious denomination, that seems like a significant problem for the theory. And Catholicism is far from the only denomination that doesn't fit the theory well. Many Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim movements, for example, are also anomalies in Yglesias' framework.
The hierarchy side of the theory also has issues. Consider the fact that communist regimes feature rigid hierarchies, with power concentrated in a small elite at the apex of the ruling party. Does that make communist regimes "right wing"? Are their opponents, therefore, necessarily left-wing? What if they are conservatives or religious traditionalists, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn? A theory under which Stalin and Mao are right-wing and Solzhenitsyn left-wing seems problematic. At the very least, it's highly counterintuitive."