6 ms·

Group of homeless moms and families are taking over a house – this time in L.A

12 points by ericdanielski 7y ago

whb07 7y ago
"<thing> is a human right" == "please spend time, money, and effort so as I can have it without paying, sucker" Now replace it with housing, healthcare, and any other thing du jour.
- esarbe 7y ago
  As a society, the moment that you allow for private property, you take over responsibility for the livelihood of everyone. Property is theft on the common good. If you steal from the common good, you have to deal with the consequences. If you deprive people from making their own living, you have to accept that these people will find ways and means. You didn't build that.
  - jaldhar 7y ago
    As a society, the moment you allow for freedom of Religion, you take over responsibility for everyone’s practice of religion. As a society, the moment you allow the right to bear arms, you are responsible for providing everyone who wants one with a gun. The “commons” are waste land until they are improved by human effort. (I’m assuming you are not a nomadic hunter/gatherer.). That is the ultimate basis for property rights. It’s true I didn’t build that but neither did those homeless moms. What they are doing is theft.
    - esarbe 7y ago
      Your counter-examples (thanks for providing them, by the way) don't quite work. Sure, they work grammatically, but not contextually. Both the right to bear arms and the right to religlious freedom are immaterial rights. There's not necessity to bear arms for my survival, there's no necessity for religlious freedom for my survival. There's however the necessity of food and shelter for my survival. As soon as you take these away by assuming property rights, you take on the burden of supporting everyone that might have used said assumed property for their own survival. Since we all started out as nomadic hunter/gatherers, this assumption of the "commons" being a wasteland does not quite hold, don't you think?
      - jaldhar 7y ago
        Yes, we all started out as hunter/gatherers millennia ago. We are not now. We have been mostly improving the wastelands ever since. (I say mostly because occasionally we re-waste them again but thankfully less and less often these days.)
        esarbe 7y ago
        I'm not sure that I would consider i.e. cutting down the amazon rain forest and turning them into pastures for cattle or fields for mono cultures as an improvement of wasteland. Pretty much the same happened to the European rain forest and is currently happening to east-Asian rain forests. What we've been doing is changing the environment to suit our needs as agriculturalists, but that's not an objective improvement from wasteland to garden-of-Eden. Indeed; exactly with this transformation from "wasteland" (as you would maybe call it) to predatively exploited ecosystem (as I would call it) we (as agriculturalists) have infringed on the rights of all hunter/gatherers that have been there before. We've set up enclosures to limited their ability to travel from hunting ground to hunting ground, we've slaughtered their prey animals (i.e. bisons), all the while claiming that their are uncivilized and barbaric and that this is all for their best.
        jaldhar 7y ago
        The Amazon has 50,000 species of beetles which is good for beetles I guess but what makes it wasteland or not is what it does for humans. There as well we can discuss whether cattle or biodiversity is a better improvement but that is a different topic.
        esarbe 7y ago
        The Amazon (and similar environments) has been supporting human life for millennia. Even if you discount beetles (as I wouldn't, since beetles are awesome), calling it a wasteland does not seem very appropriate to me.
        jaldhar 7y ago
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    Spot on!
  - whb07 7y ago
    You sound like someone who isn’t aware of the wonderful events where tens of millions of people suffered and died of starvation and political prosecution where such schemes were plentiful. Perhaps living in the USSR was indeed the golden years for you?
    - esarbe 7y ago
      You sound like someone ... [insert boring and repetitive, possible derogatorive epithet that doesn't provide anything useful to the conversation and end with a snarky, rhetorical question].
  - foxyv 7y ago
    > "Property is theft on the common good." Who are you? George Orwell?
    - esarbe 7y ago
      Indeed, I am. How did you figure it out? Seriously; where does any property come from?
extro 7y ago
This is basically theft. I bought a home in my home country and still working in foreign land to pay for it, so the home stands there empty, but i would kill if somebody would just "occupy" it while i am landlocked in a different country because corona.
- esarbe 7y ago
  This is wrong on so many levels. First; no, it's not basically theft. Theft is when you take away something without permission. They are not taking away the house, they are using it. So, it's basically not theft. Second; this is a vacant house, it's not currently used. By not renting out houses to an affordable prices, the landlords are creating artificial scarcity. Desperate people make desperate choices, if you don't offer them any other options. So I'm all good with that.
  - extro 7y ago
    It is illegal use then, what will envolve to theft as soon as they decide to stay indefinitely, what they actually already did, and will realised as somebody try to push them out with or without police force. I don't care if it state or private owned property is: "occupying" homes is theft in my eyes, as it fundamentally shaking the work and merrit based society.
    - esarbe 7y ago
      You make the assumption that we have a work and merit based society at all. I don't agree with that, but for the sake of argument, let's run with it. Even if you have a work and merit based society, you still have to provide the necessities of life to those that are unable to provide for themselves; the sick, the elderly, the unable. This includes those that do not have any abilities your society values. If you have a society that makes good use of it's people and is able to provide everyone with a position of merit, you're fine. But as soon as you have mass of people that are not able to work and provide merit, you've got a problem. Because you have to somehow stop them from taking what they need anyway. You can do that with police and the military, but in the long run this is not stable. Given that I don't think that we have a work and merit based society, my conclusion is that we have even more of a responsibility towards those left behind.

12 points by ericdanielski 7y ago

"<thing> is a human right" == "please spend time, money, and effort so as I can have it without paying, sucker" Now replace it with housing, healthcare, and any other thing du jour.

esarbe 7y ago
As a society, the moment that you allow for private property, you take over responsibility for the livelihood of everyone. Property is theft on the common good. If you steal from the common good, you have to deal with the consequences. If you deprive people from making their own living, you have to accept that these people will find ways and means. You didn't build that.
- jaldhar 7y ago
  As a society, the moment you allow for freedom of Religion, you take over responsibility for everyone’s practice of religion. As a society, the moment you allow the right to bear arms, you are responsible for providing everyone who wants one with a gun. The “commons” are waste land until they are improved by human effort. (I’m assuming you are not a nomadic hunter/gatherer.). That is the ultimate basis for property rights. It’s true I didn’t build that but neither did those homeless moms. What they are doing is theft.
  - esarbe 7y ago
    Your counter-examples (thanks for providing them, by the way) don't quite work. Sure, they work grammatically, but not contextually. Both the right to bear arms and the right to religlious freedom are immaterial rights. There's not necessity to bear arms for my survival, there's no necessity for religlious freedom for my survival. There's however the necessity of food and shelter for my survival. As soon as you take these away by assuming property rights, you take on the burden of supporting everyone that might have used said assumed property for their own survival. Since we all started out as nomadic hunter/gatherers, this assumption of the "commons" being a wasteland does not quite hold, don't you think?
    - jaldhar 7y ago
      Yes, we all started out as hunter/gatherers millennia ago. We are not now. We have been mostly improving the wastelands ever since. (I say mostly because occasionally we re-waste them again but thankfully less and less often these days.)
      - esarbe 7y ago
        I'm not sure that I would consider i.e. cutting down the amazon rain forest and turning them into pastures for cattle or fields for mono cultures as an improvement of wasteland. Pretty much the same happened to the European rain forest and is currently happening to east-Asian rain forests. What we've been doing is changing the environment to suit our needs as agriculturalists, but that's not an objective improvement from wasteland to garden-of-Eden. Indeed; exactly with this transformation from "wasteland" (as you would maybe call it) to predatively exploited ecosystem (as I would call it) we (as agriculturalists) have infringed on the rights of all hunter/gatherers that have been there before. We've set up enclosures to limited their ability to travel from hunting ground to hunting ground, we've slaughtered their prey animals (i.e. bisons), all the while claiming that their are uncivilized and barbaric and that this is all for their best.
      - jaldhar 7y ago
        The Amazon has 50,000 species of beetles which is good for beetles I guess but what makes it wasteland or not is what it does for humans. There as well we can discuss whether cattle or biodiversity is a better improvement but that is a different topic.
        esarbe 7y ago
        The Amazon (and similar environments) has been supporting human life for millennia. Even if you discount beetles (as I wouldn't, since beetles are awesome), calling it a wasteland does not seem very appropriate to me.
        jaldhar 7y ago
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  Spot on!
- whb07 7y ago
  You sound like someone who isn’t aware of the wonderful events where tens of millions of people suffered and died of starvation and political prosecution where such schemes were plentiful. Perhaps living in the USSR was indeed the golden years for you?
  - esarbe 7y ago
    You sound like someone ... [insert boring and repetitive, possible derogatorive epithet that doesn't provide anything useful to the conversation and end with a snarky, rhetorical question].
- foxyv 7y ago
  > "Property is theft on the common good." Who are you? George Orwell?
  - esarbe 7y ago
    Indeed, I am. How did you figure it out? Seriously; where does any property come from?

extro 7y ago

This is basically theft. I bought a home in my home country and still working in foreign land to pay for it, so the home stands there empty, but i would kill if somebody would just "occupy" it while i am landlocked in a different country because corona.

esarbe 7y ago
This is wrong on so many levels. First; no, it's not basically theft. Theft is when you take away something without permission. They are not taking away the house, they are using it. So, it's basically not theft. Second; this is a vacant house, it's not currently used. By not renting out houses to an affordable prices, the landlords are creating artificial scarcity. Desperate people make desperate choices, if you don't offer them any other options. So I'm all good with that.
- extro 7y ago
  It is illegal use then, what will envolve to theft as soon as they decide to stay indefinitely, what they actually already did, and will realised as somebody try to push them out with or without police force. I don't care if it state or private owned property is: "occupying" homes is theft in my eyes, as it fundamentally shaking the work and merrit based society.
  - esarbe 7y ago
    You make the assumption that we have a work and merit based society at all. I don't agree with that, but for the sake of argument, let's run with it. Even if you have a work and merit based society, you still have to provide the necessities of life to those that are unable to provide for themselves; the sick, the elderly, the unable. This includes those that do not have any abilities your society values. If you have a society that makes good use of it's people and is able to provide everyone with a position of merit, you're fine. But as soon as you have mass of people that are not able to work and provide merit, you've got a problem. Because you have to somehow stop them from taking what they need anyway. You can do that with police and the military, but in the long run this is not stable. Given that I don't think that we have a work and merit based society, my conclusion is that we have even more of a responsibility towards those left behind.