> Refusing to pay for a place to live is simply theft and entitlement.
Holding other people's basic survival need for ransom is simply theft and entitlement.
What makes you think that people are going through all the complexity of squatting if they have the options of paying for a place to live?
> If you abolish property rights, your two options are state slavery or anarchy where the strong take whatever they can.
Anarchy where the strong (rich) take whatever they can is the situation we have now. Property rights as they currently exist are that rich people have property rights and nobody else does.
Unless you start talking solutions to homelessness, it starts to sound like you just don't care about the homeless and you're only interested in maintaining the power that exists.
If posting in favor of imprisoning the homeless is acceptable to you, but pointing out how awful that is, isn't, then I'm just not that interested in what's acceptable to you.
> If posting in favor of imprisoning the homeless is acceptable to you, but pointing out how awful that is, isn't
You know very well that the problem isn't your opinion but the way that you're expressing it, and your incredibly hostile treatment of other users.
HN is a platform for thoughtful discussion of interesting ideas and topics, not advocacy and emotional outbursts. Your kind of behavior isn't wanted here.
This kind of thing is not ok here—it's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
I understand moderating discussion is extremely hard. I understand that it seems fair at face value for you to just enforce politeness and not enforce ideologies, but that's not actually possible. You are taking a side here, if you decide to censor me, and not the ideologies I'm arguing against.
I am not perfect and I should have been a bit more polite in some of the posts you link.
People post absolutely reprehensible opinions on this site, and a rational, reasonable response to those opinions is not politeness. The startup community is supportive of and participates in a lot of extremely harmful practices, and believes a lot of harmful ideologies. If espousing ideologies that are literally killing people is allowed by the guidelines, but pointing out how horrific those ideologies are isn't allowed by the guidelines, then the guidelines are effectively supporting those ideologies.
Take for example this post which you linked (I'm linking the post it was responding to):
The above post I 100% stand by. I think I said that about as politely as I think is possible; any more polite would be miscommunication.
If you consider that post a problem, I understand, but I'm not going to comply with that. If that's the case, please just delete my account and all my posts, and I won't attempt to create another account. I'd rather not be associated with a site that's protects reprehensible ideologies in the name of politeness.
(1) plenty of HN users post comments from plenty of ideological positions without breaking the site guidelines and (therefore) without getting moderated; and
(2) users breaking the site guidelines from all different ideological positions do get moderated.
That doesn't fit with "you're taking a side". In my experience the causality goes the other way: when people get moderated they have a strong tendency to jump to "the mods are against my side" rather than look at how their posts are breaking the rules and/or go against the intended spirit of the site. In other words it's not "I got moderated because you're taking a side", it's "you must be taking a side, because I got moderated". So it's probably worth adding:
(3) The users who jump to "you're taking a side" are distributed across all the ideologies.
There are also users of every ideological view making the case "my ideology is special; it requires me to break the rules, otherwise it cannot properly be communicated". This is disproven by all their co-ideologists who have no trouble communicating similar views without that.
I agree with you that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40136616 was not as bad as your other three comments I listed, but it still used the "people like you" trope, which is a flamewar + personal attack combo that leads to forum hell.
I don't believe you need personal attack, clichés of internet aggression, etc., to make your case for what you believe in. On the contrary, these things cheapen your position. Morever, they are fungible across all the ideologies—that is,
(4) commenters who resort to breaking the site guidelines resemble each another far more than they resemble anyone else. Ideology is not the high-order bit here.
By the way, I don't identify with your word "politeness". Enforcing politeness in not at all what we're after, and in that sense I agree with you, though I think you're misassessing what we do as mods. Politeness is profoundly uninspiring as a value, and I'd find it profoundly demotivating if that were the principle. But it's not.
The HN guidelines used to say "Be civil", but we changed that years ago to "Be kind", because civility (which I take to be close to politeness) doesn't go deep enough to capture what we want here. Kindness is a far better word. We want people to be in good relational connection with each other, even when they disagree about a topic. That's an ideal, of course, but it's the right ideal for HN, because it's needed in order to optimize for curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Perhaps then, the crux of your and my disagreement is that I do not think you are successfully optimizing for kindness. I believe that you intend to optimize for kindness, but you're not, you're optimizing for politeness.
You'll note that increasingly my posts here are on homelessness. There are nearly 600,000 homeless in the US alone, many of whom will die from homelessness-related problems. Many posts on this site both spread misinformation about that problem, and argue against any and all real solutions to that problem. That isn't kind, but it isn't moderated. And treating those comments as if they are not reprehensible, might be kind to the poster, but it's unkind to the 600,000 homeless in the country where a lot of HN users live.
Kindness isn't a simple thing: sometimes kindness to one person needs to be balanced with kindness to other people.
Kindness, as I understand it, has to do with how you treat the people you personally come into contact with. On HN, that means how you relate to other users.
I get that you're using the word differently and that's fine, as long as we understand what each other means by it. It seems like you're defining your political position (on homelessness in this case) as 'kind' while the opposing position is 'unkind'. Presumably someone of the opposite view might take issue with that, but I don't.
Since it's in your interest to argue for your views in a way that is personally kind to the people you're arguing with, I don't see any tradeoff between our two usages.
I support cheap and affordable housing. I support charity for people that are honest members of society.
I think unrepentant thieves need to be incarcerated, not because they deserve a housing, but to protect innocent people from their destructive Behavior.
>Quoting so you can't retract. I don't think you'll find much agreement there.
I think you'll find that you are in the minority. Look at laws for felony theft. I think most people would like even harsher penalties people that steal assets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. All it takes is seeing it once and people swing very quickly against this kind of behavior.
You being hungry does not entitle you to my dinner. You being horny does not entitle you to my body. You being cold does not entitle you to my shelter.
> I think you'll find that you are in the minority. Look at laws for felony theft.
I think the laws for felony theft as compared to the laws for murder and rape are pretty solid evidence that rape and murder are considered more serious crimes than theft. And that's setting aside that there are plenty of theft laws that are even less serious than felony theft. In cases where people are stealing to meet their basic needs such as food or housing, it's not uncommon for perpetrators to receive lenient sentences including probation with no prison time.
What's your argument for landlordism not being theft? Shouldn't those people get a job too? Or is theft only a crime when poor people do it?
> What's your argument for landlordism not being theft? Shouldn't those people get a job too? Or is theft only a crime when poor people do it?
It is very simple. Theft is when you take something from someone without voluntary agreement. renters and landlords enter voluntary agreement. If a landlord has a job or not seems irrelevant. They didn't steal anything from anyone. Everything they have, they obtained through mutually consensual exchange.
How do you think landlordism could be considered theft? Is it just because people need/want shelter that they have?
Is a farmer who grows food a thief because people need food to live?
Is a doctor a thief because you die without surgery?
Is a mechanic a thief because your car needs repair?
In my mind, lacking, wanting, or even needing something does not mean that everyone who has it and charges you is a thief.
> It is very simple. Theft is when you take something from someone without voluntary agreement. renters and landlords enter voluntary agreement. If a landlord has a job or not seems irrelevant. They didn't steal anything from anyone. Everything they have, they obtained through mutually consensual exchange.
Wrong. The vast majority of people don't voluntarily agree to rent, they are coerced. "Pay rent or be homeless" is pretty powerful coercion.
> How do you think landlordism could be considered theft? Is it just because people need/want shelter that they have?
Stop this "need/want" nonsense. I think we can agree that homes are firmly a human need. People being mad that landlords are driving up housing prices for personal gain isn't just whining that people aren't getting what they want. People need homes.
It's theft because people who already have a lot of money, are buying up things that people need, so they can hold them for ransom. Owning things so that others can't own them isn't a benefit to society, and landlords do not provide services (before you trot out the maintenance argument--compare the prices of a handyman to rent). They're just leaches.
> Is a farmer who grows food a thief because people need food to live?
A farmer grows food, like a builder builds houses.
The landlord equivalent for food would be if someone decided to buy up all the world's food and jack up the price, letting people starve to death despite an excess of food rather than compromising their profit model. And that would be murder, not theft.
> Is a doctor a thief because you die without surgery?
Surgery, unlike a food or house, is a service, not a product.
Unlike a landlord, doctors performing surgery is actually doing work. And while the prices of medical care are high in the US to the point that people are dying rather than seeking preventive care, that's largely a function of rent-seeking healthcare companies, not doctors. And that's pretty equivalent to murder, too.
Hospitals are in fact required to provide surgery if failure to do so would result in the death of the patient.
> Is a mechanic a thief because your car needs repair?
Is a car a human need? In some places, maybe, but that's a problem of a society that doesn't provide other forms of transport.
Really, though, I'm less interested in defining landlordism=theft. We shouldn't need to prove it fits your arbitrary definition of theft to say it's wrong: if you don't get that causing homelessness for personal gain is wrong, your moral compass is pretty fundamentally broken.
>Really, though, I'm less interested in defining landlordism=theft. We shouldn't need to prove it fits your arbitrary definition of theft to say it's wrong: if you don't get that causing homelessness for personal gain is wrong, your moral compass is pretty fundamentally broken.
I think landlords prevent more homelessness than they create. Homes dont magically pop into existence. They are built for sale. I think people pushed into homelessness has little to do with profit seeking landlords. No landlords means nobody gets housing that cant afford to own
You seem to be freely conflating homelessness with regular people paying rent. This is misleading debate tactic to advance the entitlement of renters.
People who can pay rent, but want another's possession for cheaper, is simple entitlement.
Homelessness is a social and legal choice to make cheap housing illegal, or not provide social housing for those that do not work. This is orthognal to landlords. Someone with a vacation home or airBNB isnt the bottleneck keeping junkie bob from having a shelter.
I think pinning it on landlords is childish. You can help junkie bob and choose not to, because you dont want them in your house, or to pay for their shelter. Blaming landlords is simply a way for people to say it isnt their problem or responsibility.
Yes, builders build them. Landlords don't create homes. Landlords take them out of the market so that they can't be bought by people seeking to buy them and live in them.
> You seem to be freely conflating homelessness with regular people paying rent.
You seem to be freely conflating removing a house from the free market with providing one.
> No landlords means nobody gets housing that cant afford to own
Landlords mean that the vast majority of people cannot afford to own, and increasingly nobody can afford to rent either.
> Homelessness is a social and legal choice to make cheap housing illegal, or not provide social housing for those that do not work. This is orthognal to landlords. Someone with a vacation home or airBNB isnt the bottleneck keeping junkie bob from having a shelter.
1. Many homeless cannot work. Perhaps they could have worked when they became homeless, but being homeless quickly makes one unemployable.
2. The social/legal choice to make cheap housing illegal is driven by people trying to keep up the values of their vacation homes and airBNBs.
3. If you were homeless you'd have very good reasons to be a junkie too. The scorn you have for people less fortunate than yourself is horrifying.
> I think pinning it on landlords is childish.
I think not pinning it on landlords is willfully ignorant of basic economics in favor of an ideology that likely benefits you.
> You can help junkie bob and choose not to, because you dont want them in your house, or to pay for their shelter.
1. I don't own a home I don't live in, and the home is really not large enough for more than one person. Claiming that someone doesn't care about the homeless because they don't let homeless people live in their home is an intentionally ridiculous bar to set.
2. As for paying for their shelter, the amount of money I donate to housing-related charities varies based on how much I make (I have to live too) but I've donated around $1k so far to housing-related charities. I'm not making a lot of money right now, or it would be more. I also donate my time at a homeless shelter (mostly cleaning and moving stuff, I'm not there enough to do more involved tasks).
3. All this is beside the point that this is a childish ad hominem argument you're making. Not everyone is in a position to help the homeless--many are on the verge of homelessness themselves. Claiming we have to be actively helping the homeless to have an opinion is absurd. Is there any issue you care about, and do make any sacrifice as extreme as letting someone live in your house for that issue? Or do you just not care about anyone but yourself?
Holding other people's basic survival need for ransom is simply theft and entitlement.
What makes you think that people are going through all the complexity of squatting if they have the options of paying for a place to live?
> If you abolish property rights, your two options are state slavery or anarchy where the strong take whatever they can.
Anarchy where the strong (rich) take whatever they can is the situation we have now. Property rights as they currently exist are that rich people have property rights and nobody else does.
Unless you start talking solutions to homelessness, it starts to sound like you just don't care about the homeless and you're only interested in maintaining the power that exists.