diputsmonro

Goals can be avoided or punted. By calling housing a "right", we elevate it as an imperative, not just something to be shrugged off. It is explicitly the purpose to make the issue more difficult to avoid.

It is a game of semantics, sure, but so is the distinction between positive and negative rights. People are still obligated to act to uphold your negative rights as well, through law enforcement and court proceedings. But they are not compelled by force - those are voluntary jobs just like everything else, and they are paid for their service by the government (or taxpayers).

The same would be true for housing. Property is bought by the government (or built at its expense), and the humans involved in making that happen are compensated as well. The costs for this will be added to our taxes (as are the costs for roads, courts, and everything else that makes our society liveable).

Of course, that is contingent on people actually paying a fair amount in taxes. Most people who support housing as a human right are also in favor of closing tax loopholes and raising taxes on the obscenely wealthy.

Morally speaking, your access to the resources required to sustain life should not be dictated by how useful you can make yourself to someone richer than you. We no longer live in a world where the production of every person's needs necessitates the active participation of every person. World hunger for example is no longer a supply problem, it's a distribution problem.

We now have machines and automation capable of extracting and producing all human needs with relatively very little human effort. We can power them through renewable energy sources far more productive than human labor. In fact, there is so much automation that workers are becoming displaced by machines and cannot find meaningful ways to contribute (some may be retrained as machine operators/maintainers, but as dictated by capitalism, they will always be far fewer than the amount of workers displaced). We are in, or on the cusp of, a post-scarcity society (for physical needs), and the systems that manage the production and distribution of resources must be rethought. The only reason that scarcity still exists in this marketplace is because the owners of those systems still demand obscene profits so that they can go on joyrides in space. The actual costs of maintaining the systems would be much lower if the end goal wasn't quarterly growth.

I've focused on food here, but the situation for housing can be similar. Additionally, housing and real estate are seen as investments that should grow in value over time, which leads to perverse incentives and pressures that are not inherent to solving the actual problem of housing people, and which drive prices far higher than the actual costs a government would need to take on.

The same author has written articles about "scientific censorship" regarding covid vaccines and ivermectin treatments. This site screams "alternative facts" to me.

This is not all "science's" fault. This whole thing has been political from the beginning, both in that those in power during the initial outbreak tried to downplay the dangers, and those opposing them tried to overcompensate to distance themselves.

Besides, it is perfectly scientific to change your beliefs and guidance based on new evidence, especially when it comes to novel diseases and a generation-defining pandemic.

It's easy to innovate and put in the hard work to do things efficiently when you have more money than God. Wealth begets wealth.

> I disagree with the notion that a more equitable society is a silver bullet for reducing human misery.

Surely it would not solve every source of human misery, but I don't see how it wouldn't be a substantial improvement.

> I doubt it would be an easy sell to suggest sharing the fruits of everyone's labour regardless of the amount of work each person has put into producing those fruits.

There is a whole branch of political philosophy dedicated to exactly that, which capitalists around the world (valuing utmost the ability to accrue and hoarde capital) have spent over a century turning into a dirty word.

Nowadays in the US, even the suggestion of public healthcare is an untouchable evil, because helping your fellow man is seen as being taken advantage of, and the idea that someone might get something for free is abhorrent. This, despite that fact that public healthcare is normal, successful, and more efficient in almost all other western democracies (because the cost of services isn't padded by executive bonuses and investor returns)

Besides, if you have insurance, you already believe in that general concept. It is a pooling of resources with the knowledge that some may give and take in unequal measures, but that on average less people will need to take than will give, and that you have a safety net in the case of an extreme unlucky event. Same idea, just applied on a societal scale.

Conversely, the "Great Awokening" is a direct result of the legitimate "democratization" that the article discusses.

It seems to me that the knee-jerk opposition to "wokeness" always comes from people who would rather sweep problems that don't affect them under the rug than acknowledge that they need to be fixed. They are the aloof, socially normative people in this article, utterly confused by and thus dismissive of the struggles of those outside of society's standard ingroup.

"We weren't like this 10 years ago" because, as the article describes, those concerns were previously ignored by the mainstream because they didn't fit the experiences or interests of those who had influence over the mainstream. Now that those institutions have lost that filtering power, we're hearing from more real people with more real problems. Healthcare access, structural racism, mental health resources, poverty, etc. They are taking their little hammers to our Twitter feeds. The solution isn't to shame and ignore the people complaining about them - it is to fix those societal issues that cause the pain to begin with.

To be frank, "I don't like politics" is a privileged position that can only be held by people who are already so well-served by the current shape of the world that they have no strong desire - or rather, need - to change it. Political parties seem equivilant because they don't disagree about things that affect your needs. (That doesn't mean your life is necessarily easy, but it does mean that the most controversial issues in society don't impact you, which is an uncommon advantage.)

That need is where the moralizing comes from. As the piece describes, there are swaths of people who are left behind by difficult gaps our societal culture - but there are also people who are either ignored or explicitly oppressed by our political system too.

The "evil" in the oppression part is easier to explain (though more divisive) - in modern US politics, Republicans are almost universally hostile towards and opposed to expansions of rights for marginalized groups. LGBT+ rights are an obvious example, which they have almost universally opposed. Yes, Democrats have also opposed things at times and acted slowly, but over time the party has changed to accept them, and Republicans have not. Whenever positive change is made, it is almost universally by Democrats against Republican opposition.

The ignorance part is trickier. As a conservative party, the core Republican demographic has always been the idealized social norm. Almost by definition, maintaining existing social norms is what a conservative party does. In pre-modern US politics (say, pre-1970s), that would be the middle class, straight, white, Christian, male. Because that is the base, that is the group whose interests the party serves. Thus, a blind spot is formed that excludes everyone else in society who does not fit that mold. Generally speaking, their needs are ignored - even fought against, if it would cause disruption to the social norms their base represents and values.

Ignorance itself is not evil. But sweeping known problems under the rug is. Over the last few decades especially, we have learned a lot about the problems of our fellow Americans that have been ignored by society. Minority discrimination, marginalization, extreme wealth inequality, lack of healthcare access, mental health problems, etc... And again, Republicans are almost universally against any change that would alleviate that suffering, usually with the excuse that they are too expensive (e.g. healthcare) or are not real problems (e.g. BLM). The real reason, though, is that any such change might cause discomfort to their base - rich white people who don't want to pay taxes (and the people like the kid in the novel who are manipulated by them).

As society learns more about the people who it has left behind - exactly as this article details - it becomes a moral imperative to fix those problems. Republicans have been purposefully obstructing progress for decades - Gingrich and McConnell have literally bragged about it.

As social media connects us more, the stories of the oppressed and marginalized become louder and more apparent. As this realization becomes more clear (as some would say, "becoming woke"), the urge to fix it becomes greater. At this point, there is no longer a reasonable justification for inaction. Combined with the growing influence of the racist alt-right and clear escalation of anti-democratic practices, it is difficult to characterize them as anything other than "evil", particularly if you are (or are allied to) any of the groups that they harass or dismiss.