hexbear
Hexbear Proposals chapo.chat matrix room.
This will be a place for site proposals and discussion before implementation on the site.
Every proposal will also be mirrored into a pinned post on the hexbear community.
Any other ideas for helping to integrate the two spaces are welcome to be commented here or messaged to me directly.
Within Hexbear Proposals you can see the history of all site proposals and react to them, indicating a vote for or against a proposal.
Sending messages will be restricted to verified and active hexbear accounts older than 1 month with their matrix id in their hexbear user profile.
All top level messages within the channel must be a Proposals (idea for changing the site), Feedback (regarding non-technical aspects of the site, for technical please use https://hexbear.net/c/feedback), or Appeals (regarding admin/moderator actions).
Discussion regarding these will be within nested threads under the post.
To gain matrix verification, all you need to do is navigate to my hexbear userprofile and click the send a secure private message including your hexbear username.
view the rest of the comments
There’s nothing wrong with buying Taco Bell and “random bullshit.” I don’t think this attitude, expressed many times over in this thread, that homeless people have to live the most spartan existence in order to deserve help has any place here.
There is often an element of learned helplessness at play as well, and I don't totally disagree that it matters that people are truthful about what the money goes to for trust reasons, but ultimately being poor is just expensive. how are you supposed to cook things like lentils and beans and veggies when you live in a tent or a car and are forced to move around constantly. just keeping food around can attract pests, you don't have space to store much in the way of cooking equipment let alone fresh produce, you don't have reliable access to grocery stores, etc. and ultimately why would you bother trying to live a basic lifestyle when the dopamine-hit slop is right there, hot and ready, and the grocery store (especially one with non-moldy produce) is miles away and swarming with security, cops, karens, etc who all don't want you there.
Every little aspect from buying food, food storage, food preparation, cooking, sanitation all have associated costs, risks, challenges, etc where getting $5 and getting enough calories worth of addictive taco bell food is very simple and has few externalities to deal with.
People here don't hold homeless users in contempt. They are limited in what they can provide. Yes, homeless people should not have to live the most spartan existence, but if the limited funds available to us on hexbear can either provide for two people sparsely, or leave one to starve while the other feasts, I think I know what we'd pick.
You made people feel helpless, and they disengaged from donations.
Trying to explain yourself over and over again isn't helping anything -- and I really really don't mean that in a cruel way.
You want to know something? When I gave money to her, I didn't feel helpless nor did I feel helpless after. I still felt inclined to help. But you know who is making me feel helpless. You and others with that reactionary attitude. Just shut the fuck up and let it go! She didn't make people feel helpless but you are.
The precariat getting mad at homeless people for eating Taco Bell and then turning around and calling it a "feast" is literal contempt. Taco Bell is corpo gruel slop with an ad campaign. Its ubiquitiousness is indicative of a diseased food system. It's usage as a "status symbol" or "luxury" because others are preparing the food is a right wing dog whistle. There only difference between Taco Bell and Chef Boyardee is that it comes out hot to the consumer at point of sale. This is an emotional and value based judgement.
If anyone here is gonna get mad at Taco Bell but not at the equivalent cash value of ravioli from the can, you should probably do some soul searching about your ideas about what you think homeless people deserve.
You are literally arguing for the ability to control how people survive homelessness through financial means. This is literally where these debates end up no matter if they start out with "drugs" or "random shit". These debates are always based not only in the idea that there is a "proper" way to survive, but the idea that you can reach financial independence on survival money. This is exactly how billionaires treat the precariat. They say you don't deserve better than what you have because you DoorDash your Taco Bell. This is an idea rooted in economic competition and in the class morality that those below must go to great lengths to prove to those above their financial responsibility despite clear and obvious abuse.
You are literally arguing about the luxury value and the "feast" that Taco fucking Bell is for a homeless person. This is gross and it is contempt.
Any antonym for starve will do instead of feast. I apologise. My intention was to contrast degrees of deprivation, not degrees of luxury.
This is not your job or your right or your business. You do not have enough information. You do not have a way to get that information. This all goes to the same place.
The sister comment to this is twisting itself into pretzels to defend creating a system of ranking worthiness, using terms like
At what point are we going to start making tiered preference lists for what homeless should buy for them to be worthy of our aid?. Are we going to prefer cat food instead of Chef Boyardee because we feel that people aren't proving themselves thrifty enough? Are we gonna optimize their calorie intake? Are we gonna question if they really need 2500 calories today? After all they're just laying around in their tents. This is exactly where these arguments end up. It's all gross value judgements, that further and further beg the question to prevent people from obtaining what should be human fucking rights. Enforcing barracks communism on people when you don't even sleep in the fucking barracks is a recreation of the capitalist social relation in a red color.
There's a 10 reply deep thread in this post gossiping and arguing about financials people are not privy to. Moralizing costs they have no proof of. Arguing back and forth over literally nothing with no proof. Going back and forth about some years long board drama. Showing their whole fucking ass. The subject of this is the post history of single homeless user that is part of this community, and people don't think she's good enough because she suffers with the typical problems of homelessness. This is absolutely gross, and this is the kind of behavior that results when you allow people to make it their business to evaluate how users spend mutual aid money.
It is completely antisocial behavior to investigate users of this forum in how they spend mutual aid money. It is completely antisocial behavior use conditional aid to play with their lives. These are people, not your hobby. Their lives are not for you to optimize. If you want to control things play with dolls, pirate a Paradox Game, there are plenty of ways to exercise this instinct that doesn't affect real people.
This is the same type of behavior that bosses do to workers. This is the type of shit that Dave Ramsay says when he talks about his gross and illegal hiring practices. "Actually everything you get is from me, I'm not going to give you more, you should live how I think you deserve to live based on the money I give you otherwise why would I hire you?" This is not your house, these are not your rules. This is just the ambient cultural petite bourgeoisie authoritarian values seeping through.
You don't have to give, but if you do, that money is not yours anymore. You don't get to demand satisfaction. You shouldn't demand satisfaction before even forking money over.
That's where all this ends up. It's simple. Attempting to deny this is silly. Nobody here is a social worker, this is not an organization, this is an online message board where people ask for help. Stop mining these interactions for value. It is gross.
Mutual aid is not control and aid is not a symbol of social and moral value. In the case of the comm, aid is to temporarily alleviate the symptoms of the social disease of poverty, asking anymore of that comm is frankly unrealistic and childish.
Honestly I have no idea what you're on about.
My concern is not what people do with the money, my concern is people disengaging from the comm.
But go off, or whatever.
Okay let me try again:
Regardless of what you call it, ranking people in mutual aid is going to result in worse outcomes for people who need mutual aid.
Guess what? People are going to disengage from the comm, Hexbear cannot solve homelessness, there are plenty of people here who are simply upset about having to see poverty in a digital space. And guess what? It's gonna get worse! It's going to reflect the fact that this is a space that is a durable source of survival resources and the fact that more and more people need those resources to survive as the economy gets worse. These are facts of life and a comm is not going to change them. Visible poverty is a natural collective punishment for living in an unjust society.
What's important is that people who need help do not disengage from the comm because of witch hunts and moralizing. Attempting to drive engagement of donators by catering to them is going to create worse outcomes for people who need money and for people who donate money.
We have no way of enforcing anything. It's very easy to scam people who think they're getting exactly what they want. That's why it's called a confidence trick.
All you're doing is giving people reasons to lie and inviting the community to air out all their vile thoughts about those who suffer poverty.
You should read thru this whole thread and see that there are comrades who, based on how everyone's shitty little thoughts have played out, do not feel comfortable even asking for help anymore. That is the harm here.
We can block comms now. We don't actually have to see poverty. That should instruct you on the limitations of webzones to both provide a safe harbor for the vulnerable and to punish the unjust.