simontherockjohnson

Neo-liberalism was supposed to pause all of these conflicts, but because America is no longer a leader in the world, because it sucks

Lmao. You realize that this idea in the modern era is based on one gigantic moron who's only job it is to be a stenographer for power had this big brain moment where he wrote down "No two countries with McDonald's have ever gone to war".

Then he changed it to any country that has a company that sells stuff to Dell won't go to war with each other.

The capitalist peace theory has never been true.

From my perspective making software, it's improved. Prior to 2016, I had to be the one pushing WCAG standards. After 2016 it's been explicit customer facing criteria managed by product managers.

Okay let me try again:

My intention was to contrast degrees of deprivation, not degrees of luxury.

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.

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

misjudgements by one of the people

probably cheaper calories per dollar

giving someone 20 dollars to sustain themselves for 5 meals rather than 1, I’m going to pick the person who makes it last 5. That’s not a morally objectionable thing to do.

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.

People who are posting stupid shit in this thread deserve this level of abrasiveness and calling out. I had to disengage last night because there's an entire 10 replies deep thread complaining about the fact that the online message board gossip they just heard about hasn't resulted in a homeless person getting banned from one of the only places allowing them to access survival funds. That level of hate is vile. Frankly this site would never allow that kind of dog whistle and concern troll style posting against our GSM and POC comrades and we shouldn't tolerate it against homeless ones.

Pretending that some kind of rules lawyering and virtue signaling on an online anonymous message board is going to "more efficiently" solve mutual aid problems is equally as stupid as thinking that we're going to start the next communist revolution or "get Bernie elected". Grow the fuck up.

We're ships passing in the night. Some of those ships need money. Other ships want to help. Leave it alone. It's not the community's business to get into this drama. It's the business of the users involved and the mods/admins on how they want to run mutual aid. Making this the communities business is going to be a good way to fuck up a unique and unabashedly good part of the fediverse permanently over some petty Hasan vs Ethan style bullshit. These aren't podcasters mining drama for clicks, they're real people.

Taco Bell

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.

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.

Every follow up post release related to this game gets progressively worse and worse.

I'm not saying you have an ego problem. I'm saying charity/mutual aid is a selfless act and being judgemental is not selfless.

You're nowhere near an ego problem. An ego problem is more like you wouldn't donate to charity until you had a 9 figure net worth based on you inventing inventing something like a toothpaste lid and you'd start a small charitable foundation which is just make work job / capitalist training camp for every one of your kids.

You are 100% correct, and it is 100% none of my business to find out.

Just a reminder that Reddit was once difficult for people to understand.

I honestly don't believe this at all.

Snapshat was popularized by a generation that grew up only using apps, and it was designed to be obtuse, mysterious and difficult to learn in comparison to other apps as a feature. It grew regardless.

To be honest though, I’m a bit disappointed by the other users here. The quality of comments is really poor, both idiotic and adversarial. I’m talking fox news comment section level.

Yeah so is reddit. The best moderation and engagement in fediverse typically exists in the highly moderated communities that people constantly complain about not respecting their freeze peach and antisocial tendencies.

I feel like allowing meta posts is going to seed witch hunts and struggle sessions with real monetary stakes which feels gross. The post you're responding to is already fairly obviously some offline drama between a constellation of users. If the mods/admins want to take charge of "protecting the good people of mutual_aid" and allow people to report scammers, I think that's your guys prerogative, and whatever level of transparency you want to give to that is fine.

In general it's incredibly difficult to judge these kinds of things in an online anonymous board, and it would not be our place to moralize who is deserving of aid based on what will inevitably be internecine drama. Allowing for even the hint of purity testing is going to endanger the long term ability for people to access aid on the site, and create an even more unfair advantage for people who are known quantities which they could then also quite easily exploit.

In short, because we can't know, we shouldn't care and it's not our place to. Caveat emptor.

I’m not trying to call you out,

I wasn't taking it that way. I just think that your POV matters, but should be treated different than the POV of someone giving.

I stopped begging for cash when I saw that the posters above and below me were victims of genocide.

I think this is very noble of you.

I’m absolutely against means testing of any kind, but I think that it is up to the poster to determine if some amount of a limited pool of resources should be allocated toward them, and failing that, it is up to the donator to determine if their donations are going to someone in dire need.

Yeah I agree with this, the best we can do is caveat emptor.

I just think that adjudicating it before/after the fact or debating whose rules are more moral is pointless and harmful. There's already calls for the user to get banned, from people who likely only read scenario as presented by Adkml which is not productive. I think there are scenarios where the $4k/car/drugs thing could be extremely shitty sure, but I don't have all the information to judge, I don't want the user to provide it, and it's not my place to judge to begin with.

This is a message board, meaning it's already a suboptimal way to distribute aid. At the end of the day this wasn't someone pretending to be in need, they did get a car with the money, this person is still homeless. People should just live and let live.