simontherockjohnson

I think from the perspective of competing needs the more likely issue is that some people get more because they are more popular / appealing than others which is another form of market logic of its own. I think that's a fair criticism, but it's still a criticism of those who choose the allocation of resources rather than a criticism of those who need them.

My point is that being the arbiter of competing needs on a person to person basis is morally fraught (and typically on some level dishonest) which is why real mutual aid is a communal and social function rather than a peer-to-peer market function. Also that enforcing a system of account on those who are in need is just opening up a can of worms for petty sectarian moralizing that is going to wind up with harming more people than preventing scenarios like this.

There's also just a lot of unverified, unknowable information to make a call here, and digging thru the post and user histories that started this thread it's incredibly difficult to tell what the truth of the obvious off board drama between the involved users is.

FWIW you shouldn't have gone homeless, that's a failing of society on multiple levels that should be eradicated.

Maximizing the MAU and pLTV of a niche internet forum for the love of the game.

I don’t think I’m the only one who, given the option to donate limited resources to people starving in Gaza or facing eviction or having that same money go to somebody buying gard drugs, I’d rather it be used on the thing that is going to actually improve the situation.

Sure, but you also have to be honest with yourself that this is about your ego and wanting to maximize the good that YOU do according to YOUR beliefs. I also doubt that this same calculus applies if the person who might be spending money on drugs is more closely related to you rather than some person on the internet.

This isn't some self evident logical principle, this is a reaction to your own feelings and ideas. Mutual aid is not about purchasing the most "alleviation" or "goodness". You're exhibiting the same form of thinking that calls things like breakfast programs frivolous luxury. The comm is called mutual aid because mutual aid is unconditional. You're attempting to make personal a normative value judgement objective rather than what it is, subjective.

Someone is saying, I have a problem and I need help. You are saying, there's plenty of people with problems in the market so I'm only going to help if I like the way you solve your problem. That's not charity or mutual aid, that's an investment.

Gotta be honest this is a you issue and it's incredibly shitty. You're combining the 2 incredibly fun tropes of "noble poor" and "the worst thing about poverty is that I have to see it".

People asking for help don't actually owe it to you to prove that they're min/maxing money that you gave them. There is no amount of money that you could realistically receive from posting on mutual_aid to bootstrap your way back to financial independence. It's all survival money. Survival isn't just coping with your hunger or exposure. It's also about coping with your feelings. Being homeless and impoverished is an incredibly lonely, dreadful and long existence. It's an experience filled with anguish, self abasement, and uncertainty. Using drugs to survive that isn't some moral failing, because raw-dogging such an existence is not a moral virtue.

By criticizing the purchase of drugs you are supposing that theru's a utility cost to that money that would fix the root causes. By conditioning aid on sobriety, you are demanding that people impoverished people should actively suffer. By complaining about the visibility of cries for help you are demanding that impoverished people should suffer in silence.

Your meager help is contingent on imposing harm because you cannot rid yourself of the ego and moral judgements when interacting with the most vulnerable members of society. You actively are showing your ass that you think poor people are inherently bad and must act a certain way to regain their "goodness". Nobody owes you atrocity porn to sate your own negative feelings about the ideas you hold.

Charity cannot be wasted because charity is a social relationship, it's not a measure of marginal utility. Charity can only be abused through deceit, but that's not what your criticizing. If you don't want to give money to people who will spend it on drugs that's your business, but don't pretend that there's some universal logic around the way people should act because of your personal feelings.

Most people are mad at hexbear because their moderation policies are consequentialist not deontological and thus more stringent against stupid online shit. As a poster you don't have a "right" to post on hexbear, however the community has a right to be protected. As such it's one of the better places if you don't want to read reams upon reams of lib coded bigotry.

I love how quickly lemmy.world speed ran the aesthetically lib to fash redditor pipeline problem without even a profit motive behind them.

This already happens in enterprise code bases with dummies running the show and juniors coding. Every primitive is actually a god object that can work at any level of the software stack.

OH YEAH BUT CAN YOU HAVE AN PUBLIC, CACHED ON MULTIPLE PUBLIC SERVERS, EXTREMELY ANTI-SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL OVER REACTION AGAINST A POLITICIAN ON CHINESE INTERNET???????

I have freely made history today by posting slurs into the public record. The SEE SEE PEE will never give its citizens the ability to do this.

mfs will post this calling it "freedom" or "political participation" or "democracy".

You are playing very loose with context. There are reasons to distrust all the Governments, which is why an uncensored internet is of value.

Yeah so your argument boils down to it's okay to dismiss the Chinese context because they're categorically evil, but the Western governments have "good reasons" because they're categorically good.

Surprise surprise it's just chauvinism.

It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.

Yeah it's equally naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a hostile censor, Chinese people aren't uneducated, oppressed, impoverished individuals, they are accomplished, politically active, and well to do. The Chinese people have comparatively derived a larger individual and collective benefit from their government than Americans have in the last 50 years.

If you read actual comparisons of "censorship regimes" there are tons of commonalities that are just ignored by Westerners and their Chinese counterparts are made out to be uniquely evil and beyond the pale. For every news article you read about how the National Security Police invites a satirist to "drink tea" you're ignoring all of the times the FBI does the exact same thing, and uses various psychological tactics to escalate into a position of legal authority to get around their limited authority to collect evidence.

You know why it's "soooo hard" for the cops to arrest rich people even if they know where they are? It's because the tactic of escalatory arrest (an arrest that happens without a warrant as the result of an "investigation") doesn't work on rich people, they have gates, intercoms, staff, and know their rights. They aren't easily cajoled into the position of opening their home to a cop, or allowing a cop access to their body. Isn't is very strange that these very technical legal distinctions aren't told explicitly to the "freedom loving people" of America? Meanwhile the agents of "evil Chinese government" don't need to play games like this, because the cards are all on the table.

People in other countries get "dissapeared", but when ICE or the Department of Corrections shuffles prisoners around for political purposes such as Mahmoud Khalil. People in other countries are "political prisoners" but in America we have the WGAD which is a nice rhetorical trick so that the government can "honestly label" it's political prisoners (upon a opaque and deliberatley difficult review process only undertaken by those who actually want to go through it for the benefit of being labeled a political prisoner. WGAD has not authority to enforce anything.

People in other countries get thrown in jail because of political corruption, in the US saying such a thing is insulting the honor of the judiciary as a whole, a judiciary that allows the same practices the jailed Stephen Donzinger for the crime of taking on a legal case against Chevron in Ecuador. Furthermore it's processes are abused to provide legal procedural punishments for missteps in engaging with the system such as the contempt charges the Donzinger case. Donzinger is still disbarred and cannot leave the country, despite winning all of his appeals. All at the behest of a corporation that doesn't want to create a precedent that it must pay for poisoning people.

The reality here is that you're not actively comparing things, you are just going on hunches or whims, and if you take a look that's how a lot of information you receive is actually structured. That is what allows labels like "authoritarian" to have a spooky evil weight. In essence the US has simplify codified the abuse into law, which is how it gets around these icky little moments of "Are we the baddies?" the reply is a thought terminating cliche of "No we're all just following legal orders, in the freest country in the World". China doesn't need to Nuremburg because it's goal of social cohesion ensures that people understand how and why things are happening to them.

Why do you think this shit matters?

They read one Tweet or at best an article from an OSINT guy about how influence operations have started to heavily rely on necro accounts to prevent moderation policies of age from affecting their reach. So much like a child learning about ghosts, he sees ghosts everywhere.

The self censorship that exists on the Chinese internet is a matter of moderation scale and techniques. It doesn't exist in the West because Western companies have the incentive to keep you interacting with their products.

In China moderation is meant to:

1. Protect the rest of the users from bad behavior
2. Signal to the bad user that they are engaging in bad behavior.

Western moderation is meant to:

1. Protect the rest of users from a bad behavior
2. Keep bad users engaged in order to drive ad revenues.

1 and 2 are inherently at tensions with one another. Thus you have the problem where 1 is diluted by 2 leading to a much more limited set of what is considered bad, and an ever changing and political understanding of it based on the whims of the ownership and their relation to the party in power. Facebook changes its moderation policies based on presidential administration.

2 also leads to non-deterministic systems of gating users into fake interaction or limiting their reach to other similarly bad users.

Another reason is cultural / social. Praise is often used ironicly in China, they have a very fine line between legitimate praise and what in the West would be considered saccharine or gassing someone up. In China when you overly praise someone it's read as a criticism of the person for what you're praising them for. So typically censorship structures do not take into account sentiment unlike in the West esp. because Chinese is more of a figurative language than English. There is a lot of context lost in communicating text only and audio only Chinese due to how the language is constructed. In essence they prefer to police topic not types of speech (e.g. hate speech, criticism, etc).

The last reason this happens is a lot of the Chinese Internet's moderation policies are based on the fact that their level of public social acceptability is much more constricted think PG not even PG-13. In that sense the codified language works to create a space where you're able to have conversations on things that would "rock the boat" without getting everyone hot and bothered. Unlike the Western Internet where social media companies want these clashes to happen because they drive more engagement and thus more revenue.

For example instead of posting about censorship and getting into an internet pile on where nothing happens and nobody learns anything because they're talking past each-other why not just post a picture of a river crab wearing 3 watches. Anyone who cares knows what that means and they know that arguing about it online isn't actually the way to change anything in China. Everyone having a take while barely understanding the thing they have a take on is only beneficial to Western capitalists running internet companies that act as treats. Higher education is affordable in China, you can actually go learn about censorship at an accredited program. Surprisingly because Chinese citizens on average are protected by their government from being wrung dry for all their profit potential by their capitalist class they have time/energy to do these things.