As it stands now, this community serves mostly as a way to get money. That isn’t a bad thing, but cash is not a 1-size-fits-all solution to every problem. Taking care of a persons needs is always priority #1, but at times, said person is unfit to handle money in a way that reliably alleviates those needs. Traditional, local, mutual-aid networks can usually address this in the form of community pot lucks, clothing exchange, etc. Here we are more or less limited to advice and more money.
Making a rule about unsolicited advice and being critical of users, limits us to just money as a tool to solve problems. Sometimes people need a tough conversation to grow as a person, sometimes people need to be reminded of the situation they are in. Yes, the capitalist system is oppressive. Yes, there are systemic issues that prevent us all from succeeding. That doesn’t mean there is no situation where decision making is a factor. Sometimes, you do actually need help making better choices. This isn’t to shame people for making bad decisions, sometimes there are psychiatric reasons, sometimes they genuinely don’t know any better, but you still should speak up so they can potentially correct the problem and learn.
This rule effectively creates a hug-box where we all pretend that personal responsibility doesn’t exist, that there is simply nothing to be done. It’s incredibly infantile, it’s a cope, and the people in this community deserve better than that.
EDIT: I feel I may have had a change of heart after reading the comments left by @EelBolshevikism If you are looking for a somewhat comprehensive response, those comments are likely a good starting point.
This post kind of grosses me out, especially with the (probably incomplete but w/e) context I’ve gathered from comments on this post, and ESPECIALLY with how I’ve seen it happen before on this site (without the site learning from it either…). I don’t mean that to insult you. While I understand it comes across as patronizing to say, I can’t really blame anyone for internalizing probably the most common brainworm in the Anglosphere.
But ultimately I disagree with your point. I don’t think personal responsibility… exists, actually. Even supposedly impulsive and random excessive purchases can usually be attributed to some unmet mental need or some sort of symptom of a common form of neurodivergency. Though, I don’t want to focus on that too much, because I know it’s a really controversial belief and I’d have to go into literally my entire worldview from scratch to explain how any of it makes sense to me - something I don’t want to do and would make this discussion (and comment lol) even longer and more painful than it already is. I do have a different problem with allowing criticism of the actions of those asking for help, though.
I can’t imagine being someone with a drug addiction, or who wants to numb their suffering by buying alcohol, or otherwise supposedly “pissing it all away” on luxuries anyone more rich and privileged would rarely if ever be judged for buying, even and especially here. Only to be met with disdain for daring to… ask for money with the hope of catching the eye of internet strangers with disposable income. Because buying these luxuries, despite being something others can afford, is seen as questionable merely because you are using the money others gave you (many of which would choose to buy said luxury in a heartbeat instead of giving you that money, and would not receive a single glance of judgement for it!)
Allowing people to criticize people for making the “wrong decisions” which leads to them being homeless (apparently, I think that’s silly and if someone is making decisions that lead to that than there are other extenuating conditions, including sometimes mental ones, that lead to those decisions) is problematic for the same reason allowing people to “criticize Wokeism” or “just ask questions” about race is problematic. It isn’t that actually asking questions about the sociological construct of race is inherently bad, or that *actually criticizing a community in a good-faith way is bad, but that the culture we exist in is so fraught with an inherently bad-faith and incorrect view of the subject that anyone who is trying to “just ask questions”, trying to “speak their mind about the Woke”, or trying to “just give advice to someone struggling” is vastly more likely than not
Do you think people are just born into this world homeless? I mean, some probably are, but a LOT of homeless people come from parents abandoning them after coming out, or running out of money due to (rent/addiction/other factor they can’t control well if at all). Am I going to withhold money from someone for making the “wrong decision” of coming out to a family they thought was safe? Of fucking course not. And I’d ESPECIALLY not dissuade others from helping them- And that’s the issue, the kind of “criticism” that people direct towards those asking for money (yes, even on a leftist forum. Plenty of people here, probably the majority, have just as many ableist and classist brainworms as the rest of the USS of Amerikkka, they’re just rarer and more advanced varieties) does not actually help people asking for help change their actions. Changing your actions is FUCKING HARD, especially when you’re talking about quitting an addiction or trying to figure out what the cheapest food is to buy, or where to sleep best without cops finding you and fucking ruining your life. People who are poor have to do way more shit to do and pay for way more shit than people who are rich have to (boots theory) and a poor person “pissing away” 4000 bucks so they can have the semblance of comfortable living is always going to be treated worse than a rich person who actually literally pisses away 4000 bucks in shitty overpriced beer because they pay for their large group of friends to go to a sports game and decide to pay for all the concessions, and that bias will hold true here, until either we bully everyone into not having that mindset (WHICH IT SEEMS VERY OBVIOUS TO ME IS THE POINT OF THE RULE) or the user base is no longer Amerikkkans.
If someone is suffering from being fucking poor, than the only kind of valid and not inherently harmful criticisms you can give would hardly ever register as criticism to most people, and would be closer to providing free information, like helping with finances by helping them figure out how they can spend less while still getting the same quality of life and things they care about, or giving tips about working out, or sharing cheaper recipes or ways to get drugs in safer and more reliable ways than they already are or giving them information about cheap addiction treatment you happen to have useful info about from the area. And these are all things, again, that would hardly register and hardly anyone would ever report, let alone ban (minus maybe the drugs thing so they don’t get the website swatted, but you know what I mean).
So I see very little purpose to allow people to give unwanted criticism to those who are fucking starving, or getting threatened with arrest for being trans, or struggling with fucking drug addiction, because unless those people are afraid of free numbers and columns there’s probably only a few situations where someone would take offense to something that isn’t just motivated by the same ambient fucking classism everyone has everywhere and to be completely frank I don’t think those exceedingly rare situations are worth the risk of allowing people to simultaneously shit on homeless people while hiding under a veneer of “civility”, which the remanding or removal of this rule would cause.
If you think giving money to the person is a bad idea, than just don’t do it, and everyone “responsible” will do the same thing as you.
And to be even more completely honest, this is a trend I see repeatedly and it is blatantly created by the discomfort of the privileged (like you or I probably are in comparison to many people on this comm who post) needing to have a constant stream of money to live, because they want the discomfort of seeing a struggling person to go away after they “buy” it with enough money. And I understand that impulse, because seeing people struggle sucks. But this is fundamentally a form of punching down; It’s a response that blames the one struggling for your discomfort (and, no matter how reasonable it seems to blame them, no it fucking isn’t), instead of the systems and people who put them and you in this fucked situation in the first place.
Leftists generally accept the systemic nature of social conditions. Individual circumstances are given, inherited from the past. Social problems like poverty cannot be reduced to mere individual choices.
On the other hand, the given-ness of our lives does not imply determinism and a lack of free will. Marxism depends on the existence of free will, for without free will there cannot be revolution and social change.
I agree that if someone asks for money, then it is valid for someone to use that money on “vices” just so they can feel human once in a while. I believe that money given freely should be spent freely.
I feel that in this comm, the requests tend to be specific. “I need money to buy some Chipotle” or “need a place to stay tonight” etc. Those requests do impart a responsibility on the recipient. Not an abstract “individual responsibility” that erases social conditions, but a direct personal responsibility to real Hexbear users who probably themselves do not have a lot of money to give.
To say that responsibility does not exist is to say that free will does not exist, that misusing the money was determined from birth and inevitable. I think this is ultimately a destructive view and does not actually help people long term.
Whether advice is helpful really depends on where it comes from; is it paternalistic, or does it contain an empathetic understanding of socially given circumstances?
I tend to agree with lifting the rule, but there would have to be moderation against comments that are paternalistic, and that will be a tough line to walk since it is such a gray area.
I didn’t want to get into arguing about this which is why I left it at only a paragraph mentioning it in passing.
You are very much misunderstanding Determinism, comrade. Determinism is less about worrying that the future is set in stone and more about understanding that the trajectory of the future is determined by the forces applied in the present.
There are of course many degrees of determinism depending on the philosopher. In western philosophy (which includes Marx) I think it is accurate to contrast determinism with free will. Marx and Marxism are often accused of holding mechanical-deterministic views of history in which revolution is seen to be inevitable in a mechanical sense. This is plainly not the way in which Marx conceived of history, in fact it is exactly the opposite. For example, writings like his Theses on Feuerbach, especially Theses 1 and 3, in which he criticizes the deterministic views of the mechanical materialists which neglect the essential role of human activity (free will).
I’m not looking to start a philosophical debate in the middle of a mutual aid struggle session, comrade. But if you are immediately assuming human activity = free will, you have already put the cart before the horse.
The point is, it doesn’t matter if you take the money and spend it on drugs. If you’re addicted to drugs, drugs are a basic need. You have to have some amount of them while you’re getting off of them, even if that’s your plan. And if it’s not, I really don’t care except insofar as it keeps you from finding housing and handling your other basic needs.
The problem is not buying drugs with donated money. The problem is failing to take any measures to meet basic needs with the money. To take a $4000 donation and then spend it all on ??? and not use any of it to secure shelter, or food, or other basic needs is a problem. And it’s a problem that cannot be solved by receiving more donated money. Maybe if they got the attention of a billionaire who could give them $50k, then they could satisfy all of their desire to spend money on ??? and still have some left over to spend on food and shelter. But since none of us are billionaires, we simply cannot fill this pit with money alone. If we here on /c/mutual_aid truly want to help the user in question, all we can do is try to convince them to change the way that they are handling what money they do acquire.
We’re not mad that money we gave is being spent on stuff we don’t prefer, we’re not mad at the user in question at all. We’re trying to get through to the user in question that this path they’re walking leads only to an early death and that matters to us because all we want is for our comrades to be safe and healthy.
Yeah, but that isn’t a problem you can solve by “criticizing” them, either. That’s a person who is probably making those decisions because, to them, ??? could genuinely be a mental need or because they just don’t want to suffer in a universe without any sort of pleasure. You could give genuine advice, such as providing a different cheaper kind of shampoo they could use, or even telling them that you’re worried that they’ll starve if they spend everything on this non-basic-need thing. And that would make sense and not even be offensive or demeaning. But that isn’t how most people say things, or “criticize” things. I don’t know why but I feel like, especially here, there is an utter inability to criticize something without also hating it. And while you say that it wasn’t the case here, that simply means it was one of a smattering of exceptions. Exceptions that can only exist because of similar issues happening in aeons past and being responded to.
There’s a difference between “criticizing” someone’s “lack of responsibility” and simply realizing someone else is easier to help, too.
I understand that you want to give genuine advice. And I relate to that, a lot. But, just as in the case of “just asking questions” debatebros and smarmy chuds, if you give a single fucking inch to the people who take any chance to blame the poor for their predicament, they will take a light year. I know this because I’ve seen how people do this to autistic people, to gay people. How people use civility and what would otherwise be genuine questions or critiques to needle and bully others while pretending it’s in their “best interest”.
And I know it’s an issue here because I saw it happen before on this very site. Does “rachel” ring a bell at all? She was poor, recently homeless, and a drug addict. We criticized her for valid reasons, yeah. But the ability to criticize was not just utilized for that. People got angry, and people get vindicative. Pretty soon we bullied a homeless woman off of our platform because the presence of someone we can’t help because of the sheer depth of their needs was too uncomfortable for us. People couldn’t properly externalize Rachel’s issues as being a result of numerous complex systems and I saw them continue blaming her for her entire situation. Not the FBI for flooding her neighborhood with drugs, not the systems of capital for grinding her amenities available into fucking nothing, not even her friends for making her homeless in the first place (because she made bad decisions if i remember correctly?? she didn’t kill anyone or anything justifying a death sentence though so it’s irrelevant to me). The Amerikkka brain just took over and all material analysis and the usual calm of this place was lost in a writhing hive of fucking hatred for this single homeless woman, not merely limited to overly hostile pleas or understandable anger from her for not getting the financial assistance she needs- If someone took personal offense to her lashing out that would be one thing. But as she retreated and went more and more on the defensive and stopped even asking for anything they continued to thrash her with constant hostility. Even mentioning her name was like mentioning furries on a Brotherhood of Steel roleplay discord server.
That paragraph probably makes me sound like a Rachel alt but I genuinely am not, I just saw it happen and it fucked with my head
I don’t know if I feel comfortable with this site taking any step even remotely toward allowing that kind of thing to happen again. I don’t feel like I can trust it. And I wish I could, but I can’t, and the only reason I’ve grown slightly more trusting over time since that incident is because of rules like this.
Of course it is reasonable to analyze someone’s situation and realize giving them money is not effective. It would even, in theory, be reasonable to say it, to explain why you can’t give them money, even to point to others who you can help easier and therefore you don’t have the money for this harder case left-over, as long as it was said in a non-judgemental and normal way. But I don’t trust people to say it that way because I’m not sure if Amerikkkan-brained people even can. Even some of the best, most compassionate, and most kind people I know treat homeless and destitute people like they’re all scammers or going to stab them to death. I generally trust people but, in this case, that trust is not more powerful than the sheer strength of Amerikkkan brainworms.
Tbf it could be effective to have a “Don’t judge or hate those asking even if you’re pointing out suboptimal decisions” rule, but I don’t even know if we could use that little leeway responsibly or if it devolve into weird passive-aggressive shit.
Funny you should ask. Those of us who have given to the venmo of the person this discussion is about, know that the first-name she gave on venmo (which I believe is not her real name, given a conversation about payment-app opsec she had shortly after joining this site) is Rachel.
I will note, however, that I recall the original Rachel being banned for violations of rules relating to trans issues (I seem to recall the term “truscum”), not run off of the site for making bad decisions. Not trying to argue about the broader point, just mentioning my recollection of those events.
Wati, what the fuck, it’s the same fucking person? The same one who bragged about scamming people the first time? Goddamn, we’re a bunch of fucking marks here
I somehow missed the scamming allegations, but yeah she posted a lot of personal details that matched up with the old storyofrachel on cth. I’ve just been assuming it was the same person but also I missed all this drama.
Also her display name on her payment info
I think she was banned multiple times. I wouldn’t be surprised if she got shit on, left, then returned, then got banned for being brain wormed…
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She got “bullied off” for calling people slurs and bragging about scanning people. She dug her own grave when it came to this site.
she literally didn’t though, people shit on her long before she started spouting that shit
I am pretty sure “rachel” bragged about getting one over on all of us etc etc? or did I imagine that? p. sure they went off the deep end, not us
No, we went on the deep end either way. Even if she faked the whole thing and was scamming us that means we reacted the way we did (with a shitton of anger, and I remember seeing people respond this way before she was banned forever, and arguing about how she “scammed” them by buying drugs with the money, etc) to what we thought was a real homeless person
Either that or I’m seriously misremembering things which is possible. Either way there was a weird amount of rhetoric about how she was too irresponsible with money and “scammed” donators that made me really uncomfortable
I recall her calling me a f****t at the same time she was bragging about scamming me, so I don’t really appreciate you suggesting the anger was unwarranted
the anger before that was unwarranted. Not going to defend transphobia
Nobody knew she was a shitty person before that. They were shitting on her for what they perceived as being a irresponsible homeless person
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Please stop reading my posts in bad faith. I am not defending homophobia either. I am not defending her bigotry or even her actions. I am just pointing out the sheer ghoulishness of people’s response before they knew HER ghoulishness.
but they bragged about doing that tho
there’s a reason they were banned…
To my memory, Rachel was actually banned for unrelated instances of certain queerphobic comments. That’s according to the modlog as I recall it. Ultimately it had nothing to do with the incident you described. There was also genuine evidence that her account was actually taken over by someone else, leading to that post. But ultimately that wasn’t the reason she was banned.
Before that, there was an actual transphobic witch hunt directed against her and other trans users of this site by wreckers off the site. Back when this place was new and called chapo.chat, we had regular raids coming in from kiwifarms and transphobic harassment discords pulling shit like that all the time because their attention had followed us here from the reddit banning of r/chapotraphouse.
Ya know…I think you changed my mind on this.
I want us to work towards a site culture that can give advice to people without being a dick about it, but I think that takes work.
You have no idea what the person who donated that was thinking. As far as I am concerned, this is between that user and some rich donator who had too much money to spare and related to this user’s struggle. This comm is for the good for the community, and this kind of directed anger toward one situation none of us can fully understand is not helpful to anyone else who has been sincerely helped by c/mutual aid.
It doesn’t matter what the person who donated the $4000 was thinking, the money could have literally appeared from thin air and nothing relevant to us here on this comm would change. It doesn’t matter where the money came from or what the person intended. It wasn’t their money anymore. It was the money of the person who requested donations, and they could do with it whatever they wanted. What we’re trying to do here is convince that person to change the way they spend their money so that they don’t end up dead in a ditch or a drug den within the next few years. Because that would be a bad outcome and we’d prefer to see a better outcome for our comrades.
Yes, and what I am saying is that Hexbear does not have the power to help this person by changing the rules of this comm. Your criticism cannot touch anything you gleamed from them by their posting on this site because every day they are out there fighting for survival unhoused.
Ultimately Hexbear is not a crisis service, we have very little avenue for directing change in this persons life other than supporting their claimed efforts to live a healthier life. You can choose to not believe they are genuine and stop donating, but there is nothing Hexbear can do but ban them on the basis of speculation. What does that solve? All we can do is lend support in whichever ways we can, and one of those ways is by giving them spare cash.
EXCELLENT post
GOOD post