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.

  • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    6 days ago

    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

    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.

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      16·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Sphere [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        18·
        6 days ago

        Does “rachel” ring a bell at all? She was poor, recently homeless, and a drug addict.

        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.

      • radiofreeval [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        5 days ago

        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

        She got “bullied off” for calling people slurs and bragging about scanning people. She dug her own grave when it came to this site.

        • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          10·
          6 days ago

          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

          • Black_Mald_Futures [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            16·
            6 days ago

            arguing about how she “scammed” them by buying drugs with the money

            but they bragged about doing that tho

            there’s a reason they were banned…

            • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              13·
              6 days ago

              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.

    • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        6 days ago

        You have no idea what the person who donated that was thinking.

        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.

        • cosecantphi [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          6 days ago

          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.