Comrade, you need to take a breath and go touch grass, because at this rate, you are the one headed for a ban

Do you introduce yourself by telling people about shitty things that you’ve done in the past? Do you make requests by offering people all the reasons they might want to refuse that request? Rachel was asking for money in a post, not DMing OP specifically asking for it. I really don’t see this as a lie by omission.

Do you support the checkbox on job applications about ever having been arrested for or convicted of a crime? This feels like the same thing to me.

A lie of omission requires context. Otherwise everyone is lying by omission at all times by not telling everyone literally everything about themselves.

Not gonna try to defend the bragging about scamming people, but it was years ago and I don’t believe in crucifying people for past sins.

Anyway, I’ve been touching grass for the last month or so, and have only been interacting with this site in one way: watching this comm for posts asking for money. That’s the only reason I’m even here in this thread. If you want to hate Rachel, no one is stopping you, but I don’t think that has anything to do with this comm or the rules, and it’s really not clear to me what this post is about other than getting mad at Rachel–I don’t see any proposed rule changes.

I’m sorry, that’s ridiculous. She never said she was a brand-new user, and I don’t think it’s wrong to come back after years away. I understand if you’re not willing to forgive her for using slurs, but I do not at all agree that she was lying by making a new account.

So as the person who apparently pointed this out to people, I have a few things I’d like to say here.

One, after I posted my previous comment, someone responded to me with more information which confirms that, yes, this is the same person. (I’m gonna be honest, I had assumed it was from pretty early on, given all the things that lined up, so that came as no real surprise to me.)

Two, whatever the story was behind Rachel’s behavior years ago, I have never observed her saying anything unkind or inappropriate since her return to the site. As far as I can tell, she at least learned her lesson on that. I’ve been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and it looks to me like she’s made good on that trust and not been toxic like she was before–in spite of all this drama that has descended on her lately.

Three, and this one is pretty big for me: I have never caught her in a lie on here since she came back. Not once. And as people may have realized by now, I pay pretty close attention.

Seriously, consider her actions in recent weeks, and tell me if this sounds like scammer behavior: First, she voluntarily tells everyone she raised nearly $800 from a single post. There was absolutely zero reason to tell anyone that. Why on Earth would a scammer, whose whole scam depended on making people think they were desperate, tell people they had just received a windfall? And that is of course magnified by the post letting us all know about that $4k. No scammer with half a brain would tell us, and no scammer with even one brain cell would let on that they got so much money and then spent it all inside of a month’s time. If anything, that proves to me that she’s being honest, even to an arguable fault.

And I want to mention that I have caught at least one recipient of my largess here on Hexbear in a lie (it was an utterly pointless lie, too; I had already made clear I was going to provide this person with money, and they then lied to me to make it sound like they had better means to pay it back than they really did, even though I had not asked to be paid back in any way). I have not given that person any money since, even though they have made posts here requesting funds since then. Another user changed their original ask after someone sent them the amount they requested and said so in a comment, which really rubbed me the wrong way. I reported that to mods but never heard anything back, and the post stayed up, but I never donated to that user again either.

By contrast, Rachel made clear that she was spending the money on food, and honestly, I think the small-time donations really were used that way. But even if not, even if she did sometimes buy drugs with that money, well, you can’t give money to a meth addict and expect them not to use it in ways you might not like. And I say that as someone who gave her upwards of $400, all told.

Is it disappointing that she didn’t succeed in making her situation permanently better with that four grand? Absolutely, and it seems clear to me that she’s more upset about that than we all are. But I don’t really agree that her recent behavior makes her a “bad actor.”

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.

Ok so this situation has gotten me to come back from a rather lovely period of touching grass. I fully intend to go back to touching grass after this, but, well, I think I have a unique and perhaps useful perspective on all of this, so I’m sharing it here.

So. You received a large donation. What some are calling a life-changing amount of money. And yeah, that kind of money certainly has the potential to be life-changing. One person said it’s not possible for a lump sum like that to help someone escape homelessness, and I have to disagree; I myself helped someone on this very website escape homelessness with a relatively similar amount of money. But, it wasn’t life-changing for you. Some people are offended by this. Some people are sympathetic. But none of that changes the reality that what you needed was, it seems, more than just that lump sum.

But I hope that you can at least take some useful lessons from this experience. I hope you’ve learned how quickly a pile of money can vanish into the wind. I have no doubt that’s a tough pill to swallow, and I’m sure it’s hard to see that as any kind of silver lining. But take it from someone who has had a very similar experience, on a somewhat grander scale: those lessons do have value.

You see, I wasn’t into meth, so I can’t say I get what you’re dealing with there. But I was into weed (still am, truth be told, so your experience will likely have to differ, in that I don’t think you can escape where you are without ditching your drug-of-choice). I was very into weed. I don’t think dab rigs existed back then, but I went as hard on weed and its various concentrates (kief, bubble hash, hash oil) as it was possible to go: hot-knives, then fancy glass hot-knives, then an expensive glass gravity bong–which I eventually semi-destroyed while in the throes of a bad mushroom trip–and a fancy custom-made bubbler that had my name written on it, in glass (I still have that one, a relic of my incredibly foolish youth; I haven’t used it in at least a decade now).

Because yes, I too received a large pile of money. Only mine was an order of magnitude larger than yours, and I was quite young. I put 40% of the money into a sensible investment–a real estate venture. In the mid-2000s. And I squandered the entire rest of it. I had more than ten times as much money as you did, but it only lasted about four times as long.

My point in telling this story is to make it clear that you can come back from this. And when you do, you will hopefully recognize the importance of stewarding your hard-won gains more carefully than you did in recent weeks.

But! You need a plan. You need to figure out how to leverage any and all resources you have to make a change. I won’t pretend that’s easy, and honestly my path was much easier than yours will be (I moved back home, got a temp job for a while, slowly got back into school, and eventually graduated with a degree that I could use to pay off the massive debt I had by then accrued; not an option available to most people, I’m afraid.) But the reason I was able to do that, where I had failed utterly at doing so before, was because I took stock of what had happened, my experiences trying desperately to find jobs after my money ran out, and assessed what I needed to do to ensure that I would never find myself in such a situation again, and then once I had chosen a direction, I pushed forward on it until I had gotten where I needed to be.

Your road will be hard, yes, harder than mine, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I think it starts with finding the will within yourself to get off the hard drugs. They’re not doing you any favors; rather, they’re an anchor dragging you down. From there, I think finding a steady job is your best bet, and perhaps a halfway house might provide you someplace to sleep at night while you look. And perhaps from there, if you aren’t satisfied with the jobs available to you, to pursuing an education. (One word of advice, if you want to make that leap to education: get an education that will get you a job. It’s not worth it if you don’t have job prospects waiting at the other end, especially if you have to borrow to do it.)

I hope this comment is helpful to you in some way, and that your situation gets better in time.

Look, I don’t really want to respond to you here. This thread isn’t about this issue, and I didn’t want to make it one. I sought merely to offer a minor guardrail against a claim that I found incorrect.

I will only respond to one point: Nobody in this thread said men cannot be raped, that’s true. I wouldn’t say anyone in this thread has been sexist against men; I don’t agree with the other dude who was in here complaining about it.

But the idea that “literally nobody ever said” that men cannot be raped is false. It is, unfortunately, a commonly-held belief. Here’s a study which mentions it as a “male rape myth” (section 1.2): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8258646/

I will not be responding to any further comments on this issue. I hope you have a good day, and I’m sorry that you found my point disappointing, but I don’t think I was wrong.

Edit: I will be touching grass for a while.

He did offer the example of Cuba’s pivot on LGBTQ rights in response to me, which I think is a reasonable one.

Look, I wasn’t making the argument; you’ll see elsewhere in this thread that I agree with you. I was just trying to get your conversation back on track. That…doesn’t seem to have worked very well, unfortunately.

Rio is asking for a specific accomplishment; you’re pointing out systems of government. As such, it looks like the two of you are talking past one another at the moment.

Removed by mod

Lmao

Edit: On reflection I have to agree with comrade @[email protected]. That said, this is really not the place to take a stand on behalf of electoralism, and honestly I question whether the current US version of same is worth even as much as the pile of shit my dog crapped out this morning.

Bump

It has to be before the 10 minute mark though, or the job will miss it and it’ll be 10 minutes old the next time the job runs.

deleted by creator

On what fucking grounds are they suing? What right do they have to dictate how the City runs itself? This lawsuit had better be thrown the fuck out.

Also, is there anything redeemable on Long Island at all? I’ve long thought it would probably be best to cleanse it with fire after the revolution. (The people can leave, with the caveat that cops aren’t people.)

This piece of shit is fucking anti-choice and the party establishment has backed him to the hilt against every progressive challenger, as I recall. More evidence (like anyone here needed it) that the party is fucking irredeemable.

another bump

pro tip: the scheduled job that re-ranks the posts runs every 10 minutes, on the 10 minutes (e.g. at X:00:00, at X:10:00, at X:20:00, etc etc), so the closer your comment is to that time, the more impact it will have.

Bump