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this is absolutely perfectly said

The reason you want an actual humanitarian aid system and *don’t* want to force everybody to rely on online mutual aid is because online mutual aid *forces people experiencing horrific trauma* to perform on the Internet for survival.

Which is not to say that online mutual aid is therefore always bad or that it’s bad to participate in it, but we have to be very honest about how it creates a pretty brutal competition.

What I am really trying to say here is "this is exactly why USAID and the international aid system it once supported, which is now close to collapsing due to its destruction, was Good Actually"

The one time I saw Dean Spade speak in person, in a presentation that was promoted as "what is mutual aid & how we can do it", I was sincerely curious to hear how he would boil it down, and then... it was nothing. Literally 100% of the talk was "why charity nonprofits are bad"... (1/2)

what if we did mutual aid, but instead of making it optional, we made it mandatory, and collected via, say, paychecks. You could collect it based progressively, perhaps based on someone's income band. Then you could centrally organize the fund for efficiency, and have it managed by elected people

But then the people giving money wouldn't get the same dose of dopamine by getting to choose who they deem worthy.

Yeah, nah, I don't need some well-fed guy to be able to make people beg in front of him. But I will note that even religious charities and HHS seem to attract personnel who decide that control & exclusion make charity better. The idealistic anarchists can fill in the cracks?

Thank you for this brilliant thread.

Good write-up. It's the same thing as with taxes vs. "just leave it with the rich, they will donate to worthy causes". No. We've tried this and "depending on the good will of some people who have money" is simply a worse system than taking the money and then distributing it according to needs.