No, I’m not saying he is, just letting everyone know what is being reported.

I don’t think it’s the reading, but the murder that’s considered to be terrorism. They just think that because of the literature, he may be a communist. Whether that is relevant to the murder or not remains to be seen. Would have been better if he’d offed Nigel Farage.

What is this from?

How old are you?

There definitely seems to be some psychological thing going on with humans and too much choice. Back in the 90s when I only had 4 channels and the choice was a bit crap, I would happily watch some boring old thing like Rawhide because that was pretty much all that was on. But with an abundance of choice it’s much harder to find anything to watch.

I really preferred life before all of this. CDs instead of downloads, going to Blockbuster instead of streaming, post instead of emails, books instead of scrolling. Everyone at school talking about the tv show we all watched last night because there were only 4 channels, whereas now there are so many endless shows that you ask someone have you seen this? And they’ve never heard of it. It unified people, all doing the same things and doing them in person, whereas people are now more isolated all doing different things alone at home online.

I think it’s really important to keep physical media. I’ve heard of cases where people paid for a whole library of films on amazon and then got banned from amazon for some reason, and all those films they paid for were gone. Same thing with any platform. There have also been issues of films becoming unavailable online, or if the government decided to ban something you might never be able to see it again without a hard copy. And of course there’s the fact that all the platforms now are adding adverts, I heard that amazon for instance added them and now you have to pay an extra monthly subscription to get rid of them. They could just keep jacking the price up constantly and unless you keep paying you lose all your films. And the basic fact of it being cheaper long term to buy physical media than pay a lifetime of subscriptions.

There are people struggling to fulfill minor expenses, people who depend on it for rent, Palestinians trying to flee the country, professional aid gatherers posting on behalf of others….

I personally don’t think anything should be done about this, remember that for a lot of people this is literally the last chance saloon, they have nowhere else to turn. I have asked for things that may seem minor to others, but are a big deal to me and I wouldn’t have been able to get without help.

While BaileyDee and their assorted usernames needed to be banned, there is a danger of going too far in the opposite direction and making life impossible for people. I wouldn’t even be alive now if it wasn’t for mutual aid. I found myself in a situation (wrongful stopping of disability benefits) where I had no income at all for a long period of time, no family to fall back on and no way to pay for anything. The situation got so dire that i ended up on a suicide pact website, searching for someone to help me end my life. That’s how i found hexbear and mutual aid, someone on that website told me about it. And thanks to mutual aid, I’ve been able to get almost everything I need, food, medical supplies, hospital transport, even a washing machine. I would never have been able to get these things any other way, would never have been able to have my foot surgery, wouldn’t have been able to eat (I’ve posted before about all my issues accessing the food bank - they only give you 9 days worth of food every 6 months and most of it I can’t eat due to my cancer treatment, also problems with collecting it.)

Perhaps a solution would be to prove yourself privately to a mod. How about this: you need to be verified by a mod to post on mutual aid. For instance I would not mind sending a PM to a mod with a photo of my disability benefit award letter showing I have a ridiculously low amount to live on and/or a photo of a medical letter verifying I’m having cancer treatment and recovering from a stroke.

Verifying yourself would remove scammers, cut down the number of people asking for aid, and donors could trust that their donations are being used for what they say they are.

Do you have the ability/opportunity to leave?

thanks for the bump

One of my favourite series of all time is Jean Auel’s Earths Children series, about cavepeople. From the third book on, the protagonist lives in matriarchal, communist societies, free love, everything shared, people can be gay, in throuples, whatever they want. But at the end they discover where babies come from, and the society turns patriarchal and it ends with women clearly about to lose their freedom.

Do things that you actually enjoy and are drawn to, rather than things you’re not enjoying but feel you should. I wish someone had given me this advice 25 years ago.

Because the media has a narrative to push, rather than honestly reporting.

I’ve been on disability benefits for 10 years in total now. After a while, they contacted me and told me that they’d actually been paying me a slightly higher amount than I was entitled to and I’d have to pay it back. So far, the extra had added up to about £2800. I spent 5 years paying back £11 a week. It was totally their own mistake but I had to lose £11 a month for 5 years, and at the time I was only getting £135 a week, so I had to live off £124 a week (and that was the total amount, for rent, utilities and food) for 5 years and got massively in debt because who can live off £124 a week?

Now again, because they wrongfully put me through an appeal that took about a year and a half, I’m massively in debt again from living off credit. I’ll never be debt free because of all this. This is why I have to spend my life begging for help on mutual aid, because the amounts paid on disability are so low (I now get more than £135 a week but still not anywhere near enough) and due to being put through appeals, told to pay money back etc I’m always in debt, so not only am I always paying off debt but the interest accrued from the debt too.

So on top of telling people to work when they clearly can’t, causing them endless stress and bullying them to death they’ve set up a system where claimants can never get out of debt either. I have to spend my life begging for people to buy me food and toothpaste and going without a lot of things. Yet the newspapers make out that disability benefits are a free-for all, so easy to claim and pay massive amounts. I remember one woman on reddit who worked as a nurse and said she only earnt £1700 a month and she could not live off that. But when I said my disability benefits are much lower than that and I couldn’t live off it either she told me disability benefits are too high and should be cut!

My disability benefits are so low, plus all this debt, that the only place I can afford to live is renting a room in an old lady’s house. She’s only renting the room out because her pension is so low that she can’t afford to live without an extra income especially since she is taxed to death, it’s not just that utility bills are astronomical but council tax is ridiculously high despite getting hardly any services for it (our rubbish is collected only twice a month and the roads are full of potholes) but even her pension gets taxed! This is why I had to beg on mutual aid for people to help us buy a washing machine, and why we can’t afford the £160 repairs for the oven. We literally can’t afford to get the oven fixed, can’t cook food unless someone comes through on mutual aid. What kind of life is this?

I recently googled my old school friends and was appalled to find that my best friend from school, who I haven’t seen in 17 years, now works for the DWP as an assessor, and seems to be doing very well out of it, with a flashy new BMW and house.

It won’t, it’s only going to get worse. The doctors say i’m at high risk of having another, worse, stroke. They cut my medication down to try and make it less likely but this means there’s now a higher chance of the cancer coming back. Although mutual aid keeps my hunger pangs away i am very slowly dying of malnutrition as my cancer treatment has given me so many food intolerances and allergies, there are just a few things i can eat without becoming violently ill. Can’t even tolerate supplements any more. The NHS dietician says there is nothing that can be done about it. And I’ll always be struggling to keep my disability benefits. I’ll always have the stress and anxiety of having to beg for help on mutual aid. There is no hope of anything except death one day.

It’s become clear to me that life is designed to be exhausting and stressful. We aren’t even meant to enjoy it, it’s just an endurance challenge.

Thanks for the bump!

Thanks for the bump!