Jesus Appalled By Americans?
POSTED BY: Mavourneen
UPDATED: Monday, April 9, 2007 23:32
VIEWED: 11915
PAGE 9 of 15
Okay... so in feudal societies, every now and again kings gave money to the poor. Yep, that proves it, charity is evil. 
Hate to say it, SignyM, but you seem to be doing what Geezer is always accused of doing by some members of the board, which is being slick, i.e. shifting the goal posts. Maybe we should just accept the definition of charity that Geezer gave, which is the commonly accepted one, and restart the discussion from there.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
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No I'm not. My point is different than what we call "giving to the poor". Can you figure out what it is?
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Your point seems to be that if rich people give to the poor it shows the hypocrisy of charity, since the rich exploited the poor in some way in the first place. I get this impression from your dog analogy, the king example and the following:
Quote:If this isn't your point, maybe you should re-think your wording.
Originally posted by SignyM:
Charity is what Gates or Soros or Buffett or the Waltons do after they rob everyone first.
In the meantime, explain to me how Gates and co. robbed everyone. You mean there'd be less poverty would it not be for commercially successful people such as Gates?
After that, tell me what you call a middle class citizen giving money to a homeless person. Surely the middle class person didn't rob the homeless person in order to do so? What do you call Western societies giving money to NGOs to help bring food to Africa, or rebuild tsunami-hit countries? Your criticism of the word 'charity' seems to be very one-sided.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
When we see historical pictures of the wealthy and powerful handing out a few coins- like Louis XVI Displays Charity in 1788 (LeFevre)-it's easier to recognize the irony of the situation: the King, whose palaces and expenses helped to ruin the country, "sharing" a few meager coins with a rare few lucky ones. It's harder to recognize the same irony in modern circumstances.
I see. You're talking about what I always understood to be "largesse", defined by my Webster's New Riverside as liberality in giving, esp. when attended by condescension
So how do you define giving attendant to a feeling or compassion or benevolence, as opposed to condescension?
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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In the meantime, explain to me how Gates and co. robbed everyone. You mean there'd be less poverty would it not be for commercially successful people such as Gates? Yep, that's exactly what I mean. It may be easier to see how the Waltons screwed people by paying their staff shit and shifting production to China. But let's take a look at Bill Gates.
The Microsoft empire grew for several reasons, but NOT because they offered better software than their competitors but because they engaged in "uncompetitive practices": they told PC makers that they would cut their balls off if the PC makers ever loaded anything but Windows, they bought up competitive companies and killed them, and created onerous end-user-license-agreements (EULAs) backed by Clinton's DMCA. MS has pushed hard to make deals with governments, agencies, and universities by wining and dining key people. As a result, individuals pay hundreds of dollars for crappy software when they could get better software for free, and government agencies and universities pay on the order of tens of thousands of dollars that they would not need to expend. Because MS software is so bloated the purchasers wind up needing relatively expensive computers, because it's so inefficient it needs to be routinely "rebooted" because it can't clean up it's own memory. (Remember the failure of air traffic control outside of LA? Due to un-rebooted PC.) And finally, the software is so insecure that users need special "anti-viru$" software, when that software fails (as it routinely does) credit card companies, banks, consumers, agencies, and businesses have to go through the hassle of cancelling old cards and issuing new ones, wiping and reloading software etc. I personally have had my card cancelled twice because a third-party credit-card processor's MS database was touched by outside parties. And that's not even getting into network management and the future of Digital Rights Management (DRM).
By forming a monopoly by illegal means, everyone pays for the inefficiencies and cost of using using MS. It constitutes a theft of taxpayer dollars, if nothing else. Bill Gates didn't "produce" anything. What he did was shift the costs to others, and the benefits to himself.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
By forming a monopoly by illegal means, everyone pays for the inefficiencies and cost of using using MS. It constitutes a theft of taxpayer dollars, if nothing else. Bill Gates didn't "produce" anything. What he did was shift the costs to others, and the benefits to himself.
Taking all this as a given for the sake of your argument, is it not possible that Mr. Gates, or the Waltons, or Mr. Buffet, or Mr. Soros actually provide the money they give to improve the lives of others from a sense of compassion, and not of...guilt? After all, what you consider fair business practices in the U.S. aren't tied to reducing HIV/AIDS in Africa, whereas billions in donations may have an effect.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Damn. Double post again.
Andrew Carnegie was another Capitalist SignyM would probably hate. Lot's of folks wouldn't have had much exposure to history, literature, philosophy, art, etc. without the libraries he endowed all over the country. So is that a plus or a minus?
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
....in our capitalistic system where the scarcest resource of all is a decent-paying job, one wonders... or at I least do... that in a world where so many people need houses, clean water, education, and medical care, and where the earth could use reforestation, recycling, clean energy and general remediation why do we have so many poor people? There is certainly no lack of work to be done.
Sorry I wasn't there to bite Signy.... finally got my well diserved 4 day weekend. I'm just starting to read what I missed while I was gone, but just had to post to say that this is probably one of the best questions I've ever read. Communism scares me, but Capitalism has shown itself to have plenty of faults itself. Perhaps either one would be just fine if you took humans out of the equation altogether....
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Great post by you too Danny. That just about sums up my thoughts about sending money to an organization to ease your conscience.
Just want to say that Government has absolutely no place spending our money on social programs. I know how deeply ingrained the concept of the Government taking care of its citizens is in most of our heads, but that's not the way it was supposed to be. We need smaller, decentralized government and we need to be free to run our own lives and give and direct our own resources to causes we feel strongly about. Any statistics regarding what money governments gave as aid is all trivial bullshit to me. Any government giving money to other nations is just "borrowing" that money from the "Federal" Reserve with no intention of ever paying it back, while at the same time, increasing the debt burden of each and every citizen in its jurisdiction. "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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After all, what you consider fair business practices in the U.S. aren't tied to reducing HIV/AIDS in Africa, whereas billions in donations may have an effect. What? Repeat please? Lot's of folks wouldn't have had much exposure to history, literature, philosophy, art, etc. without the libraries he endowed all over the country. So is that a plus or a minus? Lots of folks wouldn't have been working in poverty conditions w/o the time or energy to access libraries if it hand't been for the robber barons. A minus in that respect.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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