It's a false dichotomy. Complaining about people pledging money to Kickstarter is a silly thing to do. It's not like pledging to Kickstarter takes money away from charities. It's just another Social Justice Warrior, climbing on his high horse to bitch and moan about how people are starving elsewhere in the world, and, of course, ignoring the actual social and political causes of the third world.
Donating money to charity doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to get helped properly. Charities are, unfortunately, often at best not a huge help, and at worst can actually harm developing communities. For example, clothing drives have killed the textile industry in developing countries, because we can make so much clothing that we have enough to actually donate. We can out produce them by such a huge amount, that when we give clothes to them, we're giving them our leftovers and they're still 10x better than anything they produce on their own, so their textile industry can't hope to compete. We have such a huge economic advantage over them that, even with our economy ridiculously weak, we can out produce them by a huge amount, thereby stunting the growth of their economies. Now, the food argument seems like a good one, but we are having global shortages. The sad truth is that we need to focus on keeping ourselves fed. Our society seems great, but it's not exactly wrong to say that we're two meals away from complete chaos. Donating food to these smaller countries and communities not only removes any incentive for them to build their own food industry, it's also completely unsustainable. What we should be focusing on, if we want to help, is education and technology. We shouldn't be giving them anything, we should be teaching them how to take care of themselves.
The other problem with his premise is the idea that, because we pledge money to Kickstarter, it's taking money away from the charities. It seems like a good argument, but ultimately, it isn't. First of all, a lot of people just don't donate to charity. When I was working, the supermarket I worked for did a donation drive every other month. We generally aimed for around $2500. Usually, we'd only barely get that much in a month. Some people were actively against the donation drives. I had people yell at me for even asking if they wanted to donate. And we weren't asking for a huge amount. Usually, we just asked if they wanted to round up to the nearest dollar. And people HATED it. His premise that Kickstarter takes money away from charities is flawed because, unfortunately, a lot of people plain don't care. It's not a case of people saying "I can either donate to charity or pledge to Kickstarter." If they were thinking about donating to charity, they would have already, or still would, if they were serious about it. It's not an either/or situation.
I could probably write more, but I'm getting distracted by Starbucks closing up.
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Topic: MSPA Homestuck (Read 5196630 times)