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[ChairmanPoo]

I think that's the standard fare for billionaire's charities.

[Pnx]

I've always been a bit worried by charities anyway. I keep thinking that my money would be better off say, building a new hospital rather than giving away free toys to starving children.
It may sound cruel, but it feels like charity is just throwing wood on the fire, we need a real solution, a final solution (ok, bad joke).

[ECrownofFire]

I've always been a bit worried by charities anyway. I keep thinking that my money would be better off say, building a new hospital rather than giving away free toys to starving children.
It may sound cruel, but it feels like charity is just throwing wood on the fire, we need a real solution, a final solution (ok, bad joke).

Kill them all! No need to build a hospital for the sick if they're all dead!

And who's giving away toys to starving children? Why not... food?

[Aqizzar]

And who's giving away toys to starving children? Why not... food?

Child's Play?  They donate toys to hospitals, instead of y'know, useful stuff.  Not that the kids don't appreciate it - sometimes a little heartwarming charity is just what they need.

[Pnx]

And who's giving away toys to starving children? Why not... food?

Child's Play?  They donate toys to hospitals, instead of y'know, useful stuff.  Not that the kids don't appreciate it - sometimes a little heartwarming charity is just what they need.

Actually tax break for non profit organisation is maybe a bad thing.
Did you know that Ikea use that status for tax evasion?

I had no idea, how does that work for ikea?

    IKEA Social Initiative provided soft toys to children in cyclone affected Myanmar.[57]

Although like I said, giving away food to impoverished areas feels like throwing oil on the fire (although disaster relief is something different), at the same time it feels like the money could be put to better use.


Ok, so this is something I want to point out, and it's been bothering me for a while.
The US right now looks a lot like post-WWI Germany. Extremely high unemployment, wealth disparity, large quantities of the population disillusioned with the government feeling and betrayed by it. I've kind of been expecting a charismatic leader to step up and rally all the occupy protesters to their flag under a third party, just like Hitler did.

I'm not saying the US is going to go Nazi, I'm saying the conditions are ripe for a revolution. If you had a third party with a hard line focusing on political and financial reform they could make a major breakthrough in the next few years.

All we really need now is a group of people with an extremely high wage level compared to everyone else to blame all our problems on... Oh right, CEO's.
Let's face it, corporate overlords are our new Jews.

[ChairmanPoo]

Oh, poor, poor CEOs and bankers. Tis' a shame that they are being picked as the scapegoats of this crisis. By the ammount of hate they're getting, you'd think they did something really nefarious, like, say, causing it in the first place via half-arsed financial alchemy, or use the goverment's financial aid to give themselves huge cash bonuses!

oh wait...

[Pnx]

Oh, poor, poor CEOs and bankers. Tis' a shame that they are being picked as the scapegoats of this crisis. By the ammount of hate they're getting, you'd think they did something really nefarious, like, say, causing it in the first place via half-arsed financial alchemy, or use the goverment's financial aid to give themselves huge cash bonuses!

oh wait...

I didn't say the hatred wasn't justified.

[Leafsnail]

So why draw a parallel that clearly implies that it isn't justified.

[SalmonGod]

I'm not saying the US is going to go Nazi, I'm saying the conditions are ripe for a revolution. If you had a third party with a hard line focusing on political and financial reform they could make a major breakthrough in the next few years.

One thing the existing political/economic powers did right is indoctrinate people soooo fucking deeply into a hate-filled duality culture that values childish personal attacks over any form of cooperation in spite of differences.  So far, it's my #1 frustration with the Occupy movement... they're not blatantly conservative, therefore they must be anti-semite drugged out hippie communists.

Any significant threat to the establishment, in the form of a popular movement or a third political party, is going to go nowhere if it can't find some way to penetrate that barrier.

[scriver]

They have he most complicated status in the world, and somewhere along the line, they "are" a non-profit organisation based in Holland. But not really. It's quite confusing.

Here the exert from wikipeadia :

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In September 2005 IKEA Social Initiative was formed to manage the company’s social involvements on a global level. IKEA Social Initiative is headed by Marianne Barner.

The main partners to IKEA Social Initiative are UNICEF[52] and Save the Children.[53]

On the 23rd of February 2009 at the ECOSOC event in New York, UNICEF announced that IKEA Social Initiative has become the agency’s largest corporate partner, with total commitments of more than 180 million US$.[54][55]

Examples of involvements:

    IKEA through IKEA Social Initiative contribute €1 to UNICEF and Save the Children from each soft toy sold during the holiday seasons, raising a total of €16.7 million so far.[56]
    IKEA Social Initiative provided soft toys to children in cyclone affected Myanmar.[57]
    Starting in June 2009, for every Sunnan solar-powered lamp sold in IKEA stores worldwide, IKEA Social Initiative will donate one Sunnan with the help of UNICEF.[58]
    In September, the IKEA Foundation pledged to donate $62 million to help Somali refugees in Kenya. [59]
    According to The Economist, however, IKEA's charitable giving is meager, "barely a rounding error in the foundation's assets."[60]

In 2009, Sweden's largest television station, SVT, revealed that IKEA's money--the three per cent collection from each store--does not actually go to a charitable foundation in Holland, an IKEA has said. Inter IKEA is owned by a foundation in owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein, called Interogo, which has amassed twelve billion dollars, is controlled by the Kamprad family.[61]

Another very dubious example is the "Bill and Melinda gate foundation" that look more like a tax free investment society than a charity organisation.

Ah, truly it is so, that every time the greedy cunning of the Smallander is combined with Nazi shrewdness, a great business company is born.

Also angels cries.

[Pnx]

I know this is kind of flame bait here, but the point of drawing the parallel was to do the opposite. I wasn't trying to compare this situation to the Nazi movement, I was trying to compare the Nazi movement to this situation here.

I'm not really pointing out good and bad, I'm trying to make an observation about human nature.

The anti-Semitic sentiment was the misplaced hatred of the rich, at the time Jews were earning an average wage much higher than that of other Germans. This was because there's a great tradition of Jews being wealthy bankers and businessmen and such. You still see the stereotype around today, and its been around for a long, long, time.
It dates back to when the church forbade christians from earning/charging interest. Jews were naturally exempt from this, so a lot of money brokers were Jewish, and if you were a god fearing christian you had to get the money to start a business the old fashioned way. Anyway with a smidgen of economics can tell you that businesses are built on credit.

Thus the trend for Jews to be wealthy.

Then of course the Jewish people (I've got to stop saying "Jews" it's dehumanizing) stuck together, Jewish communities tend to be very strong, especially when you consider all the opposition and racism they've faced. So of course a Jewish employer will hire on a Jewish employee while passing over someone else. It's not an unreasonable thing to expect people to do, "we Jews must stick together" after all.
It is somewhat ironic that everyone else held more responsibility for creating the situation than the Jewish people themselves. Although nobody living at the time could be blamed for it, they didn't create the situation, they just lived in it.

...
I'm not sure this rant was especially relevant, I just find it interesting that parallels are so easily drawn. The situation that led to the holocaust was really just an expression of the old law, "The rich tend to stay rich, and the poor tend to stay poor."
If you're born the son of a rich CEO do you think you're going to be living in the gutter any time soon? Or that you're going to pull a wage less than $150k when you grow up?

If we had a racial group in particular to point fingers at, like say... rich Mexican immigrants, how easily do you think it would be to ramp up immigration laws and start revoking citizenships? Perhaps we'd even confiscate their assets too.


I'm not saying this kind of sentiment is a bad thing (although on the note of "they orchestrated it" I'd like to point out the Nazi's said the same thing, but _{godwins law godwins law godwins law}), I think it's the only thing that's going to change the US, I'm just finding it interesting that we're following the same pattern. I wonder what that says about human nature.

[Aqizzar]

I just find it interesting that parallels are so easily drawn.

Anytime I see this phrase, I read it as: "I don't really have a good point to make, I just want to obliquely draw an inference that I'm not willing to stand behind."  I know you're trying mightily to talk your way backwards out of comparing the Occupy guys to the Nazis, there's just no good way to go about it.

[Pnx]

I just find it interesting that parallels are so easily drawn.

Anytime I see this phrase, I read it as: "I don't really have a good point to make, I just want to obliquely draw an inference that I'm not willing to stand behind."  I know you're trying mightily to talk your way backwards out of comparing the Occupy guys to the Nazis, there's just no good way to go about it.

You've... got something of a point there.
I shouldn't have brought this up really, it was just nagging at my mind.

I'm nihilist, and a pessimist, so when a house is burning down I say, "The flames are pretty, hey do you remember that fire last week where three people died?" Then people tell me I'm a pyromaniac.
But that's more back peddling isn't it?

I'm really sure what point I'm trying to make here.
That human beings have a very evil nature?
That we're fighting a battle that we've fought before, and that last time it didn't end well?

This kind of mentality might sound rather outlandish, I tend to humanize the inhuman, but maybe the people of Nazi Germany weren't as inhuman, and different from us as we like to think. I'm not saying this will devolve, but I can certainly see how it could, and it helps me understand how it did once before.

[SalmonGod]

but maybe the people of Nazi Germany weren't as inhuman, and different from us as we like to think.

Perhaps this is the whole point of Godwin's Law.  Comparing people to nazis is a really convenient way to demonize... but on another level, you could also see it as the recognition that we are just as human as they were, and sometimes we're really trying to guard each other against getting sucked into the same harmful psychological tendencies.  We just tend to be a bit more overzealous about it than we need to be, which is also a very nazi-like behavior... damnit, we just can't win!

[ECrownofFire]

Not to mention the various psychological tests like the Milgram Experiment. Which, IIRC, was actually designed to test whether people in Germany were more likely to obey authority than Americans. He didn't even bother going to Germany when he saw the results.