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How often do you see bad guys create something comparable to the Gates Foundation?
by mehrdadn 7y ago
How often do you see bad guys create something comparable to the Gates Foundation?
- drcode 7y agoRockefeller, Carnegie, Barnum, Kraft, Walton, Koch?
- mehrdadn 7y agoI... can't believe my eyes. If you find what Koch or his foundations have achieved to be similar to what Gates or his foundations have achieved, I feel like you really need to re-calibrate what you call good and what you call bad.
- catalogia 7y agoThey do a great deal more than giving money to republicans and republican things you know... however I am not saying you should like them because of that. I won't enumerate those things because I don't want to encourage anybody to like them, but if you doubt me you can look up the details yourself easily enough.
- mehrdadn 7y agoThanks for making a complete strawman of my argument. Nobody said 100% everything the Koch foundations have ever done has been terrible. But I sure as hell see a world of a difference between an entity that does entirely good things and one that does terrible things half the time. List me all the terrible things the Gates Foundation did that you think make it comparable to, idk, the Charles Koch Foundation. I'm reading the latter donated $25M to UNCF, which would be great except even in that case, "the UNCF's involvement with the Charles Koch Foundation was 'a betrayal of everything the UNCF stands for' because the Koch brothers were 'the single most prominent funders of efforts to prevent African-Americans from voting'." Yeah, because I definitely see the Gates Foundation being accused of undermining its own causes and driving away its supporters as a result.
- catalogia 7y agoI have no interest in claiming any moral equivalency between the two. They are comparable, but not equivalent. I dislike all of these people, and no amount of charitable giving will change that.
- mehrdadn 7y agoI assumed you would have an interest in not making a strawman of whatever you're arguing against. These are not comparable by any sane metric. One that doesn't outright ignore all the awful things when looking at the good parts.
- catalogia 7y agoPerhaps I should have explicitly pointed out that I feel as though you have strawmanned me. I thought I could make that point implicitly, but I guess not. I dislike terms like that and I dislike discussions that hinge around them.
- ciupicri 7y agoWhat did the Koch brothers to prevent African-Americans from voting?
- catalogia 7y agoHow often do you see bad guys with wealth comparable to Bill Gates? There are only a handful of people in this category, and plenty of them were nasty people who donated a lot to charity. What about Pablo Escobar? He donated a ton to the communities he operated in, and many of those people choose to forgive his sins because of that. I don't though.
- mehrdadn 7y ago> What about Pablo Escobar? Ah yes. A drug lord who's murdered over 6,000 people and 'covered' it by donating houses to 400 to the poor in his own community is a great counterexample to show why Bill Gates, whose foundation has poured countless dollars into things like eradicating polio, malaria, etc. could very well be using his foundation as a cover for shady business. My bad for not seeing the similarity earlier.
- catalogia 7y agoPablo Escobar demonstrates that there is no depth to the depravity some people are willing to forgive if you give enough to charity. This demonstrates the incredible efficacy of laundering your reputation by giving to charity. Some may have worse reputations to launder than others, but the mechanism involved is identical.
- dredmorbius 7y agoIf you find one, you might want to give them a Nobel Prize....