Charity

GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

Publick Notice

Posted on December 28, 2022December 29, 2022 by Mike

As the more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed already, I reworked the image for the Gab Pay link up top there. One of our most esteemed CF Lifers went to dump a generous donation into the thing recently, only to run into a bit of hassle trying to ascertain what my username might be. So I took that as a sign from God that something needed to be done most ricky-tick, with the result you now see before you. It’s still far from perfect, but hey, it’ll do for now.

And considering the pitiful pittance I receive from Social Security as my sole income now—a very nice staffer-lady from the Brian Rehab Center set it all up for me unsolicited during my nightmarishly extended sojourn there after last year’s near-death experience, bless her kindly heart—anyone who might be tempted to give the revamped linky-doo up there a whirl is heartily encouraged to do so. Thanks, y’all!

Oh yeah, almost forgot: I’ve been thinking of doing as full a write-up as I can manage of that whole experience here, maybe. That is, the parts of it I actually DO remember, some of which memories have been sorta re-injecting themselves into my battered brain of late for whatever damnable reason. It creeps me out, frankly; my mom, brother, and a few others have started in to recount the events for me, and each time I’ve stopped them with a quickness, desperately wanting not to hear any of it. My last trip into the MRI, when I had a full-bore screaming freakout and tried to scratch and claw my one-legged ass out of the infernal machine, was particularly brutal.

On the other hand, maybe getting that stuff out there could turn out to be therapeutic for me, possibly? Exorcise some seriously scary demons by bringing them out of the darkness and into the cold, clear light of day, perhaps? Eh, I dunno. I just figgered I’d put the idea out there, and if y’all are at all interested, I could give it the old college try.

2

Maximally Effective Altruism

Posted on October 26, 2022 by SteveF

You may have heard of “effective altruism”. It expands on the moral imperative of altruism by adding the imperative to get the most result that you can from your good deed. Thus, ordinary altruism would have you forego spending money on a luxury and instead send that same money to a charity which saves lives. Effective altruism requires that you find the charity which makes the best use of the donation.

Large numbers of Africans have been starving since forever. “Starving”, “undernourished”, or “at risk of hunger”. Whatever. There’s an eternal food shortage or an eternal distribution problem or eternally more people than the available food can support.

There’s also an apparently eternal charity delivery of food and money. Just in my living memory, Ethiopians and Somalis have been the poster children, so to speak, of pity-tripping charity drives.

Hard numbers are surprisingly hard to come by, both for the number of starving Africans and the amount of money spent on direct food aid, farming equipment, trucks, and workers to teach them better ways to farm.

Or maybe not so surprising. In 2021, 282 million Africans were “undernourished”. That’s up from 195 million a decade earlier. (Though all counts are estimates and there’s no guarantee that the same definitions or methods were used in different years, so take it with a grain of salt.) (Salt which the starving Africans don’t need because they don’t have any food to put it on, haha.) That’s after spending billions just in that ten-year period. Again, the amount of money spent on food aid is difficult to track down because of the way numbers are split and conflated, but just the shortfall between pledges and money coughed up during a recent economic downturn was over $15 billion.

The exact numbers don’t matter because all of the trends are in the same direction: the number of underfed or starving Africans is going up even as charity continues to be provided.

Effective Altruism tells us to maximize the benefit of our charitable contributions. As we spend money, the amount of suffering increases. Our donations have a negative benefit. Obviously we must reduce the charity to Africa to zero.

Maximally Effective Altruism tells us that we can further reduce African suffering by taking money out of Africa. Colonialism, in effect.

Oddly enough, a number of Africans have said that they had it better under European colonialism: more peace, less killing, more wealth, less starvation. (Presumably they were talking about British and possibly French colonialism, not Belgian.)

It’s nice when philosophy and practicality give the same answer.

And the answer is clear: Recolonize Africa immediately.

8

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