this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
85 points (63.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43901 readers
2104 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.
Give them a cookie and the wall
In what order tho?
They get to chew on the cookie as we load the guns, it's only fair
IDK if it works in this case.
The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.
The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money "earned" through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it's still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.
The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any "good" a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren't just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.