Charity, yay or nay?

Haha. You still believe in Santa as well, don’t you?

I don’t believe in second hand smoking…
People that drive cars don’t kill people indirectly. Even with a car accident because that’s directly killing someone.
I eat meat…
The only one your right about but people gotta make a living. Also weapons can be used for hunting. And we where talking about peole.

Making reference to a fictional holiday character in rebuttal to opinions on a thread you started with this:

Certainly doesn’t help your stance.

However, The March of Dimes and elimination of Polio is a well-documented and recorded incidence of the success a charity can have in furthering the health and prosperity of a nation (and the world). Here’s some info on that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes

https://www.marchofdimes.com/789_821.asp

https://origin.cdc.gov/vaccines/events/polio-vacc-50th/key-leaders.htm

https://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs114/en/index.html

As for charity leading to productivity and helping the economy. It’s more correlation than fact. There are probably trends and data that support it, but I cannot find it. But hopefully (perhaps that’s asking a bit much) you can understand the logic:

Children educated and aided through charity grow up to understand contribution to society, common ethics, morals, etc. and therein contribute through labor (or education, or social service) as adults to society, and economically as taxpayers, spenders, and providers of services. Impoverished children without such aid have far lower chances of doing any of this. A lack of support for going to school and learning these important concepts, tied into the risk of dying from disease or criminal activity, just keeps the impoverished population in a cycle. Never getting better and continually getting worse. Intervention is the only way to break these cycles, and intervention if often from charities to feed, keep safe, and educate this population. So, charities aiding impoverished populations in this manner, help decrease the number in the population, increasing the number in the living-wage, contributory population.

Look at myself for example. I grew up dirt poor in a family with generations of uneducated, drug-reliant morons. If it weren’t for charities such as those of churches, local public health departments, schools, and scholarships, I’d just be another redneck in a trailer park like my father and my mother’s father. I would most likely reproduce offspring, introducing them to the dysfunctional family cycle and only exacerbating the population of uneducated, impoverished adults in our world. But I didn’t, I’m going to med school, and I’m actually contributing to society through volunteer work and eventually medical practice. And there’s plenty of doctors and biomedical scientists researching cancer and vaccines for AIDS that came from countries like Haiti and Africa that certainly are contributing to society a lot more than you.

As for how not contributing to others would hinder society, one simply has to look at the infrastructure of the civilized world we live in. Everyone is dependent on others in some way or another. Even those with money need doctors to keep them alive and healthy, food service to keep them fed, and income to keep them sheltered. These things that you seem to take for granted would not be so ubiquitous in more developed countries without a core component of contribution to others as a species that we as humans have.

At its core, charity is a positive thing for society, and a necessary thing for the advancement of the human species, in my opinion.

Coming out of that, I do see where people come from in complaining at the trendiness of charity. I can wholly agree, actually. Celebrities selling it, corporations sponsoring it. Some charities are bogus, very true. But there are plenty of legitimate charities that really do help society and civilization, and have done so in the past.

Who’s this lame response directed to?

That simple soul of a girlfriend of yours. You know, the one that believes that people tell the truth and/or can be trusted.

Did you miss the part where she said they had to “prove they weren’t at fault”?

Way to ignore JamestheDoc’s posts, by the way. Totally not making irrelevant points in order to avoid being proven wrong, eh?

Soup: You have to understand Bolteh’s position:

If there’s a single problem in the world, charity doesn’t work. Cure malaria? There’s still AIDS, so charity fails. Stop polio? People are still dying of famine, so charity fails. Bolteh’s position is that if you can’t have perfection, you have a 100% failure rate.

Upset that my question was snubbed
:frowning:

No I didn’t miss it. ANd I still stand by the point that people lie.

And JamestheDoc’s posts all boil down to how it’s a positive thing and a requirement for the human society to evolve. Which I don’t believe it doed and have made countless of posts stating that, so I see no point in repeating it over and over again.

You’ve stated. He’s stated, backed up and concluded his points. Little bit of a difference.

Soooo… If something has the potential for being abused…

(Do you realize how unreasonable you’re being?)[/SIZE]

Why do fucking anything then?

I’m sorry but you’re full of obnoxious shit, your ignorance is masterful and your obtuseness is bar none.

Wait. What? O_o

Guy steals stuff from work, company goes “stop it”, guy says “but I didn’t!” and keeps stealing. Company fires him, guy ends up on the streets. Guy turns to those organizations and says he got fired for things he did not do. Organization checks with company, company says “he stole from us”. Organization goes back and goes “they say you stole from them”. Guy goes “I really did not, it was some other guy and he blamed me and the company who wanted to get rid of me believed him”. Organization goes “Oh, okay, let’s give it a shot” and they appoint you to the poor bastard.

For all the organization knows, the guy could be telling the truth and he’s really the victim in this situation. Or is the word of one of those people not enough to act as proof? If not, then those organizations are rather selective, are they not. Not an organization I’d support, anyway.

So wait, you wouldn’t support the organization if they took people on their word, because then it would be abused, and you also wouldn’t support it if they didn’t, because then it’s selective.

There’s no pleasing you is there?

Well, I actually wouldn’t support it, and I still fail to see the point of supporting it. However, I do (somewhat) understand that people support it. And then (follow that statement) I fail to see how people could support something that uses some weird inconclusive way of determining who deserves help more.

It’s my moral vs my (albeit skeptical) logic.

The point of supporting it is to help people who need help.
It’s not a weird inconclusive way. If you can prove you are in your current situation through no fault of your own, you get help. Simple as that.

To me, I’m not even sure why they need to prove that they’re in the situation they’re in through no fault of their own.

Using Bolteh’s scenario of the guy that was fired for stealing from work, if the guy genuinely wanted to work to improving his life, why should the fact that he fucked up in the past be a barrier to that?

It’s an argument that really boggles my mind.

“It’s your fault you’re poor so you don’t deserve any help,” just seems ludicrous to me. It’s like they’re saying, “It’s your fault that you’re a dreg of society so keep on dregging.”

Can someone explain this to me? Bolteh?

I agree. I was just explaining what I understood was the policy of the organization Sassy was talking about.

Sounds like the “rugged individualism” argument. That totally helped during the great depression, right?

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