@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch They are, but there's a systemic question there: Should they be? Private charity make sense when donors are situated such they they have information outside parties cannot. (A local food bank may be quite different in that way than MSF.) 1/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch "Institutional charity" is a name we give formal organizations that take on role we think government should take on, but take on inadequately. In that sense, they become quasigovernments. You can argue it is more a forfeit by the state than a usurpation by NGOs, but in any case we end up with many of what ought to be public functions managed by institutions whose incentives and control structure is necessarily plutocratic. 2/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch The Gates Foundation, on the one hand, does a great deal for public health. On the other hand, it has a pro-intellectual-property agenda and insists upon doing that on terms that reinforce rather than undermine a regime that is arguably (arguably not too) a root cause of the ills its ostensible mission is to fight. 3/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch What is right and what is wrong on these questions is hard to adjudicate, but what's clear is it's wrong to have wealthy donors decide them (and its wrong that wealthy donors can use philanthropy as indulgences to tidy up all the ill they do to become so wealthy). 4/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch Institutional charity sets near-term, urgent concerns, where they can absolutely do some good, against longer-term, systemic concerns, where arguably they contribute to, enable, serve as a crutch to, very great evils. 5/

@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch This is me making a critique I think broader than the piece we're discussing makes. But if you think that following the piece's critiques to its logical conclusion brings you somewhere near here, I don't disagree. It's where I am for sure. /fin

@redoPop i don’t read it as a broad argument against charitable giving, but i would make such an argument. in specific instances, charitable giving can be plainly virtuous, but often the “side effects” — both to the putative beneficiaries, but also to third parties — far outweigh the benefits. i favor dramatically curtailing oue current (extraordinarily regressive) subsidy to philanthropy, capping tax deductibility at about $10K per person, 20K per married filing jointly.

@redoPop Has the benefit Effective Altruism done by virtue of bednets distributed etc outweighed the harm it has done by taking a generation of elite-educateds and persuading them that participating in and expanding predatory institutions in order to have fortunes both to give and enjoy is better than trying to reform away the predatory institutions? I can’t in any evidence-based way say, but I do have a view on the question.

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven we can’t know that, because we can’t know the counterfactuals. but i think your conclusion is way too incautious. the post-war period, first of dual hegemony, then of soke hegemony, for all its real atrocities, many committed by the US, was nevertheless much much safer and more peaceful than the prior half century. 1/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven unmanaged decline in perceived US power and willingness to punish territorial aggression is likely to invite more adventures like Ukraine that undo that remarkable achievement. 2/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven things have gone badly for the US and with the US the last few decades, no doubt. i’d like to find a more multilateral way of enforcing a principled norm against territorial aggression, and suspect that must involve some partnership with China on this one very limited principle to which both powers ostensibly subscribe. 3/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven unfortunately, while the current crises run as hot as they are and the Taiwan status quo is unstable, it will be hard to negotiate that kind of partnership. /fin

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven the US has participated in a lot of atrocities, no doubt. but a couple of things distinguish Israel/Palestine from other sometime atrocious interventions. first, most interventions were reasonably connected to some genuinely important state interest. vietnam and korea where horrible wars, full of US (though not just US) atrocity. but they both represented reactions to revising status quo borders by force, deterrence of which remains important. 1/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven second, the character of atrocity is Israel/Palestine is quite distinct from pretty much anything the US has been involved in. a large civilian population is trapped, blockaded, starving in huge numbers. the closest post-WWII antecedents are Cambodia and Korea, where the US indiscriminately bombed huge numbers of civilians. but even there, populations weren’t trapped, blockaded, actively starved. 2/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven the world is replete with horrors. if we are just counting bodies, it is the Soviets who suffered most in WWII, not the Jews, and Soviet and Chinese internal events (the holodomor and many similar, famine provoked by Cultural Revolution) and events we barely notice in Africa (Congo’s endless wars) that are probably worst. 3/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven But when we judge these things, we are not just counting bodies. There are questions of the character of atrocity (which is what distinguishes the Nazi Holocaust much more than its scale) and questions of whether the context in which they occur also serves some positive cause which must weigh in the balance. 4/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven I support the US continuing and quite accelerating sending armaments to Ukraine, even though I know the effect of that will likely you be to prolong the war and the casualties and destruction that results. The same ugly fact that compelled intervention in Vietnam and Korea compels at least this much intervention in Ukraine: borders must not be revised by force, of if that is more than we can enforce, it must have been very costly. 5/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven Enforcing that norm is what makes Ukraine justifiable, and Ukraine’s conduct of the war, while undoubtedly involving some atrocity (all war does, don’t imagine there is a “moral army” once you’ve captured the guy who just blew away your friend), has been solid grading on the horrible curve of warfighting. 6/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven With Israel/Palestine, it’s not at all clear what valuable norm the war is serving, and Israel’s conduct has been atrocious. 7/

@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven even in hell, there are important distinctions to be drawn. /fin