Woof
Well, since ferrets posted a thing about beefs, I just had a beef I was thinking about recently.
I hate how there's so many charities all for a cure for cancer. At camp we had a small fund raiser, and we voted to donate the money to the American Cancer Society. I put forth Heifer International!
Because, I understand the heartache that cancer causes, but we're mostly curing it in America which is fucking selfish.
There are things that kill huge amounts of people that could much more easily be solved, in other countries.
I've read something that, if we invested 15 billion dollars a year, for 10-15 years, we could give everyone in the world clean, running water.
But instead, we invest much more in fucking cancer research to save granted, a lot of lives, but there's better things we could be doing.
Once everyone in the world has clean, running water, and enough food not to starve, then I think can we work on things like cancer and heart disease.
But no, we're so fucking selfish, America gives so much fucking charity to itself.
There's people worse off than us, if you haven't noticed. You know, country with the highest GDP in the world, there might be just a few people that could better use charity...
Whatevs.
Night Oasies!
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Comments
I agree with you, really.
We mostly can take care of cancer now, you know? Like I know it's not foolproof and people still die a lot from it, but people don't seem to think of the larger picture here. I feel like a lot of money is misplaced with things. Like Native Americans are living in houses mostly without running water, a gigantic unemployment rate, alchoholism, etc. and nobody seems to feel bad for them. blarg.
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That's redick!
we are...
a very selfish nation...and I believe we are just starting to pay the price for it w/ losing the AAA rating and all these natural disasters...
Mental wounds not healing, driving me insane, i'm goin' off the rails on a crazy train- the ozzman
silly chad....
we help the less fortunate countries. we invade them and give them a goverment that we like ;) they should be so grateful...
"A loving man and woman in a committed relationship can marry. Dogs, no matter what their relationship, are not allowed to marry. How should society treat gays and lesbians in committed relationships? As dogs or as humans?"
...
you just described imperialism, sorta.
well sorta....
with imperialism, the place didnt normally get its own goverment until it behaved for a while
"A loving man and woman in a committed relationship can marry. Dogs, no matter what their relationship, are not allowed to marry. How should society treat gays and lesbians in committed relationships? As dogs or as humans?"
Hmmm...
I recently visited Tanzania, one of the stereotypical poor African countries where only fifteen percent of the population has water piped to its homes, and seeing it has made me think differently about the whole idea of charity-to-foreign-countries. Tanzania receives millions of dollars a year from the United States alone, and most of that money ends up stuck in the corrupt-but-not-oppressive government. The people go on carrying twenty-liter tanks of water on their heads all day.
The weird thing about it is that they don't seem to want improvements like piped water. Their society is largely built around gathering firewood, herding livestock, and carrying water - make it so they wouldn't have to do these things, and they wouldn't know what to do. It sounds racist, I know, but it's what I saw there - they just don't think the same way we do. They wouldn't accept it if we piped water and natural gas into their homes; they want to carry water and cook over charcoal fires. The best we could do for them would be to bring the water closer, so they wouldn't have to carry it as far, and make it cleaner.
The craziest thing of all is that it works. The people there all looked healthy and happy - happier, really, than Americans. The United States is held together mostly by lawsuits and electrical wire, I think, but Tanzania is held together by sheer force of Hakuna Matata, and it works in a way that makes no sense to first-worlders.
that...
actually sounds really beautiful.
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That's redick!
Yeah...
It was. I didn't feel sorry for those people at all, or want to 'help' them, even though they were so poor. We've all always heard about the starving children in Africa, or the polio-crippled children in Africa, but in Tanzania all the children were smiling and beautiful.
Believe it or not
I've been to Tanzania and Kenya too, and I thought the exact same thing, everyone seemed incredibly happy, and no one was starving, and our guide brought them some simple balls and they had more fun just passing those back and forth than I see anyone having playing sports over here. (Really, I like informal sports games better, when you're just playing with good people and don't get anal about rules or scores).
The experience has changed the way I've thought about happiness and things ever since.
So maybe there are like parts of Tanzania that don't need help. But what about war torn Sierra Leone? What about anarchist Somalia? What about that famine crisis that we recently had, and is, I think, still not over?
We don't need to modernise Africa, I think they're happy without it, but at least make sure they're not dying of malaria, or being shot, or starving.
And if we do give charity, I don't think it should go directly to the government. It should be like what Heifer International does, gives it straight to the people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5ghXdq6Z0&safe_search=on
Exactly.
I agree - Tanzania is probably one of the better parts of Africa, despite its poverty and its corrupt government. At least it's peaceful. The point I was making was more that we just can't really know what sort of charity would help a place if we haven't seen it ourselves, and maybe not even then. I would never have guessed that a place as poor as Tanzania would be so happy or so immune to modernisation.
Giving money straight to the people, though, has universally not worked - the people don't use it to improve their standard of living at all. It's only effective to use charity money to vaccinate people, or educate them, or give them things like water filters or mosquito nets, that sort of thing. What, specifically, does this Heifer International do?
They give farm animals
to starving people. Donation amounts come in animals. Like you donate like 20$ to give them a flock of ducks or something.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5ghXdq6Z0&safe_search=on
The problem with giving
The problem with giving money for things like water and food is that it isn't a continuing investment. Once clean water has been established, that's all that comes from it. Clean water.
But if we educate females, then we get a lot more. We get an educated class. The birthrate goes down. Education is encouraged and passed on. Families can become more stable. Females become empowered. Females become the breadwinner.
It's feminism, all bundled up in school. Wonderful, right?
Educate everybody, yeah.
Educate everybody, yeah. Clean water's good too, though - helps prevent disease, and, if you've got irrigation, your chances of famine go way down.
Interestingly, in Tanzania, girls generally get one or two years of school more than their brothers, because the boys go to work herding livestock at young ages.
But the resources to educate
But the resources to educate everyone are hardly ever available. What I'm saying, females should be given first priority in education, as they've been statistically shown to encourage and pass on education and empowers them.
Hm.
Neither sex/gender should be put forwards in ANYTHING. It doesn't matter if someone's "statistically" better at it. That's like saying men should be put forward in jobs, have the first priority being hired JUST because they're "statistically" harder and better workers. If we expect to eliminate sexism, you can't make blanket statements about everyone like that. This is why I'm not a feminist. That implies women deserve better rights than men. I'm an equalist. I don't judge your skills or your rights on your body, but what you do with them. If you're given an education, you're allowed to decide what you want to do with it, regardless of what sex you are. C'mon.
I think if we're limited on education resources, just give it to the hardworking and interested. Maybe more women would turn out, but you never know. But saying "you're a woman so you totally deserve this info more!" is really wrong...
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That's redick!
Putting forth money isn't
Putting forth money isn't just about what's "right" and what's wrong". Anything that we do with money has to be based on the laws of investment, and thus, statistics become cornerstone to charity and investment. When we give money to something, we want the biggest fucking bang for our buck. And I'm sorry, but if the goal is to improve the socio-economic situation of an entire country, the easiest and simplest way is through education, and through the specific education of females.
I mean, as it is, females and males aren't equal ANYWHERE. It's similar to the logic of affirmative action - we want the races to be equally treated, but they aren't. Our solution? Artificially bias markets and education towards minorities.
All feminism is, is the radical that women are people too. It's anything and everything you make it. It's the right to vote, it's the right to work and it's the right to be equal. I mean, what do you think the Equal Rights Amendment was about?
Ummm
Well, if someone was saying that about men, you'd be squawking your head off about how sexist it was, I bet. That's what always happens, anyways!
How about we just improve the money sent to the schools?! That's a better solution to a really large problem. Teachers are not being paid well enough anyways. Considering school and learning is the first thing that will shape you into a future working adult, you'd think it would be the thing that's funded the most- but it's not.
Also, this might only be in America but I doubt it- teachers that aren't good at teaching, especially old ones, aren't allowed to get fired unless they, say, rape a child. This is a very bad thing, especially if there's great, peppy, new teachers right in line. If you want people to succeed in school you need to have enthusiastic, good teachers taking all the slots, not just one or two of them. Think of that one teacher in life that really "got" to you. We need more of those. Then everyone learns more and loves it more.
Anyways, whatever you say Feminism is, all I see is "women are better and let's do everything for the women and you can't be sexist against men" and that's all wrong.
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That's redick!
Uhh...
Women in the US are still paid less than their male counterparts, and even at big companies like Symantec where I work, there are employee groups for women, etc.
That said, sexism is typically a one-way street, for example:
http://youtu.be/6Vq6njtmU7g?t=40s
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"Why be given a body if you have to keep it locked up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" - Katherine Mansfield
Wait, so you want to pay
Wait, so you want to pay teachers more, but you think teacher union benefits and tenure should be eliminated? Isn't that the slightest bit contradictory? What's more, fully eliminating tenure creates a job environment simply based on populism. Ultimately, schools boards are elected officials. So, I'd rather have teachers being hard on students, yet providing a quality education, then have teachers answer to parents and please them.
And no, I would not be "squawking" my head off. Stop assuming how I'd act. I'm an equity feminist who believes in affirmative action to right the wrongs in this nation. You simply can't expect things to be fair just because you say it should be. Females have the "glass ceiling" to deal with. Men? Nah. What's more, females statistically get lower wages.
This is a wacky site...
Where the gay boys are feminists and the women are sexist?!
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"Why be given a body if you have to keep it locked up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" - Katherine Mansfield
Feminism <3
Feminism <3
I didn't say they should be eliminated
But if you're not doing your job, you don't deserve to have it. And this isn't out of my ass, my sister is a teacher and constantly complains about all the old, stubborn, teachers that have literally stuck to their old methods- even if they're ineffective. If your students are all failing and you won't go to classes to learn the new teaching curriculum, you're obviously not good for your position. They don't try to connect with the students anymore because they're just frankly too old and bored of their job. THAT'S what I'm talking about.
Or, even better, your school doesn't have enough money so it even hires people who don't have any teaching qualifications!
Anyways, I understand women have SOME disadvantages still. I see that women get lower wages. But if they got lower wages because they were shown to be statistically "worse workers" in this money-tight economy, that would still be wrong, yes? So it's not okay to disclude men either, in anything.
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That's redick!
Well...
You didn't initially say they were bad at their jobs. You just said they were old. Aren't good at teaching would beg the question how they initially got tenured...
The reason you want to give tenure and such is because you want stability. Corporate America already fires older, better paid people just to replace them with young people out of college who will do the job for less money. So, sure, if you're going to keep adding new criteria every reply until you can prove your point... ;-)
To that point, there used to be all these young teachers looking for work and now they're hiring people who aren't qualified to teach.
I'll skip your sexist comments, I think you lost that one a while back, hehe. ;-)
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"Why be given a body if you have to keep it locked up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" - Katherine Mansfield
Hmm...
It isn't entirely rosy there... most interesting, it seems they keep trying to murder albinos?!
http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/tanzania/report-2011
Ahh, had to get more details on that:
In African countries such as Tanzania and Burundi, there has been an unprecedented rise in witchcraft-related killings of albino people in recent years. This is because albino body parts are used in potions sold by witchdoctors. Numerous authenticated incidents have occurred in Africa during the 21st Century. For example, in Tanzania, in September 2009, three men were convicted of killing a 14-year-old albino boy and severing his legs in order to sell them for witchcraft purposes. Again in Tanzania and Burundi in 2010, the murder and dismemberment of a kidnapped albino child is reported from the courts, as part of a continuing problem.
Other examples: In Zimbabwe, belief that sex with an albinistic woman will cure a man of HIV has led to rapes (and subsequent HIV infection).
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"Why be given a body if you have to keep it locked up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" - Katherine Mansfield
Well,
In my opinion I think we should help out the other countries, but we simply can't afford to. I know you're not saying stop helping ourselves and help others but we'd have to cut off our own nation in order to help those in other parts of the world. It's a very difficult matter to assess. And yes I do agree with giving Zakat.
I'd love to hear what you have to say about this.
Defense Spending for 2012:
Defense Spending for 2012: $1.030–$1.415 trillion
Economic Foreign Aid for 2009: $33.9 billion
Per every dollar we spend providing aid to foreign countries, we allot thirty dollars to defense related spending.
What's more, it's partly our fault (and the modernized world's fault too) that Africa's economies are stagnant and that nations are exploited. Maybe if the world adopted a universal currency, things would be fairer, but I see no reason why a US citizen gets to enjoy a low inflation rate, whilst the entire continent of Africa gets to enjoy an astronomically high inflation rate.