The real problem is that the orphans need a crushing machine themselves so that they could prevent to be crushed. We must protect the second crushing amendment.
Of course it’s a mystery. An honest discussion about why orphan-crushing machines need to exist would lead to an honest discussion about where your society’s pain really comes from.
And the owner class doesn’t want that discussion to happen. Because it would come out that they don’t pay their fair share of the tax burden, which would keep orphan-crushing machines from existing in the first place.
Hey that orphan-crushing machine is a constitutionally enshrined right. I have the right to mount that thing on wheels and drive it around to crush up orphans wherever I want! And if somebody tries to stop me and gets caught up in and jams the mechanism, I have the right to sue his estate for damages!
In short, effective altruism is commonly viewed as being about the moral obligation to donate as much money as possible to evidence-backed global poverty charities, or other measurable ways of making a short-term impact.
Just be the philanthropist that your broke ass wants to be.
Work 120 hours a week so you can receive 15% of the value you generate as a paycheck. Then take the 75% you receive from that after the tax man and donate it to a charity. It’s so simple.
You want to be a better human? Just work more, and then donate more.
Or just actually work for a charitable organization if you’re not super rich. Like a doctor is important to humanitarian aid, but so is getting them to and from the area, so is student loan forgiveness as med school is incredibly costly, they also have to offer their workers a (paltry) salary and per diem, etc, which is where the money is quite important.
Could it be done differently in a better society that we should absolutely be working towards? Yes. Can and should we also congratulate the people in our society for working with what they have? Yes.
Except it’s worse than that. The argument goes, if I could donate $1m right now to a charity, or invest that money in subprime mortgages for a year and donate $5m next year, plus keep a little bit of that profit to live on, obviously the optimal course of action is to be a capitalist and not donate right now.
Project this rationalization forward indefinitely and you get all the benefits of the 1% lifestyle while retaining the ability to feel morally superior to everyone else not in your little trust fund cult
Not to say that argument is flawless. You can give a starving child 5 meals today, or 500 meals in a year - except in a year, he’s starved and can’t eat a single one.
It basically ties in with “Justice delayed is justice denied”.
IDK why people are downvoting my post. That’s literally what that is.
I visited a talk with Peter Singer in Washington, D.C. a few years ago where people applauded a guy who had considered joining an NGO and decided to become an investment broker and donate to Effective Altruism instead. 🤔
Yeah, because everybody knows the obvious answer. It’s untethered capitalism. And no it hasn’t always been that way. Politicians weren’t always whores for the rich. That’s a rather recent development that can absolutely be stopped by the will of the people.
Lol, that’s the mildest form of corruption I can imagine.
But do you really think a village has zoning laws in the first place?
At that scale, it’s also much easier to just remove the chief’s son from his hut on the “nice hill”. And the chief along with him. Scale being the key factor is the essence of my argument.
Before Caesar, Rome actually had checks and balances to keep one person from amassing too much influence. For example, they had two consuls, which was the highest political position at the time and acted like as the heads of state.
Until Caesar fucked up those systems by literally declaring himself “dictator for life”. So really, it’s not always been this way, it’s usually just a few individuals that keep fucking it up for everyone else. Until they end up with a knife in their back.
There were substantial conflicts between rich and poor Romans well before the end of the Republic. It was not uncommon for a lower class Roman to go off and fight with the army only to come home and find some rich fuck effectively squatting on his land.
This was turning into something of a large scale crisis 60+ years before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. At the same time, politics was dominated by the wealthy and/or those who were successful military leaders.
The Republic didn’t really have “checks and balsnces” in some cases so much as “social conventions”. More a common understanding that something is just not done. They were actually rather Ill equipped to deal with individuals who had a thirst for power. Tiberius Gracchus, who served as Tribune, gave away lots of state owned land to some of the poorer Romans. He did so without consulting the Senate which raised a lot of eyebrows. When he attempted to stand for a second term as Tribune in 133 B.C. – which was just “not done” – the Senate responded by murdering him.
Tiberius’ brother, was elected as Tribune. He went further than Tiberius and sponsored a whole bunch of legislation which would have benefited poorer Romans. The Senate responded by murdering him as well. Over the next few decades, there were a handful of successful military leaders who clamored for more and more power. At the same time, the public was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the Republican government.
Julius Caesar was smart enough to recognize that the Republic was becoming frail and ballsy enough to give it a good shove down the stairs. In 82 B.C. he marched his legion into Rome – a clear act of treason – and effectively declared himself dictator. He was met with little resistance. He was viewed as a champion of the poor in some ways and, based on the way the Republic treated poor Romans, they were probably looking for a champion.
There were others who wanted to wrest Caesar’s newly acquired power from him. Pompey, another successful Roman general, went to war with Caesar. Pompey had the support of the wealthy Aristocrats. Pompey lost.
The Senate murdered Caesar in 44 B.C. Caesar’s supporters responded by killing his assassins. Then they turned on each other. That marked the beginning of another civil war from which Octavian, Julius’ nephew and adopted son, ultimately emerged victorious. By then, the Republic was effectively dead.
To make a long story short, Julius Caesar didn’t break the system. It was already broken. He managed to exploit it further than than anyone else had up until then but there were glaring cracks in the foundation of the Republic that directly contributed to it’s demise. The imbalance of power between the elite and the poor was definitely a big “crack”.
If you ever wonder why there’s an ORPHAN CRUSHING MACHINE and why they need $20k to prevent the use of it. It was because there’s this one llama with a hat that is trying to build a Meat Dragon to impress his mate named paul
That’s more commonly a US thing and it’s like, “Americans saved from America.” whether health, education, or some basic social service that’s being used for profiteering.
Shame his animated show deal fell through (or simply never took off) but yeah I don’t know if I want to pay for something that appears to not have been updated since May
Add comment