Improbable caring as an indicator of evil

No one cares about far away strangers, still less about far away strangers very different from themselves. Claims to do so are lies or self deception.

People near one are always the big threat. So if one wants to destroy everyone near one, one justifies it by piously announcing love for those far away.

Of course there are other possible motives for such pious declarations. If the highest status people want to destroy all the people near them in status, which is to say, destroy me and everyone like me, they will announce deep caring for far away strangers, whereupon going through the motions of deep caring for far away strangers becomes high status.

However, just as the cautious thing to do is to assume every black man is a murderous thug, even though most of them are not, the cautious thing to do is to assume that everyone who piously proclaims deep love of far away strangers is planning the democide of those of his own class and race.

But how accurate is this cautious approximation?  Most blacks are not, in fact, planning to murder the nearest white man.  Are most do gooders planning democide?

Empirically, actions taken to benefit far away strangers very different from oneself are usually performed terrifyingly poorly, perhaps always performed terrifying poorly. For example African AIDS turns out not to be heterosexual AIDS, but do gooder AIDS. It is spread by clinics, which have financial incentive to use contaminated needles, in that the more of their clients they make sick, the more money they get.

Similarly, remember “We are the world, we are the children”. All the good and the great got together to raise money to help the victims of the Ethiopian famine.

But the primary cause of the Ethiopian famine was not drought, but forced collectivization, government confiscation of crops, government destruction of the crops of rebellious populations, and civil war, in other words socialism. Being good progressives, did not want to admit the role of socialism, so wound up paying for the cattle trucks to take the peasants to death camps.

And, very recently the Cathedral was funding and arming the Army of the Congo to vaginally impale Tutsi women with very large objects.

Thus near 100% intent to commit democide fits available data better than near 50% intent to commit democide.

Observe the total non reaction among do gooders to complicity in crimes against the Tutsi in the Congo, and the total non reaction among do gooders to the ongoing AIDS scandal in Africa. This behavior fits the assumption that all do gooders, as near all of them as makes no difference, are aiming at war against near, and contradicts the assumption that many of them or most of them intend to benefit far.

If status competition was driving the purported caring about far, we would expect to see more monitoring of each other’s performance “Hey, your caring for far is producing horribly bad outcomes, which I, your holier and more moral superior will now correct.” So, the data compelling fits the theory that concern for far away people of other races is a lie driven primarily by monstrous and horrifying goals, and fails to fit even the relatively innocent explanation of competition to be holier than thou.

64 Responses to “Improbable caring as an indicator of evil”

  1. Zach says:

    Can’t read jack on this phone…

    Signalling. Yeah I will go with that for now… heh

  2. Piano says:

    “If status competition was driving the purported caring about far, we would expect to see more monitoring of each other’s performance.”

    Look at http://www.givewell.org/.
    It got/gets decent press from Cathedral outlets: http://www.givewell.org/what-others-are-saying

    If Effective Altruists (search recend promoted Lesswrong posts for some surveys etc.) in general became popular via the vector of applying Science to giving, then you’d have to alter your theory.

    Regardless of if they are representative, this is their rationale for focusing on “people far away”: http://www.givewell.org/international/process#GlobalPoor

    • jim says:

      Givewell’s website is down, hardly a good sign. Is money spent on Givewell well spent?

      The most serious scandals of damaging and counterproductive aid are AIDS, Haiti, Congo, and Tanzania. Googling their website for references to these, I cannot find anything that looks negative. Seems like all charities are wonderful, but some of them are even more wonderful.

      • Piano says:

        Their website isn’t down for me, right now. I’d check again.

        If you look at their homepage, the pie chart suggests an extreme version of Sturgeons law, where ~99% of charities are crap.

        They expand here: http://blog.givewell.org/2013/03/29/why-we-recommend-so-few-charities/ (Though it’s a bit wishywashy beacuse they don’t want to say to all the not-top charities “You’re transparency/first-impression/etc. sucks, so we really kinda skipped over you guys.” in fewer than 100 words.) Even the top charities are grilled and found to be very lacking in major parts. A while ago, the head guy, Holden Karnofsky spent ~10k words essentially telling MIRI that they weren’t good enough http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/

        If you want to win the battle rather than just diagnose the problem, they’re probably the people to have on your side.

        • jim says:

          Their website comes up for me briefly, and shortly thereafter goes down again.

          Now that I can check on their website, I find that their highest priority is that fewer American criminals be sent to jail and fewer executed, whereas the Veterans Administration murdering fewer veterans is not on their priority list at all.

          This inclines me to doubt their criteria for charitable effectiveness.

          There is an obvious correlation between vaccination campaigns and AIDS. Googling their website, could find no sign of awareness of this correlation.

          If you want to win the battle rather than just diagnose the problem, they’re probably the people to have on your side.

          Looks to me that they are complicit in the murder of more people than the Nazis have murdered. I would say they are the sort of people I would rather have in front of me than behind me.

          Because inability to control needle use in Africa and South Asia, all vaccination and similar programs in these areas should employ auto-disable syringes (AD syringes). This does not seem to be on their checklist.

          • Piano says:

            They’re younger tech guys, focused on the here and now with current charities. If you turn the AIDS thing into a little report with a bunch of numbers, with a discussion of the implications for the evaluations of current charities, they’d be interested.

            • jim says:

              If they would be interested, they would be interested already. It is not exactly news that vaccination campaigns in Africa tend to spread AIDS. Similarly, the massive program of international aid to Haiti turned into a disaster. Somehow, strangely, rule by Harvard graduates in Haiti turned out to be markedly worse than rule by low IQ corrupt black thugs. They don’t seem terribly interested in how that could have happened either.

  3. B says:

    Jim, given that Moldbug is getting the Cathedral colonoscopy treatment here: http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis (and note that like any good witchhunt, it starts with accusations and outings by some disposable little nobody) maybe you could write a post on how to deal with these unpleasant inevitabilities. Granted that the Cathedral doesn’t exile thought criminals to pan for gold in the Yukon or shoot them in dark basements, the man has a family and a startup. What is to be done?

  4. J says:

    Good theory to debate. Now, in the 1800s, British Quakers fought a prolonged campaign against slavery, ultimately mobilizing the mighty British Navy to combat the trade worldwide. They were most successful, in fifty years slavery was gone everywhere. What could have been their evil motive?

    • B says:

      To gain prestige and societal cachet vs. their cousins, both Tories and Whigs who were not holy enough.

      The actual outcome of abolition sucked both for the majority of the slaves and those who had to deal with them on a regular basis, but not for the Quakers.

      And by the way, I spent a year in Quaker school in my youth, and you can take it from me that those are the biggest communist hypocritical sons of bitches you’ll ever meet. I mean, worse than actual Communists.

      • J says:

        I spent more than one year in communist schools, but I didnt notice they were hypochrites. They were sincere.

        and what did Quakers get from showing they were holier than their cousins? That sick holyness competition must be a human genetic defect.

      • EH says:

        Coming from an unusually long line — no, more like bushy tree — of Quakers, I can say that this is true. Quakers, originally the “Friends of Truth”, dedicated to the belief of the intrinsic divinity of Man, the “Light within”, were the true brotherhood of light, or “Illuminati”, shaping society to their ends with only the best of outward motives, though with great profit. Quakers started the first workhouses and Sunday academic schools for mine-workers children, in fact virtually owned the lead (and associated silver), iron, and large parts of the coal mining industry, started Lloyd’s bank, and Barclay’s as well, the latter growing into the most influential corporation on the planet, far more then Goldman or BOA. Quakers even started the first fixed-price shops, invented cast steel, interchangeable parts, and Taylorism.

        Quakers in the genetic sense either assimilated or failed to reproduce, there have only been about six or seven million over nearly four hundred years and today there are only a few hundred families left of the old stock that still attend meeting in the US, so few that even the tiny cloud-forest colony in Montaverde, Costa Rica that left Alabama during the Korean War forms a notable fraction.

        The skeleton of remaining Quakers was totally overwhelmed by boomer draft-dodgers in the ’60s and their “spiritual” girlfriends. (Actually the invasion started in the ’40s and accelerated in the ’50s, and was blowback from ideologies that started from the Quakers, mutated and recombined and then re-infected the Quakers.) Today the boomer commies and their families are 80-90% of the Quakers. Their main distinguishing feature is a belief in equalism, whereas the old Quakers were unabashed spiritual elitists.

        These “convinced Quakers” look quite conservative, but they are very dangerous, often really more dangerous than all but the worst Ivy-league professors. Though they are by no means still in control of the world, they still have a lot of influence. They’re pretty steadily ahead of the Overton window, so much so that it appears that they are leading the ideological train. But they’re seldom true believers, either – they seldom state a position, but rather assume it implicitly, while implying a second level of consciousness which is quite practical, knowing, not quite tacitly cynical but sober, even “knurd”. They have a steadier grasp of persuasive tactics and bureaucratic infighting than the lower grades of social-justice horrors, and rarely go for a frontal assault.

        Basically INFPs with a bump of of Machiavellianism. Their feelings are the best way to manipulate them, especially when wrapped in a pretense of reasoned virtue signalling.

    • jim says:

      Their motive was to destroy those competing with them for status.

  5. Thales says:

    O/T: Jim, you really should take a victory lap vis-a-vis the VA hostpial scandal…

    • jim says:

      They are doing pretty well compared to many similar government programs in Europe. The real way for the government to pretend to fulfill promises it cannot fulfill would be to have promptly admitted sick veterans to hospital, and then murdered them instead of treating them.

      Instead, they merely lied about admitting sick veterans to hospital.

      They broke their unfulfillable promise to provide treatment, and lied about it, but did not cover their tracks with “prolonged deep sedation”

  6. Dan says:

    Why do people like to take road trips? Try all the different rides at an amusement park, or foods on the menu, or go places that they haven’t been yet?

    That which is novel gives a chemical tingle, it seems.

  7. Ghatanathoah says:

    Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity and stubborn incompetence.

    You are making a fairly elementary mistake that I notice often when discussing “signalling” models of altruism. You assume that the Machiavellian calculations about signalling are being done by the person doing the signalling. However, generally it is natural selection that is doing these “calculations.” People are programmed with sets of values and behavior by natural selection that happen to result in signalling behaviors, but they aren’t consciously planning it. They genuinely believe in what they’re doing.

    What is the best way evolution could come up with to simultaneously convince a person’s tribe and trading partners that they are altruistic and generous, but also prevent them from being so altruistic that they sacrifice their reproductive interests? Simple: program them to really be altruistic and generous to the bottom of their heart, but also be a screw-up who is really bad at being altruistic, and hence always fails to sacrifice their self-interest in the name of altruism.

    This explains our behaviors towards helping strangers quite well. We genuinely care about them, but we are also screwups who are bad at being altruists. So we implement stupid programs with the intention of helping and screw them up. We don’t give the programs the serious thought they deserve, not because we really don’t care, but because we are idiots who have trouble getting altruism right.

    Then when someone points their failures out we get upset, because people don’t like to be criticized even when the criticism is true. And this is true of both our attempts to help people far away, and our attempts to help our family and friends. People get upset when their friends hate a meal they cooked for them for instance.

    There used to be a crazy bunch of psychologists called behaviorists who believed humans didn’t have minds. They thought everything humans did was a result of conditioned responses to stimulus. They believed, for very stupid reasons, that it was not scientific to believe that humans were conscious and had plans for achieving objectives.

    I think that the type of reasoning you are using should be called “Reverse-Behaviorism.” You are doing the exact opposite of what behaviorists do, you are assuming that every action a person takes is a conscious attempt to achieve an explicitly articulated goal. You then look at someone’s behavior and try to reverse-engineer what their goal was.

    Needless to say, Reverse-Behaviorism is just as wrong as behaviorism. People have goals and some of their actions are explicit attempts to attain those goals. But not all human behavior consists of this. Sometimes people act irrationally or emotionally, sometimes they do something that really is a conditioned response. So any attempt to figure out a person’s goals just by looking at their behavior is doomed to failure.

    • jim says:

      And this is true of both our attempts to help people far away, and our attempts to help our family and friends.

      I don’t think so. Efforts to help family and friends seem adequately competent to me.

      For example, despite extreme pressure, the Red Cross refuses to accept blood from gays, doing the right thing in the face of massive pressure to do the wrong thing – because if they infected people with horrible diseases, they might have to look some of those people in the eye.

  8. Konkvistador says:

    This explanation seems to be based on similar observations to those Steve Sailer has made before on the conspicuous leapfrogging loyalties of Liberals compared to the reflexive concentric loyalties of conservatives.

    takimag.com/article/the_self_righteous_hive_mind_steve_sailer/

  9. Dan says:

    My explanation:

    Going far away is a fun adventure. I have one sister who did a service project in Haiti and another who did one in Honduras. Staying at home and doing stuff is much less exciting. They got to pack their bags, see new places, take pictures and have stories to tell, and feel good about making a difference.

    My sisters had no evil motivations. Multiply this across the whole first world and you get a lot of what we see today.

    Its the same thing with vacations. Getting in a car or airplane to see someplace far and exotic is exciting for some reason. The surface of the moon is the dullest, most featureless place imaginable which is how you know it wasn’t faked, because even our deserts have more going on than that. Even moon dirt is more objectively boring than Earth dirt. But seeing the moon up close was totally thrilling for everyone involved and watching because it was exotic and adventuresome.

    • Herod Antipas says:

      So instead of just going to Myrtle Beach for a week, she gets to go on vacation AND look like a good, courageous person. This would be a benign manifestation of the same principle, draping something you want to do anyway with a narrative of righteousness, a perfect example of Frankfurtian Bullshit.

  10. VXXC says:

    AH Strike that…apparently the benefactor of mankind Bill Clinton did mention it… here’s a source.

    http://popdev.hampshire.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/u4763/DT%207%20-%20Minkin.pdf

  11. VXXC says:

    Google does not reveal AIDS clinics are deliberately reusing needles. Or shed any light on that one at all.

    Would you mind then putting up a source? I did look on my own first.

    • jim says:

      Needles not sex drove African AIDS pandemic

      The re-use of dirty needles in healthcare – not promiscuity – was the main cause of the AIDS pandemic now devastating Africa, according to a controversial new analysis.

      It challenges the assumption, dating from 1988, that unsafe heterosexual sex accounted for 90 per cent of HIV transmissions in Africa.

      “We’ve gathered all the literature we can on AIDS in Africa and the best we can estimate, for sexual transmission, is a quarter to a third,” says David Gisselquist, an independent anthropologist from Hershey, Pennsylvania, who led the new study.

      Double standards in research ethics, health-care safety, and scientific rigour allowed Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic disasters

      Public health managers do not warn Africans about risks to contract HIV from unsafe health care, and no African government has investigated any unexplained and suspected nosocomial HIV infection by tracing and testing people who attended suspected clinics. Researchers have avoided finding and talking about nosocomial HIV infections in countries with generalized epidemics.

      The Uncontrolled AIDS Epidemic

      These studies empirically demonstrate that unsafe injections and other medical exposures to contaminated blood may account for two-thirds or more of the new cases of HIV/AIDS. In this new view, heterosexual sex is, at most, responsible for one-third of the spread of HIV in Africa.

      The overwhelming majority of AIDS cases world wide are in South Asia and subsaharan Africa which happen to be the two areas with use of dirty needles

      “In Southeast Asia, nearly 80 per cent of injections that are given are with nonsterilised equipment. The next highest rate is found in Africa, which is a shade under 80 per cent and then Eastern Europe with nearly 70 per cent injections with unsafe equipment,” he said.

      “(As a result), we see extraordinary high numbers in Africa and Asia infected with all three major blood-borne pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV),” Sabin stated. “Asia is extraordinarily high for HBV and HCV,” he added.

  12. Alan J. Perrick says:

    Great. This is very good, because especially with so many political women on the prog side, there will be a lot of plausible deniability to cut through.

    “Bring Back Our Girls” – It’s imperialistic… but has grave consequences for those closer to home…

    A.J.P.

  13. Far-carers monitoring each other sometimes did happen. Leftists and Christian missionaries used to monitor each other and sometimes even publicized scandals.

    Meanwhile, we can render far-carers relatively harmless by depriving them of their allies: people who believe soundbites. The best method is to come up with better soundbites.

    • jim says:

      Leftists and Christian missionaries used to monitor each other and sometimes even publicized scandals.

      Until the left thereby achieved total dominion over the Christian Churches.

  14. scientism says:

    Exactly right. Universalism is the dehumanisation of one’s own kind. Of course, I doubt many progressives understand this, but they’re utterly committed to it and they gleefully celebrate every bit of flesh they flay from the body of their own culture. In the end, self-awareness doesn’t matter much, since the destructive urge is just as strong (or stronger).

    • Herod Antipas says:

      It’s more sinister than that. The universalist isn’t trying to dehumanize their own community, i.e. the SWPLs in their gated community or the faculty at the college at which they corrupt other people’s children. That’s their tribe. The people they want dehumanized are the lower middle class or blue collar whites they’re related to who present a factional center of gravity interfering with the will to power of their tribe.

      The strategy is declaring brotherhood with some faraway tribe who they’ll never have direct contact with, and who may as well be fictional. A simultaneous and related strategy is to white knight for a group they have no affiliation with, for example blacks or hispanics, so as to indirectly undermine their real rivals.

    • Ghatanathoah says:

      No it isn’t. It’s the de-dehumanization of everyone else. It isn’t about caring less about other people, it’s about caring more about everyone.

      This is why universalism is objectively good and nonuniversalism is objectively evil.

      • jim says:

        It isn’t about caring less about other people, it’s about caring more about everyone.

        If that was the case we would expect rather more vigorous concern about Cathedral sponsored AIDS in Africa and India, and rather more vigorous concern about the Cathedral sponsored vaginal impalement of Tutsi women with objects larger than themselves in the Congo.

        The reason we are commanded to love our neighbor is that our hearts are not big enough to love the whole world, only our little part of it.

  15. Michael says:

    the question is not really how many blacks or liberals will kill you given the opportunity, what really makes them a serious problem is that so few will stop the killing. black dysfunction could be ended in a few years if blacks stopped defending and pretending not to notice black dysfunction and allowed normal social pressures to be exerted from without as well. the same with liberals how many democratic voters actually thought having a man fired for being a conservative or a christian etc is really appropriate?

    • peppermint says:

      So-called Black dysfunction is not dysfunctional. It has several clear purposes, and it works brilliantly. Would it work individual Black to act like the Chinese? Sure, but then they wouldn’t be Blacks, would they?

      The most important purpose of “dysfunction” right now is to resist gentrification. You say, they can’t live on their own, they have no purpose or future – but they do have what they need to live the way they live right now, and for the forseeable future. “Dysfunction” works. It’s also very compatible with their biologically-entrained behavior. The notion that the behavior is entrained is in fact the reason we put up with in in the first place, which is why Nicholas Wade had to be let go so NYT wouldn’t be associated with his dangerously radical ideas.

  16. Bert says:

    I don’t think the reason must be as malevolent as that. Indifferent — not improbable — caring isn’t so strange. Suffering is bad, therefore fighting is it good. You can help feed the hungry or cure the sick by simply sending some money somewhere. You don’t know the details, and you don’t care about those people anyway; it’s just about the abstract idea of reducing suffering. That way an inefficient charity or outright scam can be kept going.

    • Herod Antipas says:

      A key distinction must be made between someone impulsively sending money to the pathetic children on late night tv and someone who becomes a full time crusader for the pathetic children as a way to give themselves a veneer of virtue, while they’re playing another game entirely.

      Was Northern Abolitionism so much about a true concern for negro slaves that the abolitionists had no first hand experience of, or was it just a convenient draping for their dismantling the rival Southern gentry class?

    • jim says:

      Doubtless, exactly so, but the same people who don’t really pay much attention to people dying in Africa pay enormous attention when a lying drunken thieving violent black whore accuses members of their own class and race, and proceed to demonize the accused in ways that would have made it very difficult for them to get a fair trial, while, in their enormous kindness and benevolence, concealing the character of the accuser.

      They, and I, don’t really care about black women in Africa getting AIDS infected vitamin injections. They don’t care, I don’t care. That is why it happens. We are commanded to love our neighbor, because the human heart is not big enough to love the world, only one’s own little patch of the world.

      But if they don’t really care about the AIDS injections, it follows that even less do they care whether Crystal Mangum, a thieving prostitute with a long history of drunken violence against males, was raped by the Duke University Lacrosse team.

      If we look at nineteenth century lynchings, it is perfectly clear that the motive was not racial or class animus, but desire to eliminate crime. If we look at the Duke University case, it is perfectly clear that the motive is hatred for one’s own class, race, nationality, and gender.

  17. Was Enlightened says:

    Hi Jim, do you have sources for AIDS clinics using contaminated needles on purpose? A quick websearch found a couple studies on needles vs. promiscuity causing AIDS spread in Africa, but nothing really damning.

    • jim says:

      On purpose, or not caring. Hardly matters. If they don’t care, lack incentives to care, because AIDS profitable, AIDS profitable because the donors don’t worry, because the donors don’t care.

      And, regardless of the precise motivation of the African man who injected an African pregnant woman with an AIDS infected vitamin shot, I am interested in the precise motivation of the New York Times spraying lynch mob propaganda against people of their own class, their own race, and their own gender. I don’t care about the motivations of African guy with the deadly needle. He is no threat to me, only a threat to far away strangers very different from myself. I care about the motivations of the guy who writes for the New York Times.

      • Rollory says:

        It matters very much. You’re making a blanket statement about the whole area of operation and everyone involved in it based on cases (for which you have still not provided any specific citations) which – assuming your description is correct – are entirely in line with the massive corruption that is a general feature of Western money flowing into those areas – which has nothing to do with the motivations or pattern of activity you are claiming (with no provided evidence) exists.

        In short, you are lying, blatantly and damnably. You should not do that.

        • Alan J. Perrick says:

          That one from “Rollory” is a good example of the point-and-sputter argument.

        • jim says:

          If you don’t stick your head in the sand, it is clear that the vast majority of AIDS cases in the world occur in countries where healthcare is provided by clinics supported by international aid, South Asia and subsaharan Africa, which clinics notoriously use dirty needles.

          If you do stick your head in the sand, it is clear that you no more care about far away strangers different from yourself than I do.

          • Magus Janus says:

            or those clinics show up where you have most of aids cases. you have not established causality.

            extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. or even some evidence. im perfectly willing to entertain your theory but it’d help if you provided some sources on your claim showing rampant use of dirty needles in said clinics and associating this with the spread of aids.

            seems to me the far more likely reason for aids crisis in those countries is high time preference + promiscuous sexual mores. Exactly the same as the gays in the US for instance.

            it’s not money or some international aid conspiracy. it’s the total lack of self control and being able to think ahead and control oneself.

            • jim says:

              You are crazy. What is extraordinary about the claim that the international aid industry murders several tens of millions or so, and most of the good and the great close their eyes to it?

              But, since you insist, here is yet another a survey on the matter, which you will no doubt ignore in the same way you have ignored all the others, as to you the goodness and greatness of the good and the great is so obvious that no possible evidence could suffice to contradict it.

  18. peppermint says:

    Nice! This is what the proggies make of charity. This and “steelmanning”, in which they take arguments they do not understand and replace them with arguments they can pretend to be sympathetic towards.

    It’s enough to make one wonder if deus caritas est, and there is no charity apart from God.

  19. Contaminated NEET says:

    How do AIDS clinics in Africa, even monstrously malevolent clinics that deliberately infect their patients to increase business, contribute to democide in America?

    The only thing I can imagine is 1) that they DO strengthen the perpetrators by increasing their status through moral superiority and 2) they supply them jobs and loot to bestow on cronies.

    • jim says:

      Hostility to people near and similar, as exemplified by the hostility to the Duke University Lacrosse players, is explained as love of people far and different.

      Poor performance in doing good for far, as in African clinics, indicates that this is not the genuine reason for hostility to near – that they simply wish destruction on people that resemble themselves and are near themselves.

      I am taking for granted that the elite are national traitors, race traitors, and class traitors, but discounting their explanation that they care about the poor, people of other races, and people in other countries.

      They care about the competition.

      The normal and natural tendency is to care about close, to love thy neighbor, and ignore the possible consequences for far away people different from oneself. The elite inverts this. I argue that this inversion indicates that they hate their neighbor, rather than loving far away people different from themselves.

      Charity begins at home. If it begins a thousand miles away, this is a pretty good indicator of lack of charity.

      • Contaminated NEET says:

        OK, I think I’m getting it. But why even bother with far away charity at all? Why not just be openly, entirely, hateful? They’ve got to be getting something out of it: status, spoils for the boys, and psychological comfort.

        • Herod Antipas says:

          The far away charity is a way to psychologically soothe their conscience while implementing actions that harm their neighbors; if they didn’t at least give themselves a fig leaf of charity, however pathological it is for the Africans on the receiving end, they’d have no choice but to confront their own actions.

        • Red says:

          Most charities are scams used by the elites to avoid taxes. That’s what they get out of it.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            I think it’s better said that most scams attract money makers rather than most charities are scams.

            Most scams are there for status. Once you have a stable scam someone figures out how to make money from it.

            Global warming / climate change is an example – it starts in academia as a way to get tenure and to build a patronage network of grad students. Money is involved but not primary – money is the next step. The next step scammers are more money oriented and less status oriented (but still status oriented) – they sell “carbon offsets”. Finally you get low status people pulling a small amount of status and money in almost a pure scam business – “green engineers”.

          • Red says:

            I’m talking about charities, not progressive movements. Here’s how the most basic scam that anyone with enough money and connections runs: You donate X amount of money to charity Y. That charity then provides you with things like travel expenses, hotel stays, cars to drive, ect, all tax free to the value of something close to X. You spread this across multiple charities and you have a nice low tax life.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            Yes of course.

            But what’s a charity in the first place? That’s where the progressive movement part comes into play.

            No one is running fund raising drives to send talented overlooked boys from West Virginia to college even though you could just as easily use that as the cause to have charity parties, cars and travel, etc.

            That’s where the progressive status seeking comes into play. Step one is deciding what can be a charity. Step two is broadcasting the high status. Step three is sucking money out of the cause.

        • jim says:

          Well I would say that Alinsky, who dedicated his book to Satan, was openly, entirely, hateful. And Trotsky, in “Their morals and ours”, pretty much says that commies have no morals, but will do whatever it takes for power – which included, as it turned out, sticking an icepick in Trotsky’s brain.

          But if you are openly, entirely, hateful, then people are going to expect the purges, the great terror, the hungry ghosts famine. And if you are building a synthetic tribe, a religion, which is what you need to gain power, best not to let it be too obvious that you intend to murder pretty much everyone in your synthetic tribe, just about everyone of your own religion.

    • Orthodox says:

      There has to be an explanation for why people who ostensibly seek to do good end up delivering the exact opposite result, and yet do not care. You can look at home as well. If anti-black racists were in charge of inner cities and passed laws that forbid blacks from learning to read, the literacy rate in the inner city would probably be higher than it is today. Or flip to the opposite, what would you do if you actually cared about inner city black people? The first step in cities like Newark would be establishing near martial law to restore order.

      I think one thing that cannot be forgotten is the Left’s belief that intention outweighs action. There is a quote by a French communist I believe, who said that Nazis or fascists are evil because they kill for hatred of humanity, but communists are good because they kill for love of humanity.

      • Dr. Faust says:

        Molyneux would point out that the failures of the charities and social programs is caused by the violence of the state, that violence always produces a paradoxical effect to the intent.

        • Herod Antipas says:

          Of course, Molyneux has a propensity to blame the state for everything, much like a feminist will the patriarchy and a superstitious Christian will the Devil. This does not to deny the pathological effects the state has on society.

          The real problem that comes from the dole, not so much private, small scale charity but government subsidized free stuff, is that it fragilizes society by causing a substantial part of the population to atrophy their ability to provide for themselves.

      • peppermint says:

        Stop pretending to care about Black-on-Black crime and inner city Black dysfunction. You know as well as anyone else that if the cities implemented martial law to restore order, the next thing that would happen is the quiescent Blacks would be quietly forced out of the cities as prices go up.

        Oh, but what if set-asides were formally enshrined in law? Moldbug’s formalism was always a reactionary hoax. The minute a single plank of the complex tensegrity structure of anarcho-tyranny goes away, it all comes crashing down.

      • jim says:

        The nazis killed their enemies, the commies killed their friends. Conclusion: Better to ally with a nazi than a commie. The number of Nazis murdered by Nazis is quite small, perhaps a hundred or so. The number of commies killed by commies is enormous, and back when I was a commie, it seemed to me that they were still at it, and that the police were looking the other way, because investigating political crimes by leftists was apt to be bad for one’s career.

      • Alrenous says:

        http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare.html

        And what is communism? As a political formula? Perhaps we can define it, with a nice 20th-century social-science jargon edge, as nonempathic altruism. Or for a sharper pejorative edge, callous altruism.
        […]
        When you are motivated by genuine charity, and your charitable efforts backfire and actually harm the recipient of your help, you feel guilt and sorrow like nothing else. You’re a witness to a horrific motorcycle accident. You run over to the man on the ground, pull his helmet off, hug him and give him CPR. Unfortunately, he would have been fine, except that you just severed his spinal cord. How do you feel? Is your reaction: “oh well, at least I tried?”

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