Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> For how many decades have we been handing out money to 'the needy'? Has the percentage of poor people in our welfare states decreased as a result?

The primary consideration of helping people in need is not necessarily to reduce the number of welfare recipients, but to meet their immediate needs on ethical grounds.

Some of them might need this on a temporary basis, some might never be able to provide for themselves, and some are right in the middle where a separate kind of support (for example sponsored re-training) would enable them to transition into independence eventually. It's a complex spectrum.

There is a simplistic "fuck them" attitude coming into vogue again right now which I think is fundamentally unethical and, if implemented, threatens to deepen existing problems.

> But let's send a few trillion more to Africa! This time it will be different

It depends a lot on what is being done with that money. Traditionally, large-scale aid is actually flowing back to first world contractors tasked with construction projects that are of little use to the people they're supposedly for. Big sums are also lost to corruption on all levels. The average citizen of a poor nation will never see a single dollar of that aid money, and it's not going into the local economy either.

The typical poor African nation has problems on all levels: cultural, educational, infrastructure-related - everything is broken. It's difficult to find the correct modality that alleviates these issues across the board. Addressing just one of these at a time is essentially futile, because problems in the other areas will prevent help projects from yielding sustainable results.

> The primary consideration of helping people in need is not necessarily to reduce the number of welfare recipients, but to meet their immediate needs on ethical grounds.

We've been meeting their "immediate" needs for decades now. When do they stop being immediate?

> There is a simplistic "fuck them" attitude coming into vogue again right now which I think is fundamentally unethical and, if implemented, threatens to deepen existing problems.

Well, how exactly do I have an obligation to support some African person I don't know and will never even meet? Not that I have a choice in the matter now, but would it be unethical of me not to send my money to Africa to support whoever ends up with it?

Would that work the other way round? Suppose I developed some "immediate needs". Would Africans have a moral obligation to send money my way?

Obviously for there to be a moral obligation on my part, it would have to apply to all other people too. Otherwise some people would be more equal than others.

> Big sums are also lost to corruption on all levels. The average citizen of a poor nation will never see a single dollar of that aid money, and it's not going into the local economy either.

Yeah, I know. But.. maybe our governments don't, judging by how they just keep throwing billions of dollars of our money at the local warlords etc? :D

There are at least two different ways Aid could be "working".

> The typical poor African nation has problems on all levels: cultural, educational, infrastructure-related - everything is broken.

Yes, and again, while that's certainly unfortunate, why and how is it my problem, let alone to the extent that money should be forcefully taken from me, and sent to Africa?

The worse off a country is, the more egregiously it's been looted by its rulers.

> should be forcefully taken from me, and sent to Africa?

You don't see irony in that statement?

America/Europe doesn't have to help Africa now just like they didn't have to hurt Africa for centuries before.

In general, you should clean up the mess you made. But when your meddling makes things worse, I agree, leave Africa alone finally.

> America/Europe doesn't have to help Africa now just like they didn't have to hurt Africa for centuries before.

You don't see the fallacy in yours?

I have never "hurt Africa", nor have I ever "made a mess" there, so I have no reparations to make.

Please don't tell me I'm complicit in hurting Africa because of some piece of paper I may have dropped into a voting box.

First, I don't vote because it's pointless, and second, I'm not even from the US (or any other Imperial country).

"I don't vote because it's pointless .."

Do you do any other kind of civic or political engagement?

(Voting is already the least possible effort you could make to change the world, so I may be able to guess that no, you don't do any of the harder stuff, either.)

In every single election throughout the past decades, there have been some people working hard to enact a change for the better.

How's that working out so far? Will it be different next time? Vote the bums out.. so that other bums will take their place?

Voting is fundamentally pointless because: you dropping a piece of paper into a box does not magically constrain what the politician you voted for can do in office.

It's just a piece of paper. It has no magical powers.

In other words, politicians are free to do whatever the fuck they want, and strangely enough, they pretty much always break their promises and make things worse for us.

So no, voting really doesn't matter. Elections are a distraction meant to make us believe that we have a say in how we're governed (through magic paper!), and "governance" itself boils down to coercion.

There's a tiny elite passing laws that we must obey. Any law is just a command to behave in a certain way and we get punished for disobeying them, regardless of whether the laws make sense, or correspond to morals, or even benefit us in any way.

> I may be able to guess that no, you don't do any of the harder stuff, either

In fact, I'm doing the harder stuff right now. Encouraging independent thinking and trying to get people to wake up, and enduring the resulting cognitive-dissonance-induced hostility.

"How's that working out so far?"

It is working out very well. Where I live, we have a citizen initiative process, which ends up being quite responsive to the will of the people. We also elect politicians who make laws that take the state in a direction I like--not all of them, but enough of them that this place is getting better year by year.

Our politicians are also accessible--you can set up a meeting to talk to them, share concerns, hear the constraints they're under--and it's great. It's wonderful to make that connection with the people who are actually crafting laws.

As for the "harder stuff," not really. You don't sound like you're awake yourself, the stuff you're saying is more or less the faux world-weary cynicism that a lot of people seem to confuse with worldliness or sophistication.

I would like to vigorously encourage you to try civic engagement--if you're into waking up, it could be a useful exercise for you.

Oh come on. We all know politicians break their promises and lie all the damn time.

We all know there's massive surveillance everywhere, very much against the citizens' wishes.

We all know politicians don't give a shit about us, as evidenced by their actions.

If you want to claim otherwise, you're either being dishonest or just delusional.

Or capable of understanding that most things are not all bad or all good, and even when thinks are mostly-bad, good can be done.

I'm not saying that you are not capable of this; I don't know you.

What I do know is that I've often expressed blanket-statement cynicism and I regret that now. Once I got to know people who are fighting 'on the inside', I started realizing that things are more complicated, and a lot of good can (still) be achieved. From that point on, I concluded that maintaining my cynicism would be nothing short of laziness or defensiveness, and I decided to either shut up or work toward change.

I'm still a cynic in many ways, but at least I try not to discourage others from fighting battles that I do not fight, whether out of laziness or cynicism. Because I truly think much more stuff can be changed than we think. And besides, sitting around being cynical doesn't help at all.

> I have never "hurt Africa", nor have I ever "made a mess" there, so I have no reparations to make.

Where did the gold in your phone / computer / etc come from? How about the tantalum?

See status as a conflict resource: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalum

And are you sure your waste electronics don't end up in Africa?

Dude, seriously. By that logic, it's unethical for you to buy anything, because something bad could have happened to someone along the production chain.

That's a completely nonsensical view to take, because you just can't know what happened and why, and none of it happened due to your actions.

We're not morally responsible for things that happen without any input from our personal choices and actions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com