GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers | Hacker News Reader

GoFundMe pauses donations to Canada truckers

bbc.com

24 pointsversion_five18 comments

With work from home it would be hard for the truckers to embargo GoFundMe headquarters. GFM has a history of collecting then freezing funds for causes which don't align.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1011

The fact that they collect them at all is what seems illegal to me. They know full well they don’t intend to pay these funds out when their politics disagree with the cause. So they’re soaking up the momentum of the movement and time of donors and then locking it away until it is irrelevant. It’s plain old political warfare.

What are the legal grounds to sue GoFundMe for even allowing this donation drive?

This, btw, is a great reason to look at Bitcoin as a means of raising money for a cause, even if the point is to swap the BTC for local fiat and not to hold long term: BTC cannot be deplatformed short of making it illegal to exchange BTC for CAD.

Will they be refunding money for the BLM and other similar donation drives?

Why would they be? The terms of service make it perfectly clear that those are okay but this isn't: "Donations that are political in nature are only allowed if they're in alignment with our own political viewpoint".

(/s, in case it wasn't obvious)

And that's why donating using cryptocurrencies and stablecoins is still going to be a thing that will not being going away anytime soon.

So please, continue to ban more users, and they will just turn to that.

Sometimes somebody else said it best:

http://stonetoss.com/comic/build-big/

I wish there was a massive truck blockade here in Australia to remove vaccine mandates and passports - which they lambasted as conspiracy theories early in the pandemic. I can't leave the country because I'm unvaccinated, can't board domestic flights, get my hair cut or go to weddings with more than 20 people because I refuse to take an experimental vaccine.

> because I refuse to take an experimental vaccine.

You might elicit sympathy for your plight if you had lab confirmed robust preexisting natural immunity which was being ignored, or you were a young man at great risk of myo/pericarditis, or severely allergic to vaccine ingredients. However, as you merely stated an obvious falsehood, that the vaccines are experimental, you get no sympathy from me. What do you think you’re going to discover that the ~100,000 phase I-III test subjects and billions of people who already got vaccinated haven’t already discovered?

I don't need your sympathy

I want my human rights recognised and respected by the state legislators which have exempted themselves from taking this experimental vaccine

> I don't need your sympathy

But you do need the sympathy or at least respect of the Australian electorate and by asserting obvious nonsense to the vast majority all you’re doing is empowering your opponents.

If his legislators can exempt themselves, he should be afforded the same treatment. Do as I say not as I do isn't really a good political policy?

> Do as I say not as I do isn't really a good political policy

Government hypocrisy is a cliché and isn't very notable above the din. The people that the OP need on their side will be focusing on the fact that vaccines are so obviously not "experimental" that have gone into billions of arms with historically massive studies preceding that and historically massive post-vaccine surveillance following it. The perhaps hypocritical government people will easily be able to label holdouts like the OP as ignorant, selfish, and politically motivated and that will ring true to the electorate, and for good reason.

Here we have a textbook example of gaslighting. Dismissing victim's concerns as childish - check; dismissing victim's pain as irrelevant - check; logical manipulation in order to persuade victim that they are the sole source of their pain - check; creating impression that help and support is not available - check; that nobody can possibly agree or align with the victim - check.

Whether it is intentional abuse, or the result of genuine delusion, does not matter. It is wrong thing to do in any circumstances.

Unless the abuser already established that the person is prone to this kind of manipulation, the outcome will most likely be the opposite of what they intended. Be extra careful, people may react to gaslighting in completely unpredictable way.

Actually we still don't know many things. The studies are still ongoing and while we don't expect radical discoveries, the long-term benefit of vaccines meaning how long the protection lasts, what are effects on new variants etc. are still unknown.

Experimental for some is just a code word that the studies are not completed yet. One shouldn't read too much into this. However, it is clear that vaccine mandates are not really needed anyway, as the UK had never implemented them and recently they abolished them even for healthcare professionals [1]. What is so different in other EU countries or in the US/Canada?

Vaccines still have positive benefit/risk ratio, there is no doubt about that. However, forced vaccination seems unnecessary when vaccines don't limit the spread of infection. They are purely for individual benefit.

1. https://www.medscape.co.uk/viewarticle/relief-and-frustratio...

> Experimental for some is just a code word that the studies are not completed yet

Then that's equivocation with the word "experimental." It's chosen to evoke the idea that the vaccines are a highly risky uncertain proposition when in fact we have enormous volumes of real-world data. if they intended to communicate the uncertainty over how long immunity lasts then the word to choose isn't experimental. The choice of the word is dishonest and driven by some other motivation.

You can accuse antivax by putting too much meaning into the word “experimental” but you shouldn't fall for their attempts to redefine the meaning of this word and argue from that position.

Experimental can be just something that is used in an experiment or trial. You can take a substance that is known as completely safe (NaCl in small quantities, for example) and then experiment on it. It will be called “study drug” for the purposes of research. The regulators actually don't use the term “experimental drug” but colloquially experiment is just another word for a test or trial.

Note that the government has actually likely pressured GoFundMe in this case, which is a chilling and tyrannical suppression of the right to protest, especially after how accommodating they were with mass rioting in 2020.

See https://www.foxnews.com/world/canadian-leader-deletes-tweet-... or https://www.newsweek.com/truckers-protesting-covid-rules-has...

> On Wednesday, before the fundraiser was suspended, city councilor and chair of the Ottawa Police Services Board Diane Deans said that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson should contact GoFundMe and tell them to not distributed the money raised to the protesters.

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