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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

> For those still looking to help, Ukrainian journalists have recommended several charities and platforms that would benefit from donations, such as the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, Voices of Children, and Revived Soldiers Ukraine. There are also 3,000+ Ukrainian creators on Patreon – and thousands more using other platforms – who would benefit from our support.

Patreon seems to realize that donations are needed and direct people to alternative ways to help. This seems like a totally reasonable course of action given their existing terms of service.

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totally reasonable course of action given their existing terms of service

Oh, well, if it's a violation of their Terms of Service, then everything is perfectly OK. /s

Notions like this are what makes it so easy for the real world to hate people in the tech bubble.

Protip: Terms of Service !>= Doing the right thing

Would you be okay with Patreon funding terrorists? I mean we can play this game of what is morally correct and what is right and wrong for ages, but in the end it's safer to not get involved at all.

For one, credit card companies would no longer deal with Patreon if they find out they were passing money to fund a military.

Would you be okay with Patreon funding terrorists?

Are Ukrainians terrorists? No. Ukraine is a sovereign nation under attack. Do you not understand that?

Inventing completely unrelated hypothetical situations and edge cases doesn't make what Patreon did right.

Funding terrorists and insurrectionists is always wrong.

… but funding freedom fighters is encouraged.

George Carlin: “If crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fires, what do freedom fighters fight?”

The credit card issuers have lots of rules and enforce them only on merchants and professors. The result is we get mad at Patreon when they get skittish about rules visa and Mastercard expect them to follow.

Assuming they’re a US company, knowingly laundering money to purchase munitions overseas likely violates a number of US laws.

This is a war. Children are writing on reddit about explosions outside their windows. Patreon is doing the morally wrong thing here.

The funding was to buy guns, to buy UAVs, to train snipers and gunners. Not sure how any of those are going to help kids get away from explosions.

Facts are:

1. Patreon is a private company.

2. I don't think their policy around the whole funding military stuff has changed recently. If they changed the policy when this happened or to specifically target this. That would be quite terrible.

3. The page was against the rules of the company. It's perfectly reasonable for a company to remove a page against its rules. It's technically on the organizers, why did they create a page on a website that explicitly does not allow military funding.

I am guessing we wouldn't be this supportive of a private company funding the Iraqi Army fighting against the illegal occupation of their nation by the US.

Germany disagrees with you as a country that does not ship military equipment to war zones.

At this moment war is happening mostly outside of the cities. Soon it will be there and urban warfare is cruel. 100BTC or Patreon donations will not stop it. The best you can do for those children is to help them to evacuate to Europe, to get proper accommodation, medical help and education. Pointing towards charities which do that is morally right thing.

What if the children were living in the middle east and the money went to IS / the Taliban?

I don't believe you're as economically liberal in all cases. At some point you would draw a line.

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