It’s not about charity, it’s about the humanity

74. I sometimes wonder what constitutes a ‘kiss’ or a ‘first time’ or ‘taboo in most cultures.’  I wonder about this for reasons that I’ll take to my grave… unless you read this and choose to e-mail me.

There are three timely things that I wish to post about today, so I’ll order them by importance and then fudge the dates later on so that you don’t feel cheated when I finally write about the other things.

I’d heard about the cyclone in Myanmar Monday, but didn’t think about it until today when I heard that the death toll might be as high as 100,000. I also heard about the damage to the local industry and the ruining of the country’s rice harvest for the year and realized how serious it was. Suddenly, I realized that my own problems (”do these pants make me look fat?”) were rather silly in comparison.

I thought about donating money to the relief effort. I mean, whenever anyone asks me for change, no matter how sure I am that I’m being cheated, I think about how I don’t need to ask anyone for anything. Even if they’re lying to me, their life is still worse off than mine because they’re coming up to me, so I don’t feel bad in giving people a few bucks.

But the worst-off American is still loads better off than some of the people in Myanmar right now. And, even if the country is refusing to give visas to some relief workers, they still need any help I could muster. Especially since the risk of waterborne illnesses increases with every passing day.

I was too young, oblivious, and broke in 2004 to donate to the tsunami relief and I was in Australia when New Orleans flooded, but now I have no excuse. Now, no matter how dire my own finances may seem, I can still afford to help out the relief effort.

In fact, I can do more than that. I can ask all of my friends to give me a small amount of money and add it up to make a much greater impact than any of us could do individually. I mean, how many people don’t donate because nobody ever asked? How many don’t give money because of how inconvenient it is?

If just a few people around the world could serve as ‘bundlers’ and get others to donate, then think of the impact we could have. I’m going to try to raise some $200+ from my (college-age) friends and donate it. You could too, if you like.

I’m going to Digg and Stumbleupon this post. I hope you don’t mind.

Click below to find out more about how you can help. All of these charities have high Charity Navigator ratings and have set up special Myanmar-related pleas for help. The first few have already gotten some relief effort and supplies into the country, the rest will do so within days or hours:

• World Vision
• Save the Children
• CARE
• Unicef
• The International Rescue Committee
• International Red Cross
• World Food Programme
• Action AID USA
• International Medical Corps
• Medical Assistance Programs International
• Oxfam
• Doctors Without Borders
• Direct Relief International

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The Race Card

I’ve been thinking about race a lot recently. Mostly it’s been in the form of “I hope grad schools have a quota, I hope grad schools have a quota, I hope grad schools have a quota.” But I’ve also worried about the deeper implications of getting accepted over another, equally qualified person solely on the basis of race.

And I’ve got to say: I have no problem with that.

The argument against affirmative action is thus:

Who cares that your ancestors were brutally assaulted by my ancestors. It has no bearing on your abilities now. You should play on an even playing field against people, regardless of race.

The argument for affirmative action is thus:

If my ancestors hadn’t been brutally assaulted by your ancestors, I would be in the same position as an average white person. This isn’t an even playing field, minorities start off with a handicap: affirmative action attempts to fix that.

My high school was chosen as one of Dateline’s 10 worst schools in the nation. I can name a dozen people from my graduating class that had a child before they turned 18. Statistically, only half of my school will graduate high school and only one tenth of those will graduate from college. My graduating class was 414, which was down from 811 my Freshman year. So you can see that the odds were stacked against us.

I don’t know if that makes the thought of being accepted based on race any better, but it sure does ease my conscience. Had I been born in New Jersey rather than New Mexico, I would have had a chance to go to Rutger’s or another top-notch school. As it is, even with a great GPA and GRE scores, I’m fighting an uphill battle because my college wasn’t one of the top programs.

So, although I never pull the race card, I’ll do it here. Hopefully it’ll help me get into grad school. And my ego can handle it, because I know that if the playing field truly were equal, I would be able to compete with the best of them.

Last Year: Culture skirmishes
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Ignorance is Unpatriotic

The better the citizenry as a whole are educated, the wider and more sensible public participation, debate and social mobility will be…Highly sophisticated Élites are the easiest and least original thing a society can produce. The most difficult and the most valuable is a well-educated populace.

John Ralston Saul

It’s hard to see how a person can fully participate in a democracy without voting. Truly, elections are what make representative democracies superior (theoretically) than other forms of government. Representative democracies allow people to freely and easily choose their leaders.

One doesn’t need to vote in order to be a responsible citizen. Indeed, if a person is going to vote based on vague ideas and hazy feelings (”John Kerry is ugly!”), then it seems the responsible thing is to not vote… or have children.

However, if someone has decided to do his ‘duty’ and vote, then the best thing for that person to do would be get informed about the issues. Truly, a democracy with an educated populace would hopefully do far better than a democracy with a poorly-educated populace. In essence, by voting without being informed of all your options, you’re not doing your duty; you’re subverting it and adulterating it. If you vote and don’t have good reasons why you vote for each particular candidate, you’re being unpatriotic.

If H.L. Mencken is right and democracy is the belief in the collective intelligence of individual stupidity, then it follows that we should lessen the individual stupidity.

Thankfully, the readers of this blog need not worry about their own ignorance. I, in association with Project Vote Smart, Wikipedia and the candidate’s own literature (that is, I’ll use them as sources), will write a series of articles about this upcoming election. After which, you’ll not only know the candidates, but be the best informed citizen around.

… Just don’t vote locally, because I’m not looking up those guys for you too!

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I hate you because I care

Some time ago I wrote about how I thought that a logical consequence of understanding of evolution and the principle of equality was to murder everything that you could possibly murder. I was being facetious, but it made running over bunnies more acceptable because it meant that the bunnies with the tendency toward restlessness would not have children and thus future generations of bunnies would not be run over.

To clarify a previous post: the way I think about it, some bunnies are more inclined to react to loud noises and bright lights than others. If not, then some are more likely to learn from previous experiences than others. Thus, it seems to me that if you run over enough of them, after a few generations, only the ones with the natural or learned tendency to stay away from roads would survive to reproduce.

I just wish there were some form of meta-humans that would run over all the stupid people (half of my friends would go in the first batch). This might sound callous, but I believe I can derive philanthropy from misanthropy.

If you assume that stupidity is a natural tendency that can lead to the worst set of circumstances for humans, then it follows that weeding out the stupid is morally desirable in that future generations would have less inclination to do stupid things that would hurt them as a whole.

In other words, ’stupid is as stupid does.’ But if stupid is no more, then at least some stupid things would not be done anymore. And I can fix stupid with a shotgun.

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Philosophers eat their young

Philosophy as a discipline peaked in ancient Greece. Then Aristotle messed it up.

See, Socrates took questions to the people in power. With Socrates, philosophy and Socratic questioning was enough to scare the church, noblemen and politicians. Socrates was so fantastic, in fact, that Plato spent the entire rest of his life writing little plays in which Socrates was still alive and still asking tough questions. Psychologists would consider Plato traumatized now. I think it was PTSD.

Plato had a school and in that school he taught Aristotle who had some ideas of his own. Aristotle thought, rightly or wrongly, that women were inferior, that slavery was justified and that some people (coincidentally, the lower class) were just weak-willed and could not be taught anything.

That was about 2,500 years ago and you would think that philosophy had outgrown its initial prejudices, but apparently old habits die hard. Continue reading Philosophers eat their young…

Last Year: Stare at this title
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