this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
81 points (63.0% liked)

Asklemmy

44151 readers
768 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Squirrel@thelemmy.club 82 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don't even come close to outweighing the bad.

[โ€“] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. "If you fix twenty neighbor's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that."

Traditionally this joke is:

Bad Scottish Accent Engaged

I build 200 ships, do they call me Seamus the shipbuilder? Nae.

I paint 100 houses, do they call me Seamus the Housepainter? Nae.

But ye fuck one sheep...

[โ€“] quat@lemmy.sdfeu.org 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.

[โ€“] Balefirex@hexbear.net 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Give them a cookie and the wall

[โ€“] mustardman@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They get to chew on the cookie as we load the guns, it's only fair

[โ€“] Squirrel@thelemmy.club 21 points 1 year ago

True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.

[โ€“] Grimble@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago

IDK if it works in this case.

The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.

[โ€“] Helmic@hexbear.net 4 points 1 year ago

The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money "earned" through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it's still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.

The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any "good" a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren't just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.

[โ€“] darharrison@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the wording of OP's question is dumb for this reason. What person on this planet has done literally only evil things? A better question would be more like "What billionaire is genuinely a good person and why?" Personally the size of my list of "overall good" billionaires is a rounding error but at least the thread would be more interesting.