A Little Something Making The Rounds At Thrift Stores!

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Fellow Unbelievers,

With Spring comes Spring Cleaning, including donations of items no longer used or enjoyed.

Here’s the text of a flyer found in some of those donations, giving some valuable lessons on the true, natural, and very human origin of charitable donations, what is required to keep them coming, and another important way to help worthy causes as well:

This voluntary donation comes from the surplus of a Rational Animal.

Scientific Classification:
Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Chordata. Class: Mammalia. Order: Primate. Suborder: Haplorhini. Infraorder: Similformes. Family: Hominidae. Tribe: Hominini. Genus: Homo. Species: Homo Sapiens.

This Rational Animal has to think, produce goods and services, exchange those goods and services for a commonly-used medium of exchange (money,) and must use, save, invest, and expand the fruits of all these efforts in order to survive and prosper.

This Rational Animal also does all efforts at survival in The Natural Universe. This Natural Universe operates on Natural Laws, which can be perceived by the senses and understood by conceptual thought and this Natural Universe is open to human thought and effort.

However, The Natural Universe has no Supernatural Being within it, beyond it, or behind it, and The Natural Universe does not operate on or respond to hopes, wishes, cries, tears, threats, or prayers.

The Rational Animal who provides this voluntary surplus donation may possess any combination of inborn traits such as “race,” “ethnicity,” color, nationality, age, sex, sexual orientation, and physical abilities.

The Rational Animal who provides this voluntary surplus donation also has many chosen thoughts on a variety of subjects, from the mundane to the profound.

These inborn traits and chosen thoughts have no bearing upon the validity of this donation and how you use this voluntary surplus donation to benefit your voluntarily-chosen cause.

Rest assured, you will not get “cooties” from this voluntary surplus donation.

The voluntary surplus donation of this Rational Animal is only possible because of a political and economic system that, to some degree, still frees this Rational Animal to think, produce, exchange, and keep, use, save, and invest the fruits of these efforts. If you want more of these voluntary surplus donations, please support more of the political and economic freedom that these donations require to exist.

Above all, please never take this voluntary surplus donation for granted!

Use your own rational thought and effort, plus those voluntarily-provided by other Rational Animals and tap into the infinite Natural Universe of knowledge and information, now archived and available electronically. When you do this, you can constantly find better ways to use voluntary surplus donations to do the most good for your cause.

You may also find that investment in capital, labor, research, development, and innovation, plus utilizing the dividends for your cause, are the long-term best way to help your cause in such a way that it stays helped and doesn’t always depend on voluntary surplus donations. Please consult with competent Investment Advisers who are studied and experienced on these matters to find out more.

WHY BELIEVE WHEN YOU CAN KNOW? BE YOUR OWN SAVIOR!

(THIS DOCUMENT HAS NO COPYRIGHT. FEEL FREE TO COPY AND REDISTRIBUTE WORLDWIDE BY ANY AND ALL MEANS. ALWAYS RESPECT THE CONSENT OF PROSPECTIVE READERS AND PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS WHEN REDISTRIBUTING. AND REMEMBER: NO ONE CAN “CANCEL” A MESSAGE IF THEY DON’T KNOW FROM WHOM OR WHENCE IT COMES!)

[AutumnParticipant]

You may also find that investment in capital, labor, research, development, and innovation, plus utilizing the dividends for your cause, are the long-term best way to help your cause in such a way that it stays helped and doesn’t always depend on voluntary surplus donations. Please consult with competent Investment Advisers who are studied and experienced on these matters to find out more.

Not in this economic system, no. On the surface, it would seem like investment in, let’s say, cancer research would mean my money goes toward researching cancer treatments. Because that uses labour and resources at the cost of the cancer research team, we’d accept that their efforts require costs to be covered, and on success, some reasonable ROI for them, and, were I not a purely altruistic investor or donor, for me as well.

Investment–>research–>product–>ROI.

Maybe that isn’t my ideal, but I could get behind that. It’s just, that doesn’t feel like the reality outside of smaller operations. Perhaps for individual researchers who really are just motivated to change the world, they’d be accepting of such an arrangement. But there is a rationale that without profit, the work isn’t possible to sustain. And even once you pass the point of sustainability, the rationale grows such that more profit is required to maintain market share, to grow and increase influence. Which, if you believe in what you are doing sounds fine. On its face, the rationale isn’t bad. Except it tends to distort the order of things such that ROI isn’t a byproduct of a successful product. ROI is the product for shareholders. If you aren’t careful, you end up with:

Investment–>ROI–>product–>research

Even that might not seem so bad. Sure, the prioritization has changed, but surely you can’t get the ROI without the product and can’t get the product without the research. Except, there are lots of ways that relationship can be fucked with. And what I’d end up investing in is a scheme to push a return on investment to shareholders, with the promise of cancer treatments being secondary. So where does that return come from? Well, if my investment is actually a donation, then from me. If it’s a share purchase or similar, then from revenue streams. And those revenue streams are coming from… where? Taxes? Insurers? Cancer patients? I mean, in practice, there are plenty of options, but it doesn’t really matter. I am investing in a scheme where money needs to be diverted into a return as a priority, and product and end consumer will only matter to the extent they fulfill that relationship. And this includes scenarios where consumers are shortchanged, or taken advantage of because those are both viable means of getting a return.

Which is inherently fucked up and inconsistent with my values.

[DavisModerator]

In fact…Canada, the EU and many other cou tries have hate speech laws and media regulations which apply to Twitter. Twitter can only partially get around these. While Canada might not have much muscle, the EU does and will definitely cripplingly fine or even block a site that breaks it’s laws. It has heavily fined large media companies in the past. Autumn is right …the changes may not be as noticeable as predicted … But it will be even less noticeable in other jusrisdictions.

 

 

 

[_Robert_Participant]

Davis wrote:

In fact…Canada, the EU and many other cou tries have hate speech laws and media regulations which apply to Twitter. Twitter can only partially get around these. While Canada might not have much muscle, the EU does and will definitely cripplingly fine or even block a site that breaks it’s laws. It has heavily fined large media companies in the past. Autumn is right …the changes may not be as noticeable as predicted … But it will be even less noticeable in other jusrisdictions.

There is that, however if Twitter become even more of a place full of conspiracists, extremists, nationalists, anti-vaxxers, and religious fanatics, etc. (the list is much longer); instead of checking-in maybe a few times a week..zero times a week will be my solution (and I will not be the only one.) Last year I had a creationist trying to “discuss” the truth of the Noah’s Ark story with me. This person had such limited mental capacity. it would take a Biblical type miracle to have this person realize there are 100,000 facts going against the claim.

[Author]

Posts