this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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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.
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...
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
Give them a cookie and the wall
In what order tho?
True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.
IDK if it works in this case.
The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.
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.
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.
Also they just put money, they don't put ANY actual work.