Fuck You Peter Singer

Today I came across an old article from the New York Times dated September 5th, 1999. It was called The Singer Solution to World Poverty. At first it seems it's for a good cause, but it quickly turns into a bigoted, insulting, hypocritical and narrow-minded rant on how everyone is a terrible fucking monster for not donating every penny they've ever made to charity. His entire premise is the idea that every penny you make that doesn't go towards necessities for life should go to charity. He makes several arguments trying to guilt his readers into donating to charities. He uses tactics like false dilemmas and incredibly implausible and unrelated arguments like choosing between a child a sports car or having children's organs harvested for a TV.

Let's start here. Say we do what Peter Singer proposes. We donate all the money we make that we would otherwise spend on luxuries. Well, that felt good, look my neighbors are doing it too, looks like the whole nation just donated all of their luxury money to UNICEF  How great! Now we can rest in peace knowing we did the right thing. I'm kind of hungry, let's go to the bank to take out some necessity money for food. Oh shit, the bank is closed. Oh shit, all the banks are closed. Oh shit, the entire fucking economy is absolutely demolished because nobody spends anything other than the bare necessities. Now everyone's still in poverty,  UNICEF can't buy any more medicine or food because the dollar has collapsed and there's no one left in the US that makes medicine anymore, because the entire economy is gone.

Nobody wins, everybody lives in poverty, the world is set back decades in terms of technology and development because of some dumbfuck that thought this would actually work.

People have the right to buy what they want, they have the right to choose how they spend their hard-earned money (notice I said "hard-earned". Fuck mega-corporation CEOs). You can't force people to give away everything they don't spend on necessities on charities. If you do, you end up with a situation not dissimilar to the Soviet Union, where you're expected to work hard for no real, tangible gratification, you're just a cog in society.

We need to buy luxuries to keep the economy running. The economy isn't just this big machine that manufactures money, it's a series of tubes that circulates money. It's the entire cardiovascular system the the nation. If you start taking too much money out of the system, the system starts to die. We can take out a little, like donating blood, before allowing the money to replenish a bit and balance out from the other world economies.

Besides, just donating money is just treating the symptom instead of the problem. It's like giving blood transfusions to someone with a massive wound that won't stop bleeding. If we're going to fix third world countries, it has to be by establishing a powerful foundation for a successful society by building infrastructure like schools, hospitals and farms instead of just buying the things they produce. They need to be able to prosper autonomously before any real progress out of the third and second world can be made. Everyone knows the old saying, "Catch a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime." They need some sort of industry that brings in a substantial amount of money into their country, something solid and constant. Turns out there already are a lot of these things in third world countries, minus the solid income. Mega corporations like Nike or Apple that take advantage of third world labor laws and child labor. The infrastructure is there, it's just that these greedy assholes don't pay the workers enough. They're mega corporations, they have the money to do this, but they don't because of greed. If they were to pay third world workers even half of the US minimum wage, things there would start to improve because they would have money to spend. Money to spend on school, food, housing, and luxuries. They would have money to store in banks and to spend on whatever they wanted. They would have enough money for an economy, and therefore, progress.

So let's create economies instead of destroying them Peter Singer. Or maybe we should kill some disabled babies instead. Babies that could end up being geniuses like Rain Man or write books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. The issue of abortion is a woman's control over her own body. Once the baby is born, it's no longer an issue with her body, now it's the baby's body. You are literally killing innocence that could become something great, no longer because the mother doesn't want to go through the extremely painful and stressful process of having a child, but because it's disabled. Here you are talking about "Let's save these poor third world country children, it's not their fault they were born into poverty", yet somehow it's the child's fault if they're born disabled. Fucking hypocrite.

When I was discussing this with some friends, it was brought up that the original article could be intentionally bigoted and over-the-top to guilt us into donating. If so, it didn't work. It actually made me not want to donate just to spite this guy who's arrogant enough to think that would work. You see this 200 dollars I could spend on charity? I'm going to buy a new graphics card instead because of your self-righteous and pretentious douchebaggery. I thought you were a "utilitarian" Singer, and consequences are the only thing that matters. What about the consequences of intentionally writing a bigoted piece of bullshit and insulting your readers enough that they lose any motivation to "be a good person" in an effort to spite you.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't donate to charities, I'm saying don't do it because of this dumbass. Do it because it's the right thing to do. The purpose of this post is not to discourage you from donating to charity, but to consider alternate solutions that might be more effective, and to point out what a fucking moron Peter Singer is.

The New York Times opens his article by describing him as:
"A contentious ethicist explains why your taste for foie gras is starving children."

I'm pretty sure they misspelled "pretentious".