The World According to Jet - III · 3:16am Oct 29th, 2014
Ladies and Gentlemen! Behold! Today I shall pretend that this is a regular Blog and not something on a horsie website!
Disclaimer: I am about to piss in some people's Cheerios™. I'm gonna bring up a topic that will make some people angry, others uncomfortable, and might even lose me some hypersensitive followers. If you hate me because of this blog post, allow me to preface with: You won't be missed.
For all the actually rational people in the world, I have a rant for you today! Welcome to the World According to Jet! Part Three!
So I never check the Facebooks, right? Well today I did, and someone posted this fascinating pile of bullshit.
Now, I don't know how you feel about the Susan G. Komen foundation. I don't support it in specific myself, primarily because I only support one charity, and that is Child's Play. Perhaps that's frivolous, but I picked my thing and I'm sticking to it. Anyway, I've heard some bad things about Komen, that they're actually a for-profit, or that they're shoddily managed and rarely help anyone, all kinds of shit.
And y'know what? If you have a genuine objection to how they conduct their business? Fantastic! Tell them to fuck right off.
You know what I'm not gonna accept as a valid reason? The bullshit in that article.
First of all, I don't buy that article. It sounds like nonsense to me. Abortions cause breast cancer? That doesn't even make sense from where I stand... But fuck, I'm not a doctor. If there's an Oncologist in the house, please correct me if I'm wrong.
But boycotting an -- ostensible -- charity because they support one of the largest providers of contraception and education thereof in the world because of one of their smallest services? A service that not all their facilities provide? A service that they actively discourage, and provide so the women receiving it will be safe instead of seeking a dangerous, back-alley service like they used to do?
Fuck you.
Planned Parenthood does a hell of a lot of good. They provide contraceptives to people who would not otherwise have access to it. They provide education to those who have been kept ignorant. They provide counseling, STD examinations, and cancer screenings.
I don't give a rat shit if you think abortion is literally Satan himself in medical implement form, there's a fuck of a lot more to that organization than abortions.
So you know what? Support what charities you want. But if you boycott one, have a goddamned rational reason to do so.
If you don't, you're not just an asshole.
You're that asshole.
And this is why you're awesome, Jet. You continually turn up the most sensible arguments, while not holding anything back in how much you hate shit. I love reading your blogs.
Hear hear!
All right, I'll bite:
I have no particular opinion on Komen, because I don't know a specific fact, so let me google it.
[googling intensifies]
As I had suspected, and have now confirmed via the power of our colorful Dark Lord Google, [1] the Komen foundation has increased the amount spent on both research and public education year-over-year. Ergo, any complaint about the good they do is essentially saying "You're not doing enough good!"
And anyone who complains about the inadequate charity of others can go fuck themselves with a cactus.
As for Planned Parenthood: they do good work. Usually because for some bizarre reason they're the only ones doing what they do.
BUT! Abortions do cause health complications. This is known. So does every other surgery, for that matter. And even though I do have moral qualms with abortion in general, I also know that no one gets an abortion on a whim. Every single such operation is a big fucking deal, and any diminishing of that is a disservice to a huge number of people.
[1] This is the most recent posted financial statement.
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Not doing enough good is a perfectly valid complaint for a charity. "Good" is the product a charity offers, in a free market sense.
Say I start a charity to feed the homeless, and you give me $100. I take $80 of that as my salary, and spend $20 to buy a steak dinner for this one homeless guy I found. You would be dumb to look at that and think "Well, at least it's doing some good," especially if there are other charities where the professional staff make reasonable salaries and the money is allocated so it does the most good.
The two charges usually leveled at Koman Foundation are that the upper executives make bank (the CEO makes $684k a year. For comparison, the CEO of Girl Scouts of America (my favored charity) makes $394k a year) and the public education it does is outdated (in the current war going on in breast cancer prevention over mammograms, they are firmly on the side of mammograms, even though recent studies are showing that they do nothing to save lives and return so many false positives as to be actually harmful.) So as charities go, they're pretty controversial.
2563258 If you'll allow me, I'd like to amend my previous statements:
If you don't like what a charity is doing, or how they run their business, don't support them.
I personally don't support Komen, though my reasons are closer to Jet's: I already have a favored charity, and only so much budget. But actively hating a charity that does support a cause is a bad way to be.
Also, on the salaries: they spend more money to get the top talent. That's their argument, and the evidence bears it out: donations are (way) up, awareness is at saturaton levels, and money going to research and education is constantly rising. Some money gets spent on professionals to manage the operation, but no all-volunteer charity is going to have the kinds of numbers Komen is looking at. A significant amount is spent on advertising, probably much more than any other charity I can think of, which is the main reason they get so much in donations in the first place. There's no ideal ratio of admin cost to donation; it depends on the market, the strategy, and the only way to judge is results. And since Komen is consistently doing more good in absolute terms, I don't see a reason why they should get rid of the management. It would literally be punishing them for being good at their job.
I have no knowledge nor stake in the frequency of mamograms, ergo I have no opinion.