My feed is filled with bad news, which is my fault for using the fediverse as a news feed, but it made me wonder: Which organisations, groups or individual people in the world are doing the most good for our world? I’m particularly interested in those who manage to do good on a larger impact scale (quantity or quality), but if the unknown person on your street who fosters kittens is a great example, I’d love to hear about them too.
Mr. Rogers told me to look for the helpers in times of trouble. Tell me about your favorite helpers!
Yao Ming (an NBA basketball player) has, nearly single-handedly, saved the lives of tens of millions of sharks by simply asking citizens of China to stop eating shark fin soup. Since he started doing this, the price of shark fins has tanked, and 90+ percent of people surveyed in China support a ban on selling shark fins.
That is impressive! Sometimes you need a right figure to improve messaging.
James Christopher Harrison, a blood donor from Australia, who has saved over two million babies with his blood because it has properties which can treat rhesus disease.
Yep, 2.4 million estimated lives saved across 60 years of weekly donations. He’s the kind of human you write songs about. Retired from donating at doctors behest in 2018. I hope he inspired new donors.
Definitely a huge impact for one person. It’s amazing what the right genetic quirks and science can do!
Thank you for showing me this
Maybe before, but not these days. They take donations claiming to help abortion rights, but also quietly admit they can’t defend them. https://www.jezebel.com/satanic-temple-abortion-rights-religious-exemption-real-1849073332 https://queersatanic.com/the-satanic-temple-cannot-help-you-get-an-abortion-and-it-does-not-deserve-your-support/
Plus the Temple was sued for harassment of it’s members/advocates. The people were linking publicly accessible info about the Temple’s internal issues and then sued for libel and defamation. https://www.newsweek.com/orgies-harassment-fraud-satanic-temple-rocked-accusations-lawsuit-1644042
Then when Newsweek covered the lawsuit, they themselves were sued for libel, when they literally showed that a lawsuit for telling the truth was being made in courts. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2022cv01343/575138/27/ https://casetext.com/case/the-satanic-temple-inc-v-newsweek-magazine-llc-12
TL;DR: The Satanic Temple sues you for telling publicly known truths about itself, and then takes money that could go to actual help for abortion rights.
Large scale wise, Doctors without Borders, World Health Organization, and the organizations that help fight for/track sex trafficked people to liberate them.
And within the US (I’m sure there’s others, I’m a yank so my understanding of how things in Germany/Canada/China/South Africa go is often poor) there’s the Electric Frontier Foundation, Meals on Wheels, Planned Parenthood, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and a lot more that help most citizens and biological beings get the right to, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that isn’t actually given by any government.
Also Child’s Play and Make a Wish Foundation are pretty good for sick children to get some levity in a harsh childhood. I usually chip in some online donations/sale credits to Child’s Play and EFF so that they have entertainment when stuck in a hospital, and more digital rights for when they get out of it.
Elon Musk, of course!
“I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on earth. What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it - and what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil,” - Elon Musk
/s
This but unironically. Tesla put electric vehicles on the map. Starship will change humanity forever, and Neuralink is already helping patients.
He’s not perfect (but hey, Von Braun was worse), but at least he’s actually doing stuff that matters.
I get your point, but he didn’t create Tesla, he bought it (as far as I know). So it could be argued that these things would be happening with or without him. But with him, he’s giving electric cars (at least, that brand) a bad name.
Given the amount of his personal wealth he put into Tesla and the financial tricks he pulled to get further funding (if what is said in Elon Musk by Ashley Vance is true), then it seems likely that Tesla would have gone bankrupt without him. Maybe any rich person could have done it, and electric cars would always eventually be on the trajectory they are now, but he was the rich person that actually did it. He should get some credit for that, I think. But it is right that he didn’t create Tesla, and he should definitely stop implying that he did, I agree with that.
If he pulled his funding like he did with OpenAI, they would have found funding somewhere else (like OpenAI)
The only thing he does is invest in all manners of companies, and once one of them becomes successful, he pretends like he is a founder and sues the actual founders if they disagree. Or he pulls funding because they don’t want him to be the CEO.
Guy is an egomaniac that only invests to make it seem he is a cool guy on the internet.
Back then they had no cars at all though.
But yeah he’s not personally building the rockets and engines, but he’s still far, far better than 99% of politicians and oligarchs who are just using the same money to go to Epstein’s island etc.
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all I can hear is a big fat boot being licked very thoroughly
It’s actually hilarious that he mentions “people who care about looking good while doing evil” because that’s basically his entire existence.
The way he’s doing for the environment is controversial (i.e. unnecessary drama on social media and news, and this list is long)
I don’t think the Musk hate is completely justified. Yes, he has awful takes, and yes, some of his projects are stinkers. However, you can’t deny that his projects have done a net good for humanity. He made electric vehicles commercially viable and got legacy car manufacturers to make their own, made huge progress in decreasing the cost of space launches, and is giving underserved areas high-speed internet. Each of those is difficult to do on their own, and his companies have done them all simultaneously.
He setup hyperloop to get the funding that should have gone to the high speed rail network of California, and then let it go bankrupt in order to sell more cars.
Isn’t CHSR already funded?
Also, Hyperloop was the stinker I was referring to
Electric vehicles are part of the problem. Definitely not part of the solution. Personal cars are incompatible with any realistic sustainability target. He actively sabotaged the development of public infrastructure to make profit out of his stupid cars. He’s evil as fuck.
New electric and plug-in hybrids are still better than new gas cars, and those are easier sells than high-speed rail unfortunately. People still want their Ford F150s.
We have not made any real progress on passenger rail until Biden came into office with the exceptions of California and Florida. Unless you can link a good source, I don’t buy that Musk singlehandedly delayed nationwide high-speed rail projects.
Not nation-wide, but definitely in California and he claimed that himself. Anyway, if you want to dig deeper: https://disconnect.blog/the-hyperloop-was-always-a-scam/
I like to watch these rewilding, nature restoration or cleaning channels on YouTube. Like ocean cleanup, mossy earth etc.
I would stop fixating on who is doing the most good, like some kinda top 6 listicle of Humanity’s Most Positively Impactful Helpers, and just reach out to anyone who is helping.
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because help is multidimensional and we don’t know what metrics you personally consider more important (there is no objectivity here), 2) maybe I’m getting hung up on a word and have misunderstood you
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I appreciate your sentiment and hope you find a worthy cause to throw in with! :)
Oh it’s less a fixation and more an interest in scale of impact. There’s a lot of people out there who talk a big game but when you look at the results, they’re clearly underwhelming. Edit: or worse, they’re self-serving publicity not designed at all to do good. The blood donor in this thread is a great example of oversized impact, but that’s difficult to replicate. It does give good food for thought in terms of things to look for that could use more support.
The multidimensionality is why I didn’t provide any opening suggestions; I didn’t want to guide the answers. This was so that I might find some dimensions I had not previously considered, and I was curious about what metrics others use to measure “good” in the first place. Unfortunately Elon Musk as always proved to be a topic that generates more opinions.
Thanks for the support though. Honestly, there are a huge number of good choices already, more than I could ever dedicate enough to. I’m hopeful there are some gems out there that have potential to really offset some the vast quantity of suffering the world has to offer, this was just a small experiment in looking outside my own bubble of experience for them.
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FSF
