of course they should have. ok, here comes a diatribe. nobody understands tragedy or disaster of poverty. you dont solve it with canned foods and coat drives. nobody in america needs a coat, and the poor are fat. when people see the marathon organizers with pallets full of thousands of bottles of gatorade, and insist that it be sent to staten island, not only is that stealing (i paid 200+ for the marathon, foregners paid almost 400), the exact equivalent of yanking a necklace from a woman on the subway, it doent help anyone. when the local library collects water bottles and socks, it just goes to the a useless pile and nobody wants it. disaster are not solved with canned goods and coats. those are just waste. they get in the way because the red cross refuses to create negative PR by refusing them, but they dont want them and they hurt the cause. and yet the ocal news shows the marathon tents and pasta in central park and then contrasts it with a destroyed house on staten island. why not just show a rich person in a ferrari and and steal it from him to give to haiti? in any disaster, you should never give stuff. stuff is not scarce. distribution of stuff might be, but the stuff itself isnt scarce. new york is not bangladesh. there is a store on every corner that has more water bottles than anyone can drink. and the water in the tap is free and in infnte supply. the residenst of staten island stole my marathon water and they can open a fire hydrant and have enough fresh water to kill everyone with hypoanatremia. the way to solve problems is always economics. there is a reason why a basically identical earthquke kills 300K in hait, and only 500 in a developed area in chile. wealth solves problems. devatsated areas in staten island need builders and house repairs, not trucks silled with useless piles of clothing and canned shit. the marathon is 350 million for the city. more this year because for the first time ever, it was a nationally televised event. its the biggest marathon in the world and it would have raised huge money. but people wote editorials in the new york post, whish is total shit, saying "how can they run a race when we are pulling bodies from staten island?". first, only a few people died, mostly morons who refused evacuation orders. fuck them. overall the storm killed like 30 people? thats is basically nothing, this is a city of 8 million, where 20 people die per month in pedestrian accidents. when you donate money, the red cross shows up and sees a guy needs a coat, he gives him a check and the guy walks down the street and buys a coat from local merchant. everybody wins. when the marathon is cancelled and 50 thousand t shirts and bagels are donated, its 100 percent waste and everyone is worse off for the loss of the race revenue. and of coruse thousands of people spent months and hours and hours of miserable running thousands of miles to prepare for what is basically a huge charity even to help the city. but nope. idiots come on fascebook and theaten violence to runners and the media loves, it, so they push and push and the mayor knows its stupid to cancel it but the pressure s oeverwhelming. and mencken said it, democracy is the idea that people know what they want and they deserve to get it good an hard. fuck everyone, they deserve what they get. live on staten island, no insurance, no evacuation, cancel my fundraiser for you, fuck yourself, i hope you drown. so white people like me, we are so privileged, we are desperate to justify it to ourselves. we solve this in two ways : religion, which rides our guilt hard to use us for evil, or charity, which is almost always useless. the coats we donate end up in trash bags in the rain clogging up the recovery process. donating canned goods to anything is completely counterproductive because the value of the food is less than the value of distribution. so i have two solutions to the problem of guilt that humans are troubled by: 1. donate blood. its really needed and a scarce thing, unlike food or stuff. 2. alcoholism. also donating your time is stupid. like when a lawyer goes to the food bank, that is ridiculous when he could work one hour and earn enough to hire 5 mexicans (that want jobs)to work for hours in the food bank. its grossly inefficient to volunteer your time. just donate a day;s pay and hire an army to work. so never donate time or goods to anyting, its terrible and makes things worse.
I feel like I agree with martin on everything about Tebow yet our eccentric debate styles make it more like an intense argument. I even agree that the media has warped my feeble mind. Not that ESPN makes Tebow appear to be talented as a QB, but just that he is worthy of being discussed. I will get back to donating blood starting next week. I had been holding it against them for always calling my cell from different (local) numbers and tricking me into answering.
you are not kidding about that one. i donate platelets and they call me so much i quit. i wish i could donate anonymously and not be called but they are relentless and i show my donor card every time and they have records of me so they always try and try and call and call and text. damn them. last time i gave platelets the needle wasn't my arm right and i complained and they thought was just whining. the next day my entire forearm below my elbow was bright purple, they had filled it up with blood after spinning out my platelets. there is a tebow story in the daily news here, every day. for a backup! and not even a backup, a hybrid special teams player! the real backup is greg mcelroy, who is a pro style QB.
Glad I'm not the only one that quit donating after the blood people kept stalking me. I donated regularly until they started that shit. Now I don't donate out of pure spite. I'll go give at the hospital if someone I know is in an accident or something, but screw the blood bank for being stalkers. I know that's a terrible attitude but they should really be more appreciative to the people that were kind enough to give in the first place.
In the interest of going completely off topic, here a delightful article about how white people are self serving an condescending in times of tragedy http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/n...se-a-new-york-divide.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
And remember when I called the tebow story and the media obsession with it, the kardashianification of sports? It is as if I wrote this article here http://deadspin.com/5929361/how-esp...-skip-bayless-to-the-bottom-a-tim-tebow-story Espn is shit. The market is wide open for a network with intelligent sports coverage.
i havent really paid attention well enough to know, but i think they have gotten worse. if it has to do with the yankees, the cowboys, tebow, sandusky, or something else terrible, it will get 24 hour coverage on espn. espn is basically unwatchable when a story about these things is happening. local coverage (like SNY in new york and presumably other regional networks like MASN and NESN) are vastly superior. not sure but i think fox sports is also awful. there needs to be a network for sports fans who are not toolbags.
