6:11 More Stupid Human Tricks
While waiting for his water to boil, Gareth surfed his feeds on his phone. On one of his favourite sites, libertariansocialismgonewild.org, he stumbled across a piece that made him smile.
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A comment appearing after a CBC.ca article talking about a billionaire suing Forbes for miscalculating his wealth:
A brilliant example of what is wrong with this world.
No worries, there’s only a few million starving right now … and a few million more suffering without medical assistance.
While I sympathize with the reasoning behind the this comment, I find it, well, ironic, that the thing that is most wrong to teh commenter is the billionaire doing the stupid things that billionaires do while the commenter him-(or her-) self seems to think there are only a few million people suffering in the world. If one is willing to stretch few to mean 925 then they might be more accurate.
In round numbers there are 7 billion people in the world. Thus, with an estimated 925 million hungry people in the world, 13.1 percent, or almost 1 in 7 people are hungry.
Personally I think the thing that’s wrong with the world is that the numbers have gotten too big. We cant really comprehend the disaster that we are living in so we in the privileged world just reduce the size of the problem so we can wrap our minds around it then end up marginalizing it because it doesn’t seem so significant any more. And yes, I do it too…
Just my 2 cents.
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“Huh,” he thought, “Be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth — or keyboard— into gear.”