> I have no idea how you can say that helping people in one area "has nothing to do with" helping people in another.
That one's easy: what tangible benefit will people suffering from the events of the Boston Marathon get from a donation to Watsi? None? Then it has nothing to do with it.
People are indeed suffering the world over. Objectively it would be better if people who want to do something donated to Watsi instead of wringing their hands, praying/sending thoughts, and reloading cnn.com. But people are not objective and trying to steal this kind of attention for your own cause is highly insensitive.
Also, it comes off as crass and tasteless and generally won't work. Except on people who can keep their objectivity in this situation, which categorically aren't the ones pg is trying to reach. So this is crass, tasteless, highly insensitive, and ineffective.
> That one's easy: what tangible benefit will people suffering from the events of the Boston Marathon get from a donation to Watsi? None? Then it has nothing to do with it.
This is becoming pure wordplay now. Sure, if you take the vague phrase "something to do with" and redefine it more specifically as "provides tangible benefits to", then you'd be right. But who gives you the authority to redefine it so? PG made the relation clear in his tweet: "When terrible things happen to people I can't help, I ... help people I can." In other words, he uses tragedies as a reminder to donate to the less fortunate.
Seems pretty simple to me.
As for the rest of your post, it seems that your argument rests on the belief that PG's tweet didn't cause anyone to donate. If so, your argument fails, because some people did donate as a result of PG's tweet (or at least claimed to).
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that, instead, your argument rests on the belief that getting a few people to donate is not worth causing offense to others. In that case, I would denounce your argument is immature, selfish, and immoral. I would gladly give offense to 10 or 20 people (and tell them to get over themselves) if it caused 1 person to donate to Watsi.
Lastly, you haven't provided any evidence why people should be offended. I completely disagree that anything PG did was crass, insensitive, or tasteless. Au contraire, I think you are the one mistaken for interpreting it that way. You've misappropriated an arbitrary societal rule for reasons you likely cannot defend.
My argument rests on the belief that attempting to exploit a tragedy to grab attention for your unrelated interests is socially offensive. I cannot conceive of how you gleaned the interpretation you did, but that you did suggests that actual meaningful conversation here is fundamentally impossible.
This has been pure wordplay for quite a while. My mistake was engaging the hive in defense mode.
> attempting to exploit a tragedy to grab attention for your unrelated interests
"exploit": False. PG does not benefit from people donating to Watsi. What he's doing is quite literally the opposite of exploitation: persuading people to give money to others.
"unrelated interests": I've already debunked this, as did PG in his tweet. A terrible event occurred. This has caused people to become abnormally empathetic toward their fellow man. PG is encouraging people to channel that empathy into a good cause however they can.
The belief your argument rests on consists entirely of falsehoods.
See, even more wordplay. You're picking the definitions of my words that make it easiest to argue with them, then knocking down the straw man you've constructed. That in any given response only a fraction of my statements are cited supports this.
Hurray, you've successfully countered an argument I wasn't making! I suppose congratulations are in order, though I'm at a loss as to why.
And you're intentionally keeping your arguments vague, which makes it impossible for me attack them, then refusing to clarify in your response. "Exploit" and "unrelated" are very common words, and the definitions I took were the most common ones. If you're going to use obscure definitions to prove your point, the onus is on you to clarify. Until you do, the fact the remains that PG was not "exploiting" the event, nor was his recommendation "unrelated", and you have no justifiable reason for taking offense.
That one's easy: what tangible benefit will people suffering from the events of the Boston Marathon get from a donation to Watsi? None? Then it has nothing to do with it.
People are indeed suffering the world over. Objectively it would be better if people who want to do something donated to Watsi instead of wringing their hands, praying/sending thoughts, and reloading cnn.com. But people are not objective and trying to steal this kind of attention for your own cause is highly insensitive.
Also, it comes off as crass and tasteless and generally won't work. Except on people who can keep their objectivity in this situation, which categorically aren't the ones pg is trying to reach. So this is crass, tasteless, highly insensitive, and ineffective.