Three Charities That Don’t Deserve Your Money

This is the concluding post of the PBH series Choose Another Charity, comprised of 3 articles on the Salvation Army, MADD, and ChildFund.

Salvation Army [Editor’s note: For a vigorous debate on the Salvation Army, see the comment section of the original article]

Everyone knows the Salvation Army. Whether it’s the secondhand goods at their thrift stores or their collection kettles outside department stores, the Salvation Army is ubiquitous to the holiday season.

However, the Salvation Army’s virulent opposition to gay rights both in public and through persistent legislative lobbying raises the question how donations intended for the needy are being spent. Many people forget that the Salvation Army is in fact an Evangelical church, and as such, it tends to have a hard-right social agenda.

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Family Values In America

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Dylan In Mozambique

Bacon is good for me!

Ever since YouTube added the comment rating system, it’s been so much easier to find the diamonds in the rough piles of shit that are 99% of YouTube comments. And because of this I found the greatest quote ever, attached to this equally great video. Enjoy.

“He’s very articulate for a child and has a southern accent. And is fat.”

EDIT: OMFG there is a Facebook group

Fur Coat Revolutionaries (How Humanitarian Assistance Isn’t Humanitarian)

The Article: Alms Dealers: Can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating conflicts? by Philip Gourevitch, published in October by the New Yorker.

The Text: In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid, visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie, withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pictures alongside harrowing reportage for days on end. Soon, the story got picked up by newspapers all over the world. More photographers made their way to Biafra, and television crews, too. The civil war in Nigeria was the first African war to be televised. Suddenly, Biafra’s hunger was one of the defining stories of the age—the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience—and the humanitarian-aid business as we know it today came into being.

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