1. Yeah, and this is TOTALLY how to get everyone in SL behind it... not. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/01/second_life_poverty/

Posted at 9:51AM on Dec 1st 2006 by Kris

2. I'd be much more motivated knowing how I can help rather than feeling like I'm being intimidated or guilted into doing something. An awful lot of these children are dying due to the coruption of their evil governments and many aid shipments in the worst of these countries are intercepted and used to keep the wealthy there wealthy.

Poverty won't end because of people in SL donating a few hundred thousand Lindens. Poverty will end when technology and science provides a way for the poorest of the poor to get clean, cheap water, cheap medicine, cheap food, cheap clothing and cheap shelter. The initiative to give the world's poor children a laptop computer is one step in the right direction.

Caring people won't end poverty (though we can all help put a dent in it and help alleviate some suffering). People like the guy giving micro-loans to the poor and companies developing crops that can grow almost anywhere and scientists working on nanotechnology eventually will.

If you want to eliminate poverty tell the US government to drop its suspicion of science and educate our children to become scientists and engineers. Tell fundamentalist countries to treat women as equals. Give young men in the Middle East a reason to live besides killing their neighbors. Tell China to free its people.

Support science. Support technology. Support education. Support freedom.

Posted at 10:57AM on Dec 1st 2006 by Tad McConachie

3. It's important to recognize that there is a real world outside of the virtual expanse.

However, I find it somewhat galling that an organization would choose to target people who play MMOGs. The real world is full of egregious examples of horrific waste thousands of times more significant than anything going on in a MMOG. Over $400 billion a year is spent feeding the American war machine, but darn it, it's all those wasteful virtual world geeks who are responsible for world poverty!

Uhm, yeah, right. How about targeting people who earn over $1 billion a year? "Over 5 billion people have starved since you started screwing the average citizen out of their salary". Or putting up big signs outside major military contractors saying "Over 20 billion children have died since you started building things to blow up people!"

It makes me wonder how much thought actually goes into these things- apparently, not as much as I put into writing this blog response.

Posted at 11:24AM on Dec 1st 2006 by Tomas_Hausdorff

4. My own bitchy comments about this really poorly considered idea:

http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2006/12/global_poverty_.html

Posted at 3:53PM on Dec 1st 2006 by Rik Riel

5. For once, Rik Riel and even FlipperPA who has disses on SC and Prokofy Neva all agree about one thing: this is a stupid-ass idea for 100 reasons.

It springs from a deeply flawed Marxist ideology that says you must "expropriate from the expropriators" -- two false concepts wrapped in a lie. We don't cause children's death, their kleptocratic governments do. And given the fragile nature of these conflict-ridden zones where most child deaths occur, if you suddenly made all the children live, you'd face another set of even more daunting problems: how to cure the great percentage of them who will get AIDS; who to keep some of them from joining armed rebel bands that rape and pillage and murder, including their own families; and how to get some of them educated -- and after you were done with all that, and figured out how to feed them and get them innoculated -- find them jobs.

Segregating out children from the complex miseries of a least-developed-nation is a way of pandering to emotions but it's just plain fucked. You have to be more holistic about solving the whole society's problems, but also not be abstract and utopian. There's some really basic things to be done. For example, getting people educated enough to accept the germ theory of disease and stop shitting in their water supply and also figuring out how to get cleaner water supplies -- working on water and the politics of water and funding those campaigns that do that might be a more rational thing to do with charity dollars, or working on education of women and girlsl and strengthening women's rights through CARE, etc.

These kinds of guilt-tripping campaigns are about trying to put small bands of radicals in power -- I expose them heartily.

Posted at 6:07PM on Dec 2nd 2006 by Prokofy Neva