Friday 18 November 2011

You Philanthropic Bastards

Hello there, you ugly, ugly people.

As for the recent assault on your self-esteems the only real explanation for it that I can comes in three points:
a) I'm feeling rather satirical of recent,
b) It's a pretty good way of getting your attention and,
c) You're all horrible, disgusting, sinful people. Probably.

I should probably think more about my target audience. Wait. No. Damn you media course, getting me to think like a businessman...

For the sake of structure and what not, today's post comes to you in two parts, the first being an alluded and slightly ironic attempt to beg you and the second being a criticism of some of the behaviour of a certain number of charities nowadays.

First part! So for a while I've not been updating my blog posts much under the reasoning of me having a super secret amazing project that I couldn't tell you about, but now I can! 

So over the summer I spent a lot of my time blogging or looking through blogs and reading blogs and looking at the history of blogging, how it relates to other forms of writing, wondering profusely what people did before blogging, that sort of thing, and something occurred to me.

On the 'blogosphere' there are a ton of amazingly talented people - whether they are not far off of being able to write professionally or whether they found that they are better at something else and just never got round to it. So what was stopping these people from using their powers for good, writing a book, helping charities? I'm kind of pointing rather obliquely towards my point here but anyway - I wanted to use as little of everybody's time as possible to unleash the power of the blogosphere, and do some amazing work for charity.

Hence - The Thought Report! I got together 12 amazing bloggers from around the world (Me included, obvsly) to pool their skills and write about what happened in the last 12 months - whether it's a satirical piece, or a serious thoughtful piece, or simply giving you some awesome facts. Then I wanted to step it up - I wanted to get all their thoughts on the past year printed, into a nicely bound book that would be sold to raise money for an amazing charity (More information on the website) when it gets sold to all our amazing minions fans who want to use some of their Christmas money to spend some holiday cheer (It's being released in December, see what I did there?). 

Glad I got that out the way. What? You mean I need to write a second part about charity? Oh ball-sacks.

So today is Children in Need day, which is a pretty big thing in Britain where everybody gets together and do stupid s**t to raise money for children... in... well, need. I guess it doesn't take much explaining. 

But the explaining isn't what I want to do, I want to strip straight through to the criticising part.

And don't worry, it's not just applicable to CIN, so put down the machete Pudsey, you fluffy yellow bastard.

Every time there's a charity event big enough to get on television, it seems that the only way that they can get you to donate your hard earned benefits is to guilt trip the absolute balls out of you. 'Yeah, we'll give you a night of entertainment, but only if you sit through slow motion pictures of sad children every ten minutes'. Yeah, that.

Maybe this is the only way for people to give money to charity, maybe we all need to be skull-f**ked with sad images to want to do something nice for the world around us, but my point is this - isn't that terrible? Isn't it bad that we can't just want to help people? Isn't that missing the point?

Whenever I give money to charity or volunteer, or run an amazing project, I don't do it because I masochistically blasted myself with videos of starving Africans, it's because I thought it was a good idea, and it helped people - and strike me down if it's strange, but I like spending my time doing that. 

When you give money to charity, or help out at a charity event, which you should do right now you greedy bastards, don't do it out of sympathy. Why? Because I told you to. Do it to do something good for the world around you, and appreciate the gesture, the power of your movements. Some people can write a book to help people, some of us just have to settle with change - but don't do it out of guilt, do it out of love.

-Lewis
Jesus Christ that sounded fucking soppy. Better bust out some well-placed swearwords to re-acclimatise you shitheads. Douche sack.

2 comments:

  1. Yay thought report! I'm writing my articles, I promise. I'm just really fricking busy as of late. But I will get them to you, promise!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am your humble minion.
    ...and by "minion" I mean "fan who will buy your book."

    misstapir.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete