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[+] -7 points 1 day ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Funny how people like you never post a source for their own claims.

    Oh another thing I want to remind you. If you got a COVID vaccine or survived the pandemic because people around you got theirs, you owe a thank-you to Dolly. Her million-dollar early donation, when the First Trump Reich was still denying and stalling, jumpstarted the research and got other funds rolling in.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I hate to agree with you, but I do on one point: the $500 million charity estimate is sourced from a Facebook post. Their source could be their own arse for all we know.

    https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=872015621886912&id=NirfoxOfficial

    Did Dolly Parton help fund charities and make sizable financial donations? Unquestionably. Did she donate $500M or more over her lifetime? Unknown as I can't find any legitimate sources that quantify her total charitable expenditures.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago

    I can’t find any legitimate sources that quantify her total charitable expenditures

    And you probably never will. I can speak anecdotally on that she gave us $3500 to get our truck fixed for our mutual aid project to keep delivering water to the southern coal fields of West Virginia. She didn't publicize it, and she didn't ask us to do anything one way or the other in terms of saying where they money came from. She just saw that we were helping people and helped us do it.

    I think we can, and should, be critical of that the charity model she chose was less helpful than mutual aid models, but I certainly can't find it in my heart to say that she built her empire and put her money towards what she put it toward out of pure selfish greed. To my eyes she got enough money to always protect herself forever from the horrifying traumatic poverty she grew up in, and then looked around her lifeboat, saw other people drowning, and got to work not just pulling people into her lifeboat but helping others build their own.

    Again. There are definite critiques to be made about how she went about doing that since I think she overshot her protection mark by a margin and didn't create durable mechanisms to survive her death, thus potentially creating a vacuum now that she's gone. But I don't think being a scold will help. I think trying to train the next abjectly impoverished person with some talent how to build out better than Dolly did will go a lot farther.

    When you scold Dolly Parton, all the people who really got helped see is you saying that the person who inspired them to get to helping isn't worth drawing inspiration from. It's disheartening, and that's why that other poster is getting downvoted so hard I think. Instead of virtue signaling that we hate rich people, let's instead model that we help people, and use opportunities like Dolly's shortcomings as a dedicated helper to educate the next generation of helpers to be more robust, resilient, and daring than any of us ever dreamed was possible when we were struggling with poverty.

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