"The United Nations is a transparently antisemitic organisation"
- Google Co Founder
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/08/sergey-...
Like greedy Brin here has donated around $4B to charity that has gone to all manner of public good. Philanthropic organizations like his tend to be pretty efficient with getting good bang for their buck.
Had he given it to the government, which I'm sure you would call reason for celebration, well some of it would have gone to helping people directly, but most would have gone into protracted bureaucracy where just the rind ends up at the final objective. I'm actually pretty sure you yourself could write a decent list of government expenses that you would not want that money to go to.
In fact if you wrote a list of things that you would like it to go to, I'm pretty confident it would have very high overlap with what Brin does give to.
So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?
Alright, lets give it a try:
- Wealth Tax
- Taxes of all sorts and kinds
What percentage of overlap do we have? I have a feeling it's zero.
> So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?
We're trying to call out that working against a wealth tax because it'd impact you personally (since you're wealthy), is greedy behavior and greed is generally something most humans want to reduce, just like most of us wants less violence. We call people who favor greed and violence "bad people".
$4B out of $250B = +1.6% tax rate
And total over all years, not annual.
So no, charity fig leaf doesn't cover being a dick and fighting a meaningful wealth tax.
Out of ~40 million people in California, the impact of this tax seems to be about ~250 individuals. If they were considering users of their products and services, wouldn't that amount of users compared to the entire user base, be considered almost a rounding error?
The quality of argumentation here. “Wealth tax therefore good” “just pass it even though it’s shitty, who cares.”
How many bad laws are on the books and now it’s nearly impossible to claw them back?
$100m (focused on a single issue!) buys a lot of influence.
It's a problem that extends far beyond this one example, but this one example is a good example.
It was dismaying to see this flagged so fast. When I reached out to the moderators about it they felt that it should remain flagged for reasons that seemed dubious and inconsistent imho.
Semites are also e.g. Arabs. It comes from linguistic science and denotes people speaking Hebraic, Arabic or new-Aramaic languages. Look up the philologist August Ludwig von Schlözer who coined the term if that is new to you.
Also, criticizing a country is something very normal.
When one criticizes the Japan of 1930 to 1945 ... was this anti-zen? Or anti-nipponic? Or was it about their government?
When one criticizes the Syria of 1971-1924 ... what this anti-islamistic? Or anti-arabic? Or was it about their government, specifically their dictator?
When one criticizes the Israel of recent times ... is this anti-jewish? Or anti-semitic? Or is it about their government and various movements in said country?
It's only when we criticize the Israel government that suddenly people intermix politics with religion. And also with belonging to long extinct tribe groups. Or that they blame e.g. a synagogue congregation in Denmark with human-right violations of Israel settlers. Suddenly people stop being able to differentiate.
I see that there are countries that are anti-jewish (like Iran). And Persians aren't Semites, so maybe they are also anti-semitic, I can't judge this. But neither Iran nor Yemen or other puppet-organizations like the Hezbollah rule the UN. I'm quite sure that they can't even nudge the UN.
So claiming that the UN is anti-semitic is un-factional. I have seen zero evidence, and the people claiming this haven't brought up any evidence. The most they can bring up is that some UN sub-organization doesn't do the exact bidding of the current Israel government. Or that some UN sub-organization has the occasional mole or spy amongst them ... but hey, I don't want to know how many organizations have the odd moles or spy from the Mossad in them. That doesn't make them wholly israel-controlled.