A Critical Examination of Bill Gates' Philanthropic Record 370
sam_handelman writes "The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record. His philanthropic efforts may turn out to be not as altruistic as one may think. Edweek, not ordinarily an unfriendly venue for Gates, is running a series of blog post/investigative journalism pieces into what the Gates' foundation is doing, and how it is not always well received by stakeholders."
Not a strong case (Score:5, Insightful)
While it seems credible that some money comes back to Bill Gates, they aren't making a strong case that this would actually be his goal. AFAIK he's getting poorer (less rich) rather than richer now. Also, he would have very little incentive to get even more money other than to pump it back into the foundation. This article does not convince me that this isn't real charity and AFAIK many projects have also been very effective and helpful.
a problem with large nonprofits in general (Score:4, Insightful)
Large nonprofit organizations get increasingly likely to be run in questionable ways. The most common failing, of course, is just the usual inefficiency and bureaucracy. But when you're moving around millions or billions of dollars, opportunities for personal interest and corruption are around many corners. As this article notes, nonprofit-corporate partnerships may benefit corporate shareholders, depending on how the partnership is structured (who fronts the money, who benefits, what long-term effects are generated, etc.). And even at levels below official big partnerships, there are always decisions being made: using a contractor here or there, adopting one technology or methodology over another one, etc. It's just really hard to move around billions of dollars without an array of consequences, sometimes intended and sometimes not (and sometimes intended by some people and not intended by others).
So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like Edweek is complaining that the Gates Foundation channels its money through private enterprises to achieve its goals instead of corrupt African dictatorships?
Why do people think they have a voice in how a private not-for-profit spends their money? The Gates Foundation does a lot of good. This seems like a lot of knocking down the guy on top.
What's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
From what I read, instead of handing out money directly.. which just leads to corruption, he is leveraging it in a way that prevents the money from being abused. Free money never works when it comes to aid son.
Re:All charity ends (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the money supposed to come from, tooth fairies?
This is a story about how philanthropic Bill Gates is, so yeah, the money comes from him. That's the whole point of charity -- you give away portions of your wealth for a cause.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Donor nations were shocked last month, when UNICEF disclosed that it has been forced to pay artificially elevated prices for vaccines under an arrangement called the Advance Market Commitment, which was brokered by Gates Foundation-dominated GAVI alliance, to greatly increase drug company profits. Stakeholders also worry that industry reports of particular vaccine's effectiveness might be skewed by marketing goals.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proves once again that leopards dont change their spots.
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a bad hatchet-job.
For example, it demonizes the Gates Foundation for having some partnerships with Monsanto. Without discussing the details of the actual partnership, and the expected status quo, and the change the partnership creates.
It effectively creates a vast conspiracy of things the author doesn't like. And then blames them on the Gates foundation, because it does some things they don't like. Like their portfolio is in a double-blind trust that can own stock in evil corporations like coca-cola. Which is a fair criticism, buried in the middle of a paragraph halfway down the page. There is some content in here, but it's either buried or so biased that it is like listening to Noam Chomsky.
And it mentions leverage like it's a dirty word.
The quality of slashdot is really going downhill when this kind of thing makes it onto the page.
Re:Speak for yourself, bucko (Score:5, Insightful)
So, do I need to RTFA to have that confirmed, or is that pretty much the gist of it?
Hey, I've got an idea. Try RTFA.
I know, new here etc etc...
Re:All charity ends (Score:3, Insightful)
And that is what I am talking about, if you build an entire business out of charity, you should make it profitable, you should be able to show that your management costs are very low and that the money that the charity is providing is mostly making it to the actual recipients of whatever the benefit is, and if you can show that, then you can run the charity as a business by hiring people and advertising the fact that you are a very efficient charity and those who want to donate to that cause should do it through you rather than through other charity groups, because you are the most efficient in it.
Only donating your own money is one thing and it always ends, one person's resources are not limited. Creating a steady stream of donations by running a successful charity business is another.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet people have been denying this from day one on the phrase of "oh it's philanthropic".
If someone can't figure out that working with Glaxosmithkline, Monsanto and Coca Cola (who happily works with Cargill, as if they aren't bad enough on their own) might be a bad thing, then they deserve to have a fast one pulled on them by the Gates foundation.
Maybe now people will realize that Bill Gates didn't step down to do "Great things for the world". He stepped down to continue the Microsoft concept of business and expand it *further*, outside of the US's reach.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Foundations are tax shields (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, please, that's just complete bullshit.
I'm assuming you didn't actually read the article? Perhaps you read the careful research in the primary source:
http://www.ghwatch.org/sites/www.ghwatch.org/files/D3_0.pdf [ghwatch.org]
Pharmaceutical companies make third world dictatorships look like Finland.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
Re:All charity ends (Score:2, Insightful)
In an inflationary environment created by the government the real return on interest is negative.
Billionaire businessman favours businesses. Gasp. (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't he realise that he is just supposed to pump money into Africa and hope that amongst the missile launchers and the AK47s, someone manages to smuggle in some penicillin?
Are we supposed to be shocked that a man who made a huge fortune in the private sector, favours a private sector approach when he is trying to get shit done?
Re:Not Me (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It would be crazy to try to solve disease by creating research facilities in Africa, when there isn't the infrastructure or educational standard to support to work. Cures will develop much faster in developed nations.
2. Ditto with American drug companies - which African ones are large and stable enough to handle the work?
3. You're describing aid programmes with your alien tech analogy, which are flawed for the reason you give. That's not how the Gates Foundation works. I can only speak to their agricultural development work, but it is not similar to an aid programme - they invest heavily in R&D geared towards specific high-impact goals. They are investing the money where they think it will have the highest impact per dollar spent.
4. I agree about the fundamental problems in Africa, but those aren't the remit of the foundation. They are about developing technological solutions, not about steering political and economic change, which is much less concrete and difficult to engineer. Frankly, whether or not you think it's the major problem, the tech is needed.
5. MONSANTO DO NOT USE TERMINATOR GENES. NOBODY DOES. It's crazy how many people have this idea, but there have never been seed with terminator genes on the market from any company. The technology *was* developed to an early stage by the USDA and a small agro company, who were later bought out by Monsanto. Monsanto made a public commitment to abandon the terminator technology when they acquired the company.
The simple fact is that the Green Revolution worked in Asia, it raised nearly 1.5 billion people out of frequent famine. Whether or not it created a perfect system, it got massive humanitarian results. It couldn't have happened if it didn't leverage existing infrastructure including plant breeding and seed companies, as well as agrochemical producers.. The same is true of Africa - if agricultural production is to be massively increased there within a reasonable timeframe, it needs to be done using the best infrastructure we have available, which includes having the world's major seed companies involved in seed production.
Re:All charity ends (Score:3, Insightful)
The money is supposed to come from people who selflessly give money and time out of compassion to help others, not to make a profit. That's why charities in the US are almost always non-profit organizations.
You think otherwise, because you are an autistic narcissist. Every time you post [slashdot.org] something on Slashdot, especially when you start the discussion [slashdot.org], you demonstrate the precisely inhuman way to act.
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like BP oil spill levels of accountability?
Well, maybe you mean union carbide in Bhopal?
People are people, the only difference between private and public is that at some point you might be able to vote to impact the nature of a public policy.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Until the US government got involved, running US healthcare strictly as a business left millions of us to get sick, stay sick and die, without preventive or responsive care available. That left many millions of other people to stay trapped in a sick home, unable to live fully, work properly or contribute economically or educationally.
Since the time the US government got involved in a coordinated way, through Medicaid and Medicare, the large majority of the population has been freed from the worst afflictions, healthwise and otherwise. Meanwhile the expanded healthcare economy has completely transformed health science and practice.
You and your fellow "libertarian" corporate anarchists would return us to the bad old days. Next you'll tell us war is good for the economy, so we should have more of what ruins us.
Re:All charity ends (Score:2, Insightful)
I peaked at what you wrote, and there's this:
In a free market economy, the unemployment is very low, anybody with a job can afford * health care and insurance, because those services are very cheap, just like they were prior to 1965 **.
That's obvious bullshit. The introduction of very expensive diagnosis machines (MRI, gene readup and the like) and treatments (artificial organs, radiation treatments) push costs up. Probably hospital infrastructure's more expensive now, doctors more trained etc. Also patients want the best possible care whenever they realize their life and health is at stake. Best possible care today is expensive.
Trying to use the logic of supply and demand to determine prices is doomed to fail here. If I'm healthy, my demand for chemotherapy is zero. If I'm dying, my demand is infinite. Plug those into your equations and see.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it worked so great that in 1965 all kinds of things would have been a death sentence that are now done on an outpatient basis.
Even in a perfect free market land if you get a disease that so few people have that no money can ever be made on a cure you are totally screwed.
Even worse is that short term profit motives will slow research to a crawl on all but the most profitable sectors of drug research. We would be able to have 40 kinds of pecker medicine and not much else.
What's the point of this article? (Score:4, Insightful)
To prove the Bill & Melinda Foundation isn't perfectly run? To suggest it's a sinister organisation perhaps?
There's no love for billg here that's for sure but poo-pooing his attempts (however imperfect) at doing good in the world is just petty.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Shout all you like that the problem with health care is the US government, nobody can hold up an example country with fully privatized health care which is being run well (Well as in, people dont die early or have to live with treatable health problems for lack of income, not well as in it makes corporates boatload of money).
I hear what you are saying, and I tend to agree with you (having been in Japan, I know what good health care is, and how bad we have it here in the USA.) However, @roman_mir does have a point. Fully privatized health care DID work.
The problem here is not whether health care is privatized, or whether other countries have better health care systems with some type of government intervention. The root of the problem is the collusion of government and health care firms, which have created a self-perpetuating carcinogenic mass of middle man sitting between the patient and the physician.
Not all private enterprises are created equal. There are those that compete freely (with price controls dictated by supply and demand), and there are cartels. Two solutions to the problem exist:
1. Have a government-sponsored health care system as found in Japan or Germany
2. Have the goverment dismantle the health care middlemen cartels, forcing them to compete freely.
Either one will work, and both require goverment intervention of some form. People need to stop looking at goverment vs private enterprise as if both formed a zero-sum game, a black-n-white, matter-antimatter dichotomy. They are not. Such parrochial black-n-white window painting serve well to pander simple solutions to the simple-minded masses on both sides of the political fence, but that's the extend of its usability.
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's not what Edweek's writer is complaining about. They're complaining that Gates' foundation is doing quite a lot of harm for private benefit. It specifically points out how African doctors, not dictators, are watching patients die because Gates forces healthcare to work only on what benefits Gates, rather than any of the other medicine that could save lives. Gates sucks all the oxygen out of the room, and people literally die from it.
I don't see how you can miss the many examples the article points out. You really should either read it again, or explain what vested interest (financially or ideologically) you have that makes you unable to notice it.
Re:So basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you're just blurting out whatever your ideology tells you, with no actual knowledge or experience of African healthcare, government or economy. Nor do you evidently care about African people, since you're more interested in standing against them out of ideology than just looking into it before defending the people being harmed.
Re:Not Me (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be crazy to try to solve disease by creating research facilities in Africa, when there isn't the infrastructure or educational standard to support to work. Cures will develop much faster in developed nations.
Not all of Africa is warlords and mud huts. Are you racist, or is this just typical ignorance?
Ditto with American drug companies - which African ones are large and stable enough to handle the work?
!American != African. Logic fail, kid.
I can only speak to their agricultural development work, but it is not similar to an aid programme - they invest heavily in R&D geared towards specific high-impact goals.
And draw human and logistic resources away from other goals that health care professionals are already working on.
I agree about the fundamental problems in Africa, but those aren't the remit of the foundation.
Right, if your goal is to spread the dominance of Big Pharma, you don't have to worry about whether people are dying faster than you can vaccinate them. You just give out a bunch of vaccinations, declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and move on.
MONSANTO DO NOT USE TERMINATOR GENES. NOBODY DOES
Yes, actually, this is one of the world's great tragedies. The terminator genes can never do worse than decrease yields, and in exchange they would prevent other farmers' fields from being contaminated with Monsanto's IP, which would prevent Monsanto from stealing their land. In fact, we should have demanded that every GMO plant ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD be modified with Monsanto's terminator gene. The down side, bad seed practices. The up side? No accidentally saving seed and getting assraped by Monsanto.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
Well, I agree most with your last sentence. 8^)
I've worked for and with NGOs and non-profits large and small, from UN agencies to universities to the independent think tank where I am now. Let me assure you that the death-knell of any non-profit is to have it taken over by someone who claims it needs to run more like a business.
Profit-making and non-profit organisations are very different in their nature and -more importantly- their culture. They each have a million ways to fail, but here's the key: Non-profit organisations can and must measure success by something other than financial returns. This impacts every single aspect of its work. It sometimes means that you can (and should) spend more time on seemingly pointless details getting things just right. It sometimes means that you work on things that you know have a high chance of failure, but you take them on precisely because no profit-making outfit can't afford the risk.
The killer on both sides of the equation, though, is complacency and power. Allow either to become too apparent and the same sociopathic personalities begin to appear at the head of the organisation. And though they die in different ways, their death is a painful spectacle. Non-profits, especially those with guaranteed budgets, get over-run by careerist know-nothings who spend more time agonising over their per diems and life-saving meetings [blogspot.com.au] than actually thinking about what they're supposed to be achieving.
In profit-making ventures, the organisations get overrun by strategic thinking business-school types who spend more time plotting strategy and market position than actually running the fricking company.
Non-profits die like old oak trees: They rot from the inside; they remain standing for far longer than they should, providing shade for a few but hosting an increasing army of parasites.
Profit-making companies die by fire. They remain standing until the first lightning strike, then collapse in flames, sometimes taking half the countryside with them.
Re:Foundations are tax shields (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a hard time believing that it's entirely a scam. If you are going to buy a billion doses of vaccine, there is no "little pharma" or local sources equipped to deal with you. Big Pharma is the only choice, unless he wants to spend half the money building a factory and risk becoming Big Pharma himself.
I don't expect GSK to change their spots, and I'm not surprised that they're taking advantage of the situation, but at these scales the Gates Foundation has to deal with the giant - even when the giant is part of the original problem.
Re:All charity ends (Score:2, Insightful)
All of this 'run it like a business' stuff is misplaced, becase it is always meant as 'like a for profit business'. It is misplaced when applied to government and misplaced when applied to charities.
A for profit business has the single goal of making a profit. At whenever mean necessary, and even if that means is illegal, as long as the profit exceeds the penalty it should be done. No matter the external harm. If distilled down all decisions at the business should be about profit: who to hire; who to fire; changes to the product; which congressmen to lobby; etc.
If the goal is to just be efficient and mindful of the purpose of the organization's existence when making decision, there is no need use for profit businesses as a model. Efficiency isn't their exclusive domain nor are a lot of them even good at it. Look at pre-bailout GM, who could possibly consider them efficient?
People run their households in an efficient manner every day. You don't burn your furniture to heat your house.
Re:Not Me (Score:4, Insightful)
Not all of Africa is warlords and mud huts. Are you racist, or is this just typical ignorance?
I never suggested it was. The quality of biological research in most African nations is so bad as to be meaningless when compared with developed countries. It makes no sense to try to tackle the biggest biological challenges of the century using the worst labs and worst educated researchers in the world. It's a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless. It's got nothing to do with race.
!American != African. Logic fail, kid.
I oversimplified in response to parent, but this was your logic fail. I never asserted that there was a binary choice between African and American, I just used the words used by the parent. The Gates Foundation does not only use American companies - GSK for example are a UK company.
And draw human and logistic resources away from other goals that health care professionals are already working on.
Firstly, the GF is trying, as every philanthropic organisation must, to prioritise the most important work. Of course that means some people will work on the more important problems, that's the whole point. They add funding and structure, the work gets done. Secondly, they are primarily *adding* resources to the (African) system, not diverting them.
Right, if your goal is to spread the dominance of Big Pharma, you don't have to worry about whether people are dying faster than you can vaccinate them. You just give out a bunch of vaccinations, declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and move on.
This is trollish. Perhaps you have not actually read the article or about what work the GF supports, but this isn't it.
Yes, actually, this is one of the world's great tragedies. The terminator genes can never do worse than decrease yields, and in exchange they would prevent other farmers' fields from being contaminated with Monsanto's IP, which would prevent Monsanto from stealing their land. In fact, we should have demanded that every GMO plant ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD be modified with Monsanto's terminator gene. The down side, bad seed practices. The up side? No accidentally saving seed and getting assraped by Monsanto.
I don't completely disagree. But what do you mean by 'bad seed practices'? Licensing their technology? I think you misunderstand how the world is being fed - it's by farmers who willingly buy licensed seed because it is more productive and generates higher yields and profits for them than other alternatives. If they want to cheat by breaking the license conditions, they face the legal consequences. Most don't, and they feed the world under that system.
Re:All charity ends (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly, this is lobbying & bribery that is being portrayed as charity. He donates a few million for drugs if a country agrees to stop using cheap imported drugs (that violate patents but would end up saving many more lives). Its sickening and immoral.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Medicare running out of money has nothing to do with whether or not it was a good idea. It is running out of money because of the combination of a baby boom and a poor economy. Even if it single handedly made the baby boom possible, it didn't make it necessary, and so it still was not necessarily a bad idea. In fact, statistics [wikipedia.org] suggest that more, not less, government aid results in better systems.
Another way of looking at it is that Medicare isn't designed to be profitable. The amount of money it can get is determined by law makers who decide how much goes to Medicare and how much goes elsewhere, like say, the military. If the military was running out of money, it wouldn't mean having a military is a bad idea, it would mean we're not funding it enough. It's the same with Medicare.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile Big Pharma has let farmers stuff farm animals with antibiotics until resistant bacteria (including old killers like tuberculosis) are a major health problem, while failing to develop new antibiotics. I, like many older people, depend on a couple of drugs to remain healthy and reasonably comfortable, but I believe that the drug industry needs supervision and regulation, just like the banks.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spending all the income on bonuses to the executives and window dressing, sounds in every way exacly like running it as a business. Running it as a business is what they should move away from, which is why charities dominated by volunteers are so much more efficient.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that when most people say a non-profit should be "run like a business", they really just mean that the organization should be setting concrete goals and objectively measuring progress towards those goals and evaluating all the organizations actions as they relate to achieving those goals.
No, that's precisely the kind of talk I was objecting to. For one, it leads to insane reporting requirements, often in situations where every hour and every dollar spend doing actual work saves -or at least changes- lives. For another, it leads to a desire for quantifiable metrics, which mean that a ton of really important aspects of development work get left by the wayside, because they can't be easily measured. For yet another, it turns the conversation into a financial one. That's important, sure. Nobody wants their money to be wasted. But it should not be the only topic discussed when evaluating the success of a non-profit.
All too frequently, though, that's precisely what happens when people try to run a non-profit 'like a business.'
I know it sounds whippy-dippy to say that concrete goals are of secondary interest when the real goal is saving lives, but bear with me. As a good friend of mine who worked in disarmament used to say, it's hard to know if you're doing well when you measure your success in terms of the number of people who didn't die. They don't always show up when you're forced to measure your progress in terms of 'concrete goals.'
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Good financial controls are essential. We're in screaming agreement on that count. But that's not nearly as big a part of the conversation as you might think when it comes to measuring success in this kind of work.
Re:Foundations are tax shields (Score:4, Insightful)
He's just doing what he has to with HIS monies
No, that's one of the main issues raised by the article. You should go read it-- it's quite interesting. Gates uses his foundation's leverage to direct other charitable funds into projects that support his personal world view. Instead of being chosen by their public merits, the projects are determined by the influence of Gates, and those projects get money from more than just the Gates foundation.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a hatchet job.maybe it just appears that way to those of us who read the summary here first. We were told to expect investigative journalism. We read a heavily biased opinion piece. Very little facts. I read the whole thing. There is no substance. I am not sure if you are being deliberately obtuse or have a similar axe to grind.
Where is the investigation? Where is the journalism? The author read some news articles and a couple of opinion pieces on-line and wrote an extremely slanted summary. Who did she talk to? What was uncovered?
The EdWeek readers want Bill to take a hit for supporting teacher testing. Why don't they stick to a topic that fits into their magazines core competency.
Re:All charity ends (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me crazy, but I don't think business should be run like a for-profit business either. That is to say, I don't think people should generally be motivated by, "what's going to generate the most possible profit at the lowest investment over the course of the next quarter."
If you're making a computer OS, then focus on making a kickass computer OS. If you're building hardware, make awesome hardware. Build your business around your business, around doing a good job at the thing your company does, and not around generating short-term profit.
Sure, yes, obviously you need to make a profit. You need to at least break even, or you'll go out of business. But so long as a business is making enough profit to keep their doors open, then in my not-so-humble opinion, they should devote their attention to doing a better job at serving the clients/customers and providing good products, services, and support.
Oh, and yeah, I know. Shareholders, shareholders, bla bla bla. Fuck'em. If we can't run our businesses responsibly because everyone needs to constantly kowtow to the abstract idea of "maximizing investors' profits", then it's time to reevaluate our system of investment.
Re:Foundations are tax shields (Score:5, Insightful)
African and Indian agricultural workers maintain that the Foundation's philanthropy is environmentally toxic [theecologist.org] , and undermines vital agricultural development that respects local conditions.
This one grabbed my eye, but the article is full of them; I checked the link, and there's no mention of the Melinda Gates Foundation..
Diana Ravich comments on the Gates Foundation's proposed education reforms:
I am also puzzled by the Gates Foundation’s persistent funding of groups that want to privatize public education. I am puzzled by their funding of “astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.
So she's a teacher who is suspicious of young teachers who don't want to be in unions, and want to be rewarded for performance instead of how long they have been teachers / how many degrees they have?
That's understandable for an elderly teacher with degrees, who is in a powerful union and has many job protections, but there's really no substance to the blog article other than "Gates doesn't know about education".
I also spotted some fear mongering about the initiative to start a "Green Revolution" in Africa (i.e. to bring its farming on par with other places in the word, to reproduce the massive productivity increase it brought in Asia). They talk about affecting the lifestyle of poor farmers, and the risk of genetic patents, but that's a bit narrow-sighted when you're just talking about bringing African agriculture up to standard.
They talk about his investments in blind trusts to sustain the fund, and the way the fund is used to try and lead the way for public money, as if those are bad things. They talk about the use of GlaxoSmithKline to deliver vaccines, reminding us that GSK was recently involved in some scandal, but ignore that drugs and vaccines are what GSK does, and obviously if you want to ramp up production of malaria vaccines you're going to need to involve big pharmaceutical companies.
The whole article seems a bit desperate really.. I'm not sure if it's just a laundry list of vague associations or if it's trying to make some point. Is it questioning Gates' motives? If it is it doesn't make it explicit, it just makes ambiguous jabs.
Re:What's the point of this article? (Score:5, Insightful)
No difference at all, right, the two are completely comparable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Saint_Valentine.27s_Day_Massacre [wikipedia.org]
You've pretty much demonstrated why I rarely bother even taking up this subject anymore. Simular thing with republicans when they start comparing democrats to nazis - it blows any chance of reasonable debate out of the water and there's just no point continuing.