Healing the blind is "ableism"

(AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

And you thought you had seen the limits to woke idiocy?

Never! The depths will never be plumbed. They will never stop mining for nuggets of oppression buried deep in the souls of the White heteronormative patriarchy. Nefarious schemes to crush and “other” people who are not of the pale penis people tribe will be exposed for the world to see!

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Buzzfeed News has the story.

Prepare to be scandalized!

A YouTuber just helped treat 1,000 people with blindness and low vision. Why are people so upset about it?

MrBeast, a 24-year-old whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is the highest-earning creator on the platform with a record-breaking 131 million subscribers. His fame was a slow build at first. He started posting at age 13 and says he carefully studied other creators and his own stats to create the most watchable content possible. His repertoire now includes dramatic displays of charitable giving, with videos like “Planting 20,000,000 Trees, My Biggest Project Ever!” and “I Cleaned the World’s Dirtiest Beach #TeamSeas.

Sounds like a smart kid. He turned doing good things into a thriving business. He makes money entertaining people with feel good stories that are genuine, and uses some of the returns to keep the business of doing nice things up and running. And each successive cool thing gets bigger and bigger, making a virtuous circle.

What’s not to like?

A few things, apparently. First of all he is making money off of other people’s misery, we are told. The fact that he is actually alleviating that misery is irrelevant.

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On Twitter, there were a number of negative responses accusing MrBeast of “using” disabled people and people with low incomes to generate views and likening his video to “charity porn.”

“There is something so demonic about this and I can’t even articulate what it is,” one user wrote.

“Mr Beast has been making exploitative content for awhile now. … He uses vulnerable and desperate people for content,” another tweeted. “Doesn’t make him a good person for making that happen.”

That’s kinda like bitching at farmers for making a living off of people’s hunger. Commisars in the Soviet Union made that complaint and instituted collective farms, solving that whole making money off of hunger problem once and for all by starving millions to death.

Problem solved!

Mr. Beast created a controversy online recently by doing the unthinkable: helping 1000 people see again after going blind.

Appalling. Truly appalling. What a monster!

I nearly vomited when I saw this, it made me so ill. Mr. Beast was being ableist, assuming that he was doing a good deed by helping people see.

No, I am not kidding. That is the argument that the Buzzfeed author put forward.

Another huge problem: MrBeast’s video seems to regard disability as something that needs to be solved. He doesn’t say in the video or in any of his subsequent public statements whether he consulted with the video’s subjects about how they felt to have their disability treated as a problem. That’s something that’s been argued over in the days since the video was uploaded.

“If Mr Beast TRULY wanted to do something good and TRULY cares about disabled people, he wouldn’t monetize their suffering and make them tap dance on video just so he can slap it up on YouTube,” healthcare advocate Kendall Brown tweeted.

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Of course nobody is asking the people whom he helped, because they need to be turned into symbols without agency in order to turn them into victims of his generosity. He is a White man, and likely heterosexual, so he is clearly a bad guy.

The compaints rolled in, apparently, because Mr. Beast has not solved everybody’s problem, he has not convinced the US government to create a government-run health care system, and he is being paternalistic by helping people out.

He isn’t giving people the gift of sight; he is reinforcing ableist norms that keep people victimized (despite helping them out of a class that is also considered victimized by his critics).

As with everything woke, it is a trap. There is no way out because they begin and end with the same thing: some people are irredeemably evil, so everything they do is evil.

Antiracists like Robin DiAngelo make that clear up front. If you are white, as she is, you are evil. All that is possible is “doing the work,” whatever that means. For her that means becoming a celebrity and zillionaire while attacking the rest of us as evil capitalists keeping the melanin-enriched down. But you get the point.

Since it’s impossible to win, don’t play the game. Don’t help people and you are cruel. Help people and you are also cruel.

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There really is no point in engaging them. We must marginalize them.

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