Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

To be clear, I'm fully aware of how unlikely it is that either you or this author were even aware that guinea worm disease existed. You'd never have gotten it whether or not it had been nearly eliminated. Them's the breaks.

I grew up in India and I'm well aware of the Gates Foundation's work to help eradicate polio and malaria and am grateful for it. If billionaires do genuinely help, I'm happy to give them the credit they deserve.

But he's also *not* Batman in that he's pretty quietly doing not-very-glamorous work that's having an impact. If that were the norm for billionaires that would be fine, but is it?

I mean, is that really where we're at? If you're going to eliminate polio and malaria, you'd better do it quietly, or some freelance thinkpiece wankoff will make fun of you for trying to be Batman?

I struggle to fathom how much of a loser you'd have to be to even consider writing this piece, and to be immoral enough to actually do it is just straight-up beyond my imaginative capacity

I leave it to Anna to be cordial and to stop tagging me if she doesn't want the bad cop to show up, but for my piece I have zero remaining tolerance for trust fund navel-gazers who have Serious Concerns about the people who aren't moving resources toward solutions the "right" way

Steelman attempt: "My complaint isn't that they are solving the right problem in the wrong way. My complaint is that they are "solving" a non-problem. What you call "low-hanging fruit" went unpicked because most people didn't want to pick it, not because nobody saw it."