Also enjoying Wikimedia's largesse was Borealis Philanthropy. Borealis is yet another grant giving organisation: They're even more political, and fully committed to driving America's cultural revolution.

Wikimedia gave $250,000 to Borealis's Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. That money was then cascaded down to a dozens of ideologically aligned news outlets across the US.

Thus, the money you give to keep Wikipedia online is diverted to bankroll the inescapable American culture war.

Back in 2017, a Wikipedian called Guy Macon wrote a strident article entitled "Wikipedia has a Cancer". He predicted Wikimedia's runaway spending would bankrupt Wikipedia, resulting in its takeover by Facebook or Google. Since then, Wikimedia's budget has almost doubled.

What Macon misunderstood is that orgs like Wikimedia are not cancers. They are parasites that cannot survive outside their host. Almost nobody would donate to Wikimedia so it could spend money on these causes - without Wikipedia, Wikimedia would starve.

In the west, an advanced industry of NGOs, charities, and foundations has evolved which funds so much of the weirdness in our daily lives. A caste of activist-professionals have emerged, which inevitably capture any non-profit with spare cash.

This is what is sometimes called The Blob: a powerful but inconspicuous force that has given us the dysfunction of the 21st century.

Wikipedia is an amazing and important website. But it doesn't need your money. It has enough to stay online, improve and grown. What it needs more donations for is to fund one side in the United States' culture war.

A sad footnote to this: In 2021 SeRCH ran their own funding programme, "Hot Science Summer". In deciding who to fund, the key criteria was use of the Intersectional Scientific method. Everything else - a scientific background, data - was optional. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the projects was into spatial learning in the California Two-Spot Octopus, for which the researcher got 12 hatchling octopuses. Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded.

@occultiscool @echetus Oh thank god someone else said it first 💀