<i>"""Your over-analyzing makes your post seem very cold and callous."""</i><p>It does, but it shouldn't (or maybe it should and I am?). The parent post was exhorting me to act without thinking, and that sets off my skeptical spidey sense and makes me ask what's in it for them? It's a pressure tactic that people selling things use to get me to make a worse decision than I would otherwise make. In the case of helping people, making a worse decision is, well, worse.<p>A read of the article suggests that donating to some cause would be of no particular help, donating elsewhere might go to a celebrity's recording studio fees, and doing it one way might lead to it sitting in a bank account for five years being unable to help anyone. How far is over-analyzing and how far merely analyzing?<p>"""Yes it's getting a lot of media attention and people are pouring in money...so what"""<p>So the need for me to act immediately is less. So it's presenting a distorted and unbalanced view of problems in the world with the potential of over assigning to one cause and at the same time increasing suffering elsewhere because resources are reduced. So the media has a habit of turning everything into extremely opposed black and white views and a huge media fuss makes it more difficult to sift out accurate and detailed information on a topic. So a huge media fuss increases social pressure to 'donate now' without thinking and without regard for whether lack of cash is a main bottleneck or not.<p><i>"""the alternative would be to simply ignore everything like the rest of the world suffering year-round"""</i><p>That's another issue. Why is it that we happily go about our lives every day doing just that, but it's not OK to do that now? Isn't that part of the media fuss generating social pressure so that people act to be seen to be donating rather than for any other reason? Very much an 'ends justify the means' approach?