WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.
They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification. The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
I think you can argue that behaviors can be gay as distinct from people being gay - so those girls would be doing gay stuff, but if it's just a one-off thing rather than something they pursue regularly, they aren't themselves gay. The phrase "Men who have sex with men" however, implies men who habitually have sex with men, not just "Men who fooled around with another man at some point". Bisexuals notwithstanding, it's easier to argue that that is essentially synonymous with "gay".
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Were you exclusively attracted to men, or to women as well? If the latter, wouldn't that make you ex-bisexual? If not, does this mean you also became attracted to women at a certain point, or have you wound up asexual?
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing, and nobody knowing there's anything that should be cut. Again, what good is letting them do that? Or put another way: how does that plausibly lead to cutting away the waste?
Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent, and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied. The denial process can be unilateral and impossible to appeal, if we want, and that would still be much better than freezing everything Day One while giving grifters no more of an out.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
We're talking about months-long trials that were already ongoing when everything was suddenly put on hold with no forewarning. Obviously no one should be starting any more trials for the time being; and doubly-obviously, any doctors trying to blackmail the government by suddenly adding dangerous procedures to an ongoing trial should be sued with extreme prejudice. (They shouldn't be hard to catch, the whole deal with clinical studies that get government funds is that you register what you said you were going to use the money for in advance.)
The place where Elon's people draw the line doesn't have to be accepted by the woke activists, though. DOGE can just come up with a common-sense criterion that makes sense to them, and if someone tries to argue in obvious bad faith that their bullshit study is on the right side of the line, they can just say "no it isn't; you may not appeal this decision; goodbye, please don't email us again". This would undoubtedly still cause a ruckus, and it might even have a few false positives, but it would still be immeasurably better than not having common-sense exceptions at all, and I genuinely think it should be trivial for DOGE to implement if they really have the stuff.
Like, why are you acting as though trivial word-salad smoke-and-mirrors would leave them helpless and befuddled? Isn't cutting through the obfuscation and identifying the good government programs from the woke hustlers supposed to be what they're for? If they're not up to this then one wonders why an elite crack team led by one of the most successful men in the world is needed for this job. You could get the same effect if you told an AI to cut all government programs no matter what, gave it access to a government email, and let it loose.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Coordination is hard. I think it's unsurprising for liberals' position to be "we have a coordination machine, it's called the government, please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason". (Even if there are obvious rejoinders.)
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men.
The poll I linked specifically polled heterosexuals. Thirty percent of male respondents would have to have lied about being straight (and thirty percent of female respondents would have to have lied about having had it at all) for this to fit the data.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?
I'm not particularly invested in proving that it does, I just specifically wanted to point out what I believed to be a really weird jump in reasoning.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
HIV doesn't readily spread from heterosexual sex. There is essentially zero risk from vaginal intercourse the way that 99% of Americans will experience it
This is a heck of a non sequitur. Whether you like it or not, a lot of straight men like anal sex - with women. The first Google hit found that in 2013 about a third of heterosexuals in 20 US cities they polled admitted to having had anal sex in the past year. Now, I've never seen the appeal myself, and you're welcome to say it's against nature for all the same reasons as gay sodomy if you want to be all Catholic about it - but it's a thing, massively so. Promiscuous gay men might be a small minority of the American population, but it doesn't follow that the remainder only have wholesome church-approved missionary sex, and you'd have an even harder time trying to change that than trying to walk back gay acceptance.
OP isn't talking about whether these things needed to continue to be funded indefinitely. The problem is that instead of "we will fund no further studies, no argument" the order literally caused studies to be halted midway through. Which would be fine if the study was a passive observation of the mating habits of roofing bats in the wild; less fine when it means the volunteers have already begun potentially dangerous treatment regimens, and are now being dumped out into the world. (It's not even as though they can continue taking experimental drugs on their own dime to avoid withdrawal; if the study's over the study's over.)
Lots of people answer this kind of talk with "it was a clean break, or the tiniest amount of leeway being used by everyone and their dog until the whole DOGE died by a thousand paper cuts". But come the fuck on. Leaving clinical-study volunteers hanging is ridiculously evil in principle, and I just can't accept that it was this or setting such a precedent for leniency as to scuttle the entire DOGE endeavor. Really now. The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
(b) given their loud, performative feminism, which annoys anti-feminists, of course the latter will delight in crowing about their downfall
I would add that for isomorphic reasons the actual feminists will disavow him as loudly as they can, adding to the overall prominence of the story.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
It's common knowledge (I hope this point is simply consensus so that I can't be accused of building one) that far-left, white-hating, anti-colonial Jews are often, perhaps usually, also anti-Israel
But are they then distinguishable in any way from non-Jewish far-left white-hating anti-colonialists? If not, then what explanatory power does harping on about their Jewishness bring to the equation?
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
the rescuer is perfectly justified in refusing their request on those grounds
Well yes, but this is my sticking point: since when is it the outsiders' request at all? The people complaining about USAID are not foreigners in a position to step up to replace it, even if they wanted to. They're American liberals. That's where the wailing is coming from. (Whether because they sincerely think it's import or because it was a useful power-seeking ploy for them; doesn't matter here.) The people complaining about cutting USAID are not people who could take up the slack once America pulls out, because they are Americans. This is why I am saying that what the EU does or does not do about this has no bearing on the validity of the claim.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
All this is sensible. I'm not trying to debate its merits as a coherent position.
I was specifically complaining about FistfullofCrows' pithy "if it was so important to have these millions for the poor people dying of TB then maybe soros or the whole of the EU can pitch in a few millions to go cure people", which I think is a bad and kind of baffling way to frame the question. It's really the "if it was", as opposed to "if it is", that sticks out to me. It seemed to be saying "we can prove, right now, that all this foreign aid isn't actually important, because the EU & Soros aren't taking up the slack". Which is bonkers and not the point. It can be genuinely important and still not a reasonable burden for the US to shoulder indefinitely, for all the reasons you cite. Or indeed the EU's or Soros's. People's unwillingness to do a hard and costly thing might be circumstantial evidence that it is indeed intractably hard and costly (duh) but it's just not some kind of gotcha that proves that the hard thing was never important. At the end of the day humanity can just collectively and intractably fail at doing an objectively important thing, because it's too hard and coordination problems are a bitch. That's life.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I see what you're going for - but this seems to start from the premise that it's the other countries slash charitable billionaires who are positioning themselves as moral arbiters and saying the US should keep doing what it's doing. This seems… wrong? It's mostly American liberals and centrists writing the think-pieces, angry tweets, open letters, and so on. So within the drowning-child scenario I am picturing all of this as an internal debate within the swimmer's warring conscience.
And anyway, the important question is surely whether it is as a matter of fact important to save the child; not whether the outside observers who may or may not wail about it are cowards. As a hypothetical, "The bystanders are, to a one, a bunch of sanctimonious dicks who won't, actually, take over if the swimmer stops in his efforts to save the child" is many things, but it's not exactly a moving reason for the swimmer to stop what he's doing.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I don't think you wrote it in that spirit but I can see how georgioz would interpret the tone of "get a grip!" as an officer dressing down his men.
I never understand this argument - the "if it was really so important then surely someone else would already be dealing with it" thing. "Someone has to do it, and it happens to be the United States that has, as a matter of fact, taken up the slack" is a perfectly logical proposition. This is like saying "why are you jumping into the water to save that kid? if he was really drowning, someone else would have already jumped in". It's meaningless.
By all means, you can say "even if it is important, the US shouldn't be bearing the cost, someone else e.g. the EU should take care of it". That's very different. And I'm not even making a positive claim as to whether it is as a matter of fact important (though I'm concerned about the kind of global Bystander Effect this kind of bucket-passing might lead to). But I just don't see how 'nobody else is stepping up to do the hard thing that someone is already doing' supposedly proves that the hard thing isn't worth doing and the second guy is a chump for bothering.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
America isn't a direct democracy. The people elect representatives, and then the representatives decide what to do. If the people don't like what the representatives do, their only recourse is to elect different representatives next time; they don't get to simply overrule the representatives' decisions while in office through a majority vote. There would then be no point in having representatives in the first place.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
mandate all office-based male federal government employees (…) wear black oxford shoes to work every day, NO exceptions
No exceptions? What if the gentleman is missing both legs?
Irrelevant joke, but putting "NO exceptions" quite so emphatically just begged for some smart-aleck to find a loophole, and I'm that guy. Besides it adds a bit of levity to my more substantial reply which is to observe that "cruel and wrong", in my book, describes a great deal - though not all! - of your proposed suggestions; and also that trying to implement most of them, particularly the '300,000 temporary ICE agents' thing, would result in an actual literal civil war.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
I'd have parsed it as more of an appeal to fair's-fair ("We're the people who paid for this building, the least you can do is let us in"), or even just "we're not random activists sticking our noses where they don't belong, we actually are involved in the DoE's operations and have legitimate cause to pay them a visit".
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
Money means nothing to them, but they know it means something to us, and so they will disingenuously complain that the things we want cost too much to get us to back down
A somewhat more charitable reading would be something more like "We don't care if fraudsters waste money and we don't care if DOGE wastes money; but if DOGE only exists to stop waste, and winds up wasting more money than it saves, then it fails on its own terms and has literally no reason to exist".
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners
Surely that's consistent with the hypocrisy running the other way. They've come to believe high immigration is in their selfish interest, and spend a lot of time pretending they support it out of a deep moral conviction to make themselves look good. It's bad psychology to suppose that "it's in our economic self-interest" is the face-saving cover story, and "it's the ethical thing to do, however painful" is the dirty secret: in leftist spaces the latter is clearly the higher-status thing to say, whether you believe it or not, while coming out and admitting "we need more immigration because it'll make us wealthier" makes you sound like a deeply uncool capitalist.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.
That may be true! But if that is the husband's problem he ought to say so, not pretend that his concern is spending the household's money frivolously in general. It is perfectly sensible to say "I don't really care what you do with those $50 I gave you, just so long as you don't spend them on things I actively disapprove of; by all means buy a dress with it, or set fire to it on TikTok, just don't give it to that smelly nuisance over there". But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!".
Given the place this thread started, I thought it was obvious that the answer is "because letting a few useless diversity programs persist for a few months before they're inevitably shut down is a lesser evil than interrupting good programs in needlessly disruptive ways". I think it's trivially the lesser evil ethically; it might very well be the lesser evil economically too, depending on how costly it is for good programs to make up for lost time once they get the green light, e.g. restarting studies from scratch or finding replacements for people who quit for lack of pay and found other employment in the private sector. (See Scott Aaronson arguing that every week the NSF is frozen harms American science's future prospects as postdocs either quit their academic career, or move abroad rather than stay in the US - something in which the most competent, most valuable researchers-in-training will be more successful than the rank and file, selecting for mediocrity among the people we'll have left once the gridlock ends.)
I am saying that DOGE should review all the programs and decide which ones to cut. It's not that much work.
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