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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   36920 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Man, that's pretty charitable to just say it "doesn't steelman".

I didn't find it very satisfying, but foreign aid opposition is a sea of "I don't want altruistic spending," so I didn't want to condemn his failure, either. To your points:

If it's so tiny, why is it critical for American taxpayers to cover it? Things that are so tiny and so good should be pretty easy to convince people to participate in voluntarily rather than via confiscation.

Wollen has a paragraph addressing this, linking to another post on "taxation is theft." I haven't read his "taxation isn't theft" post, so I don't know whether or not I agree with him about that question, but I think the paragraph in this post includes a good counterargument to opposition directed at PEPFAR: "Still, if you really think taxation is theft (and aren’t like the Republicans who say ‘taxation is theft’ when it comes to Medicaid, but not, for some reason, when it comes to roads, national parks, and hurricane relief), surely it makes sense to do away with the ineffective government programmes first, not the coolest federal programme in history."

In the event that there's really a coordination problem, that it can't be done via charity for some unclear reason, why isn't it an internationally shared expense? It's super-duper tiny, barely costs anything at all, and does so much good, so it should pretty easy to get the UN to fund this instead of it just being a responsibility for the United States.

International coordination would itself be a coordination problem? UN funding would just move "taxation is theft" up one level of abstraction? The absence of other countries having an equivalent program isn't a strong argument that we shouldn't maintain the original.

This argument is fully general for anything that you just think is good in the federal budget. It precludes ever cutting anything if its advocates say that it's really important and doesn't cost that much anyway. If it's true that nothing that supporters think is good and costs less than eleventy bajillion dollars can ever be cut, fine, I'm probably just going to oppose more or less all new programs since they can apparently never be ended or shifted to the private sector.

I think this is a good counterargument.

At the end of the day, my real question is why the hell HIV spreads so well in Africa. I've read the explanations and they just don't really make much sense to me. In the United States, Europe, and Asia, HIV just spreads really poorly among heterosexual populations that don't use intravenous drugs.

I'm curious about this, as well. It seems many infectious diseases spread more easily in Africa than other continents, across various routes of transmission. Two HIV-related challenges I know of are decades of pseudoscientific denial that it was the cause of AIDS in certain countries (South Africa is a good example) and the normalization of men using sex workers while away from home and bringing STIs back to their wives in certain countries (I can't name a specific country, off-hand).

Is men away from home frequenting sex workers really that much more common in Africa? Genuine question: I would bet prevalence of sex work is really high everywhere with a large group of transient men without much education and weak public health. But Africa's HIV rates are far higher (10-50x) than e.g. India's, and Africans aren't having 10x the amount of risky sex as Indians (I think?)

Maybe the graph has more clustering for Indians, which would limit spread, but I don't see how that would cause the rate to be so much lower.

Given the heterogeneity of prevalence even within Africa, I think reaching some bare level of competence in government/public health actually makes a difference here.

Prostitution is extremely common in the American trucking industry; still not much of a problem with heterosexual HIV.

surely it makes sense to do away with the ineffective government programmes first, not the coolest federal programme in history

This is extremely weak, because we can do away with both at the same time. If that guy can name some programs you think are less effective than PEPFAR, let him do it, and we will cancel those in addition to cancelling PEPFAR.

International coordination would itself be a coordination problem?

No. Coordination problem is when individual action is mostly ineffective, and it’s only when everyone agrees on something, you get a benefit. Here, half of spend gets you half of benefit, so you don’t need to get all the countries to agree and coordinate, just make the case for them, and whoever wants to pitch in will be able to.

The absence of other countries having an equivalent program isn't a strong argument that we shouldn't maintain the original.

If you think so, you are very far removed from how normal people think. Why do you think cafes make sure tip jars are made of transparent material, and make sure there is always some change inside?

The absence of other countries having an equivalent program isn't a strong argument that we shouldn't maintain the original.

If you think so, you are very far removed from how normal people think.

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