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Someone's wrong on the Radio: Internal contradictions in the narratives on USAID
I was listening to NPR today. The main story seemed to be that Elon Musk's DOGE is seeking to shut down (or severely pare down) USAID, the US Agency for International Development. This would probably not be very interesting to me, except that the NPR narrative made two seemingly conflicting statements within a ten-minute time frame.
"Later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was now the acting administrator of USAID — which has long been an independent body — and that a "review" is underway aimed at the agency's "potential reorganization."
"You know, over the weekend, there were reports of two security officials at USAID who were put on administrative leave for refusing DOGE access to certain systems. Democrats have accused DOGE of inappropriately accessing, you know, classified materials, which the lawmakers are saying they're going to investigate.".
(This is being stated much more unequivocally by other outlets: "The Trump administration has placed two top security chiefs at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to ...".)
So on the one hand, USAID is described as an independent nonpolitical agency and should not be subsumed into Rubio's State Department. On the other hand, they have troves of classified materials that should not be accessed by staff of another agency. ... Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material? I recognize that I am confused...
So I looked at the Foreign Aid Act of 1961, as amended up to 2024. It looks like amendments are added several times per year, so this is not necessarily up to date, but such is the version of the law which is easy to read, "with amendments." It is 276 pages, so I didn't read more than the first five. Searching for "indep" turns of several uses of the term "independent," but they are for functions of USAID like "support for independent media" and "independent states of the former Soviet Union" (with four hits for "independent audit[or]). So the department isn't "independent" under the law, at least not in those terms.
Surprise surprise, on page 2 or 3 USAID is defined as "Under the policy guidance of the Secretary of State, the agency primarily responsible for administering this part should have the responsibility for coordinating all United States development-related activities," and is headed by an "Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development." There is no mention of whether this is a cabinet-level position. So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.
Also, USAID is tasked with funding the International Atomic Energy Agency, for "civilian nuclear reactor safety" in former Soviet states, for limiting aid to countries engaged in nuclear weapons development, and for "nonproliferation and export control assistance." So that seems to explain why classified information may be found in its headquarters.
The claims of Elon Musk and NPR actually align on the topic of aid for LGBT causes, with NPR guests stating that the loss of USAID will be a disaster for gender nonbinary people. The MAGA narrative is also supported by the Act when compared to archives of the agency's website: there are only 12 mentions of "gender" in the law, and they are exclusively for "gender-responsive interventions" for HIV/AIDS, for "gender parity in basic education", "performance goals, on a gender disaggregated basis" and for statistics about who has received how much aid, again "disaggregated" by gender. In contrast, USAID's website used to contain pages with text like "USAID proudly joins this government-wide effort with its own commitment to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ people around the world, including members of its own workforce, and supports efforts to protect them from violence, stigma, discrimination, and criminalization.". There is a Trans angle, with text like "In Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, and Nigeria, transgender-led CSOs delivered health services (including transgender-specific health and HIV services), emergency housing, and economic empowerment programs. In Burma and South Africa, the first transgender health center was organized, drawing upon best practice from Thailand." (ibid)
Then there is the pandemic angle, of which I am skeptical, but Musk did retweet that USAID provided $38M in funding to Ben Hu for "bat coronavirus emergence" research from 2014 to September, 2019, from a document which appears to have been obtained under FOIA by the White Coat Waste Project. Ben Hu was a PI with EcoHealth alliance and was previously alleged to be one of the first three Covid patients according to "sources within the government," although an intelligence community report mandated by Congress later denied that any Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists were known to have been among early Covid patients.
If the FOIA document about funding is true, that funding appears to have been outside of its mandate and potentially a misuse of public funds: the only mentions of "pandemic," "epidemic," or "virus" in the Foreign Aid Act concern HIV/AIDS.
I'm left with the impression that Musk and MAGA are being more truthful than NPR, and maybe the Agency does deserve to go into receivership.
i doubt there has been a legal misuse of funds. i suspect whatever words are used to control funding are broad enough that they let the wordcels do anything with the funding.
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Right now I'm feeling kinda smug because Musk's takeover of various federal agencies looks a lot like I imagined it to be: https://www.themotte.org/post/1233/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/266617?context=8#context
I didn't actually expect him to take over IT servers with his merry men, but I'm glad to be right for once.
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I don't understand the claimed contradiction.
I do not see any claims that Rubio being director is illegal. Sen Andy Kim claims "This is an entity that was created through federal statute, codified through federal statute, and something that cannot be changed, cannot be removed except through actions of Congress.", and I agree that significantly changing or removing it might be illegal, but not Rubio taking over.
A lot of very unimportant things are 'classified'. A very small percent of 'classified material' are things that'd be genuinely bad if they got out. I don't think this is significant. The DOGE people accessing classified USAID information thing is probably similarly insignificant.
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You know, I accept just about all the rest of the post. But this is silly. A US agency needing to distribute food in the Ivory Coast needs to understand the actual (unvarnished truth of) the situation on the ground there, at the very least so they don't hire a boat to go dock in a harbor right before the rebels grab it or try to truck it through some area where the government has (in fact, but not avowedly) lost control.
That kind of up-to-date intelligence is rightly classified. Probably the most rightly-classified as compared to the median bullshit that gets the stamp.
Anyway, this is not the thing to be confused about.
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AP News also describes USAID as "an independent agency":
Given that are now at least two Reliable Sources calling it "independent", you can expect wikipedia article to also do so. That primary sources, in this case Foreign Aid Act of 1961, do not will not change anything.
It's independent in the sense that it's not part of the Executive Branch. Similar to how FDIC is always described as an independent agency because it isn't part of the Treasury Department (or any other department), or how the US Forest Service is described as part of the Department of Agriculture. Being under "guidance" of the SoS isn't the same as being part of the State Department. Rubio is acting administrator, but there's usually a separate administrator who doesn't take orders from the State Department, just advice.
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You're missing some important context.
It is a
long running conspiracy theoeryopen secret that the Democrats and the CIA have been (are?) in the tank with Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Taliban Et Al. actively working against US/Western interests in the name of "decolonization" and that the primary role of USAID was to "launder" food, fuel, arms, and other forms of material support allocated to these groups while also as serving as a slush fund for various woke causes and NGOs. Ever wonder who was funding all thos migrant caravans? The reason the current administrator presumably doesn't want to turn over the books to Rubio is that is that they don't want the opposition (Ie the MAGA crowd) to know where the proverbial bodies are buried or who to subpoena.I really wish to ask when the vetting process failed such that the vetters were these ideologues to begin with. Is it just that everyone with capability and independent thought left the US civil service because it is a bloated swamp that neither rewards financially or emotionally unless one has the specific temperament? Like I've dealt with other civil services before, and petty power politics and paper pushing bureaucratics protecting their iron rice bowls are common, but never have I encountered a bureaucrat whose mission is to destroy the nation they say they serve. Every functionary will claim that they are True American Patriots, but only the barest gust of wind is necessary to uncover the reality that they wish to create a New America that is in their preferred image instead of preserving an old or existing version of America. At least the corrupt bureaucrats here in Southeast Asia don't pretend to have the interests of the state at heart when they suggestively indicate which midget bar has the most discrete hostesses.
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USAid has been advancing US political interests along with the CIA operations branch overseas for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development#Political_operations_abroad
https://kyivindependent.com/how-us-foreign-aid-transformed-ukraine-through-the-years/
In other nations:
From 2003, NED-family Ingos got into the act of securing regime change at the next parliamentary elections, turning against Akayev who had initially allowed them access to the country during the heyday of IMF and Usaid conditional lending. Even more than in Ukraine, American dominance of the local NGO sector is complete in Kyrgyzstan. P Escobar describes the monopolisation of local civil society thus: "Practically everything that passes for civil society in Kyrgyzstan is financed by US foundations, or by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). At least 170 non-governmental organizations charged with development or promotion of democracy have been created or sponsored by the Americans."
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/colour_revolutions_3196jsp/
There are several biased sources but also some pro neoliberal sources.
They have been also advancing leftist causes abroad, whether that benefits US is pretty dubiuos.
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Not sure I would trust the King of Cocaine on this, but then again I imagine he has significant experience in dealing with various arms of the US federal government
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I suspect that "The Agency" is an...apt term to describe USAID.
People are thinking a lot about
Missed in this is the question of 3): What message is being sent to foreign governments by shutting down a branch of the US intelligence apparatus*?
*Yes, I think this is an overstatement, but think about it from the perspective of a foreign government: once USAID serves as cover for a hostile covert op aimed at overthrowing a government, you have to assume the entire agency is serving as a CIA arm. And this is without getting into even the "soft power" or perhaps "propaganda" aspects of what USAID does.
If the CIA was competent enough it'd set up its own network of shell companies or charities to just continue the work of infiltrating nations and cultivating domestic assets. Funneling everything through USAID or some other US centric organization just seems like a forced sharing of the feeding trough with other pigs that exist just to be the first up for slaughter when the butchering season begins. Actually once I say it that way it makes sense that the CIA would have a vast number of friendly organizations embedded in the bureaucracy that would be first on the chopping block. Being the biggest baddest hog in the swamp is a survival strategy, but so is being one step faster than the clueless pigs feasting next ro you.
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When the US funds regime change abroad, it doesn't go into a budget line item as such. "$100,000 for anti-Orban parties in Hungary." It's just called something else. In this case unimpeachable-sounding charity at USAID is the cover for vast amounts of patronage and graft. It's an extremely partisan organization, it's inherently secretive, it's an arm of the CIA, and it's anti-democratic. A lot of bodies are buried at USAID and the thing is probably unsalvageable. Incredible whitepill to know that Trump is gutting the whole thing.
"$3 million for Pakistani development funds" (actually this is going to fund Cuban Government Overthrow Twitter)
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