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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Scott-featured global health philanthropist and activist John Green made a video about TB treatment and USAID. tl;dw, TB is the brick-shithouse of bacteria, so treatment takes 4-6 months, but the good news is that people mostly aren't contagious during treatment. Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance, including the spread of newly-treatment-resistant strains, so interruptions in the supply chain are a major global health problem. Yes, it's bad that global health was overly reliant on the USA, but it requires government-level funding and logistics. (Unsaid, his family pledged $1m/year 2024-2027 for a USAID TB program in the Philippines, in addition to $6.5m for Partners in Health, so he's literally put his money where his mouth is.) His contacts in confirm that drug supplies are being interrupted.

Even if one wants to cut USAID, a stop-work order, rather than a phase-out, was likely a net-negative by most measures of utility.

What amount of money do we speak about and how many people are treated?

Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance

How many people are affected by this order versus the number of noncompliant patients who get their jar of pills and just never show up again or just forget to take the pills?

A quick nih search gives me:

93% of MDR-TB patients interrupted the treatment at least for one day during follow up period in Philippines

...

a meta-analysis recently published showed that 20% of MDR-TB patients are non-adherent

So maybe the US money helicopter stopping for a few days doesn't matter as much as you're making it out to be. And maybe the Philippines can scrape together enough money to buy the pills themselves, and maybe do all the other supporting activities a bit more efficiently.

The libs keep saying that foreign aid is only 1.2% of Federal spending. Well the TB aid is only 1% of the Philippines national budget so maybe they can afford to pay for it themselves. Don't forget that the US helicopter money is also redirected to promote equity and inclusion, spend on sinecures for connected people, and otherwise wasted.

In India, we have TB treatment protocols that mandate observation by a doctor or nurse when the medication is dispensed, and the patient has to take it while they're watching. That's the only real way to deal with poor adherence, which often leads to MDR or XDR TB.

They'll chase you to your home if they have to, though I don't think they have any legal recourse beyond strongly insisting you take your damn medicine.

At any rate, the generic drugs are dirt cheap, and within the budgets of even most third world countries to begrudgingly dole out even if the aid tap is cut off.

1% of a national budget spending on strong antibiotics, that would terrify me. Clearly that cannot be right.

Obviously costs include much more than cost of drugs but workforce, transportation, storage in Philippines most likely are cheap. Drugs for treating resistant TB are expensive but not that expensive to be 1% of the national budget.

Maybe they are, I don't know. My intuition is that USAID probably spends 5% on medicines and 95% on everything else, salaries to western volunteers, rent etc. that are normal for the US but very high compared to local prices. The local government could probably do it for a fraction of cost.

To GP's point, "we are cutting funding at the end of 2025, figure it out" would have still been a better way to do this then an immediate stop work order (at least if it could be made to stick, which is perhaps not something the Trump administration could actually do).

The trouble with simply cutting funding is that it leaves the agency with the ability to keep the sinecures and DEI spending, axe the TB drugs and food aid, and then wail to the press that Trump's budget cuts are killing people. You can't prove they're lying unless you actually obtain the details of where exactly all their money is going.

Almost every time I've seen government make a promise like that, the "end of 2025" gets pushed out 3 months, then to September for the federal Fiscal Year, then delayed indefinitely. The Sequester is maybe the only time I've actually seen something like that go into effect. Not to say it couldn't be done, but I think it'd be much less likely to go into effect that way -- independent of my feelings about whether or not it's a wise choice to do so.

Yeah, it's sadly plausible to me that "shut the program down in an orderly fashion" is a fabricated option.

Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.

Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.

Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.

This kind of posturing is very hard to take seriously absent a compelling case that USAID funding is a meaningful obstacle to conservative victory as such. Your pro-life vs pro-choice analogy doesn't work because the pro-choicers' victory necessarily depends on pro-lifers' defeat.

I think it’s a good strategy because the left has long since weaponized empathy to the point where any cut to government anywhere is going to hurt the empathy puppy. Which effectively means that if you start acknowledging the “do no harm” principle, you effectively cannot ever cut spending. So heartlessness is the only defense against the weaponized empathy. It doesn’t work on people who state openly that they don’t care about the empathy puppy.

And at this point, we have no choice. We cannot sustainably be the world’s sugar daddy, protector, doctor, infrastructure manager and nature conservator. We probably have many more domestic programs than we can actually afford to sustainably support. If we keep that up, we’re going to end up in a mess when we can no longer produce enough value to support this. We might already be there.

Which effectively means that if you start acknowledging the “do no harm” principle, you effectively cannot ever cut spending. So heartlessness is the only defense against the weaponized empathy. It doesn’t work on people who state openly that they don’t care about the empathy puppy.

How exactly did not eliminating something like PEPFAR prevent any further cuts to spending? The State Department did exactly that weeks before your comment and Rubio still managed to fire the majority of USAID's workforce.

No one, as a matter of the practical reality, has ever had to commit to some totalizing "do no harm" principle, you can simply (to the extent "you" have discretion over the matter) weight the cost of aid cuts against the benefits of doing so. Those benefits certainly include the strictly political and strategic value that defunding partisan enemies involve, but if those are being alleged they need to be specified in concrete terms. "The left will use any morsel of moral thinking against you in some unspecified and indeterminate way" is a useless thing to say without information about what this amounts to in concrete legal or organizational terms, and nobody insisting that we desperately need to halt every last cent of aid has given such an account here.

We cannot sustainably be the world’s sugar daddy, protector, doctor, infrastructure manager and nature conservator.

Are you really suggesting that the <1% of GDP the US currently spends on foreign aid is some kind of unsustainable luxury? It's a rounding error as far the deficit is concerned.

Also we have seen decades of it all going one way and understand momentum is easy to arrest. We understand time is short and the iron must be struck while it is hot.

America is not responsible for saving the world and even if cutting some funding causes some harm we never had a duty to mitigate that harm in the first place. I would even be open to redressing some of those harms after we get our own house in order; not before.

I believe that the entire US federal government and civil service is an obstacle to conservative victory. There's only so many times you can play kayfabe and watch your politicians be devoured by DC and come out as creatures of the American imperium. It was a mistake to believe that the institutions would abide by the popular will and not act in their own self-interest. At some point Elrond has to push Isildur into the volcano instead of hoping he won't be tempted.

Except Tolkien's point is that no-one had the strength of will to do that. Not even Elrond, not even Gandalf. The ring could only be destroyed by someone not trying to destroy it but to possess it and destroy it by accident (or by divine intervention).

"Tolkien wrote that no one could have willingly destroyed the Ring, no matter how good their intentions were. He also wrote that the Ring was "beyond the strength of any will to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it"

Elrond would have rationalized why he should not push Isildur because he would not have the will to destroy it. Indeed, that might exactly be why he didn't! (well in the book they don't even enter Mount Doom so even more effort would have been required). Note that Isildur in the book is in fact on his way to destroy the ring when it betrays him and falls off his finger so he can be killed. But Tolkien is clear when it came down to it, no-one on Middle Earth had the will to destroy the ring.

Everyone will be tempted. Everyone will succumb at the end. Even the wise, even the pure. If you think the federal government is like that, then logically your prediction should be that Trump/Elon will not destroy it, but instead take it for their own. Or that Isildonald, heir of Fred and Elond of Tesla will turn against each other and in fighting over it, one will fall into the volcano and be lost with the government.

Hopefully in this analogy the volcano is not one of nuclear fire!

To continue the analogy, what we have here is a case where the ring betrays Isildur... but he survives! Then the ring tries even harder to finish Isildur off, lest Isildur ever get it back again and finish what he was talked out of the first time. And somehow, someway, Isildur just doesn't stop, and just keeps winning. Now he has the ring, and he's hammering away at it with every tool and faculty, because a judge told him he can't just cast it into Mt Doom without a 4 year comment period.

Will a wiser, more battle hardened, once betrayed Isildur let the ring go undestroyed a second time, after all that?

I mean, sure, Tolkien would say "Yes" because that's the mythology he wrote and it's his world and he defined the metaphysical parameters of it to be exactly that way. Analogizing to Trump's current destruction of the deep state, hopefully they have not been created to have such absolute authority regarding the nature of reality.

Although Mike Benz has been going off about how USAID has basically created an entirely false Truman Show-esque reality we've all been living in. So I guess there might be that.

I guess the analogy falls apart a bit here, I don't think they are actually trying to destroy the federal government, just size it down.

So I suppose the better analogy is the ring is at the jewellers getting resized. Which isn't really as dramatic. Unless the jewellers is Sauron's Discount Rings and Gems of course.

A reveal that Musk was part of the deep state all along would be a shocking twist worthy of Sauron deceiving Celebrimbor.

One DOGE to rule them all, one DOGE to find them, one DOGE to bring them all and in the Deep State bind them. In the Land of D.C. where the bureaucrats lie.

I wonder. Maybe it's performative, but Trump seems to angrily blurt out things from time to time indicating he believes the deep state tried to murder him. The axe he's been taking to various departments seems to be driven by vengeance. And the array of ideologically heterodox misfits he's arrayed around him have one thing in common, the destruction of various tentacles of the deep state they've spent their lives combatting.

I don't think he's resizing the ring. I think this is more deeply personal than we appreciate. This is Caesar returning to the pirates who ransomed him and crucifying them to the man.

But the ring in the OP's post is the entire federal government not just the deep state. I simply don't see Trump trying to destroy what lets him govern. Downsize it sure, target the bits that have been problematic for him, absolutely. Take a chainsaw to agencies and NGO's? Yes.

But taking the whole thing down? Shuttering every three letter agency? Getting rid of the military, national parks, ICE?

I really do not see Trump as wanting to be the President who essentially ended the United States of America by delegating every single power to the states, including his own, somehow. Does he really want New York or Portland having control of immigration in their state?

Draining the swamp still leaves you with the land under the swamp. If you didn't want that, you wouldn't have to drain the swamp at all, just blow the whole thing up. And I don't see evidence despite much outrage, that he wants to do that.

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I see this somewhat regularly and I really dislike this style of comment, written like a Roman general giving a speech to the senate.

On a surface level, get a grip! You aren’t fighting a war. Most anybody here engages with politics to is to squabble on the internet and maybe vote.

On a deeper level, I think it really reflects a polarized view. The battle-lines are drawn, and you’re rallying for a cause. But in reality these issues are often not as polarized in the public as you might think. There is room between ‘change nothing’ and ‘blow it all up’.

There is a number of people on this forum who clearly would like to see it as a place for smart right-wingers to organise and rally, rather than a carefully tended neutral ground. Unfortunately, the mods don't seem terribly interested in acting against it unless directly called out for inaction, so the only way to reduce it would probably be to persuade the majority on a grassroots level that it is not in their interest either.

Indeed, it's quite disappointing what this place has become. Good posters like TracingWoodgrains have been banned or moved on. Shitposters from CultureWarRoundup have moved back in, telling us constantly how we have to hate the outgroup with every fiber of our being, and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal. The mods are apparently asleep at the wheel. Zorba, the original creator of the site, hasn't posted in 3 months, and hasn't really participated that much in nearly a year.

The shitposters from the CWR never left, although I suppose they used to be better behaved.

Yeah and I don't do it constantly.

and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal

Do you think you made a good attempt at understanding the outgroup you described in your post?

Yes, they're fully in the tank for conflict theory. Look at a post like this and try to disagree.

Aside from FC's point, how does conflict theory see any notion that people should try understanding their opponents as akin to betrayal?

Did you read Kulak's post? His general idea is that allowing for discussion just legitimizes evil people who think things like that it's OK for people to rape white girls.

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...Kulak is your example of a typical poster? With a post about how he doesn't post here any more?

Kulak is a particularly blatant example but plenty of people here are working off the same template.

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I agree with this sentiment. I broadly align with the right wing but don't like the turn this place has taken since the move off of Reddit. I think we would all be much better served by actually looking more for heat than light, and having less right wing applause lights.

You aren’t fighting a war

On the contrary, they are fighting the culture war, and what's a war without some war crimes?

You flatter me. I have a sophist's love of rhetoric: but if politics is serious - if it is about human life - then it should be taken seriously. I find it less moral to equivocate, to pretend that there is a difference between 'save some lives' and 'save all'. Removing the room for argument is the only way to reduce the size of government otherwise you are merely a ratchet on Leviathan's appetite.

‘Removing the room for argument’

That’s already been done. I don’t know all the details, but Trump seems to have direct authority over USAID. In theory, he/DOGE could take even a cursory look at what programs they fund and make some decisions from a rational basis. But it doesn’t seem like they have a real methodology, it’s just ‘XYZ is corrupted by the woke left, burn it all down’.

I’m fine with making things more efficient, when it comes to aid programs, grants, and regulations, I want people to be arguing over the merits. What I don’t want is for it to be all-or-nothing situation. It doesn’t have to be that way, it would be better if it wasn’t, and I simply don’t agree with your framing.

The other side of that is that leaving room for arguments just leads to the deed never actually getting done.

Imagine a situation where a patient is morbidly obese. He weighs 500 lbs. if he doesn’t lose weight, he dies. Do you start by “negotiating” about how many cheat days he gets? How many sugary drinks he’s allowed to have? How many times he gets to eat dessert? Or do you hand him a strict diet plan that tells him that if he wants to see 2035, he needs to drink only water, not eat more than 2200 calories a day, and he can’t go over. When you start from the position that the cure is negotiable, you end up coming up with excuses to continue the behaviors or in this case the spending habits because if there are loopholes, then you’ll tend to find ways to squeeze more and more programs into the loopholes and not end up doing any actual cutting. If things that are national defense are okay, everything becomes national defense. Just like if you start allowing people to declare cheat days, every day will eventually meet the criteria for a cheat day.

This is why metaphors are overrated outside of poetry. They tend to obscure at least as much as they illustrate. If you want to stick with the fat guy metaphor, DOGE's "economy" drive is hectoring the patient for eating a salad for lunch while ignoring that he eats two pounds of bacon for breakfast and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts for dinner. You would discuss dieting plans where you step down food consumption and coming up with a plan the patient could actually follow and doesn't harm them. You wouldn't just say "you're going on a starvation diet now, figure it out."

But in actual fact the USG is not a fat guy. Spending is not food. It's not going to drop dead of a heart attack if it has irresponsible fiscal policy. The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.

Moreover, the US has a lot of tools with which to solve its fiscal problems, but no one wants to use them. Conservative elites are primarily focused on cutting taxes for conservative elites and weakening consumer/labor protections; electoral success dictates protecting transfers to elderly and rural voters. So the obvious solution of trimming entitlements and raising taxes is a nonstarter and instead we get a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.

*high confidence prediction: these will not result in meaningful government savings over the long run and will incur higher social costs
*intermediate confidence: they will actually increase government costs over the long run as even more Federal staff are replaced with more expensive, less efficient contractors

If we can break the katascopocracy and stop funding foreign coups and dictators that's good enough for me.

The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.

The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, in a social context where the taboo on political violence has been trampled to nonexistence. Many millions of people are openly cheering for political assassins at this present moment. Many millions more have already demonstrated their willingness to shred the basic constitutional, legal and social protections of those fellow Americans they consider their outgroup, without apparent limit.

If you think "a lot of economic turmoil" is survivable under these conditions, it seems to me that you are stretching optimism beyond the bounds of credibility.

I would contend that we are headed for an economic collapse simply because we are spending so much more than we produce in GDP, often by simply printing more dollars. To an extent, we can get away with it for now, simply because we’re the World Reserve Currency and oil is traded in Petrodollars. I don’t believe that’s going to last as long as we think it will, and large amounts of liabilities are going to make the process much harder because we’ll be dealing with several crises at once.

First, Theres the inflation from trillions of dollars that will be eventually dumped when the world switches to Petroleum-Yuan or whatever currency we eventually trade oil in. Then you have people and even entire countries suddenly not getting the expected benefits as they’ve long since become dependent on them. You also have millions of people who have been doing essentially make-work jobs and have few marketable skills.

The combination is going to be a poly crisis that will probably crater the US economy and possibly the world economy as well. Add in people used to the government tit no longer getting their benefits, government workers looking for work with no skills that mean anything outside of the government/NGO environment, now needing help or working minimum jobs, needed services no longer happening because the costs are too high to justify showing up. Teachers get low wages now, but if we have 20% inflation and no teacher can afford to be a teacher.

I would contend that we are headed for an economic collapse simply because we are spending so much more than we produce in GDP, often by simply printing more dollars.

"Economic collapse" covers a range of outcomes from Mad Max to austerity. If this economic apocalypse described really is looming, then DOGE is in chair of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A project to streamline federal bureaucracy - even if successful - is not going to cover budgetary shortfalls, reverse the rise of China, or bring back the 60s US manufacturing dominance. It's not even going to cushion the fall. Neither is cutting foreign aid to zero.

Which bring me back to my point: the US has the tools to manage its fiscal issues, but there is no good faith fiscal conservatism in the US when it comes to Federal politics. There are serious conservative proposals for bringing spending under control, but they have no traction with actual politicians. If you think harsh fiscal discipline is the only way to save America from economic disaster, you should be yelling at your leaders to stop grandstanding over trivial savings and a) raise taxes b) cut entitlements. The 'every little bit helps' excuse is, in fact, wrong.

To illustrate what I mean, we have the current House GOP's budget proposal. Now, it's just a proposal and it probably undergo major changes, but it does demonstrate what I am talking about. Johnson has floated cuts to Medicaid (hey, something substantial!) among other things, but not in aid of deficit reduction. No, the plan is to cash in all of the savings (and likely then some) on tax cuts that will increase the deficit.

So let's not pretend DOGE is about radical measures to save money.

To an extent, we can get away with it for now, simply because we’re the World Reserve Currency and oil is traded in Petrodollars

If this analysis is correct, it is a huge argument in favor of US foreign involvement. It suggests we are getting absolutely staggering returns for our role as global hegemon and the fact that it isn't coming in the form of annual tribute is immaterial. Pretty much the last thing you'd want to be doing is running around alienating people by abruptly cutting off trade and aid.

Teachers get paid fine and they’re always going to to be first in line for government backed pay increases. They’re just a big and sympathetic constituency that thinks they should be paid like doctors and lawyers.

a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.

Sorry, what banking scams are being legalized? (asking for a friend)

The story I'm seeing, is that with the CFPB getting destroyed, banks have free reign to do whatever they want. The fact that banks can't reorder your transactions to extract the most fees from you is attributed to the CFPB. They've also been the ones up Silicon Valley's ass about their crypto projects. The accusation is that the CFPB debanked SV startups trying to get some sort of blockchain based crypto banking off the ground.

The fear is that SV will reinvent banks, but on a computer and with crypto (and hookers and blackjack), but without all the "protections" that normal banks have to provide. Like FDIC insurance, or making sure their mortgage backed securities aren't fraudulent... anyways. They'll all run FTX style scams with their customer's money because they can, and then everyone is worse off, the economy is wrecked, and everyone loses all their money.

I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I also just don't trust the people making it they've so bankrupted their credibility with me, and the things they are willing to spend their political capital on are straight out of a Slaaneshi cultist meeting. So even if they are right, it's just the bad I've accepted I'll have to take with the good.

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I take this point, and it’s certainly true that this kind of decisive action can be gummed up, but I’m not sure it applies here. It seems like the administration has free rein on program approval, they don’t have to negotiate with anybody.

To extend your metaphor, it’s like if the doctor, instead of establishing a strict calorie limit and diet plan, simply said ‘Stop eating!’. You don’t have to be that harsh, you can take a second to come up with a plan that makes sense to you, and enforce it with an iron hand.

Except that “doing it on a rational basis” means getting information about the programs, having public criteria, and sitting down with the heads of the various programs. Word of mouth will quickly out what kinds of programs (say defense) that Trump won’t cut. Then suddenly for no reason at all, everything in USAID is defense related. If you cut than later perhaps restore, there’s a good chance of most of the cuts sticking because you didn’t start out negotiating, you started by laying down the law.

From Tucker Carlson’s interview with former State Dept. guy Mike Benz, it sounds like USAID was some unholy combo of CIA and the State Department, doing state-destabilization work neither of those relatively above-board organizations wanted to do.

DOGE is basically a Scooby Doo episode where four hackers pull a lever and fall through a trap door into the secret basement of a charity, where they discover the Illuminati are running The Matrix.

“Well gang, let’s pull the mask off this monster and see who it really is…”

“Gasp! It was old Man Kristol all along!”

All sardonic takes aside, it looks like State is bringing all the non-woke USAID charities under its purview.

Ironically, DOGE and Musk open themselves and the administration up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way. What should have been a slam dunk - cutting wokeness out of USAID by defunding drag shows in South America, ceasing to fund opposition magazines in Eastern Europe, yada yada - has turned into stories of children dying because they were denied life-saving treatment so we can save less than 1% of the federal budget by dismantling an agency 99% of voters had never heard of and the dismantling of which has zero effect on their daily lives.

After living through the first Trump presidency, this falls on deaf ears. The standard arguments as soldiers rebuttal to anything Trump did, no matter how reasonable, no matter how within the norms of his predecessors, no matter how legally justified was "He's opening himself up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way." But that's just how it looks with you have a media ecosystem that is basically an extension of the DNC, Judges in the middle of nowhere who feel they can exceed their authority issuing national injunctions on spurious grounds, and a bureaucracy hostile to the President as a person, much less his agenda, and a security state that spreads misinformation about it's own commander in chief.

Trump 47 is basically doing things completely different than Trump 45, and still that tired old soldier of an argument "He's opening himself up to attacks by doing it this way" gets trotted out.

There is no counterfactual where Trump is not "opening himself up to attack", except perhaps if he didn't walk away from Butler PA. But it turns out, the best defense is a strong offense.

Ironically, DOGE and Musk open themselves and the administration up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way. What should have been a slam dunk - cutting wokeness out of USAID by defunding drag shows in South America, ceasing to fund opposition magazines in Eastern Europe, yada yada

How was it supposed to be a slam-dunk? You know that USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, and the only reason we know any of this, is from who started complaining when they lost their funding.

Wait, why are my grocery prices still high?

There are some psy-ops to this effect, but I'm yet to see anyone express this sentiment organically.

Aren’t USAID programs and their funding all a part of the public record? The websites not working, but I believe you could previously just search stuff up.

There's a lot of information that gets messy when you try to get more than surface-deep into it. There was a big deal about a USAID grant for 45m to Burma/Myanmar scholarships after DOGE tweeted about it, and these are things you can look up!...

But while there's some funny punchlines involved, it doesn't really tell you that much. IIE got the grant -- which is better than some cases, since domestic grantees in some categories can receive anonymity -- but outside of some joking-not-joking CIA links, that doesn't actually mean much. They're 'just' a cutout, and while they've got a lot of staff, their day staff aren't the ones doing most of the actual spending and day-to-day education stuff.

You can kinda piece together a rough outline by seeing who publicly announces that they've gotten onto a grant with similar numbers around the same time, but even a lot of that falls off the internet pretty quick. It's really easy to go full Pepe Silvia, too.

So, Mike Benz has been doing a victory lap over USAID. He did this Joe Rogan episode like a year ago before it was in the spotlight, and he's been slowly plodding along over the last who knows how long with his own dinky little podcast or substack or whatever.

To say his profile has exploded is an understatement.

But the thing listening to Mike Benz makes clear, is none of this is as simple as reading the public records. I might only be able to summarize the shenanigans with lots of they, like we know who they are. Mike Benz dives into memos, NGOs, executives, revolving doors between organizations, etc, etc. And somehow, when you stop summarizing everything with they like you are talking about a secret cult, and start naming names and citing specific policy directives, it sounds even more schizophrenic.

Because none of this shit has "Destabilize Hungary" in the memo field of the check. It has nice sounding things like funding the arts, or health, or "training". But then it turns out absolutely all of it actually goes towards people critical of Victor Orban, and attempting to change the culture out from under him such that his positions are unthinkably evil.

"Politics is downstream of culture" often gets attributed to Andrew Breitbart. But it turns out the CIA and USAID have been playing that game longer than Andrew was even alive, including in our own country.

I see this somewhat regularly and I really dislike this style of comment

get a grip! You aren’t fighting a war

you’re rallying for a cause. But in reality these issues are often not as polarized in the public as you might think.

It is interesting how self-unaware this comment is. You are doing what you incorrectly accuse the OP of - only worse.

My point was that you should have a sense of perspective, and not frame things like you're leading the frontline into battle. I don't see how I'm guilty of that.

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.

Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.

The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.

The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)

It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.

All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros. That is the level of commitment that they will need to win. If they can endure that level of opprobrium then the battle is already won. Do you believe that pro-choicers support abortions to 'own the cons'..? On some level, maybe. But they have a genuine belief in the liberty of women, unshackling them from the tyranny of biology. We must similarly have cruel principles that put our own well being over the needs of others.

All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros.

Is that really all you're asking for?

The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is "Don't kill them." I would assume this position also applies re: the lives of foreigners. The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is NOT "The government must provide all the food/medicine/trans operas/LGBTQIA++ comic books required to get that embryo through life."

This sounds like the old canard that by not providing a womb-to-tomb welfare state, you are in effect murdering the weak.

What am I missing?

I was speaking circuitously: what I meant is that 'conservatives should act as if the value foreign lives at zero'.

This serves a tactical purpose, as to defang reflexive knee-jerk appeals to sympathy.

But also strategically, in shining a spotlight on the revealed preference of their enemies as to the value of foreign life. If foreign lives are valued at one to one, and conservatives are through inaction killing them, then liberals are put in a moral dilemna to overthrow the government or reduce their valuation in contrast to their rhetoric. More likely, however, there will be a downward correction: and then the true work of negotiation begins.

But I don't think basically anyone is claiming they value foreign lives at a 1-to-1 ratio to domestic lives.

Given that the programs were 0.2% of the federal budget, I'd be okay with saying that I value America lives the ~450 times more than foreign lives that that implies, at least as far as US federal foreign policy goes.

This is a hostage puppy, which has been discussed here before.

It's not a hostage puppy, it's collateral damage. There's no evidence that USAID was shut down and the bureaucrats decided to stop TB treatment first. Everything got axed, the good with the bad.

It's still a hostage puppy, 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, hell, go ask China for a belt and road initiative to fund some medical relief.

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.

The problem is that because we’re stepping in all the time, first of all, it’s just expected that every global problem is our responsibility to fix. And it isn’t sustainable to keep doing this. We have finite resources, limited by not only how much we can produce, but how much our own people need.

Secondly, it’s actively working against getting countries to clean up their own messes. Why would Africans demand their government give them better education or health care when Americans show up and do it for them? For that matter, why would Ghanaian government officials bother to not steal education money when we’ve already given them money to build schools and buy books? Why spend money you could put in a Swiss bank account to buy TB drugs when Uncle Joe Biden will just give them to you for the asking?

It doesn’t even give us good will. The programs don’t seem to make other countries respect us or even like us. They see us mostly as the stupid people who give them stuff no strings attached. We’re suckers. Iraq hates us, but despite that, and despite the fact that they don’t like us, don’t like democratic values, we’re going to fund them.

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.

I don’t think you’ve fully understood the objection. It’s not “somebody else would already be dealing with it.” It’s “Somebody else should now start dealing with it.”

A man jumped into a pond to save a drowning child. Halfway to shore, he stopped swimming and let the child go. From the shore, no one knows why—maybe he cramped up, maybe he decided he hated the kid, maybe there was some other reason—all the bystanders know is that he’s not going to keep helping the kid to safety. From that point on, it’s quite reasonable to ask why none of bystanders will jump in to take the man’s place instead of just standing around hurling abuse at him. If the kid’s safety is their true concern, they should do something to prove it. Otherwise their criticisms of the man ring hollow.

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.

not whether the outside observers who may or may not wail about it are cowards

You misunderstand.

That wailing is not genuine; it is merely an exercise of power to force you to serve their moral ends.

Whether their moral ends are objectively correct in this case is not relevant (stopped clocks right twice a day, and all that)- the rescuer is perfectly justified in refusing their request on those grounds. And yes, that means it is the bystanders wagering the kid's life, if that bluff is called he dies, and that's the way it is; shame on the bystanders for using a drowning kid as such a bluff.

"Won't someone please think of the children?" is never about the children and never has been: it's about the power.

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.

More comments

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.

You never know if someone else will step up until the person already doing it steps back and opens up that opportunity.

In my view, if any truly important program is shut down along with USAID, someone will step into that vacuum, whether it's a non-profit or a private philanthropist or a religious organzation. Maybe there will even be a new federal program created if such a need is identified.

But this idea that the U.S. government is responsible for all charity throughout the world is not only a logistical problem but also a conceptual problem, neither of which will ever be corrected as long as the US govt continues to enable it.

In what sense is this a collateral damage? It is not as if the government wants to send an airstrike for military installation and kills an innocent janitor. They are defunding a corrupt organization and money spent are saved. In fact I would say that the DEI and grift is the airstrike in question, it is those corrupt people who in their greed caused people to suffer now.

As an analogy - basically all the companies have some sort of charity pledge to send 1% of the profit from a good you buy to spend on saving poor children in Africa. So if you personally decide no longer to buy that product, are you an evil man who just collaterally damaged kids?

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped. If you let them slow you down they'll keep finding reasons to do it until the whole thing grinds to a halt.

There was a limited supply of veto power and it has been squandered on less important issues. Don't blame the bartender for cutting you off, blame yourself for drinking too much.

This argument is constantly advanced and it's ridiculous - it's basically blaming the left for the right having a) a stupid base and b) being rubbish at politics. Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down. That Trump is too stupid or impulsive to do this is no-one's fault but his own.

Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down.

Could you give some examples?

Deng, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Feng Guifen, Attlee

Please correct me if my history is off, but AFAIK Thatcher is the poster child for tearing it all down. That's why she privatised everything she could get her hands on, destroyed the unions and ended British coal mining. It's also why the Left burns her in effigy every chance they get. Her most famous line is "The lady's not for turning."

Harold Wilson, on the other hand, is famous for trying to come to a civilised accommodation with hostile unions and failing utterly:

For 16 months Prime Minister Harold Wilson has cajoled, wheedled and haggled with Britain’s powerful labor unions in a vain effort to stop their rampaging wage demands. The basis of his policy was the “social contract,” a formal deal (although never written into law) between the government and the labor unions. The government would deliver social welfare benefits in exchange for voluntary restraints in pay settlements. Purpose: to keep workers abreast of—but not ahead of—inflation.

But the unions have welshed on the deal. One major union after another won pay raises of 30% and more; during the past twelve months, average weekly wage rates for manual workers rose 32.6%, leapfrogging ahead of the 25% inflation rate for the same period. Last week, after inflation had worsened and the pound sterling had hit a new low, Wilson and his Cabinet took a deep breath and finally scrapped the tattered social contract.

Time Magazine 1975

(And Attlee came from before the time of entrenched hostile bureaucracies. Indeed, he founded many of them, including but not limited to the NHS and the various local planning committees).

but AFAIK Thatcher is the poster child for tearing it all down

This is rather overwrought, deindustrialisation and the drawdown of employment in SOEs was well underway under Wilson, but in any case the relevant point here is in her interactions with the bureaucracy, which is the particular point of discussion in this subthread. The point is that whatever changes Thatcher was in fact able to make re: privatisation and retrenchment (though bear in mind she increaseda a range of taxes (especially early on) because unlike Republicans she actually believed in austerity, for better or for worse) she did so without tearing apart the Civil Service, even though prevailing governmental consensus was for a mixed economy and national and regional planning.

And Attlee came from before the time of entrenched hostile bureaucracies.

This is silly - just because the scale of governmental employment was not what it is now, he still was dealing with an e.g. Treasury which, though changed by the dual experiences of depression and war, was still not inclined towards his agenda.

One analogy I heard somewhat recently that I keep thinking about when seeing all this DOGE-related news is that, when you amputate an infected limb, there's almost undoubtedly lots of cells in that limb that are perfectly fine and perfectly functional, but it's just not viable to go in there and surgically (literally) remove only the bad cells and leave the good ones behind. Perhaps it might have been possible earlier on when the infection was small, but at some point, the infection became large enough such that, if we don't remove the limb along with the good cells, the host itself will die.

There are many issues with the analogy, such as the fact that the host in this case probably won't die and the fact that the good cells in the limb are humans with suffering, free will, a voice, and a vote, and the fact that whether the infection has gotten so bad that amputation is the only viable option isn't something we can determine with the same level of confidence as a doctor looking at an infected limb. But I think it's a reasonable enough position to have with respect to the current circumstances.

And I think it points to the fact that, if the "good" cells in a metaphorical infected limb wants to survive, then it's incumbent on them to take control over the infection within and take active steps to credibly signal that it's in control, if not rooted out entirely. I think the past couple decades of escalating DEI (I think the term "DEI" becoming a popular catchall term for this is more recent, but certainly the push for that exact sort of ideology has been around and quite strong at least since the 90s) is one part of this that shows the utter failure of many institutions, both within and out of the government, to make credible signals that they have the infection under control.

Are there any previous examples? Trump has a pretty wide open range of options, and I don’t see why there is a rush on it.

Unless the point someone is making is that absolutely zero dollars should be spent in foreign aid, I feel like it would be useful to come up with an objective approach and do at least a basic combing through.

There is a long history of government “efficiency” initiatives spinning up, wasting unimaginable gobs of taxpayer money, and ending up with nothing usable to show for it. Elon mentioned from the Oval Office yesterday that the government stores and processes retirement records on paper inside an underground mine. Here is an old GAO report detailing past attempts to modernize the process. The theme of the piece is repeated abject failure.

You can’t waste time on planning, outreach, and meetings. You either do the thing, or the thing never gets done. Existing governmental organizations are not going to give you what you need to do the thing. You have to make them accept a fait accompli

If previous attempts failed, I assume it’s because they lacked a real focus and drive. What you highlight, I’m guessing b/c the link is broken, is more about a process change. Embarrassing to fail at fixing it for so long, but that’s at least a difficult problem. You’re making repairs to a moving vehicle.

In comparison, choosing which USAID programs are worthwhile and which aren’t should be fairly simple, at least at a surface level, and there currently an enormous push to make cuts and authority to do it. If it’s easy for them to shut down the whole thing, why wouldn’t it be similarly simple to cut off only parts of it?

Start by cutting and popularizing the obvious cases, I’m sure there’s easy instances where even the average Kamala voter would agree that it’s wasteful. Then get into the more ideological stuff. Continue extending as ideology and politics permit, until you’re left with useful programs. You could do this in a month or two, and I think it would actually change minds about the situation.

Thats what efficiency means to me, and the fact that the administration isn’t doing that leads me to that that either they aren’t very component or they really don’t care and just want to burn it all down.

Why didn't Alexander just unwind the Gordian Knot?

I guess he just wasn't competent and lacked real focus and drive.

Well if I’m not given specific examples I can’t exactly respond in specifics. But it does seem like the first time in my lifetime that government ‘efficiency’ is actually top of the president goals, so I do think it has real focus and drive unlike, say, a house report or something.

Unwinding the knot is impossible because it was designed to not be unwound. When the millionth competent person walks up to the Gordian Knot and fails to unwind it, it's not because they're all actually just dumb and incompetent, it's because the Gordian Knot is designed to not be unwound. It must be cut.

The federal worker retirement system is literally bureaucrats toiling in a mine underground and shuffling manila folders back and forth between caverns. It takes months for retirement paperwork to be done. There is a hard limit on the physical ability of the toiling bureaucrats to process retirement claims. Meanwhile, it takes the stroke of a key to send dozens of millions of dollars illegally to a Hotel operator to house illegals.

This is a purposefully designed Gordian Knot in order to make what Trump is doing impossible. It's hard to not notice that most critics actually don't want the Gordian Knot to be unwound and/or they don't like Trump and that was he's doing is at the very least moving the needle and the various criticisms about Trump not doing it "the right way" and whatever else are just soldiers in that war.

Previous attempts failed because they were sabotaged with the exact same appeals to decorum and proper conduct and empathy and compassion and coincidence and fortune and anything else that would fucking stick, and all of it topped with a heaping helping of 'while I've never looked into it or even thought about it you probably can't do anything about it and therefore shouldn't even try' as you peddle here.

Yes there are better ways to do things. Considering what has already been uncovered, the amount of graft and waste and just plain corrupt and autocratic bullshit we have already learned has been done in the name of the American people ENTIRELY in the dark, I prefer "incompetence". At least we can see when they fuck up.

What previous attempts you referring to?

Also, what am I supposed to be peddling? I never said you shouldn’t look into it.

You might not be doing it deliberately, but you are pushing the same line and attitude mate. Even with the revelations of the circuitous and incestuous nest of payola and corruption that has USAID funding the media to push its propaganda, and working as a cut out for the CIA to overthrow democracies (then bringing those tactics back home) your assumption is that any previous failed attempts must have lacked focus and drive, not deliberate sabotage by the people who would lose their job if it succeeded. And on top of that, you also don't like the attempt with focus and drive.

And the previous attempts I am referring to are all of them. Trump's first term, the tea party movement, Buchanan's attempt to rein in the neo cons - they always have heaps of momentum at the start, but because they are asking bureaucrats to reduce bureaucracy they get stymied by malicious compliance and feigned incompetence at every turn. Meanwhile the media - these days especially - fixates on every error and ignores any positives, ginning up hysteria and painting a false view of the world because their own bottom line is in peril too.

The operational strategy is that of Blitzkrieg: by forgoing careful, methodical advances in favor of moving as quickly as possible, you incur substantial tactical penalties, but this is more than made up for by disrupting the abilities of your opponents to respond effectively. If your advice were followed, it would give the defenders of USAID ample time to challenge every single cut to the maximum ability possible, likely with multiple consecutive injunctions, as well as reorganize and potentially reroute funding to prevent the next most likely targets. Then, when those programs are cut, even if they have not already been rerouted elsewhere already, they will be well-prepared to immediately mount a defense-in-depth. The effort would be halted in a quagmire of legal proceedings and public propaganda for so long with so many challenges that the public would despair of any change and the political support would evaporate. That's why the only effective strategy can possibly be to cut as much as possible as quickly as possible, then give back only where it is tactically prudent to do so.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

My thoughts throughout this Presidency (all three weeks of it) has been a mix of:

  1. Damn, Trump is reckless, unprofessional, and vain.

  2. How the fuck does he have so much ammo?

There's a plane crash? Air Traffic Controllers were hired under a racist system. Foreign aid? Transgender operas in Colombia. Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on. Threaten Canada with tariffs? Suddenly our border security is a valid issue. Random whatever? $20M in subscriptions to the Associated Press, and another $1.6M to the NYT.

It feels like a weird mirror to the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: He gives every indication of shooting blindly, but there has actually been a bullseye where he hits all along. That could be luck or good spin, but the most compelling story is that everywhere is that bad.

(Related joke: There has been a shooting at a peaceful protest! A child molester, a sexual assaulter, and a convicted felon illegally carrying a gun are the only people injured.)

I still don't think he's doing a good job, but damn does he have a strong narrative.

Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on.

"Indirect costs" are overhead, and 60% is too high (much higher than average in the US right now), but it's not all administrative overhead. Everything from lab equipment and computers to the lights and air conditioning in the research buildings is being paid for by that indirect take. You could make grant recipients itemize instead, but then you either have administrators (more administrative overhead!) do the itemizing, or you have often-highly-paid researchers wasting time on figuring out what fraction of their PC upgrade needs to come out of grant A vs grant B.

This feels like the ivory tower version of "What do you mean the plumber is charging $200! He worked for an hour to replace a $50 part!" You might want to look for a cheaper plumber next time (and in this analogy, I do think it's a problem that spending other people's money doesn't give grant committees so much incentive to price shop), but if you can't find any cheaper plumbers then it might just be possible that you're not considering his whole cost accounting.

It's one of those spectrum things or Russel conjugations. Hard to know when it goes from being somewhat convenient bundled billing to unaccountable slush fund. They are effectively lying on many of their budgets. I've seen some where the PI is taking less than a week's salary for the project. Everyone "knows" that's fake and that there's no real accounting of what the guy is spending his time on.

If they limit overhead unis probably will just start itemizing a few more of the regular things. I won't be surprised to see them start charging for their tuition 'waivers'. That'll still be a fake number that mostly finds its way into a slush fund. They'll pump up the base numbers with more 'newly standard' stuff, drop the overhead a bit and end up with about the same overall number.

I've seen "the PI is barely getting paid" budgets before, but they weren't lies, they were common cases where the bulk of the work was being done by a postdoc or one or two grad students, with a faculty member PI just providing supervision and answering questions for a couple hours a week for each such project. Arguably the most important thing the PI was doing in those situations was "having the paper qualifications for the bureaucracy to allow them to be a PI", and maybe that should raise some eyebrows, but about bureaucratic requirements rather than funding. Even then I'm not sure changing requirements would change much, because the second most important thing the PI was doing was acting as a guarantor, using their track record of good collaborative work to indicate that they were good at picking successful postdocs and students and that they'd help keep that record up if the current project ran into problems.

I might have just been lucky enough to be around honorable people, though. E.g. these were the sorts of PIs who would insist on a paper's first author being the lowly student who did most of the work, whereas I've heard that "the first author is the one with seniority" is sometimes the rule elsewhere.

I just don’t have much belief in price discovery where the main buyer is price indifferent

How the fuck does he have so much ammo?

General rule of politics is that systems will be about as corrupt as they can get away with. One would presume that DOGE was not baked into the calculations of how much they could get away with.

The top level comment is about the hostage puppy of tuberculosis treatment. Which suggests how it works. Corruption grows, shielded by hostage puppies. The puppies are very effective at shielding corruption. Corruption grows: 10% corrupt, 90% puppies; 50% corrupt, 50% puppies; 90% corrupt, 10% puppies; 99% corrupt, 1% puppies.

Eventually the anti-corruption campaigners have a vast amount of ammo; there just aren't enough hostage puppies to provide cover for all the corruption. The level of corruption at which the anti-corruption campaigners can break through is determined by how sentimental the general public is. The more sentimental they are, the better the hostage puppies work at shielding corruption, and the more complete the corruption has to be before the dam breaks.

I doubt anything's 99% corrupt, at least with regard to its stated mission (obviously there are departments whose stated mission many think is evil). 1% puppy, sure, but there's usually quite a lot of stuff that's fulfilling the stated mission (so not corrupt) but also not puppy. I'd expect corruption levels to usually top out somewhere between 20% and 70%, depending largely on scrutiny levels (I developed this rule from experience in Australia; our local governments are typically shockingly corrupt but state and federal ones far less so, and the obvious reason why is that media and electorate attention focuses on state and federal politics).

Corporate security at my job keeps referencing "attack surface". How much vulnerable and hypothetically open to malicious action "surface" are we exposing to the world? They go a bit far in fearing this, in my opinion. Saying we shouldn't be handing out business cards on foreign trips, etc. But their larger point is valid. If you go around leaving possible vulnerabilities exposed to the world, then someone is going to exploit some of them.

Millions spent on transgender animal research, millions on Central American gender assessment clinics, etc, etc. They are hanging targets for a Republican Texas sharpshooter to accidentally hit while making broad cuts. The attack surface was massive so even blundering unfocused "attacks" happen to stike it again and again.

The name of the concept you're reaching for is "target-rich environment".

I've been digging into some of these laws and regulations. I'm coming away more convinced than ever that democratic governance is a myth. No regular person could possibly comprehend the byzantine labyrinth of rules, regulations, and case law required to competently evaluate government decision making.

Every spigot of federal funds grows into a hydrothermal vent of highly-specialized fauna perfectly adapted for siphoning-off those sweet sweet grants. Congress can't fix the problem, because all they are able or willing to do is appropriate more funding for things.

At least in the US, Trump has demonstrated that democratic governance is not a myth. You can in fact elect someone to take an axe to everything and they can take an axe to everything.

Robert Michels eternally vindicated. To say organization is to say oligarchy, where the people who care about the organization inevitably rule over the people who care about the goals of the organization.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

Can you give examples of past attempts? As a cynic, it wouldn't surprise me, but this is The Motte, not The Bailey, so I don't want to assume that what wouldn't surprise cynical, old me is correct.

Afghanistan and Syria withdrawals last Trump term come to mind. Generals bragged about playing shell games in Syria with troop numbers.

https://nypost.com/2020/11/13/diplomat-says-officials-misled-trump-on-troop-count-in-syria/

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” James Jeffrey, US special representative for Syria engagement, said in an interview with Defense One.

Different branch of gov, but basically the same idea. Leave wiggle room and you leave them room for to wiggle out of the order.

Relatedly, pulling out of Afghanistan. We finally did it, but the military leadership insisted on dragging their feet and doing it in an incompetent fashion to undermine Biden and it worked.

No, Biden absolutely owned that one, on multiple levels. From the decision to delay the American withdrawal in an attempt to renegotiate with the Taliban to the choice to putting the formal American withdrawal to the anniversary of 9-11, which was the peak of the Afghan fighting season, was an American political decision to try and wrap a bow on it for the american electorate.

Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?

I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan. Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.

It was a Presidential level, or at least cabinet level, decision to trust Afghani security forces ability to protect Kabul airport and rely on that for the exit as opposed to maintaining Bagram airfield and staging the exit from there. As was the exact timing. Others have pointed out that there are more advantageous seasons to stage a withdrawal. 3 months later an exit from Bagram would have likely been fairly orderly.

Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?

Because in August you can still more or less drive freely in Afghanistan, and in February you can't because the mountain passes are still snowed in.

Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative. Fighters would literally drive / ride / walk out of Afghanistan before the winter snows, because if they didn't before they were liable to be unable to (or risk death if they tried, because no help is coming on those roads or in those passes). Civilization basically shuts down, and while there is no hard dates, the fighting season is typically over in October and doesn't start again until March-April, once the passes free of snow and you can get people in

In turn, this made the summer season an escalating tempo, as more reinforcements / seasonal fighters would enter the country, prepare for major attacks in the country, and so on. Typically the there would be a peak during whatever the last major islamic holiday was of the fighting season- basically islamist theology that virtuous actions are holier then- and then the tempo would fall off as militants began to move out for the winter.

In 2021, when Afghanistan fell in August, the offensives that started building the pressure were basically timing to such religious holiday offensives. Specifically, while Kabul fell on 15 August, in 2021 that was 3 days before the Day of Ashura, a week after the Hijra, Islamic new year, and Eid-al-Adba, was 20 July, less than 4 weeks before.

Put another way- the Taliban took over in the middle of a series of obvious, typically, and routinely foreseen religious holiday offenses at the height of the fighting season. These offensives were going to occur because they'd occurred yearly for the previous decade, almost two. The offensive was as fast as it was because you could literally drive from a village that had just flipped to the next village, with the village leader who flipped, and make the point that if he flipped, maybe you should to, and anyone who was familiar with Afghan tribal / clan based politics could have told you the implications that had- which were forewarned more than once.

In the original Trump-era plan, the plan was for the US forces by 1 May 2021. Since the American troops don't literally board the plane the last day, but typically do so over weeks and months, the actual pullout would have been in the preceeding months. That means March and April on the final combat units, before the fighting season is in full swing, and January February for everyone else, still in the winter lull.

Which is to say, the Americans would have stayed in force for the climax of the last fighting season, had an uncontested winter non-fighting season to withdraw in good order, and have the opening months of the first fighting season (March/April) to make a decision of re-surging if necessary before a major Taliban offensive could get the people and material in-country for a country-wide offensive.

That, in turn, would have given the western leaders who wanted to more time to decide to send in a relief force to secure Kabul, rather than be overtaken by events on the ground, and given the Afghan government a gradual escalation of enemy activity rather than a sudden shock of attacks everywhere. Because the situation would have taken longer to unfold, the nature of the system shock that enabled / incentivized the domino cascade would have differed, in part because, again, you couldn't just drive from Pakistan to Kabul.

Kabul might still have fallen, but it would have taken considerably longer without the political cascade effect, and most notably well after the Americans had mostly withdrawn, without the Taliban able to claim the momentum of an uncontested crescendo.

In the Biden plan, which became a thing because Biden tried to abandon the Trump plan but then wasn't able to secure another full year for withdrawal, the Americans withdrew in the middle of the fighting season. Which, of course, the Taliban knew, and the Afghan government knew, and all the tribals elders knew. This, in turn, set the conditions for the sudden offensive shock that saw the rapidity of the cascade we saw in history, as American forces ceased combat support operations in preparation for the multi-month pullout process.

What this also did was mess with the coalition evacuation plans. Up to the year before, the plans to leave Afghanistan if necessary relied on using Bagram Airfield, the major American military airbase in the capital. As long as the US was in Afghanistan, it was the safest / most defensible / easiest to access route for any entry or exit movement. When it was abandoned- because of the summer pullout schedule- various states and organizations hadn't actually updated their plans on how to leave Kabul. Which left Kabul airport, with the results you saw of the American airborne basically flying in to occupy from the inside while the Taliban controlled the gates, rather than having American and their Afghan partners at the guard points.

Further, the nature of the speed- and thus shock- is what led to the American embassy implicitly burning all its Afghan personnel records in the 'burn it all / don't let anything get captured' continency that most warzone embassies have. Except... in part because the embassy hadn't actually had to follow through on the evacuation according to the earlier timetable, the US Embassy in Kabul was the only location with the various documents such as the pre-approved visas for Afghan partners who were intended to be pulled out last moment. Which were supposed to be what cleared Afghan friends and partners to get on the planes to get out.

So when those went into the burn pit, you had literally nothing distinguish -person who helped US soldiers for decade at great risk to themselves- from -person who sees opportunity to get into US / flee the Taliban-. Which is how you got the stories of afghans calling American soldiers they worked with years ago, who called actively serving soldiers at the airport, to guide people to sneak in side doors, using nothing but 'I know a guy who knows a guy' levels of trust and coordination.

Because the partner document packets were burned in a panic that wasn't necessary.

Because the Embassy thought it was going to be overrun in an offensive that wouldn't have been possible 6 months earlier or later.

Because the Embassy thought it had several more months to get around to dispersing the documents because Biden pushed the pullout date back to the end of the fighting season.

Because anything but Trump was the order of 2021, and after his election in 2020 Biden was signaling he was going to redo the pullout (but was 'convinced' not to by his opposite negotiators).

Because Biden wanted a big ceremonial 9-11 anniversary rather than an unceremonious pullout that would have been a minor political critique in his first year.

I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan.

I, too, approve of actually getting out of Afghanistan. I don't think that was a mistake. I even think biting the bullet and accepting the humiliation was the correct move. History would be significantly different had Biden doubled-down, and had a major military force in Afghanistan when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.

What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?

The American military was not responsible for the decisions to re-adjust the military pullout to the middle of the fighting season. They were not responsible for the decision to handover Bagram, the main military airbase to be used for emergency evacuation plans, or the timeline to do so. They were not responsible for the decision by the Embassy to destroy partner national documentation, or to only have the copies literally in Kabul. They weren't even responsible for sending the airborne to into Kabul airport at the end, where the world then got to see Afghans falling to their deaths off of military aircraft.

And I do not even believe those were all bad decisions to make. Once the offensive was clearly racing forward, embassy purge was not an unreasonable choice to make. Having already given up a military airbase, a civilian airport is not the worse substitute. The Afghan pullout, as much as it is remembered as a shameful defeat, was an unprecedented logistical effort that, coincidentally, got a lot of people- including non-Afghan partners- safely out of Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. Many of the ISAF partners were in more or less the same boat of having no backup plan to Bagram, because they, too, thought ISAF would have time to muster a relief force.

But the Biden administration, including Biden himself, made a significant number of political decisions with easily predictable- and predicted- consequences that led to those reasonable-in-context decisions. Consequences that- had the administration struck to the start-of-the-fighting season pullout- would have substantially reduced the various costs, reputational and otherwise, to the americans in general and to the Biden administration in particular (which certainly did itself no favors by claiming no one warned them and claiming that a 9-11 anniversary just happened to be necessary for a well-ordered pullout).

Thanks you for the effortful post, and Jesus Christ on a cracker, what a mess.

What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?

This is not an easy question to answer. Complicated opaque processes require trust, and if trust is broken, you're left with a question of balance between false positives and false negatives in your oversight.

First, it's worth pointing out that, at least in my view, trust has been broken here. The DoD is a bureaucracy, with all the attendant moral hazard that label implies. We know they can be incompetent. We know they cover their incompetence when they can. We also know they can be malicious: we have the papers out of Afghanistan showing that DoD leadership was lying to the public for two decades, and we have numerous examples of them lying to Trump to circumvent his direct orders, and even bragging about it publicly.

More abstractly, at some point, "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ignores the fact that malice is easily disguised as incompetence in a complex, opaque environment, and also the fact that sufficiently advanced incompetence is isomorphic to malice, and the DoD over the last few decades has, in my view, cleared this bar.

There's been several threads of discussion above about the DOGE versus USAID; one side of those threads is "why not just do cuts in an orderly fashion?" The answer that keeps emerging is "we don't trust the bureaucracy to cooperate in good faith, so it is better to treat them as hostile and simply cut everything." You seem amenable to that explanation. If I asked you "what would convince you that USAID is simply compliant rather than maliciously compliant", what would your answer be?

Or maybe it's a bit simpler. If someone can present a DoD planning document stating "if you issue these orders, here are the negative consequences", and Biden signed it saying "do it anyway", that would be a pretty open-and-shut case of this being Biden's fault. Only, I'm pretty sure that document doesn't exist.

Further, reading through the description you've provided, I find a lot of the items seem to simply kick the can down the road. Okay, the Taliban has a known fighting season. We could have avoided the known fighting season, but that's been scotched. But by your explanation, what happens next should be predictable, which means our extraordinarily-well-resourced DoD should adapt to the change in circumstances. That adaption doesn't appear to have materialized. I understand that the enemy gets a vote, that the DoD and our military personnel are also human, that morale on the very end of a twenty-year mission was probably not high, and that requests for additional resources for an operation explicitly aiming at reducing resources to zero is not going to work well. All of these are plausible forces pushing against success.

But at the end of the day, our military's job is to take a mission assigned and execute it done with a high degree of professionalism, and that very evidently did not happen here. To the extent that constraints complicate matters, it is their job to work the problem and deliver a solution. To the extent that the mission was simply not possible within the given constraints, they need to say so (and I don't expect they actually will; Yes-Manning seems to be endemic throughout the officer corps of at least the army and navy, from what I've observed.)

Likewise with the paperwork. Why is all this paperwork being kept in an office in Afghanistan? We have telecommunications. There were no backups in Washington? Those backups weren't integrated into the bugout plan? There was no way to keep this important data other than in paper files in a cabinet in Kabul?

I am not inclined to hold Biden accountable for the outcome because he is neither a tactician nor a strategist nor a bureaucracy expert. I can readily believe he imposed restraints: get out of Afghanistan by one year from now, in time for the 9/11 anniversary. A year is a pretty damn long runway for an event that should have been pre-planned in detail twenty years ago. If there was not a plan on a shelf for this eventuality, that seems like a failure on the part of the planners. What if an actual hot war kicked off, and we needed to pull our forces out of Afghanistan not in a year, but by the end of this week? There was no plan for that?

And again, I appreciate that hindsight is 20/20, and it's all very easy for me to say, having never been involved in the un-invasion of Afghanistan. But I don't actually trust the DoD, and that lack of trust arises from what seem to me to be sound reasons. If I'm expected to blame political leadership, I want a paper trail of explicit warnings that the leadership explicitly ignored and efforts to compensate that the leadership explicitly overruled. If the system is, as I suspect, built more or less entirely around preventing such things from existing, well, that's one more reason why I don't trust it, and why you shouldn't either.

Alternatively, maybe that paper trail does exist, in which case I'll be happy to update.

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The Taliban actually have a fighting season (weird I know). The original plan was to pull out when the Taliban weren’t in their fighting season which would’ve meant less chaotic exit (eg abandoning a bunch of perfectly useful tech at Bagaram).

Reagan is the classic example. But pat Buchanan in the 90s is an additional attempt. Government grew over the time period.

The problem, for me, is that my options are not between an orderly phase-out and a stop-work order, but between a stop-work order and the status quo. I firmly believe that doing this in a slow, orderly fashion would just result in caterwauling about how we're killing the children in the future and that this caterwauling would continue apace through the next administration, which would restore funding in full plus a little extra bump for their trouble. If, like me, you want many of these activities curtailed, you just have to bite the bullet and accept that it's going to be an ugly process where every single person denied a previously received bit of American largesse informs you that you're literally killing children.

So, the solution, for me, is to say that the mistake is not in stopping now, but that we ever began the process of giving away so much American money that can never be redacted in the slightest and that is never enough to even begin to slake the demand.

I firmly believe that doing this in a slow, orderly fashion would just result in caterwauling about how we're killing the children in the future and that this caterwauling would continue apace through the next administration, which would restore funding in full plus a little extra bump for their trouble

I'm afraid this is called politics. Republicans were unashamed in their mobilisation of patriotism/the troops in the early 2000s, but that didn't mean that when Obama entered office he issued a stop-work order to the military. He simply just withdrew from Iraq. You might Trump is engaged in 'just politics' too, and this is sort of true, but he and his supporters have to own the negative consequences of their actions, and not blame the left for... complaining about Trump endangering valuable aid programmes when he does so.

but that didn't mean that when Obama entered office he issued a stop-work order to the military. He simply just withdrew from Iraq.

Yes, but you may recall that it took another two Presidents for the US to actually works towards meaningfully disengaging from the Middle East afterwards--and even now, we can't afford to ignore the region. I think a lot of the people who voted for Obama actually expected him to go more whole-hog than he did.

John Green is a good point of discussion in philanthropy apropos USAID. The mediocre king of YA and man who appears truly convicted in his beliefs has, in addition to his tuberculosis charity, also contributed in fighting maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. He uses some of his money to, he believes, improve the world.

Does he? Are we a net positive when we spend money on maternal mortality and tuberculosis in the third world?

You ask John and the NGOs involved in these efforts what the causes are and they'll rifle off a list of things money fixes. For Sierra Leone, if they had better infrastructure, more hospitals, more trained medical workers, antenatal care and all the supplements in the world, their rates would fall. For tuberculosis, the relevant parts of the above and also staff ensuring patients complete their regimens. Americans regularly fail to complete antibiotic regimens, what of those in far poorer, far less equipped nations? Their failures are prolific. They use the wrong medications, or the right ones at the wrong amounts, and either way the patients at unacceptable frequency fail to complete their regimens.

Add to this pharmaceuticals in countries like India pumping out genericized versions of American pharmaceutical products under government license and we reach the outcome of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

And all this happened under robust US aid spending. More money in a year than John Green, who does well for himself, will make in his lifetime and beyond with the royalties of his estate. We can no longer afford to tolerate these practices. The solution is not more money, we've tried that, it's not infrastructure, health workers, medication access. The solution is those countries cease public treatment of tuberculosis, it is travel bans, and it is drone strikes on factories making knockoffs.

This is where John Green, Scott and EA utterly fail. It's true that with first-class western medicine far fewer mothers in Sierra Leone would die, but the root cause is population health, it's the genetic basis for particular risk and susceptibility to postpartum hemorrhaging. Throwing money at Sierra Leone will not solve that population health issue, it will also not improve its socioeconomic conditions. Nigeria is far wealthier, similar rates. Liberia at least for a time, far lower rates. Haiti, same as Liberia. When those mothers live through one birth, what happens? More children, more daughters, more future mothers, more future aid necessitated. But at least with Sierra Leone and broadly with efforts to lower maternal mortality you can't say an obvious externality is superbugs. With tuberculosis we know outright the process is creating superbugs and the response somehow has been "give even more money."

No, it is no longer time for that. If India cannot manage its tuberculosis issue for itself, if India has to keep on stealing American weapons against illness only for their population to dull them flat through misuse, they don't get help anymore, they don't get to make our drugs anymore. They must live or die on their own mettle, because they aren't playing a domestic game with domestic consequences, they're toying with a pandemic. Every dollar spent "fighting" TB in the third world is a dollar spent adding fuel to the fire of a real global health crisis. I can't blame John, he's so charmingly naive that he's constitutionally incapable of considering the solution is doing nothing at all. I can blame Scott, he knows better.

Directionally I agree with EA and with the moral judgment of value in eradicating disease. I believe it in completely, but lifetime treatments, fighting and suppressing and temporary cures, these do not constitute eradication. When we can engineer treatments that do eradicate, when we can target population health through genetic engineering, such as in reducing the risk of postpartum hemorrhaging, when we have the panacea that can wipe out AIDS and TB and whatever else, it won't be merely worthwhile but our true moral obligation to see it through the world over.

But efforts that increase suffering -- like increasing populations by creating more mothers at risk in Sierra Leone, creating more people throughout sub-Saharan Africa who will ultimately become infected with HIV in excess of those spared of mother-to-child transmission, and separately causing the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, these are not actual charity and they are not love. Blindness to the consequences of your actions from whatever flavor of naivety is not love, knowing what is truly best for someone and acting in accordance with that is love. Love would be making treatments in Sierra Leone dependent on subsequent sterilization, same for PEPFAR. Love in India would be establishing secure facilities where under no circumstances are patients permitted to leave during their entire course of their regimen. Call it Directly Observed Treatment, Until Cured. It may sound cruel, but our current "kindness" is leading many of these countries straight to hell.

Hold up. India is catching strays here for no good reason.

We have DOTs programs. They're paid for domestically, and while I'm sure donations are accepted, the largest source of foreign aid I could see is a $400m loan from the World Bank. I believe USAID has spent about $140M since 1998.

TB treatment is a national priority, and immense amounts of effort are put into DOTs, surveillance and follow-up.

India has a compulsory licensing scheme for life-saving drugs, which you're free to disagree with (good luck coercing a nuclear power or directly attacking it). It sells generics for about 10% of the retail price in the States.

I did some napkin maths:

The Indian state saves about $1 billion through CL a year, so about 5 billion USD by 2030. The US would lose a maximum of around 3 billion a year on pharma revenue, but that's with the unrealistic assumption that there wouldn't be any cost-negotiation or the availability of generics.

The CDC shows that TB treatments in the US can cost tens of thousands for normal TB, 150k for MDR and >500k or more for XDR.

You guys have around an order of ~100 MDR cases a year already. That is despite screening for immigrants and travelers being put in place.

If India paid standard prices, they're looking at about $100 billion for the same level of care. This would be untenable in practice, and TB incidence would soar. This would have knock-on effects, both globally, and in the States, existing screening is already rigorous, so God knows how much you'd end up paying when more MDR and XDR TB cases pop up. I'm not qualified to put firm numbers on the expense, but it ranges from anywhere between 10 million USD to 1 billion USD a year in treatment costs.

You'd be looking at quite serious economic fallout from sanctions, and the theoretical gains of about $2B USD PA are unlikely to manifest, since if India somehow was forced to stop using generics, they'd likely just spend less and then face an explosion in TB cases that wouldn't particularly respect borders. If the US really put the squeeze on, then India could well retaliate by flooding international markets with generics for other drugs.

And of course, do you really want to piss of another >billion strong nuclear power which is a willing partner against China? From a pragmatic point of view, I'd wager not.

Uh, what does India stealing medical patents have to do with anything? Are their knockoffs less effective? Pardon my ignorance, but it would seem that a stolen antibiotic is, in terms of effects, identical to a purchased one.

While the factories likely have purity issues, the main issue is the antibiotics are culturally ineffective. That is, people routinely do not complete their regimens, which is a primary driver of antibiotic resistance. There are subpopulations in America where this is also true, but it is believed to be a widespread problem in India.

How would making India buy antibiotics from the US do anything about this?

The implication is that they are not allowed to have them except under conditions strictly administrated by American doctors, probably few at all.

It is not clear that finishing the course prevents resistance.

I was going to post this, and it seems correct for antibiotics in general, but it may not be true for TB, due to the nature of the illness and the fact that it takes megadosing on antibiotics for months to make a dent in the infection.

No, opposite problem. They are effective, they aren't utilized properly. Prescribed wrong, treatment regimens not followed, both kinds of failure cause TB to gain further drug resistance.

Again, has nothing to do with who makes the antibiotics.

  1. America develops new TB treatment
  2. India, South Africa, et al., misuse it
  3. Misuse drives further drug resistance in TB
  4. New treatment doesn't work anymore

Whether it's made locally or shipped to such nations the solution remains prohibiting methods of treatment that risk further drug resistance, e.g., changing to requiring the locking down of patients for the entire duration of treatment.

Not OP, but if we were giving them antibiotics we might at least hope to suggest they use them responsibly. If they just steal them instead, they can hand them out like candy.

(Again, not OP, and I have no stake in this issue, just suggesting a possible connection).

The point he's making is "if Indians misuse antibiotics then they shouldn't be allowed to have the ones we're trying to keep in reserve; since they'd respond to a refusal to licence by seizing the patents, blow up the physical factories".

Sure, but, India is not asking permission. They get ahold of a new American made drug and cheaply copy it. Once you already know the molecule, making copies is easy. It is discovering and testing potential drugs that is enormously expensive. Europe and India leave that Herculean task to America.

This is not responsive to @jake's suggestion. He was suggesting that the West respond to Indian misuse (e.g. feeding to animals, or rampant failure to finish courses) of in-reserve pharmaceuticals (i.e. those we're trying to keep microbes from becoming resistant to) by not only revoking their patent licences and embargoing India, but literally blowing up Indian generic factories producing these drugs with airstrikes.

I reiterate that this is Jake's suggestion, and not mine; while his suggestion avoids your objection, there are others it does not avoid, such as "acts of war against a nuclear triad power are a bad idea".

If the United States tells the people of the Global South "We have the ability to save you from a painful death, but we are choosing not to For The Greater Good", the survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists. They will be much more sympathetic to the Peking Clique, if and when they decide to demand something Washington is unwilling to concede. No fortress you can build will be strong enough to keep them out, when, like Belshazzar, you are numbered, weighed, and divided.

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

The US budget and financial system is extremely overburdened and the nation has a vast amount of debt, to the point that the costs of servicing it are an increasingly significant cost in the budget. Your options are to rip the bandaid off now, or to let things get worse by subsidizing the creation of more aid consumers until the US actually does collapse (or the populace gets desperate enough to elect a strongman) and there's no aid to anyone anywhere.

survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists.

That's fine, as long as we don't have our very own glowies issuing passports/visas to known fighters so they can come train how to fly airplanes in the US. And also if we don't import half-their country to a single US state, we'll be fine.

If the United States tells the people of the Global South "We have the ability to save you from a painful death, but we are choosing not to For The Greater Good", the survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists.

You are making the classic mistake of presenting the status quo as the undesirable alternative to the status quo.

Notably, bin Ladin did come from the Global South, which was/is already fertile soil for various radical cultists, however you decide to define the term. Moreover, this occurs despite the status quo already being the funding line, as opposed to the supposed consequence of not funding.

The mistake in the framing is presenting the lack of preferred policy as a difference in nature, as opposed to a difference of degrees. This creates a discrediting effect- 'why should we keep paying for the thing we'll get regardless of if we pay'- rather than a cautionary effect 'things will be worse if we don't pay.'

The issue/weakness of the later, of course, is that an argument of efficacy has to prove it's efficacy, and that has the burden of being coupled with what's being paid for in practice and not just in objective. Like, 'USAID is spending money on life-saving things... but does so by also paying for gay operas.'

You can like opera. You can approve of gay operas even. But a medical cause that is spending on gay operas is not a compelling medical cause, even if people would be- in theory- willing to support medical causes.

(This is a classic weakness of government agencies that lose their sense of purpose / mission and get scope-creeped into fields outside their focus. The consequence of losing public legitimacy and political support isn't losing the scope-creept stuff, but also the efforts that were the nominal original focus.)

The US would never implement such a policy, not without an effective or actual revolution in governance. The brutal pragmatism wouldn't stop at "Good luck with that," it would be a fully isolationist US or West. We're talking a mined, milecastled and turreted border wall with Mexico with no entrances, boats flying unacceptable or no flags being sunk, no flights to those countries, no business in those countries, no telecommunications access permitted from those countries. We're talking skin color as a reason for detainment and summary deportation. It's a nightmare scenario.

The position was hyperbole in service of my conclusion: we do have an ultimate obligation to help these countries but what we're doing right now is hurting them. Hurting them so much threatening them with drone strikes would be superior than our "aid." It's not charity to think of every human as a blank slate, it's confusing what ought to be for what is, and profound differences in human behavior is what is. Just health differences, that our discourse has devolved so far that in another environment I might have to heavily couch myself to avoid the impression of wrongthink when all I'm wondering about is a genetic propensity to PPH, this isn't right, good, truthful. Now instead we're in decades of a geopolitical implementation of the trope of the pageant girl's vapid "I'm going to work for world peace." Charity must be tailored to the target, it must be undertaken with knowledge of the recipient's strengths and shortcomings, all of them. In other words, it must be undertaken out of actual love. John Green wants to show love, he grew up Christian in whatever surely protestant environment that didn't teach it right, though anymore, what churches do? But when he donates to fighting maternal mortality he isn't thinking as hard as he needs to be, he isn't asking, okay, well, what if this just means a lot more girls will be born who wouldn't be, what if they grow up and they need all this, and what if the money isn't there, and they die? The most important questions with these kinds of charitable projects must be above all others "What is our plan for obsolescence?" — "What is our plan if we have to stop?"

One of the arguments in the post you are replying to would require tens of thousands of 9/11s to get close to rebutting .There are already billions of wannabe Bin Laden's in the global south, most currently don't have the resources or skills. If anything, propping them up makes the terrorism and future war problem worse...

Radical Islam is already running wild in Africa and getting worse by the day, partly because of how ineffective US military aid is. African countries have already been turning away from the United States by the dozen because of the US’s inability to help them fight it. America’s help is weak and ineffective partially because the aid is conditioned on a bunch of stupid aesthetic requirements like “respecting bizarre western sexual practices” and “not being a military dictatorship”. The Russians and the Chinese don’t make these totalizing demands. They are more than happy to trade guns and effective military advisors for mineral rights on a transactional basis. The Africans like that better because relationships with Russia and China, while mercenary, actually allow the Africans to govern their own countries and don’t turn into a clingy codependency where they have to live and rule according to what makes American liberals feel good.

To be crude: Those folks will become fertile soil for MOAB 2.0. Like the people unlucky enough to have shared a slice of continent with Osama bin Laden.

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

My gut tells me this isn't true at all. Where is the direct negative for the western world to not giving free stuff to an infinitely growing third world?

It feels like you are hoisting the western world on its own petard. Leveraging the massive amount of sympathy and charity it has given, which has driven it to its knees, in order to justify it continuing the practice to not face the wrath of the people it has been saving for the past century.

"Better keep giving charity to us or we will kill you."

Whenever I hear an argument along the lines of "We have to engage in leftist policy X, or else terrible thing Y that right-wingers fear will happen!", I reach for my tired disappointment.

Be honest with me now: you don't want to provide aid to the people of the Global South to prevent radical cultists; you want to provide aid to the people of the Global South because you think it's the right thing to do, and Osama 2.0 is a convenient argument you came up with.

I do favour providing aid to the Global South because I believe that it is the right thing to do, and wish everyone else supported it for the same reason.

However, as many people here do not share that moral instinct, I am left only to appeal to their self-interest.

The fact that they point in the same direction is not a coincidence but the working of karma. If you harden your hearts towards the suffering of the least fortunate among you, it will come back to bite you in the rear end.

If you harden your hearts towards the suffering of the least fortunate among you, it will come back to bite you in the rear end.

The trans-Sarahan slave trade was at least as large as the trans-Atlantic, but one observes that there's no class of descendants begging for reparations in the Middle East. In large part because they castrated male slaves to prevent that issue.

Hardening your heart does not tend to bite you, if you harden it enough. Being charitable is good, being hard-hearted is advantageous, it is the mushy middle that bites you. History makes many arguments that moral improvement comes with surprisingly high and enduring costs. Europe is steadily learning that lesson.

I am left only to appeal to their self-interest.

Do you prioritize defending against the future foreign enemy, or the current domestic one?

If we prioritize defeating the domestic one, we will at least have the resources and the willing soldiers (and industry to support those soldiers) to defeat the foreign one if and when he appears.

The reverse is not as true; if we refuse to defeat the domestic one we will not have the resources or the personnel to defeat the foreigners we simply prioritized less.

Also,

If the United States

The NGOs are more than capable of funding these operations on their own (perhaps with fewer administrative staff if they want the altruism to actually be effective). The fact they will not suggests they just want it done with the tax dollars- and if they wanted it done with the tax dollars they should have adjusted how much of a domestic enemy they wanted to be (which they didn't).

The fact that they point in the same direction like this is a sign of motivated reasoning. Karma is not real.

But from what I hear USAID has been making the Global South more sympathetic to the Peking Clique, as you call them, by showing up and demanding to know how the sexual minorities are being treated. Eliminating USAID is not a commitment to forever forsaking the Global South and banning all foreign aid forever, it's shutting down an organization that's served as an arm of US coercive diplomacy.

And, from what I hear, an arm which didn’t coordinate with the state department.

Do you have evidence of USAID unjustifiably deviating from best practice or Sierra Leonians having a genetic susceptibility for postpartum hemorrhaging?

Postpartum Hemorrhaging as leading cause of maternal deaths in Sierra Leone.

Particular disposition to hemorrhaging is my speculation, but when Sierra Leone at least was the world capital of obstetric mortality with >1000/100K while Haiti had <500/100K, a genetic basis is the rational guess.

Sierra Leone is less genetically homogenous than other similar-sized African countries because it is where the British released the slaves seized by the West Africa Squadron. This points against a genetic basis.

People dying of TB is bad. But it's net negative only for the countries with the TB problem. Why should US subsidize this?

Because doing good things is good!

You know how every time there's a new potential pandemic you hear about how new diseases are deadlier because the pathogen is not adapted to human hosts? And how a well adapted pathogen doesn't want to kill the host, it wants to live in the host long enough to propagate to other hosts?

TB is arguably the most human adapted pathogen out there. It has our immune system beat six ways from Sunday, kills slowly over an extended period of time, and can lie dormant for years before becoming active again (which means healthy people you let through customs may have a passive infection, and will only turn active and contagious later when they're already in the country). It is also arguably the most difficult bacterial infection to cure. You need to be on multiple powerful medications with significant side effects (including potential blindness) for 6-9 months in order to cure it.

If a TB strain managed to become resistant to one of those medications then it may not be possible to cure it, not without new drug development. In the US we've managed to mostly extirpate the disease at great cost over many years of effort. If an antibiotic resistant strain showed up it could undo decades of progress in US health.

I think a good way to avoid that trojan horse scenario would be to only permit entry to high achieving people from that region of the world as I would assume they are more likely to follow medical advice.

Maybe you shouldn't let people through immigration at all. Maybe the people you do let in should stake a good X amt of currency denominated in USD for the privilege of entering. They can have their money back when they leave if they don't suffer from TB on their way out.

Most people with dormant TB don't know that they have TB: getting to keep their money isn't worth them spreading antibiotic resistant TB.

It'd be interesting to compare the cost-effectiveness of USAID's reduction in pathogens brought to the US and quarantining all international travelers and cargo ships, including economic impact, but the counterfactual in the comment you replied to was "phase-out," not indefinite continuation.

Ah, thank you for pointing this out. It's already paid for and thus unnecessarily cruel - this is the main point. IMO good faith interpretation, from the US government perspective the management of the drug supply chain isn't free, so they are just saving on that.

Because while the NGO's left hand is open demanding money, the NGO's right hand has boatload after boatload of diseased "asylum seekers" poised on your border. One way or another, they will make it your problem.

The selfish motivation is that pathogens don't respect borders. Travel between the US and the Philippines is relatively common, almost a million Americans visited the country in 2024. Any one of them can pick up a new antibiotic resistant strain of TB and bring it home, at which point it's our problem. Solve the problems where they are so we don't have to solve them here in the future.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to:

  • Ban immigration from and travelling to the countries with this problem
  • Treat your own citizens if this issue arises

After a while these poor countries find new sponsors who will solve their problems. Or solve it by themselves.

Will we have to have another World War (or perhaps two as last time) to prevent the American relapse into the fiction that they shouldn't care about anything or anybody abroad?

Cheaper maybe, but more authoritarian than I'd think most would be comfortable with especially considering that immigration isn't necessary here, just travel. TB is incredibly infectious. Even if you ban travel to affected countries, it still leaves you open to second order infections (American travels to e.g. Japan, Japan isn't restricting travel to the Philippines, American contracts antibiotic resistant TB from a Japanese traveler who visited the Philippines). As others have said, there's no guarantee that this antibiotic resistant strain of TB will be treatable without novel antibiotic research (which is expensive as well, and results are not guaranteed).

  1. Poor countries find new sponsors, like China or Russia

  2. Poor countries start advocating for China and Russia and against the US on the world stage

  3. Europeans, who think of poor countries as intrinsically virtuous, pick up the tune

  4. Europeans become more anti-American and wrestle their governments into reducing support for US plans and military logistics

  5. Core US interests abroad, such as supporting Israel, suffer or become significantly more expensive

  6. More money winds up being spent on workarounds than it would have cost to continue bribing the poor countries

An appealing offer, but I'm still waiting to hear the downside.

Europeans become more anti-American and wrestle their governments into reducing support for US plans and military logistics

Trump's stated policy of ”we take what we want from you, no matter if you’re allies or not” is already speedrunning this with little need for anything related to the third world.

If anything, those of my British friends and relations who are not card-carrying anti-Trumpists actually seem to be sneakily impressed.

Part of it is that it seems nice to have a forceful leader who actually tries to do things rather than put all his time and energy into long, boring attempts to explain why he can't do anything. Part of it that in many ways soft power is more insulting than hard power.

"Do what I say because I'm bigger and richer and stronger than you."

has a certain honesty about it.

"We're all friends, right? Obviously we're much bigger than you, but you know what, that doesn't matter. We'd never dream of using our overwhelming military and economic advantage to compel our friends. Oh, btw, can you close this guy's bank account for us? No, we're not going to tell you why. Just trust us. We're all friends, right? Allies, even. You like having our soldiers in your country to protect you from all the other powers who totally aren't selfless like us, don't you? It's such a shame, really - we did everything we could to support countries like China, and they paid us back by trying to be independent. That's not a worry with you, of course. Isn't it nice that we all get along?"

seems nicer on the surface but really isn't.

If anything, those of my British friends and relations who are not card-carrying anti-Trumpists actually seem to be sneakily impressed.

Having as contrast Keir Starmer, who is desperately trying to give away pay Mauritius to take away the British Indian Ocean Territory for no reason other than that a court controlled by enemies of the U.K. said they should is probably helpful here.

Well, yeah. The bar is low.

Has there been a CW post about this that I've missed? Feels like the sort of thing that would get discussed here but I haven't seen any mention of it.

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Banning all travel to and from places millions of Americans visit each year would be costly to the economy so while it might be cheaper for the government it would surely be more expensive for the country. Also, I want freedom to travel where I please. We shouldn't impose travel bans that aren't actually necessary.