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