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Notes -
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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