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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33246 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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OP isn't talking about whether these things needed to continue to be funded indefinitely. The problem is that instead of "we will fund no further studies, no argument" the order literally caused studies to be halted midway through. Which would be fine if the study was a passive observation of the mating habits of roofing bats in the wild; less fine when it means the volunteers have already begun potentially dangerous treatment regimens, and are now being dumped out into the world. (It's not even as though they can continue taking experimental drugs on their own dime to avoid withdrawal; if the study's over the study's over.)

Lots of people answer this kind of talk with "it was a clean break, or the tiniest amount of leeway being used by everyone and their dog until the whole DOGE died by a thousand paper cuts". But come the fuck on. Leaving clinical-study volunteers hanging is ridiculously evil in principle, and I just can't accept that it was this or setting such a precedent for leniency as to scuttle the entire DOGE endeavor. Really now. The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

Because you aren’t working with people who want to cut. So every carve out you give will be expanded beyond belief. Half measures rarely work against an entrenched enemy.

The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

No, it's literally impossible. Remember, you're dealing with people with sufficient motivated reasoning to pretend to be confused about words like "man" and "woman". People with years of critical theory training that teaches that meaning is subjective, and concepts constructed.

The place where Elon's people draw the line doesn't have to be accepted by the woke activists, though. DOGE can just come up with a common-sense criterion that makes sense to them, and if someone tries to argue in obvious bad faith that their bullshit study is on the right side of the line, they can just say "no it isn't; you may not appeal this decision; goodbye, please don't email us again". This would undoubtedly still cause a ruckus, and it might even have a few false positives, but it would still be immeasurably better than not having common-sense exceptions at all, and I genuinely think it should be trivial for DOGE to implement if they really have the stuff.

Like, why are you acting as though trivial word-salad smoke-and-mirrors would leave them helpless and befuddled? Isn't cutting through the obfuscation and identifying the good government programs from the woke hustlers supposed to be what they're for? If they're not up to this then one wonders why an elite crack team led by one of the most successful men in the world is needed for this job. You could get the same effect if you told an AI to cut all government programs no matter what, gave it access to a government email, and let it loose.

The DOGE (and Trump more broadly) is fighting a bureaucracy hostile to them. The activists are the people carrying out the orders.

Doing it before-the-fact rather than after-the-fact enables what is essentially a DDOS attack on the decision-makers. Doing it in this order makes a flood-the-zone-with-appeals strategy work in favor of DOGE instead of against it.

The argument against that is that if I have funding and I think I won’t next week, if I get a reprieve by “putting medical devices in bodies”, then I might just do that. Or maybe a drug that needs to be strictly monitored, again, if I will lose everything if I don’t and I get to maintain funding and my job if I just start the trials and hope that the funding doesn’t dry up, why not?

And this would actually be worse for those patients who are being asked to start said trials knowing that the funds might not be there to finish. I’ll be honest, any doctor at the moment trying to recruit people for a NIH trial on a serious disease like cancer knowing that the funding won’t be there should have his license yanked. We know these trials will be stopped, and we know that those recruits will waste time and possibly risk health doing a trial that will stop. And those patients lose time for treatment.

That’s where ripping off the bandage helps. We know the trials are stopping mid trial so people signing up now should know better.

We're talking about months-long trials that were already ongoing when everything was suddenly put on hold with no forewarning. Obviously no one should be starting any more trials for the time being; and doubly-obviously, any doctors trying to blackmail the government by suddenly adding dangerous procedures to an ongoing trial should be sued with extreme prejudice. (They shouldn't be hard to catch, the whole deal with clinical studies that get government funds is that you register what you said you were going to use the money for in advance.)

We have very rich liberals in Washington. And wiring money takes less than 24 hours. If people cared as much as they whine about it - someone would have picked up the slack already.

Coordination is hard. I think it's unsurprising for liberals' position to be "we have a coordination machine, it's called the government, please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason". (Even if there are obvious rejoinders.)

please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason

The conservative then proceeds to holds up a mirror. "Just build your own foreign aid organization."

I'm honestly surprised they don't. It would be such an obvious PR win, even if they don't actually care about the affected people.

If you prove it can be done without the state, then you'll have a much harder time arguing that it should be the responsibility of the state.

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