I Suggest my fellow Europeans to contact the European Commision President (or national leaders) to from a Coalition of the Willing to save George Bush contructive legacy:
You try and make the case here that it is in the interest of the US to keep giving aid to prevent refugee movement. But it seems that it is a lot easier to stop refugees from coming in by tightening border security and eliminating welfare / foreign aid aimed at bringing in migrants and refugees. Or even something as simple as taking away the app that gives refugees easy hearings and citizenship opportunities. So the Trump admin can stop foreign aid without seeing a large increase in migration.
People generally are becoming more wary of hostage moralizing. You and others talk about these African children dying of AIDS like hostages. GIVE INTO OUR DEMANDS OR ELSE THESE CHILDREN WILL ALL DIE...
Well, first of all, it's unlikely that the U.S. will simply never let in more refugees. Thus, even if the ideal refugee policy wouldn't let them in, the actual one will. Second, a destabilized world of war and famine is likely to hurt the U.S. even apart from refugees. Third, what the fuck are you talking about? If you abruptly cut off aid that is saving people's lives, it's taking people as hostages to say that if you don't stop that the people will die.
Getting to zero total refugees is a difficult ask. Going from millions to a few thousand or less is doable, and doesn't require maintaining any sort of foreign aid. Just prior to the election, the Biden-Harris administration managed to drastically reduce migrant inflow just by talking to the Mexican president and asking him to shut down the Darien gap, presumably in exchange for some unspoken favors.
People dying in Africa often function as rhetorical hostages to maintain aid programs. If someone wants to stop the world food bank or similar programs, then there will be starving Africans. If someone wants to stop foreign aid for diseases, there will be Africans dying of AIDS. Someone in this sphere wrote an article recently about 'moral hazard'. A problem with this being a commitment to always feeding people who cannot feed themselves, and providing medical assistance for people who cannot stop themselves from spreading HIV to each other. And this comes at a time where Americans saw that the government spent so much money on foreigners and migrants that it suddenly had empty pockets when trying to deal with a nasty hurricane.
Well to stop beating around the bush, would say that given differences in diet etc. the typical American is worth less than the typical sub-Saharan African, that presumably you think that the typical American meat eater is worth less than the typical American vegan with some obvious implications.
> But abruptly cutting off life-saving aid is more akin to killing than to failing to save people’s lives.
This I think is where I part ways with your reasoning. I have a strong gut instinct, which I do endorse, that nobody owes anybody charity.
Think about the incentives this principle sets up. It creates a very easy way to avoid being evil: never start giving any charity to anyone. To call cutting off charity evil, you have to think that giving charity for a decade and then cutting it off abruptly and without warning is somehow worse than never having given charity at all. If this is what you believe, it is at least non-obvious and requires an argument.
As a matter of policy, I do agree that we should resume PEPFAR and much other foreign aid, both for the benefit of the people directly helped and for the benefit for us. But I don't think we owe anyone charity, and I don't think it is evil to stop. I think we should reserve notions of evil for things that are worse.
He of course explains his logic in the very next paragraph. If what Trump had done was say, “PEPFAR is going to go away in three months. You have that long to figure it out” I would disagree but it would at least be something to debate over. Cutting it off with zero warning is indeed just straight up murder
Agreed with your general points here, but one minor nitpick:
"They immigrated to America just a few decades before the Nazis took over and killed all the Jews in Poland and Romania."
The Nazis actually did not murder a huge part of Romanian Jews. The Jews in the Romanian Old Kingdom territories mostly survived the Holocaust unscathed, to my knowledge, because the Romanian dictator, Ion Antonescu, refused to deport them to Nazi death camps in an unsuccessful attempt to save his own skin once he realized that the Allies could win WWII.
For argument's sake let's call shutting down this program evil and intolerable. But what about in the future are we never allowed to shut down programs that save lives? Is that always evil and intolerable? Personally I would be in favor of: 1 year before you can shut down aid and instead of just shutting it down allow other people to fund the initiative rather than the USA Government.
Great. People outside of your tribe often respond better to trades (here's the process to achieve what you want) rather than emotional blackmail (you cannot do anything because you would be killing babies). Conservatives are fed up with being emotionally blackmailed by progressives. I see Hanania highlighting "cruelty" but when people emotionally blackmail you you have to harden your heart to them to break free.
What are you talking about? It's not emotional blackmail to say that if you do things that cause babies to die, then you are killing babies. That's just true!
Why are you putting a distinction between something being true and it being emotional blackmail? There is no "that's just truth". There is truth and The consequences of you bringing up the truth
Most times you cut large programs that will statistically cause death. Look at the crying pictures of children in response to immigration crackdown. As I said, conservatives are tired of this and it's not a practice that works well on other groups
> The Iraq war was immoral, and it would have been immoral even if it ended up being slightly good for America, because it killed lots of Iraqis
Nitpick, but this is probably false. The Iraq war was bad for America (and probably the rest of the world, since it helped empower Iran by removing a regional rival), but it probably was good for the Iraqis themselves on net. Between persecutions and pointless wars Saddam had several *million* pointless deaths on his hands, and getting rid of him probably saved a lot more Iraqis than died in the Iraq war.
I think it's interesting what Trump is doing. I've long had the intuition that the federal government is mostly bloated and useless, but with these cuts, we're finding out the hard way which parts are actually important.
At this point, I want to dismantle both the Democrats and the Republicans and assemble a new party from the pieces of both that make sense.
Why does the United States have any moral obligational at all? Infinity aid is just as tenable a moral position, oh yeah it's real sad that when these programs are run down, because they created this structure and taking it away will suck. But people like this can write infinite grants to save people all across the world.
I mean do they actual fix the world? Not really, they just do harm reduction and plug holes. Is it impossible to imagine the actual governance of these structures might be to blame, and be held responsible for providing inadequate care. Half measures that can be taken away when the US can't provide infinite aid might lead to implosions of these programs because they weren't build on sustainable foundations.
They prevent lots of people from dying. They fix many problems for many people, though usually some remnant remains. I think it's good to prevent terrible things from happening, by the very nature of what a bad thing is.
Specially at modest price, and when you adress an externality (every infected person in crease the Risk of trasmission).
A funny thing is that Talmud suggests that as a general rule you do not have an obligation to be charitable, but when an oportunity for leveraged charity arises, you must take it (even helping your enemy, that can be so grateful to change his Mind):
Taking homeless junkies off the street against their will would also prevent some terrible things from happening…to them. But for many, the terrible thing just IS taking them off the street against their will.
Utilitarians have a hard time with this liberty stuff.
If someone in a film or book acted like Trump, the character would be criticised for being too cartoonishly evil
I Suggest my fellow Europeans to contact the European Commision President (or national leaders) to from a Coalition of the Willing to save George Bush contructive legacy:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CCHwPXCTRNKdnyYbk/the-anti-aids-program-pepfar-the-european-union-must-replace
(Sorry for the joke, but it was too irresistible).
You try and make the case here that it is in the interest of the US to keep giving aid to prevent refugee movement. But it seems that it is a lot easier to stop refugees from coming in by tightening border security and eliminating welfare / foreign aid aimed at bringing in migrants and refugees. Or even something as simple as taking away the app that gives refugees easy hearings and citizenship opportunities. So the Trump admin can stop foreign aid without seeing a large increase in migration.
People generally are becoming more wary of hostage moralizing. You and others talk about these African children dying of AIDS like hostages. GIVE INTO OUR DEMANDS OR ELSE THESE CHILDREN WILL ALL DIE...
Well, first of all, it's unlikely that the U.S. will simply never let in more refugees. Thus, even if the ideal refugee policy wouldn't let them in, the actual one will. Second, a destabilized world of war and famine is likely to hurt the U.S. even apart from refugees. Third, what the fuck are you talking about? If you abruptly cut off aid that is saving people's lives, it's taking people as hostages to say that if you don't stop that the people will die.
Getting to zero total refugees is a difficult ask. Going from millions to a few thousand or less is doable, and doesn't require maintaining any sort of foreign aid. Just prior to the election, the Biden-Harris administration managed to drastically reduce migrant inflow just by talking to the Mexican president and asking him to shut down the Darien gap, presumably in exchange for some unspoken favors.
People dying in Africa often function as rhetorical hostages to maintain aid programs. If someone wants to stop the world food bank or similar programs, then there will be starving Africans. If someone wants to stop foreign aid for diseases, there will be Africans dying of AIDS. Someone in this sphere wrote an article recently about 'moral hazard'. A problem with this being a commitment to always feeding people who cannot feed themselves, and providing medical assistance for people who cannot stop themselves from spreading HIV to each other. And this comes at a time where Americans saw that the government spent so much money on foreigners and migrants that it suddenly had empty pockets when trying to deal with a nasty hurricane.
Yes, often when you advocate for things that will cause people to die, people object that those things will cause people to die.
I think people like you would have more success trying to set up a private charity to continue handing out PEPFAR type aid.
Humanitarian aid (not private charity) is a racket that undermines others’ national self-sufficiency
Is perhaps an unspoken reason as to why you seem to be especially partial towards saving sub-Saharan Africans their much lower meat consumption? I did speculate (I think correctly https://open.substack.com/pub/statesofexception/p/climate-change-is-worse-than-factory?r=1eio29&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=84417232) that part of the unspoken reason as to why you were much less worried about climate change than others was the presumed large benefits in reducing wild animal populations.
No, what?
Well to stop beating around the bush, would say that given differences in diet etc. the typical American is worth less than the typical sub-Saharan African, that presumably you think that the typical American meat eater is worth less than the typical American vegan with some obvious implications.
> But abruptly cutting off life-saving aid is more akin to killing than to failing to save people’s lives.
This I think is where I part ways with your reasoning. I have a strong gut instinct, which I do endorse, that nobody owes anybody charity.
Think about the incentives this principle sets up. It creates a very easy way to avoid being evil: never start giving any charity to anyone. To call cutting off charity evil, you have to think that giving charity for a decade and then cutting it off abruptly and without warning is somehow worse than never having given charity at all. If this is what you believe, it is at least non-obvious and requires an argument.
As a matter of policy, I do agree that we should resume PEPFAR and much other foreign aid, both for the benefit of the people directly helped and for the benefit for us. But I don't think we owe anyone charity, and I don't think it is evil to stop. I think we should reserve notions of evil for things that are worse.
He of course explains his logic in the very next paragraph. If what Trump had done was say, “PEPFAR is going to go away in three months. You have that long to figure it out” I would disagree but it would at least be something to debate over. Cutting it off with zero warning is indeed just straight up murder
That is a clarification of what his position is, not an argument that his position is correct, Dr.
Agreed with your general points here, but one minor nitpick:
"They immigrated to America just a few decades before the Nazis took over and killed all the Jews in Poland and Romania."
The Nazis actually did not murder a huge part of Romanian Jews. The Jews in the Romanian Old Kingdom territories mostly survived the Holocaust unscathed, to my knowledge, because the Romanian dictator, Ion Antonescu, refused to deport them to Nazi death camps in an unsuccessful attempt to save his own skin once he realized that the Allies could win WWII.
For argument's sake let's call shutting down this program evil and intolerable. But what about in the future are we never allowed to shut down programs that save lives? Is that always evil and intolerable? Personally I would be in favor of: 1 year before you can shut down aid and instead of just shutting it down allow other people to fund the initiative rather than the USA Government.
Yeah I think you ought to do that before shutting down a life-saving program.
Great. People outside of your tribe often respond better to trades (here's the process to achieve what you want) rather than emotional blackmail (you cannot do anything because you would be killing babies). Conservatives are fed up with being emotionally blackmailed by progressives. I see Hanania highlighting "cruelty" but when people emotionally blackmail you you have to harden your heart to them to break free.
What are you talking about? It's not emotional blackmail to say that if you do things that cause babies to die, then you are killing babies. That's just true!
Why are you putting a distinction between something being true and it being emotional blackmail? There is no "that's just truth". There is truth and The consequences of you bringing up the truth
Most times you cut large programs that will statistically cause death. Look at the crying pictures of children in response to immigration crackdown. As I said, conservatives are tired of this and it's not a practice that works well on other groups
I struggle to see how the "emotional blackmail" label couldn't be applied to *any* sufficiently consequentialist moral claim
> The Iraq war was immoral, and it would have been immoral even if it ended up being slightly good for America, because it killed lots of Iraqis
Nitpick, but this is probably false. The Iraq war was bad for America (and probably the rest of the world, since it helped empower Iran by removing a regional rival), but it probably was good for the Iraqis themselves on net. Between persecutions and pointless wars Saddam had several *million* pointless deaths on his hands, and getting rid of him probably saved a lot more Iraqis than died in the Iraq war.
I think it's interesting what Trump is doing. I've long had the intuition that the federal government is mostly bloated and useless, but with these cuts, we're finding out the hard way which parts are actually important.
At this point, I want to dismantle both the Democrats and the Republicans and assemble a new party from the pieces of both that make sense.
Why does the United States have any moral obligational at all? Infinity aid is just as tenable a moral position, oh yeah it's real sad that when these programs are run down, because they created this structure and taking it away will suck. But people like this can write infinite grants to save people all across the world.
I mean do they actual fix the world? Not really, they just do harm reduction and plug holes. Is it impossible to imagine the actual governance of these structures might be to blame, and be held responsible for providing inadequate care. Half measures that can be taken away when the US can't provide infinite aid might lead to implosions of these programs because they weren't build on sustainable foundations.
They prevent lots of people from dying. They fix many problems for many people, though usually some remnant remains. I think it's good to prevent terrible things from happening, by the very nature of what a bad thing is.
Specially at modest price, and when you adress an externality (every infected person in crease the Risk of trasmission).
A funny thing is that Talmud suggests that as a general rule you do not have an obligation to be charitable, but when an oportunity for leveraged charity arises, you must take it (even helping your enemy, that can be so grateful to change his Mind):
https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/ki-teitse/social-capital-fallen-donkeys/
.
Taking homeless junkies off the street against their will would also prevent some terrible things from happening…to them. But for many, the terrible thing just IS taking them off the street against their will.
Utilitarians have a hard time with this liberty stuff.
Freedom is mostly necesary to allow people to maximize utility. That is the answer to Lenin.
Now, it is an instrument for humans, not an idol for whorshipping.