Shoe is not so much a leftist as the embodiment of third-positionist populist brainrot. She represents all the dumbest opinions of both the far left and far right.
Seriously, I can't fathom why anyone still listens to her or watches her videos. It's one thing to go down this rabbit hole when you're 12, but how can any adult human with a brain find her intelligent or even mildly insightful?
Full blown far right wingers, like Fuentes, for instance, are certainly more malevolent, and often say demonstrably stupid things regardless of one's views on their morality or lack thereof. But at least they're moderately original. The populist brainrot grifter crowd manages to be far more irritating.
I find some people just need it to be true that there is some kind of grand order to the universe. So if USAID does a lot of good things and some bad things, that must indicate that the good things were fraudulent. Otherwise, why would the all-knowing council of elders at USAID have allowed the bad things? It cannot be the case that these were different programs created by different people in different years with different competencies in pursuit of different goals. Especially in this secular era, there's a weird way in which a powerful and evil government that does everything with intention is somehow more reassuring than the reality that it's just people like us at the wheel, with all of our flaws, flailing around in hopes that we arrive at a place a little better than where we started.
Or it could just be that it's an instrument of foreign influence and policy, designed from the start to hide this fact, and the good things are at best a byproduct of that, while the bad things are its purpose point.
Of course complacent first worlders who don't suffer from that influence have no problem with it, or go "think of the children" when it's mentioned.
> Especially in this secular era, there's a weird way in which a powerful and evil government that does everything with intention is somehow more reassuring than the reality that it's just people like us at the wheel, with all of our flaws, flailing around in hopes that we arrive at a place a little better than where we started.
If 99% of the value in USAID comes from 1% of the program, that would be a good reason to cancel it. Shut down USAID, and make a new program called the annual PEPFAR grant.
If a business has one salesman making 100 million in sales, and 90 other salesmen making 1 million in sales each, this is not a good argument for axing the entire sales department and then maybe rehiring the one salesman.
BB isnt making the claim that it should be a basis for cancellation, you are though, so im asking why does that validate shutting down usaid?
how are you seeing value here or the lack of value?
bentham isnt even making a claim regarding its value coming from the 1 percent only
hes making a comparison between what the best 1 percent does with respect to the 99 percent, which is somewhat different to what you write
'The best 1% of foreign aid probably does more good than the bottom 99" emphasis on more. he doesnt say the remaining 99 percent is of no or little value.
"PEPFAR, for instance, did not have any ulterior motive."
I'm not sure this is true. I don't think it has nefarious ulterior motives, but I don't think we were providing aid purely because it's a good thing. We were doing it because, in addition to saving lives, it raised America's standing in the world. It makes America look good when countries get aid packages with "Provided by the USA" stickers. I don't think this detracts from the good it does, but I'm not sure we would have done it if we didn't also get to say "look at all the good we're doing!"
I think this is a very weird non-point to make, since it could feasibly be true any time any large organization or actor does something good. i think Chastity is correct that the inner machinations of GWB's mind are not enigmatic---but since you agree that if it had been just a move to enhance soft power, it would still be good, I don't know what the point of saying this is.
Since PEPFAR was Bush's baby, we can tell what its intentions were relatively easily compared to most other programs, by just reading his words on the subject:
- AIDS was getting insanely horrifically bad, and a bunch of other anti-AIDS stuff had been tried, to limited or no avail. Look at that graph of AIDS deaths, but cut off the part where it starts getting better. "The statistics were horrifying. Some ten million people in sub-Sarahan Africa had died. In some countries, one out of every four adults carried HIV."
- As a genuine Christian, GWB thought that there was a non-zero moral duty to the poor and downtrodden, and wanted to create an effective program to stop it. "I saw their suffering as a challenge to the words of the Gospel: “To whom much is given, much is required.”"
- After 9/11, it "became clear to me that this was more than a mission of conscience. Our national security was tied directly to human suffering. Societies mired in poverty and disease foster hopelessness. And hopelessness leaves people ripe for recruitment by terrorists and extremists."
(All quotes from his autobiography, Decision Points.)
I don't miss him. Iraq wasn't a funny little fuck up. It was a monumental disaster and waste of trillions of dollars. Maybe if he hadn't lied about it it would have been more justifiable. And in that case, sure, I could accept some argument about invading Iraq as maybe being unfalsifiably good in the long run somehow. Iraq seems okay nowadays, and maybe it wouldn't be okay today under Saddam's kid.
But he did lie. It was a war crime and murderous lie to the entire world. And the fact that it was allowed to happen unpunished is just baffling. Bush and his piece of shit crony Powell walked around up until Powell's death, going completely unpunished for everything they caused.
He didn't lie, it was various poor practices in the intelligence agencies that led to them greatly overestimating the probability that Saddam had a nuclear program. (And, yes, this happened in part because they were telling him what he wanted to hear.) Iraq was bad, and a stain on his Presidency, but it wasn't an active, malicious lie.
As to me "missing him yet," Trump is now the head of the Republican party, and rather than believing in shared humanity and something called The Good, he believes foreigners are all evil and everything is friend/enemy distinctions. His followers gleefully decry the idea of basic morality as "suicidal empathy" and "emotional blackmail." He's actively sabotaging the attempts of Ukrainians to defend themselves because he is more sympathetic to evil autocrats than democratically elected leaders struggling against genocidal invaders, has worked to undo the program whose positive impacts outdo every negative of the Bush Presidency 10:1 (PEPFAR), and is actively and currently causing a global recession because he's unable to admit that tariffs don't work. All of these things are both bad on the scale of Iraq, and done with clear intentionality.
No, this is part of the myth and the categorically incorrect understanding of the situation. Bush explicitly lied in contradiction of the intelligence agencies, not in agreement with them or due to a bad report. They concluded there were likely no WMDs in Iraq, and he told the UN there was objective proof of WMDs anyways.
> Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.
This is saying that the underlying intelligence data did not fit with the analysis of that data. But the NIE was "prepared under the auspices of Robert D Walpole, National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Strategic and Nuclear Programs: with assistance from Paul Pillar, NIO for the Near East and South Asia; Lawrence K. Gershwin, NIO for Science and Technology; and Major General John R. Landry, NIO for Conventional Military Issues." IOW, by intelligence officers, not by Bush in defiance of their work. They were doing poor analysis of the underlying data, like a quant who ignores systemic risk in mortgages.
Okay, you drew me into a partially correct part of the discussion. Yes, the claims specifically about WMDs in Iraq were ambiguous, rather than contradicted. But WMDs weren't the only stated reasons for invading Iraq from Bush himself.
"The US government's belief that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the form of nuclear weapons was based upon intelligence which the CIA argued could not be trusted.[40] The CIA was overruled on its opinion on nuclear weapons as the administration sought outside information from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC). Declassified CIA reports from 2002 suggested Iraq had begun production of other forms of WMDs in the form of chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas, sarin, Cyclosarin, and VX. [41]"
Other Western intelligence agencies similar contradicted the idea of nuclear weapons in Iraq, including our dependable allies the Canadians. Going on to more direct fabrications about Iraq:
"Along with Iraq's alleged development of weapons of mass destruction, another justification for invasion was the purported link between Saddam Hussein's government and terrorist organizations, in particular al-Qaeda. 94 In that sense, the Bush administration cast the Iraq war as part of the broader War on Terrorism. On February 11, 2003, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress that "seven countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea - remain active in the US and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans". (43](4]"
"Evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda was discredited by multiple US intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Department's Inspector General's Office even prior to the 2003 invasion. A 21 September 2001 President's Daily Brief (prepared at Bush's request) indicated that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and there was "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." The PDB wrote off the few contacts that existed between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda as attempts to monitor the group, not work with it.[118] The CIA also expressed skepticism about the alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence.[119]"
"Despite these findings, US Vice President Dick Cheney continued to assert that a link existed between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which drew criticism from members of the intelligence community and leading Democrats.
1100) As of the invasion, the State Department listed 45 countries, including the United States, where al-Qaeda was active. Iraq was not one of them. (101]"
The problem with your post is that you don't consider the counterfactual of what would have been done with this money otherwise. It could have gone to say healthcare or more important uses. The standard has to be very high for public funds to not be squandered.
It's also this, by what justice would a government have to spend my money on my behalf? Maybe the counterfactual is that Americans would donate to a charity that did the equivalent of PEPFAR without the system skimming a chunk off the top.
Well the counterfactual is that it gets dropped in the debt black hole and disappears. It's less than 1% of the budget. There's always an effective allocation for the first 1% of funding for something you use.
USAID is just a natural way to give executives flexibility and permission to allocate resources to acquire good will and solve problems overseas. If you got rid of USAID, it would just come back in a natural way, because there's no reality where such a massive country doesn't need to influence the world.
USAID had the state capacity of the most powerful country in the world behind it; it delivered way more bang for the buck in terms of improving lives. If you want that money to go to Americans, cut DOD's budget by 1% and give that back.
the rest of the government suffers from similar inefficiencies, and let's not pretend most people donate even 1% of their income. it's incredibly uncertain that the money allocated to USAID would otherwise go to "healthcare or more important uses" considering, like, for instance, that the DoD can't account for 63% of it's 4tr in assets.
Sorry—I'm Canadian and over here the average is ~0.5%. Also, in the states, it's still 2-3%, not 2-5. But the point still stands, it seems that as long as PEPFAR is even minimally effective, it would be worth doing.
USAID was dedicated to meddling in the internal affairs of other nations and subverting their societies on all levels. I don’t give a shit about AIDS medications in Africa. Let your affluent family pay for it not average Americans who did not benefit in any tangible way from this agency or its programs.
Every country meddles in the internal affairs of other countries. Nearly every week the DoJ was indicting Russian or Chinese or North Korean actors trying to meddle in our internal affairs. Halting US foreign meddling pointlessly disadvantages us compared to every other country in the world. The Trump admin is also dismantling our attempts at detecting internal meddling from other countries - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/bondi-ends-fbi-effort-combat-foreign-influence-us-politics-rcna191012
Which is mostly bs to deflect the massive meddling by the U.S. around the world. I don’t know your age but you’ve lived a single year in your life where America has been subverting other countries or killing people around the world, overwhelmingly for reasons not synonymous with the interests of ordinary Americans either.
The average american benifits from the US being in good standing with the world. You'll see that soon with most US allies abandoning you (besides the UK and Israel)
BS. That’s total rubbish. It’s about the U.S. controlling its vassals via purse strings for mostly useless garbage. Can you defend funding for Trannies in Sri Lanka while native-born Americans are eating out of fucking dumpsters? Of course you can’t.
The native born Americans who are eating out of dumpsters probably don't have any taxable income anyway, and the US benefits in many dimensions when other states are her vassals.
Wrong again. Many pay taxes reduced to poverty do to criminal elite economic and social policies. Supporting mentally ill trannies in Sri Lanka neither saves lives nor advances the interests of average Americans.
I can’t speak for teenaged edge lords but wonder about all the defective incels and autists out here now posing as reborn elitists just like they fancied themselves being in high school.
it’s already been mentioned but shoe is not a leftist and never has been, she’s at best a ideology-less grifter who says she’s a leftist for clicks and at worst actively reactionary
My family is a DC family, Uncle in the Pentagon, Dad in the State Department, Brother in HHS, Sister in Defense. Dad briefly ran VOA until McCarthy came for him, his best friend committed suicide when Nixon came after him. Children in the family were friends with Children of various Vice Presidents and Presidents. Sleepovers at the Naval Observatory kind of thing.
One thing we all assumed from childhood was USAID was a CIA /DOD front and/or slush fund. It had “feet on the ground” in numerous conflict zones and seemed to follow trouble, so to speak. Why was USAID operating in Russia? It mysteriously appears in Georgia after the war with Russia. It operated in all sorts of interesting places.
I think going after it and damaging legitimate programs for aid is bad, but there are landing spots - there are after all a half dozen or more global programs for PEPFAR work to land on if USAID doesn’t support them.
I don’t think USAID is a benign, benevolent organization.
I’d keep that idea and temper factual statements with understanding what the real mission is.
Because that might be the ideal time to set up surveillance infrastructure. Georgia is also particularly an interesting spot - Iran, Russia, Armenia, Iraq, Syria - it’s all so close… it’s like having a friendly army base in the middle of a whirlwind.
I went there on a mission funded by USAID, which was fascinating.
As the term goes “I was disambiguated” by what was present.
I was being sarcastic, because it is also plausible that they went there to provide post-war humanitarian relief. You might also be right, although I wouldn't take what you have to say on faith, but I think that stuff's all good.
I realize. As you aptly pointed out, the language coming from the current administration is generally false, and people swallow it whole. But just because the Republican administration is against the mission, don't imagine that it's heroic, benign, selfless... what's the word... oh - altruistic.
The fact that USAID was operating in Russia is the tell (forced out in 2012). You'd think Russia was an impoverished region needing caloric assistance and vaccines, and we altruistically, heroically even established groups there to help. Help indeed.
CIDCA - the Chinese version of USAID - operates within an overall $5B "development aid" structure, in some ways a copy of USAID. Fascinatingly, they have current operations in Russia, to "help out".
As a leftie myself, I think this is reasonable. There have certainly been knee-jerk, low-IQ takes on this, fueled by Elon and Trump's blatant misrepresentation of what USAID does and social media influencers trying to get clout.
I also think it's important to listen to voices from around the world on this, which have been decidedly mixed. Claudia Sheinbaum, for example, noted that
"It's involved in so many things that, honestly, it's better if they just shut it down. If there's going to be aid, it should come through other transparent channels—that's the real issue,"
Or Gustavo Petro of Colombia, no ally of Trump, who put it more succinctly:
The use of an aid agency to hide problematic programs, even if those programs are a small proportion of the total, generates pushback and makes people reflexively distrust even programs that are done for good reasons.
It's long past time that we audited and assessed U.S. foreign aid and reoriented it to focus on the programs that promote health, welfare, and social justice around the world rather than exercising power or undermining legitimate institutions. And though you might describe the bad things USAID has done in the past as a drop in the bucket, those bad things have an outsized perception on how others in the world perceive us. Try explaining how great PEPFAR is to a Peruvian woman who was sterilized by the Fujimori dictatorship.
I agree with your overall point that USAID has been a force for good, as many of the other examples in the NPR link I posted above point out. But it is critical that we get the State Department/CIA/ other interested parties out of it and make sure that our hands are clean before we start mixing them in other countries' business.
Trump, however, is probably the worst possible president to try to do this.
I'm a big fan of the CIA and American imperialism, so I naturally disagree. But, putting that aside, it sounds to me like all the really bad stuff you and Shoe don't like happened 3+ decades ago, with most of it happening more like 5ish+ decades ago. Am I wrong about that? If I'm right about that, it seems like the backlash is not natural or inevitable, but a product of populists choosing to harp on stuff that happened 30ish+ years ago. Does it seem to be the case that the statecraft portion of the USAID's mission is currently a problem?
While I generally agree with the idea that U.S. meddling abroad is less unconstrained than it was during the height of the Cold War, it never seems to have disappeared entirely.
Scandals are usually revealed in retrospect, so there will generally be a time delay between when something happens and when it becomes widely known, especially for the really bad stuff. But there's evidence that at least some degree of bad stuff is still going on (or was, until a few months ago).
You can argue the links you provided provide evidence of waste, but I don't think any of it is as damning as your comment alleged. My point was that the supposedly morally damning 'really bad stuff' seems very clearly to be in the distant past.
Not sure where you draw the line on "really bad stuff," but the title of the second article I linked was "USAID programme used young Latin Americans to incite Cuba rebellion"
'She correctly notes USAID has facilitated kidnapping and torture in Uruguay, however, that was through the aforementioned training program that was terminated in 1974 and mostly active during the Cold War. She also correctly notes USAID facilitated forced sterilization in Peru, which was very bad!'
How do you know it was bad? Did you do a lot of research and calculate pain and pleasure over the long-term consequences of sterilizing poor people and torturing communists, using whatever algorithm is required by your version of utilitarianism? Maybe the Peruvians would have grown up to eat shrimp. Seems kind of suspicious that you have all these incredibly counter-intuitive moral intuitions, but then default to basic left-liberalism whenever you can't be bothered, almost like utilitarianism is a tool you just use when it's convenient.
Imagine using math when things matter and defaulting into heuristics on unimportant things instead of getting out the calculator everywhere, or just use vibes to make all decisions all the time. What a ridiculous and unprincipled way to live life.
Do you think GiveWell was wrong to recommend malaria nets over your local art history museum without first carefully doing extensive analyses on the impacts of modern art on global health?
Additionally, she's not really a leftist in a meaningful sense. She's been palling around with Blake Masters and the rest of the right for years now, and per my understanding only meaningfully portrayed herself as a member of the left in 2016 after being an anti-SJW creator before then. The rest of the YouTube left, correctly construed, have varying levels of disregard or hatred for her.
She's a leftist, just the more traditional old left rather than the internationalist anarchist left. She wants public healthcare for example. Might want workers to seize the means of production and trade unions.
My primary complaint about her is that she often tries to dunk on feminists and feminism without observing differences in strains of feminist philosophy. She also seems to think terfs are a problem.
The economic axis and the Capital/Labor question is the only reliable way to identify who is to the left of whom.
Gender/sex, language, and some bourgeois diversity program aimed at elite recipients, are a fixation of today's post-60s, but a socially conservative socialist is further to the left than a woke Democrat. and Shoe isn't even reactionary, more like libertarian/liberal on social issues, which was a common stance among many leftists and even anarchists until like 5 minutes ago when every social issue needed its own ministry of correct thinking to browbeat the false consciousness proles.
Again, shoe doesn’t make distinctions. Also, I’ve never heard a single TERF talk about putting men in camps. Though I would criticize such rhetoric if I heard it. There is nothing terribly radical about wanting single sex spaces (bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons) and sports.
This article is just as misleading as some of the points in the YouTubers video. Both of you using partial truths to convey your message. The straight up falsehood that really irritated me you got wrong is about John Bolton. John absolutely has worked with USAID in a supervisory position. For years he was directly in charge of their Budget and had direct decision making ability in their policy. Ive been with Hagler Bailly a long time & worked/met with Bolton many times. Over half of my contracts are funded by USAID and/or the State Dept, so many of your assumptions are either extremely biased, ignorant or majorly stretches just as the YouTuber. Difference is she is at least correct in her core premise where you are not. The United States can't afford any of these programs you felt were good or helpful, no we don't need ANY social programs in Armenia! 90% of the country lives in the city of Yerevan, 5,6,7 & 8 family members in a single family 1 bedroom apartment & they still can't go get stuff at the store when they have a need. Armenia has much bigger problems than anything regarding their LGBT+ community. If we are giving them money it needs to be so they can cover basic needs, not have to sleep on the floor in an apartment next to their grandmother with holes exposed to the outside as big as a basketball. The bigger issue is now recovering from all the government money spent from Covid and the last 4 years. We have $19 trillion dollars left that we can borrow/print, after that the US ability to issue bonds is done as our debt ceiling is so high. We don't need to be spending a dollar of this crap, even some of my own projects shouldn't be funded by just the US but they are, even with the hit to my personal income I would take, I will find another job, I just need this country financially strong still for my kids and future grandkids. Do better and stop defending an issue that you know deep down is screwed up.
Shoe is not so much a leftist as the embodiment of third-positionist populist brainrot. She represents all the dumbest opinions of both the far left and far right.
Seriously, I can't fathom why anyone still listens to her or watches her videos. It's one thing to go down this rabbit hole when you're 12, but how can any adult human with a brain find her intelligent or even mildly insightful?
Full blown far right wingers, like Fuentes, for instance, are certainly more malevolent, and often say demonstrably stupid things regardless of one's views on their morality or lack thereof. But at least they're moderately original. The populist brainrot grifter crowd manages to be far more irritating.
yeah, she cut her teeth on anti-feminism videos before becoming a "leftist". third-position brainrot all the way.
She is not wrong.
I find some people just need it to be true that there is some kind of grand order to the universe. So if USAID does a lot of good things and some bad things, that must indicate that the good things were fraudulent. Otherwise, why would the all-knowing council of elders at USAID have allowed the bad things? It cannot be the case that these were different programs created by different people in different years with different competencies in pursuit of different goals. Especially in this secular era, there's a weird way in which a powerful and evil government that does everything with intention is somehow more reassuring than the reality that it's just people like us at the wheel, with all of our flaws, flailing around in hopes that we arrive at a place a little better than where we started.
Yes, this is fundamentally the barrier - failure to imagine that the world simply is not highly ordered.
This comment is so good. Nothing to add.
thx :)
Or it could just be that it's an instrument of foreign influence and policy, designed from the start to hide this fact, and the good things are at best a byproduct of that, while the bad things are its purpose point.
Of course complacent first worlders who don't suffer from that influence have no problem with it, or go "think of the children" when it's mentioned.
> Especially in this secular era, there's a weird way in which a powerful and evil government that does everything with intention is somehow more reassuring than the reality that it's just people like us at the wheel, with all of our flaws, flailing around in hopes that we arrive at a place a little better than where we started.
Pseudo-psychological slop
If 99% of the value in USAID comes from 1% of the program, that would be a good reason to cancel it. Shut down USAID, and make a new program called the annual PEPFAR grant.
Too bad this isn't happening though.
Part of the reason why it isn't happening is that no one wants it to happen. All the guys on substack decrying the loss of PEPFAR also think that:
The president getting rid of USAID in the way he did at all is illegitimate.
Most of the other things USAID does are Good, Actually, rather than being objectionable.
So instead of putting any energy into reviving PEPFAR, they will fight tooth and nail to keep all of USAID going.
Liberal substack writers have approximately 0 influence on what happens to USAID right now.
I believe that the biggest names probably have second or third degree connections to some US congressmen.
If a business has one salesman making 100 million in sales, and 90 other salesmen making 1 million in sales each, this is not a good argument for axing the entire sales department and then maybe rehiring the one salesman.
What exactly validates this claim? What about the aid to Ukraine given via the us aid?
Bentham's was the one making the claim. I think it's mostly correct since I view Ukraine as a money hole that should be shut down.
"If 99% of the value in USAID comes from 1% of the program"
Mr. Bulldog did not say this. Learn to fucking read.
BB isnt making the claim that it should be a basis for cancellation, you are though, so im asking why does that validate shutting down usaid?
how are you seeing value here or the lack of value?
bentham isnt even making a claim regarding its value coming from the 1 percent only
hes making a comparison between what the best 1 percent does with respect to the 99 percent, which is somewhat different to what you write
'The best 1% of foreign aid probably does more good than the bottom 99" emphasis on more. he doesnt say the remaining 99 percent is of no or little value.
the point on value seems to be added on by you
OK. My point is that Benthams is obsessed with the lives saved by PEPFAR, which is 1% of the program.
hes not obsessed with it, its just an example like shoes claim about guatemalan sex change ops
Go through his archive and observe how many posts are just about PEPFAR.
"PEPFAR, for instance, did not have any ulterior motive."
I'm not sure this is true. I don't think it has nefarious ulterior motives, but I don't think we were providing aid purely because it's a good thing. We were doing it because, in addition to saving lives, it raised America's standing in the world. It makes America look good when countries get aid packages with "Provided by the USA" stickers. I don't think this detracts from the good it does, but I'm not sure we would have done it if we didn't also get to say "look at all the good we're doing!"
I think this is a very weird non-point to make, since it could feasibly be true any time any large organization or actor does something good. i think Chastity is correct that the inner machinations of GWB's mind are not enigmatic---but since you agree that if it had been just a move to enhance soft power, it would still be good, I don't know what the point of saying this is.
Since PEPFAR was Bush's baby, we can tell what its intentions were relatively easily compared to most other programs, by just reading his words on the subject:
- AIDS was getting insanely horrifically bad, and a bunch of other anti-AIDS stuff had been tried, to limited or no avail. Look at that graph of AIDS deaths, but cut off the part where it starts getting better. "The statistics were horrifying. Some ten million people in sub-Sarahan Africa had died. In some countries, one out of every four adults carried HIV."
- As a genuine Christian, GWB thought that there was a non-zero moral duty to the poor and downtrodden, and wanted to create an effective program to stop it. "I saw their suffering as a challenge to the words of the Gospel: “To whom much is given, much is required.”"
- After 9/11, it "became clear to me that this was more than a mission of conscience. Our national security was tied directly to human suffering. Societies mired in poverty and disease foster hopelessness. And hopelessness leaves people ripe for recruitment by terrorists and extremists."
(All quotes from his autobiography, Decision Points.)
I miss him yet.
I don't miss him. Iraq wasn't a funny little fuck up. It was a monumental disaster and waste of trillions of dollars. Maybe if he hadn't lied about it it would have been more justifiable. And in that case, sure, I could accept some argument about invading Iraq as maybe being unfalsifiably good in the long run somehow. Iraq seems okay nowadays, and maybe it wouldn't be okay today under Saddam's kid.
But he did lie. It was a war crime and murderous lie to the entire world. And the fact that it was allowed to happen unpunished is just baffling. Bush and his piece of shit crony Powell walked around up until Powell's death, going completely unpunished for everything they caused.
He didn't lie, it was various poor practices in the intelligence agencies that led to them greatly overestimating the probability that Saddam had a nuclear program. (And, yes, this happened in part because they were telling him what he wanted to hear.) Iraq was bad, and a stain on his Presidency, but it wasn't an active, malicious lie.
As to me "missing him yet," Trump is now the head of the Republican party, and rather than believing in shared humanity and something called The Good, he believes foreigners are all evil and everything is friend/enemy distinctions. His followers gleefully decry the idea of basic morality as "suicidal empathy" and "emotional blackmail." He's actively sabotaging the attempts of Ukrainians to defend themselves because he is more sympathetic to evil autocrats than democratically elected leaders struggling against genocidal invaders, has worked to undo the program whose positive impacts outdo every negative of the Bush Presidency 10:1 (PEPFAR), and is actively and currently causing a global recession because he's unable to admit that tariffs don't work. All of these things are both bad on the scale of Iraq, and done with clear intentionality.
No, this is part of the myth and the categorically incorrect understanding of the situation. Bush explicitly lied in contradiction of the intelligence agencies, not in agreement with them or due to a bad report. They concluded there were likely no WMDs in Iraq, and he told the UN there was objective proof of WMDs anyways.
From the Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence:
> Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.
This is saying that the underlying intelligence data did not fit with the analysis of that data. But the NIE was "prepared under the auspices of Robert D Walpole, National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Strategic and Nuclear Programs: with assistance from Paul Pillar, NIO for the Near East and South Asia; Lawrence K. Gershwin, NIO for Science and Technology; and Major General John R. Landry, NIO for Conventional Military Issues." IOW, by intelligence officers, not by Bush in defiance of their work. They were doing poor analysis of the underlying data, like a quant who ignores systemic risk in mortgages.
Okay, you drew me into a partially correct part of the discussion. Yes, the claims specifically about WMDs in Iraq were ambiguous, rather than contradicted. But WMDs weren't the only stated reasons for invading Iraq from Bush himself.
"The US government's belief that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the form of nuclear weapons was based upon intelligence which the CIA argued could not be trusted.[40] The CIA was overruled on its opinion on nuclear weapons as the administration sought outside information from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC). Declassified CIA reports from 2002 suggested Iraq had begun production of other forms of WMDs in the form of chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas, sarin, Cyclosarin, and VX. [41]"
Other Western intelligence agencies similar contradicted the idea of nuclear weapons in Iraq, including our dependable allies the Canadians. Going on to more direct fabrications about Iraq:
"Along with Iraq's alleged development of weapons of mass destruction, another justification for invasion was the purported link between Saddam Hussein's government and terrorist organizations, in particular al-Qaeda. 94 In that sense, the Bush administration cast the Iraq war as part of the broader War on Terrorism. On February 11, 2003, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress that "seven countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea - remain active in the US and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans". (43](4]"
"Evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda was discredited by multiple US intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Department's Inspector General's Office even prior to the 2003 invasion. A 21 September 2001 President's Daily Brief (prepared at Bush's request) indicated that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and there was "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." The PDB wrote off the few contacts that existed between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda as attempts to monitor the group, not work with it.[118] The CIA also expressed skepticism about the alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence.[119]"
"Despite these findings, US Vice President Dick Cheney continued to assert that a link existed between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which drew criticism from members of the intelligence community and leading Democrats.
1100) As of the invasion, the State Department listed 45 countries, including the United States, where al-Qaeda was active. Iraq was not one of them. (101]"
Shoeonhead believes the most low IQ populist talking points
The problem with your post is that you don't consider the counterfactual of what would have been done with this money otherwise. It could have gone to say healthcare or more important uses. The standard has to be very high for public funds to not be squandered.
It's also this, by what justice would a government have to spend my money on my behalf? Maybe the counterfactual is that Americans would donate to a charity that did the equivalent of PEPFAR without the system skimming a chunk off the top.
Well the counterfactual is that it gets dropped in the debt black hole and disappears. It's less than 1% of the budget. There's always an effective allocation for the first 1% of funding for something you use.
USAID is just a natural way to give executives flexibility and permission to allocate resources to acquire good will and solve problems overseas. If you got rid of USAID, it would just come back in a natural way, because there's no reality where such a massive country doesn't need to influence the world.
1% of the budget is still the lifetime’s work of millions of Americans. It’s not just a 0 on a spreadsheet.
USAID had the state capacity of the most powerful country in the world behind it; it delivered way more bang for the buck in terms of improving lives. If you want that money to go to Americans, cut DOD's budget by 1% and give that back.
It really didn’t though.
Don’t tempt me with cuts. I’m a libertarian.
the rest of the government suffers from similar inefficiencies, and let's not pretend most people donate even 1% of their income. it's incredibly uncertain that the money allocated to USAID would otherwise go to "healthcare or more important uses" considering, like, for instance, that the DoD can't account for 63% of it's 4tr in assets.
They actually give 2-5%.
Sorry—I'm Canadian and over here the average is ~0.5%. Also, in the states, it's still 2-3%, not 2-5. But the point still stands, it seems that as long as PEPFAR is even minimally effective, it would be worth doing.
USAID was dedicated to meddling in the internal affairs of other nations and subverting their societies on all levels. I don’t give a shit about AIDS medications in Africa. Let your affluent family pay for it not average Americans who did not benefit in any tangible way from this agency or its programs.
the comparative isn't that "affluent families" pay for PEPFAR instead, the comparative is a bunch of people die.
Every country meddles in the internal affairs of other countries. Nearly every week the DoJ was indicting Russian or Chinese or North Korean actors trying to meddle in our internal affairs. Halting US foreign meddling pointlessly disadvantages us compared to every other country in the world. The Trump admin is also dismantling our attempts at detecting internal meddling from other countries - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/bondi-ends-fbi-effort-combat-foreign-influence-us-politics-rcna191012
Which is mostly bs to deflect the massive meddling by the U.S. around the world. I don’t know your age but you’ve lived a single year in your life where America has been subverting other countries or killing people around the world, overwhelmingly for reasons not synonymous with the interests of ordinary Americans either.
The average american benifits from the US being in good standing with the world. You'll see that soon with most US allies abandoning you (besides the UK and Israel)
BS. That’s total rubbish. It’s about the U.S. controlling its vassals via purse strings for mostly useless garbage. Can you defend funding for Trannies in Sri Lanka while native-born Americans are eating out of fucking dumpsters? Of course you can’t.
The native born Americans who are eating out of dumpsters probably don't have any taxable income anyway, and the US benefits in many dimensions when other states are her vassals.
Wrong again. Many pay taxes reduced to poverty do to criminal elite economic and social policies. Supporting mentally ill trannies in Sri Lanka neither saves lives nor advances the interests of average Americans.
Learn to write an English sentence
Learn to disappear into well-deserved obscurity where you belong.
Good. I’m for destroying the U.S. empire and support the destruction of Israel too.
This newsletter attracts a lot of teenage edge lords for some reason. How did you end up here?
I can’t speak for teenaged edge lords but wonder about all the defective incels and autists out here now posing as reborn elitists just like they fancied themselves being in high school.
You know you're doing great when you reply twice to the same comment so you can get in another insult you just thought of.
I don’t really put a lot of thought into silly dipshits online. It’s all in fun.
Ah, another aspiring EHC creep.
it’s already been mentioned but shoe is not a leftist and never has been, she’s at best a ideology-less grifter who says she’s a leftist for clicks and at worst actively reactionary
My family is a DC family, Uncle in the Pentagon, Dad in the State Department, Brother in HHS, Sister in Defense. Dad briefly ran VOA until McCarthy came for him, his best friend committed suicide when Nixon came after him. Children in the family were friends with Children of various Vice Presidents and Presidents. Sleepovers at the Naval Observatory kind of thing.
One thing we all assumed from childhood was USAID was a CIA /DOD front and/or slush fund. It had “feet on the ground” in numerous conflict zones and seemed to follow trouble, so to speak. Why was USAID operating in Russia? It mysteriously appears in Georgia after the war with Russia. It operated in all sorts of interesting places.
I think going after it and damaging legitimate programs for aid is bad, but there are landing spots - there are after all a half dozen or more global programs for PEPFAR work to land on if USAID doesn’t support them.
I don’t think USAID is a benign, benevolent organization.
I’d keep that idea and temper factual statements with understanding what the real mission is.
Because that might be the ideal time to set up surveillance infrastructure. Georgia is also particularly an interesting spot - Iran, Russia, Armenia, Iraq, Syria - it’s all so close… it’s like having a friendly army base in the middle of a whirlwind.
I went there on a mission funded by USAID, which was fascinating.
As the term goes “I was disambiguated” by what was present.
I was being sarcastic, because it is also plausible that they went there to provide post-war humanitarian relief. You might also be right, although I wouldn't take what you have to say on faith, but I think that stuff's all good.
I realize. As you aptly pointed out, the language coming from the current administration is generally false, and people swallow it whole. But just because the Republican administration is against the mission, don't imagine that it's heroic, benign, selfless... what's the word... oh - altruistic.
The fact that USAID was operating in Russia is the tell (forced out in 2012). You'd think Russia was an impoverished region needing caloric assistance and vaccines, and we altruistically, heroically even established groups there to help. Help indeed.
CIDCA - the Chinese version of USAID - operates within an overall $5B "development aid" structure, in some ways a copy of USAID. Fascinatingly, they have current operations in Russia, to "help out".
It's like a giant Risk game board.
Altruistic is the wrong word, but I think a lot of state department statecraft is good
Why might a humanitarian program show up after a war... curious
I'm not disagreeing with your overall interpretation of the facts per se, I just thought that line about Georgia was funny
As a leftie myself, I think this is reasonable. There have certainly been knee-jerk, low-IQ takes on this, fueled by Elon and Trump's blatant misrepresentation of what USAID does and social media influencers trying to get clout.
I also think it's important to listen to voices from around the world on this, which have been decidedly mixed. Claudia Sheinbaum, for example, noted that
"It's involved in so many things that, honestly, it's better if they just shut it down. If there's going to be aid, it should come through other transparent channels—that's the real issue,"
Or Gustavo Petro of Colombia, no ally of Trump, who put it more succinctly:
"Trump is right," Petro said. "Take your money."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/11/g-s1-47661/trump-musk-usaid-ukraine-south-africa-mexico-colombia-india-afghanistan-hiv
The use of an aid agency to hide problematic programs, even if those programs are a small proportion of the total, generates pushback and makes people reflexively distrust even programs that are done for good reasons.
It's long past time that we audited and assessed U.S. foreign aid and reoriented it to focus on the programs that promote health, welfare, and social justice around the world rather than exercising power or undermining legitimate institutions. And though you might describe the bad things USAID has done in the past as a drop in the bucket, those bad things have an outsized perception on how others in the world perceive us. Try explaining how great PEPFAR is to a Peruvian woman who was sterilized by the Fujimori dictatorship.
I agree with your overall point that USAID has been a force for good, as many of the other examples in the NPR link I posted above point out. But it is critical that we get the State Department/CIA/ other interested parties out of it and make sure that our hands are clean before we start mixing them in other countries' business.
Trump, however, is probably the worst possible president to try to do this.
I'm a big fan of the CIA and American imperialism, so I naturally disagree. But, putting that aside, it sounds to me like all the really bad stuff you and Shoe don't like happened 3+ decades ago, with most of it happening more like 5ish+ decades ago. Am I wrong about that? If I'm right about that, it seems like the backlash is not natural or inevitable, but a product of populists choosing to harp on stuff that happened 30ish+ years ago. Does it seem to be the case that the statecraft portion of the USAID's mission is currently a problem?
While I generally agree with the idea that U.S. meddling abroad is less unconstrained than it was during the height of the Cold War, it never seems to have disappeared entirely.
Scandals are usually revealed in retrospect, so there will generally be a time delay between when something happens and when it becomes widely known, especially for the really bad stuff. But there's evidence that at least some degree of bad stuff is still going on (or was, until a few months ago).
The Cuban social media network to undermine the government happened from 2010-2012: https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other-times-usaid-pretended-to-be-an-intelligence-agency/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/04/usaid-latin-americans-cuba-rebellion-hiv-workshops
MCCI, which was the "independent journalism" outfit that was the target of Sheinbaum's ire, was founded in 2015 and most active during AMLO's presidency. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexicanos_Contra_la_Corrupci%C3%B3n_y_la_Impunidad
The general waste and redirection of funds was quite prominent in USAID-funded NGOs in Afghanistan (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/25/afghanistan.internationalaidanddevelopment1)
and Haiti
https://cepr.net/publications/a-look-at-usaid-spending-in-haiti/
in the recent 2 decades. There are probably other examples as well.
You can argue the links you provided provide evidence of waste, but I don't think any of it is as damning as your comment alleged. My point was that the supposedly morally damning 'really bad stuff' seems very clearly to be in the distant past.
Not sure where you draw the line on "really bad stuff," but the title of the second article I linked was "USAID programme used young Latin Americans to incite Cuba rebellion"
That's certainly the title. It reads like a pretty run of the mill attempt to provide opportunities for dissent in Cuba. Which seems like a good thing
I'm sure the people involved said the same thing about the Arab Spring, and that was definitely a disaster
'Try explaining how great PEPFAR is to a Peruvian woman who was sterilized by the Fujimori dictatorship.'
Try explaining how PEFPAR is not great to a Peruvian who didn't have to die in a famine because communists took over his country.
'She correctly notes USAID has facilitated kidnapping and torture in Uruguay, however, that was through the aforementioned training program that was terminated in 1974 and mostly active during the Cold War. She also correctly notes USAID facilitated forced sterilization in Peru, which was very bad!'
How do you know it was bad? Did you do a lot of research and calculate pain and pleasure over the long-term consequences of sterilizing poor people and torturing communists, using whatever algorithm is required by your version of utilitarianism? Maybe the Peruvians would have grown up to eat shrimp. Seems kind of suspicious that you have all these incredibly counter-intuitive moral intuitions, but then default to basic left-liberalism whenever you can't be bothered, almost like utilitarianism is a tool you just use when it's convenient.
Imagine using math when things matter and defaulting into heuristics on unimportant things instead of getting out the calculator everywhere, or just use vibes to make all decisions all the time. What a ridiculous and unprincipled way to live life.
How do you know it's unimportant until you calculate it?
How do you make any decision in life if you can't look at a problem and just eyeball the order of magnitude for the vast majority of non-edge cases?
Do you think GiveWell was wrong to recommend malaria nets over your local art history museum without first carefully doing extensive analyses on the impacts of modern art on global health?
> Yet the number of lives estimated to be lost by foreign aid cuts is less than the number of people exterminated in the holocaust.
Is this meant to say "more"?
Oops yes fixed.
Minor note: I believe her sobriquet is actually Shoe0nhead (with the second o replaced by a zero).
I think spelling out Shoeonhead is still permissible locution.
Additionally, she's not really a leftist in a meaningful sense. She's been palling around with Blake Masters and the rest of the right for years now, and per my understanding only meaningfully portrayed herself as a member of the left in 2016 after being an anti-SJW creator before then. The rest of the YouTube left, correctly construed, have varying levels of disregard or hatred for her.
https://x.com/bgmasters/status/1488177995105939456
She's a leftist, just the more traditional old left rather than the internationalist anarchist left. She wants public healthcare for example. Might want workers to seize the means of production and trade unions.
My primary complaint about her is that she often tries to dunk on feminists and feminism without observing differences in strains of feminist philosophy. She also seems to think terfs are a problem.
They are a problem. TERFs are still radical feminists, they believe in a conspiracy about men and joke about putting them in camps.
Bernie losing the nomination broke her brain.
I think this is wholly accurate.
The economic axis and the Capital/Labor question is the only reliable way to identify who is to the left of whom.
Gender/sex, language, and some bourgeois diversity program aimed at elite recipients, are a fixation of today's post-60s, but a socially conservative socialist is further to the left than a woke Democrat. and Shoe isn't even reactionary, more like libertarian/liberal on social issues, which was a common stance among many leftists and even anarchists until like 5 minutes ago when every social issue needed its own ministry of correct thinking to browbeat the false consciousness proles.
Again, shoe doesn’t make distinctions. Also, I’ve never heard a single TERF talk about putting men in camps. Though I would criticize such rhetoric if I heard it. There is nothing terribly radical about wanting single sex spaces (bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons) and sports.
This article is just as misleading as some of the points in the YouTubers video. Both of you using partial truths to convey your message. The straight up falsehood that really irritated me you got wrong is about John Bolton. John absolutely has worked with USAID in a supervisory position. For years he was directly in charge of their Budget and had direct decision making ability in their policy. Ive been with Hagler Bailly a long time & worked/met with Bolton many times. Over half of my contracts are funded by USAID and/or the State Dept, so many of your assumptions are either extremely biased, ignorant or majorly stretches just as the YouTuber. Difference is she is at least correct in her core premise where you are not. The United States can't afford any of these programs you felt were good or helpful, no we don't need ANY social programs in Armenia! 90% of the country lives in the city of Yerevan, 5,6,7 & 8 family members in a single family 1 bedroom apartment & they still can't go get stuff at the store when they have a need. Armenia has much bigger problems than anything regarding their LGBT+ community. If we are giving them money it needs to be so they can cover basic needs, not have to sleep on the floor in an apartment next to their grandmother with holes exposed to the outside as big as a basketball. The bigger issue is now recovering from all the government money spent from Covid and the last 4 years. We have $19 trillion dollars left that we can borrow/print, after that the US ability to issue bonds is done as our debt ceiling is so high. We don't need to be spending a dollar of this crap, even some of my own projects shouldn't be funded by just the US but they are, even with the hit to my personal income I would take, I will find another job, I just need this country financially strong still for my kids and future grandkids. Do better and stop defending an issue that you know deep down is screwed up.
John Bolton is left-coded now, get with the program!
I'd be interested to hear your response to Simon Laird's response to your response to Shoeonhead's response to USAID
https://open.substack.com/pub/simonlaird/p/sh0eonhead-is-basically-correct-about