The Anti-Foreign Aid Right Is Low IQ

Lots of people spent the last week gleefully calling for the deaths of millions because they were too dumb to understand analogies

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with [online right-wingers who are anti-foreign aid] is that they have an IQ of 110 and think they have an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.

—J.D. Vance.

(This is probably one of the most unhinged things I’ve written, especially at the end: be warned. Also, the last post has been unpaywalled, if you want to read that.)

There’s been a major Twitter kerfuffle over PEPFAR recently—the wildly successful international aids program that’s saved about 25 million people, most of them women and children. It was briefly slashed but has been brought back under the glorious leadership of Marco Rubio. Lots of people are unhappy about this, on the grounds that we should be spending the money on America.

Or to put thing more succinctly: there’s been a recent spat between people that are supportive of foreign aid and those that are supportive of foreign AIDS. I’m in the former group.

Now, part of my problem with the anti-foreign aid people is that they’re uncompassionate ghouls. If you don’t support spending around .1% of the budget to save millions of lives, that displays a profound callousness and indifference to human lives. Many of these people didn’t even try to hide their wickedness: one person named Captive Dreamer cackled gleefully about the shutting down of PEPFAR, before saying “You can just win an election and take libtard gayaids programs offline.” (Joke’s on him—PEPFAR is back). Another bravely declared she was “at this point out of fucks to give about Sudanese babies.” She later declared explicitly that she would be opposed to spending a single dollar to prevent millions of foreigners from dying.

In the online PEPFAR wars, I was blessed by having enemies completely without redeeming qualities.

My first problem with these people is, therefore, that they’re evil. Their stated position is that they don’t mind children dying of horrible diseases, so long as those children are far away. They proudly and confidently declare their allegiance to evil and their hatred of the good.

But my second problem with them is that they’re just extremely stupid. They are…oh, I don’t know, perhaps people with IQs of 110 who think they have IQs of 130. They’re profoundly incapable of reasoning about morality. While one can be impressed by the mental competence of genuine psychopaths, these people are not that; they are, by and large, just too stupid to follow basic moral arguments. They proudly revel in their own stupidity and ignorance.

Such people tend to have no clue what PEPFAR does or how HIV works in the developing world. While Captive Dreamer calls PEPFAR “the libtard gayaids program,” it is he who is accurately described by a word that contains tard. If he knew anything about what he was talking about—which he obviously doesn’t—he wouldn’t call it a “gayaids program,” when more than half of its recipients are women.

Captive Dreamer’s rigorous process of truth seeking involved reading that PEPFAR combatted HIV, vaguely recalling that gay people in the U.S. have high rates of HIV, and declaring it must be about helping gay people. He doesn’t care if a large group of people dies, but is too lazy, ignorant, and stupid to even figure out which group it is. It would be like if Hitler proposed a final solution to some question or another but wasn’t quite sure which. His almost superhuman obstinacy and ignorance reached a crescendo with this exchange:

Well, you see, if parents have HIV they can pass it on to children. This is why millions of children have HIV. This is something that someone who has a fucking clue what they’re talking about would know.

Another profound display of these people’s stupidity came from the widespread deep confusion exhibited in response to a Scott Alexander Tweet (or X as I guess you’re supposed to call it). Scott, commenting on those who supported PEPFAR cuts on the grounds that we have special obligations to our loved ones, wrote:

Now, his point was quite obvious to anyone who can read and grasp simple analogies. Even if we have stronger obligations to those who are nearer to us, this doesn’t absolve us of having any obligations to people who are far away. We still obviously have some obligation to help people who are further away. If you could press a button that would cost five dollars and save 1,000 Africans, you’d obviously be obligated to press it. Given that PEPFAR is the most effective federal program by orders of magnitude and takes about .1% of the federal budget, this is not an argument for cutting PEPFAR, any more than obligations to your children are an excuse to let children drown.

There’s a famous meme on the internet that many on the online right love to trot out. The idea behind the meme: if you ask low-IQ people how they’d feel if they hadn’t had breakfast, they’ll usually answer “but I did have breakfast.” Such people are just completely unable to grasp counterfactuals. Many of the same people who tiredly trot out this meme immediately seemed to resort to “but I did have breakfast,” level reasoning. I offer some examples below:

Once again: the point is that only a tiny portion of the federal budget goes towards saving foreigners. The money spent on PEPFAR wouldn’t be spent on some other wildly more effective program helping Americans, but probably would be added to some other inefficient sclerotic bureaucracy. Pointing out that we have stronger obligations to those nearer to us is profoundly besides the point, just as whether we have special obligations to our family doesn’t tell us if one should save drowning children from ponds at slight personal cost.

Other people hilariously replied with roughly “if you like charity so much then why don’t you give your money to poor African kids,” which is a hilarious retort given that Scott does do that! This would be like saying to me “if you’re so concerned about shrimp welfare, why don’t you give your money to the shrimp?”

Still others expressed grave concern about the impact of PEPFAR on the federal budget:

But again, if you’re concerned about the budget, your primary focus shouldn’t be on the single most effective government program at saving lives, that happens to take only a minuscule portion of the federal budget. It should be about the overwhelmingly greater shares of government spending that goes to entitlements, military aid, and pretty much anything else.

One other super intellect chimed in to say:

“But what if this analogy has this other feature that makes your action bad? Take that!” I remember hearing a story of a person who couldn’t really get analogies, and so would, when replying to them, make bizarre additions to them (e.g. when confronted with the trolley problem he’d say things like “well what if the trolley was made of balloons?”) No, giving to PEPFAR (or indeed effective altruist charities) does not inexplicably cause lots of other deaths by making people take riskier behavior. If it did, that would show up in the RCTs on its effectiveness.

Other people, missing the point by miles, replied along the following lines:

PEPFAR takes around .1% of the federal budget. It is a very tiny portion of it! Scott was not arguing for mandating everyone give away 80% of their wealth to poor foreigners—he was simply arguing that basic compassion demands we don’t slash the tiny fraction of the budget that has prevented enough death to offset the holocaust several times over.

The last reply, from certified brain geniuses Captive Dreamer and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, just involved triumphantly being too stupid to get that people make arguments for PEPFAR—or, more precisely, for the notion that we have obligations to far-away people.

(There’s something rather ironic about a person who called PEPFAR the “libtard gayaids program,” whinging about vitriol).

The argument is quite straightforward and has been made consistently for decades. If you came across a drowning child, you’d have an obligation to save them, even if doing so would ruin your suit. The claim is then made that failing to save foreigners is equivalent to walking past a drowning child. The fact that the children are far away shouldn’t affect our obligation to them; if you could press a button that would save a life at some cost, your obligation to press the button wouldn’t decrease as you flew in a plane away from the person whose life you could save. But if proximity isn’t inherently morally relevant, well, if there were millions of people and hundreds of foreigners about to drown in U.S. lakes, most everyone would agree that the federal government should spend a few billion dollars saving them. PEPFAR is, therefore, analogous to that program.

The drowning child argument—which I’ve defended at length for those curious—is an argument by analogy; it says that our failure to save the lives of people who we can save at minimal cost is like our failure to save a drowning child. Gobry is just too stupid to recognize how philosophy works and how one makes analogies. Captive Dreamer is too stupid to recognize that an argument of the form “PEPFAR is good because it prevents something that is bad—children dying,” is, in fact, an argument.

I’ve been spending too much time on Twitter recently fighting with people who were gleefully cheering for PEPFAR cuts. They recognized these PEPFAR cuts would kill lots of people, many of them poor women and children. If anything, this made them more excited about cutting PEPFAR. They reveled in cruelty and sadism; they were utterly indifferent to the people whose deaths they supported bringing about.

But they were also just profoundly low-IQ. They couldn’t follow any arguments! Generally the arguments for evil conclusions are bad arguments! If you want to overturn an argument for a commonsense moral conclusion, you should have a strong reason. They had nothing of the sort. All they had was cruelty and malice.

I consider such people the lowest of humans. I’ve spent a lot of this article bashing Captive Dreamer for his maliciousness. What I haven’t mentioned is that the Tweets I’ve mentioned are very hard to find because he Tweets so much per day that his Tweets about how much he loves it when kids get AIDS were buried beneath an avalanche of other idiotic Tweets. A man who Tweets hundreds of times per day about how cool and based it is that the new administration is stomping on the poor and vulnerable is just about the most pathetic conceivable excuse for a human being. Honestly, I have more respect for Jeffrey Dahmer than for this man. If you’re going to be evil, at least don’t be stupid. If you’re going to be stupid, at least don’t be evil. And if you’re going to be stupid and evil at superhuman levels, at least don’t be a pathetic Twitter-addict whose life is devoted entirely to indulging in your cruelest impulses.

Those people like Gobry, Captive Dreamer, and many of the others I’ve talked about aren’t just callous pieces of garbage who delight in wickedness and cruelty. While they fashion themselves intellectual titans, and mock others for being low-IQ, they’re also profoundly low-IQ—incapable of understanding analogies or philosophical arguments or abstraction. That’s sadder, in a way.