Man, Scott was straight up cooking them in that thread. I especially loved when people asked him "well how much do YOU donate to charity then huh???" as if he hasn't donated not only hundreds of thousands (million+ total?) and also a kidney.
With all due respect, this article shows your viewpoint to be just as dumb as this twitter cretin who keeps being referenced.
You repeatedly make analogies to a drowning child or pressing a button to help people. But a drowning child is an exceptional situation. Children are not always in water at risk of drowning. If you rescue a child from the water and return him to his parents, he should be fine for a while. What is the obligation of someone if the child keeps returning to the same pond to drown, over and over again? What if a whole village of children insists on dumping their kids in the water every single day without teaching them how to swim? Is it your job to stay there all the time and constantly pull the kids out of the water?
How long must the person sit there and press the button, draining his bank account and time, to help millions of poor Africans?
There are plenty of other poor people in the world who don't have such high rates of HIV/AIDS infections. Africans top the charts because they can't stop being extremely polygynous without stopping the spread of the disease. Providing this aid means that there will have to be money given and people on the ground forever because the Africans are not changing their behavior.
But it's not one child that returns to the same pond over and over again. If there were millions of children drowning in ponds, it would be worth spending at least .1% of the budget to help them. Again, my claim, and Scott's claim, which was made repeatedly and at length is we should take at least minimal action to help poor foreigners, not that it should be the only thing we spend the budget on.
Africa remains a shithole despite whatever amount of aid we give. Its population keeps going up and up. Some of that excess population inevitably leaves Africa and comes to the west. There an African’s burden multiplies by like x1,000,000 because they can access the welfare state, vote, and their dysfunction gums up our whole society. If enough of them immigrate they can turn our society into a third world shithole.
The same leftists that want to increase African population will gleefully import them on the same humanitarian grounds.
This has to end. These people’s existence is not good for the world. If they can’t sustain their population without outside assistance that assistance should be cut off.
There are millions of children drowning in the ponds whose parents keep dropping them there, and who grow up never learning to swim and returning to the ponds to drown. Moral hazard.
No, their parents don't drop them in the ponds repeatedly. It's not like if you save the children once from HIV they're likely to die shortly thereafter. If there were millions of children drowning in ponds, it would be worth spending at least .1% of the budget on that.
But it's not like there are repeatedly different sources of danger. Continuing to treat someone for a common disease isn't analogous to constantly pulling the same person out of ponds.
Not as unhinged or insulting as I was hoping but lmao at ‘if you’re going to be evil don’t be stupid’. I’ve noticed it in myself too that I hate an evil person more if they’re dumb and I do wonder why that is
It reminded me of a line from Game of Thrones. "We've had vicious kings and we've had idiot kings, but I don't know if we've ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king!"
You have interests, and those things that go counter to them, will naturally be perceived as evil. Hatred is a useful motivation to fight, possibly kill those, when that would be in your interest. Dumb people are less capable, hence less of a risk to fight.
An intelligent/capable person is potentially more dangerous, those that didn't respect their higher threat and too easily committed to fight them, driven by by the same hatred... evolution did not favor them.
Also with an intelligent person, you start to feel model uncertainty. "If he believes that evil thing, but he is smart... I should be less sure that I am actually correct.". Or you might remember "Nobody thinks of themselves as evil, and since he's so smart, he might learn the error of his ways!". Also intelligent people make for better allies, if you need to team up against some greater evil.
I think evil and stupid people are more immediately dangerous. An evil and smart person is aware that their negative behavior may rebound back on them - that if you go around defrauding people all willy nilly, for example, you wind up in prison. This naturally restricts how bad their behavior can be. Evil and stupid people hurt others with functionally no concern for themselves, making them do more damage in less time (though perhaps less damage overall).
Yes, the anti PEPFAR argument is very stupid. The twitter right should just come out and say that they hate Black Africans, a view they certainly have no problem expressing before, and that under the nihilist Hitlerite conception of racial struggles any disease that befall the outgroup benefits the ingroup. Anything that accelerates African dealignment from the Union of Satan and into multipolarity is a good thing
Very good post, Bentham. However, how much more the US government should be spending on actually useful foreign aid is, to the average American, a difficult problem. After all, nobody panics when things go according to plan. What do you think about how much more the US government should spend on actually useful foreign aid?
Excellent article, you really are a gem when it comes to human and animal welfare. But you probably could have gone further and identified Elon/Trump as major wellsprings and superspreaders of this kind of moronic evil, and as a net negative impact on the world.
another shitty moral utilitarian argument. this is a loose quote from somewhere i cant remember, but a universal love of humanity is a way to spread love around so thin, you never have to care or love anything too deeply. also, interesting you didnt write a scathing article about how we ONLY spend 0.1% on "gayaids" a month ago.
That's a good point. He did mention that he feels utilitarianism doesn't force him to accept any unpleasant truths, which I found bizarre. For starters, it's anti-democratic, because since decision making should be left to an utilitarian calculus, there would be no point to democratic participation in decision making (there are objectively correct policies that this calculus would dictate).
Ok, I'll bite and play Devil's Advocate. High-ish IQ FWIW.
The American people want foreign aid cut. They voted for an administration that would do that. "America First", all that jazz. The typical response from liberals and elites has been (basically), fuck the people, they don't know what is good for them
Frankly, I find the latter persons and attitude more evil than the first.
Why should Americans pay to save Africans from AIDS? Do you know how they get AIDS? Do you have any idea, how rampant, how promiscuous, you have to be to contract AIDS heterosexually (on average)? Look it up--it is staggering. You would need to have unprotected sex with an infected partner over 100 times, on average. So for AIDS to be epidemic, on a whole continent, in a society that likely averages well <10% homosexual, you need rampant, rutting, unchecked promiscuity. No one ever mentions this in the paens to "save" Africa, for obvious reasons. VERY politically incorrect.
Do you understand what this means? What this says about the promiscuity and infidelity in sub-Saharan Africa? What it means for the prospect of ever having even a single viable nation or institution on the continent?
No fidelity between men and women means no marriage, no family unit of any strength. The men lack ambition, just focused on "entertainment". No institutions developed, as faithless women would then have a claim on wealth. I think Aporia's substack wrote it well (Arctherium I think?): you literally cannot develop as a nation when men and women betray each other so casually.
So, to use your analogy, it is not a drowning child. It is an adult, who has wantonly exposed themselves to the elements; who would not take even the meager step to wear the life protector offered to them; and who, if you save them, will deliberately drown their children (and have more to drown), too, unless you step in and save them from themselves also.
What say you? Should taxpayers bear this burden, or should Africans shoulder the moral hazard?
1) That the American people barely, by 1.5%, picked one wildly unpopular person over another says absolutely nothing about their position on individual policy positions like PEPFAR.
2) We have never had direct democracy precisely because people are wildly ignorant about most policy questions. Some amount of elitism/technocracy/*representative* democracy has always been intended to guard against that, not to ignore democracy but as the only condition under which democracy can ever work. Is it evil to let experts set interest rates at the Federal Reserve, or decide which drugs are medically safe/effective, etc? Or is an appeal to democracy on subjects that most people know nothing about a pretty basic error from Political Science 101?
3) Your entire theory about how people contract AIDS is wildly uninformed and mistaken. "Do you have any idea, how rampant, how promiscuous, you have to be to contract AIDS heterosexually (on average)?" Yeah exactly zero, as the "how would a child even get AIDS?" commenter already pointed out. And your follow-on theories about promiscuity in Africa are baseless racist trash you read on racist trash websites populated by other low-IQ people.
In case you forgot, about 10 years ago, you just could not escape Reply Guy. It was always a virtue-signaling White Male, here to "do the work", non-ironically calling himself a feminist and an "ally". Now I guess Reply Guy is another loser wannabe writer on Substack, but still showing up to call people names. Very self-righteous of you!
Hey smart guy: how do the Africans contract HIV? How did it become endemic there, and only there, among heterosexuals, in all the world, over three generations now? Why is it that the only demographics to ever experience AIDS epidemics are male homosexuals and sub-Saharan Africans?
(Tip: there is no answer Reply Guy can give that will not read as racist, so he will either change the subject or attack me again for telling the truth. I've got odds on the latter).
(WOW--just checked his profile, and the first two things are about how he is a feminist! I am dying over here. 2015 called and wants its "Stay Woke" shirt back)
You started this thread by replying to someone else to play Devil's Advocate, which is the textbook move of the meme from 10 years ago that you seem oddly fixated on. Why is that on your mind, bud? Did enough smart people call you out on it back then that you've nursed a grudge this whole time?
Sub-Saharan Africans have higher HIV rates because they are the poorest people on earth, with less developed healthcare systems and less access to condoms. They also have less education on sexual transmission and stronger social taboos about discussing the subject, which leads to more people keeping it secret. Ineffectual governance and social conflict/instability leads to more rape. As an artifact of their desperate poverty, there is also more prostitution. A history of colonization and medical experimentation has contributed to higher distrust of medical institutions, which are sometimes demonized by religious groups or political disinformation campaigns.
All of this is easily verifiable from 5 minutes on Google. None of it "reads as racist." And none of it means that you need to have had sex to contract HIV. As several people have already pointed out to you, children can be infected from mother-to-child transmission.
Yes, in certain subregions, there are also cultural norms at play regarding marriage and sex partners. But you mischaracterize those norms, and in any case, your choice to focus on that singular cause among the very many factors involved is pseudoscientific bullshit driven by motivated reasoning. Your efforts to smear the character of an entire race, as a justification for why we should let kids with AIDS die, is just what I said the first time: baseless racist trash. I'm not changing the subject to attack you: I'm running circles around your pathetic argument, and then I'm also attacking you.
Feminism has little to do with this conversation, and trying to refute my three points (two of which you did not even mention) by mere association with a political tribe you disagree with is one reason nobody intelligent takes you seriously. But for what it's worth, both of those comments + posts were critical of the feminist movement, because I'm not the unthinking blue-tribe automaton you wishcast me to be.
1985 called and it wants "blaming diseases on moral failings" back.
What’s particularly disgusting is many right wing Maga evangelical Christians feel the same way. To them I say you can take your WWJD T-shirts and shove them up your ass.
I feel like you are missing the key moral question, and calling everybody you disagree with idiots does not help with that. The question is this: does the government have the right to use coercion and take money from Americans and send it overseas. Now personally I think the answer is "Maybe, if we can do a really good job of demonstrating effectiveness" but it's a difficult question, and appealing to the drowning child argument (which is about voluntary acts) does not help. Arguments from Scott (and you!) have convinced me it's morally important for us rich Westerners to give more to charity, but that does not mean we can ignore the distinction between voluntary and coerced acts.
No, it's just an argument that the "drowning child"-framing cannot be usefully applied here, since it does not account for coercion. Because people have a natural interest to resist coercion, even if the coercion would force them to do something that they see as morally correct and they'd want to do anyway.
I would save the drowning child, but if a Dane tried to force me to under threat of violence, the argument would need to account for the cost/benefit differently. The cost is not only the ruined suit, but also by allowing the Dane to wield power over me. It would increase his confidence in his ability to be able to do it again in a different context. Concessions always increase demands. The alternative actions would be to walk away ignoring the Dane, seeing if his threat is serious. Or to attack the man and try to drown him in the lake. I might gain information about my new enemy's strength and possibly rid myself off him. Or it might cost me my life. But if you pay the Dane, it might just cost you your life down the line.
But that's still a poor analogy to the current situation, unless you want the argument to become massively more complex.
No, anything you manage to defund is incremental progress by reducing the load of coercion imposed on you.
And especially if you target the most effective programs first, you're doing more to undermine the legitimacy of the tax system/the establishment, that runs it, than if you targeted something obviously wasteful. This will help you make progress down the line. Though in this case, I think it's mainly about a spite stratagem, detailed in my other comment.
What you're doing here is essentially a circular argument. The loop of "Ah, we shouldn't defund thing X, because it's nice and taxes will always be there anyway", which is obviously fallacious.
But people do use this kind of hopeless reasoning (or maybe the existence of the state reassures them, instead of giving them nightmares?) which is part of why the government sector during my lifetime and long before has only ever gotten bigger, more powerful and more expensive.
EDIT: Wait... is it a circular argument? Eh... not really as stated. Had something more complex in mind, but it got too long. So... not circular!
I agree that this is the key point raising toxicity. Coercion vs Voluntarism. If there’s any difference between morality and legality, it’s that one is compulsory and the other is continuously debated and, in turn, informs what’s legal. However, when we blur the line between the two and call charity/aid, an “obligation”, then people will pushback (sometimes viciously) against the principle.
Trying to convince people of giving more is great but when you call them evil for not doing it, you might undermine your goal. If charity is non-negotiable then make it an official tax.
Of course, this will just change the goalposts, and other preoccupations will become the new moral obligation. Repeat the process and people will start talking about how socialism always ends badly.
There's a recurring core problem in American politics where partisan liberals will say it's insane Republicans are prioritizing (small budget item) instead of prioritizing entitlement reform.
Then you nod in agreement and ask them if they'll work with Republicans on entitlement reform. They politely explain they would prefer to successfully bully Republicans in every future election with the entitlement reform topic so they can win and repurpose some of the growing entitlement spending on new partisan spending items instead of reducing the deficit with it. Say what you will about morals, this is tactically shrewd.
However, tactics aside, this is far more powerful immoral conduct than a schizo rightist screaming on Twitter about how our deficit is primarily caused by alleged Godless NGOs for African child rapists. In practice, the demagoguery around Medicare is obviously doing far more to corrupt our society and its values, in addition to blowing out the spending side. But it is respectable and baby boomers vote and healthcare industries donate. So it has that going for it.
Welfare was pretty unpopular amongst the whites paying for it in many of the blue states I've lived, but they got overwhelmed by the non-whites at the polls.
California used to be Reagan country before the Mexicans. Same happened to the Northeast and Illinois. If you import two Dems for every one person who goes Rep in response, the Dems gain ground.
That's good, and I don't consider you in the partisan liberal camp from my experience reading you. Although perhaps it would better if you were, then you could convince them to change their minds!
What's the rationale for cutting access to Medicare and lowering Social Security (which increasing the retirement age would do), while simultaneously arguing for foreign aid on effective altruist grounds? Middle America should cop higher out-of-pocket costs and lower pensions to save the global poor? Some of the most highly redistributive, foreign aid funding states (per capita) are the Nordic countries which have high taxes and big welfare states. They even have high rates of private donations.
At the very least, I can understand why the anti-EA right so smugly mocks the pro-EA right. They're evil and stupid, sure, but they know that cutting benefits to the elderly and increasing global health/development aid would be political suicide.
I didn't say it was politically feasible, I think it's not. I'm in favor of welfare! But social security is a welfare program that goes mostly to well-off rich elderly people, who have way more wealth, on average, than the young.
Yeah that's fair, I'd just be more in favour of the universalist program (high taxes, universal welfare programs) as opposed to more targeting or cutting retirement benefits.
I'm tempted to say that cutting tax concessions to private retirement income accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs would avoid people being excessively worse off while young and better off after retirement. We have a similar scheme in Australia that massively exacerbates this problem and people end up oversaving during their working years, worrying about running out when they retire and almost inevitably passing on a giant nest egg to their descendants.
Medicare uses scams to siphon money from the US tax base. The system is and has been thoroughly gamed. That's the rationale. If it can't be reformed so Joe Citizen isn't dishing out a $1,000 for ineffectual Paxlovid subsidy it'd be better to be rid of large chunks of it.
Surely it can be reformed like every other public drug insurance scheme to cover the most (cost) effective medication. Public drug insurance certainty does a better job in this regard than private insurance.
We need to replace the entire health care system as it exists with universal health care guaranteed for all citizens. This system could take many forms and doesn’t necessarily have to be completely nationalized. As for retirement age, why not lower it? More people than ever are unable to retire at all and will be working until death.
No, ‘entitlements’ aren’t at all doing those things provided these are limited to native citizens and not racial aliens or ‘refugees.’ What is destroying western economies is neoliberal capitalism, race to the bottom policies, neglect of domestic infrastructure, deindustrialization. When you move to Israel and make Aliyah you can lobby for a libertarian economy where the poor and elderly of your people can live in and eat of out dumpsters. Just the way you like it.
I have a theory. People lie on a coordinate plane of intelligence and rationality. Not all highly intelligent people are highly irrational, or vice versa.
People who are high in intelligence but low on rationality are over represented on the very far left. They often seem to care greatly about elaborately constructed ideals and principles but don’t feel a strong need to square them with reality or human nature.
People who are low in intelligence but high in rationality may be over represented on the far right. They are pretty consistent in favoring common sense narratives that appeal to “the way things are.” They intend to be rational but due to their limitations suffer cognitive distortions in their interpretation of what’s rational. They find it hard to appreciate nuance, counterfactuals, and cost-benefit, so rationality takes them only so far.
Those high in both intelligence and rationality probably tend to the middle of the spectrum, whether on the left or on the right.
This is not "low IQ". Many genuinely dim people can grasp all these ideas, I have met people who would probably be genuinely diagnosed as "retarded" when doctors still use that word who did not need to be told why charity exists. The people you are arguing with deliberately choose not to grasp them; their stupidity is not lack of intelligence but the presence of cruelty and sadism. They could have a 190 IQ for all it matters, the real issue is they're arguing in bad faith and pretending not to understand because it is not (yet) acceptable to say "I don't care about n---- kids".
Man, Scott was straight up cooking them in that thread. I especially loved when people asked him "well how much do YOU donate to charity then huh???" as if he hasn't donated not only hundreds of thousands (million+ total?) and also a kidney.
With all due respect, this article shows your viewpoint to be just as dumb as this twitter cretin who keeps being referenced.
You repeatedly make analogies to a drowning child or pressing a button to help people. But a drowning child is an exceptional situation. Children are not always in water at risk of drowning. If you rescue a child from the water and return him to his parents, he should be fine for a while. What is the obligation of someone if the child keeps returning to the same pond to drown, over and over again? What if a whole village of children insists on dumping their kids in the water every single day without teaching them how to swim? Is it your job to stay there all the time and constantly pull the kids out of the water?
How long must the person sit there and press the button, draining his bank account and time, to help millions of poor Africans?
There are plenty of other poor people in the world who don't have such high rates of HIV/AIDS infections. Africans top the charts because they can't stop being extremely polygynous without stopping the spread of the disease. Providing this aid means that there will have to be money given and people on the ground forever because the Africans are not changing their behavior.
But it's not one child that returns to the same pond over and over again. If there were millions of children drowning in ponds, it would be worth spending at least .1% of the budget to help them. Again, my claim, and Scott's claim, which was made repeatedly and at length is we should take at least minimal action to help poor foreigners, not that it should be the only thing we spend the budget on.
Africa remains a shithole despite whatever amount of aid we give. Its population keeps going up and up. Some of that excess population inevitably leaves Africa and comes to the west. There an African’s burden multiplies by like x1,000,000 because they can access the welfare state, vote, and their dysfunction gums up our whole society. If enough of them immigrate they can turn our society into a third world shithole.
The same leftists that want to increase African population will gleefully import them on the same humanitarian grounds.
This has to end. These people’s existence is not good for the world. If they can’t sustain their population without outside assistance that assistance should be cut off.
There are millions of children drowning in the ponds whose parents keep dropping them there, and who grow up never learning to swim and returning to the ponds to drown. Moral hazard.
No, their parents don't drop them in the ponds repeatedly. It's not like if you save the children once from HIV they're likely to die shortly thereafter. If there were millions of children drowning in ponds, it would be worth spending at least .1% of the budget on that.
Antivirals are a lifelong treatment.
But it's not like there are repeatedly different sources of danger. Continuing to treat someone for a common disease isn't analogous to constantly pulling the same person out of ponds.
Pulling one child out of a pond isn't analogous to foreign aid either, or anything, really.
Not as unhinged or insulting as I was hoping but lmao at ‘if you’re going to be evil don’t be stupid’. I’ve noticed it in myself too that I hate an evil person more if they’re dumb and I do wonder why that is
Sometimes I'm impressed with the mental gymnastics to choose evil and be okay with it by rationalizing that it's not evil.
It reminded me of a line from Game of Thrones. "We've had vicious kings and we've had idiot kings, but I don't know if we've ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king!"
You have interests, and those things that go counter to them, will naturally be perceived as evil. Hatred is a useful motivation to fight, possibly kill those, when that would be in your interest. Dumb people are less capable, hence less of a risk to fight.
An intelligent/capable person is potentially more dangerous, those that didn't respect their higher threat and too easily committed to fight them, driven by by the same hatred... evolution did not favor them.
Also with an intelligent person, you start to feel model uncertainty. "If he believes that evil thing, but he is smart... I should be less sure that I am actually correct.". Or you might remember "Nobody thinks of themselves as evil, and since he's so smart, he might learn the error of his ways!". Also intelligent people make for better allies, if you need to team up against some greater evil.
I think evil and stupid people are more immediately dangerous. An evil and smart person is aware that their negative behavior may rebound back on them - that if you go around defrauding people all willy nilly, for example, you wind up in prison. This naturally restricts how bad their behavior can be. Evil and stupid people hurt others with functionally no concern for themselves, making them do more damage in less time (though perhaps less damage overall).
Go off king
I think Gobry gets a pass because he did write out a detailed position on PEPFAR that is highly reasonable and defensible: https://x.com/pegobry_en/status/1884372977531101612
He even made up with Scott Alexander later in that thread.
But, otherwise, yeah, spot on.
We are the richest country in the world and no other country is even *close*. "Someone else should pay" rings wildly hollow in that context.
No it doesn't. You being richer than others doesn't mean you should fund their domestic policy.
That's not the argument I'm responding to
Two of his five points being reasonable does not give him a pass.
Yes, the anti PEPFAR argument is very stupid. The twitter right should just come out and say that they hate Black Africans, a view they certainly have no problem expressing before, and that under the nihilist Hitlerite conception of racial struggles any disease that befall the outgroup benefits the ingroup. Anything that accelerates African dealignment from the Union of Satan and into multipolarity is a good thing
Very good post, Bentham. However, how much more the US government should be spending on actually useful foreign aid is, to the average American, a difficult problem. After all, nobody panics when things go according to plan. What do you think about how much more the US government should spend on actually useful foreign aid?
Wow, you really unloaded on those guys, with both barrels. Nice job!
Excellent article, you really are a gem when it comes to human and animal welfare. But you probably could have gone further and identified Elon/Trump as major wellsprings and superspreaders of this kind of moronic evil, and as a net negative impact on the world.
another shitty moral utilitarian argument. this is a loose quote from somewhere i cant remember, but a universal love of humanity is a way to spread love around so thin, you never have to care or love anything too deeply. also, interesting you didnt write a scathing article about how we ONLY spend 0.1% on "gayaids" a month ago.
That's a good point. He did mention that he feels utilitarianism doesn't force him to accept any unpleasant truths, which I found bizarre. For starters, it's anti-democratic, because since decision making should be left to an utilitarian calculus, there would be no point to democratic participation in decision making (there are objectively correct policies that this calculus would dictate).
Ok, I'll bite and play Devil's Advocate. High-ish IQ FWIW.
The American people want foreign aid cut. They voted for an administration that would do that. "America First", all that jazz. The typical response from liberals and elites has been (basically), fuck the people, they don't know what is good for them
Frankly, I find the latter persons and attitude more evil than the first.
Why should Americans pay to save Africans from AIDS? Do you know how they get AIDS? Do you have any idea, how rampant, how promiscuous, you have to be to contract AIDS heterosexually (on average)? Look it up--it is staggering. You would need to have unprotected sex with an infected partner over 100 times, on average. So for AIDS to be epidemic, on a whole continent, in a society that likely averages well <10% homosexual, you need rampant, rutting, unchecked promiscuity. No one ever mentions this in the paens to "save" Africa, for obvious reasons. VERY politically incorrect.
Do you understand what this means? What this says about the promiscuity and infidelity in sub-Saharan Africa? What it means for the prospect of ever having even a single viable nation or institution on the continent?
No fidelity between men and women means no marriage, no family unit of any strength. The men lack ambition, just focused on "entertainment". No institutions developed, as faithless women would then have a claim on wealth. I think Aporia's substack wrote it well (Arctherium I think?): you literally cannot develop as a nation when men and women betray each other so casually.
So, to use your analogy, it is not a drowning child. It is an adult, who has wantonly exposed themselves to the elements; who would not take even the meager step to wear the life protector offered to them; and who, if you save them, will deliberately drown their children (and have more to drown), too, unless you step in and save them from themselves also.
What say you? Should taxpayers bear this burden, or should Africans shoulder the moral hazard?
In other words "how would a child even get AIDS lol"
So I win? Guess the low-IQ troll is on the other foot
Answer Tony's question. How did so many Africans get AIDS?
I'll even point you towards my other comment where I present several alternative explanations.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-anti-foreign-aid-right-is-low/comment/90871560
You're a very stupid racist though, so I'm not reading that
So you can't actually answer my questions.
There's a difference between less aid, and shut down the whole.org.
Here are three reasons this argument is stupid:
1) That the American people barely, by 1.5%, picked one wildly unpopular person over another says absolutely nothing about their position on individual policy positions like PEPFAR.
2) We have never had direct democracy precisely because people are wildly ignorant about most policy questions. Some amount of elitism/technocracy/*representative* democracy has always been intended to guard against that, not to ignore democracy but as the only condition under which democracy can ever work. Is it evil to let experts set interest rates at the Federal Reserve, or decide which drugs are medically safe/effective, etc? Or is an appeal to democracy on subjects that most people know nothing about a pretty basic error from Political Science 101?
3) Your entire theory about how people contract AIDS is wildly uninformed and mistaken. "Do you have any idea, how rampant, how promiscuous, you have to be to contract AIDS heterosexually (on average)?" Yeah exactly zero, as the "how would a child even get AIDS?" commenter already pointed out. And your follow-on theories about promiscuity in Africa are baseless racist trash you read on racist trash websites populated by other low-IQ people.
Oh look, Reply Guy is here! We've missed you.
In case you forgot, about 10 years ago, you just could not escape Reply Guy. It was always a virtue-signaling White Male, here to "do the work", non-ironically calling himself a feminist and an "ally". Now I guess Reply Guy is another loser wannabe writer on Substack, but still showing up to call people names. Very self-righteous of you!
Hey smart guy: how do the Africans contract HIV? How did it become endemic there, and only there, among heterosexuals, in all the world, over three generations now? Why is it that the only demographics to ever experience AIDS epidemics are male homosexuals and sub-Saharan Africans?
(Tip: there is no answer Reply Guy can give that will not read as racist, so he will either change the subject or attack me again for telling the truth. I've got odds on the latter).
(WOW--just checked his profile, and the first two things are about how he is a feminist! I am dying over here. 2015 called and wants its "Stay Woke" shirt back)
You started this thread by replying to someone else to play Devil's Advocate, which is the textbook move of the meme from 10 years ago that you seem oddly fixated on. Why is that on your mind, bud? Did enough smart people call you out on it back then that you've nursed a grudge this whole time?
Sub-Saharan Africans have higher HIV rates because they are the poorest people on earth, with less developed healthcare systems and less access to condoms. They also have less education on sexual transmission and stronger social taboos about discussing the subject, which leads to more people keeping it secret. Ineffectual governance and social conflict/instability leads to more rape. As an artifact of their desperate poverty, there is also more prostitution. A history of colonization and medical experimentation has contributed to higher distrust of medical institutions, which are sometimes demonized by religious groups or political disinformation campaigns.
All of this is easily verifiable from 5 minutes on Google. None of it "reads as racist." And none of it means that you need to have had sex to contract HIV. As several people have already pointed out to you, children can be infected from mother-to-child transmission.
Yes, in certain subregions, there are also cultural norms at play regarding marriage and sex partners. But you mischaracterize those norms, and in any case, your choice to focus on that singular cause among the very many factors involved is pseudoscientific bullshit driven by motivated reasoning. Your efforts to smear the character of an entire race, as a justification for why we should let kids with AIDS die, is just what I said the first time: baseless racist trash. I'm not changing the subject to attack you: I'm running circles around your pathetic argument, and then I'm also attacking you.
Feminism has little to do with this conversation, and trying to refute my three points (two of which you did not even mention) by mere association with a political tribe you disagree with is one reason nobody intelligent takes you seriously. But for what it's worth, both of those comments + posts were critical of the feminist movement, because I'm not the unthinking blue-tribe automaton you wishcast me to be.
1985 called and it wants "blaming diseases on moral failings" back.
What’s particularly disgusting is many right wing Maga evangelical Christians feel the same way. To them I say you can take your WWJD T-shirts and shove them up your ass.
I feel like you are missing the key moral question, and calling everybody you disagree with idiots does not help with that. The question is this: does the government have the right to use coercion and take money from Americans and send it overseas. Now personally I think the answer is "Maybe, if we can do a really good job of demonstrating effectiveness" but it's a difficult question, and appealing to the drowning child argument (which is about voluntary acts) does not help. Arguments from Scott (and you!) have convinced me it's morally important for us rich Westerners to give more to charity, but that does not mean we can ignore the distinction between voluntary and coerced acts.
But this is just a fully general argument against taxation!
No, it's just an argument that the "drowning child"-framing cannot be usefully applied here, since it does not account for coercion. Because people have a natural interest to resist coercion, even if the coercion would force them to do something that they see as morally correct and they'd want to do anyway.
I would save the drowning child, but if a Dane tried to force me to under threat of violence, the argument would need to account for the cost/benefit differently. The cost is not only the ruined suit, but also by allowing the Dane to wield power over me. It would increase his confidence in his ability to be able to do it again in a different context. Concessions always increase demands. The alternative actions would be to walk away ignoring the Dane, seeing if his threat is serious. Or to attack the man and try to drown him in the lake. I might gain information about my new enemy's strength and possibly rid myself off him. Or it might cost me my life. But if you pay the Dane, it might just cost you your life down the line.
But that's still a poor analogy to the current situation, unless you want the argument to become massively more complex.
Well, you see, the tax system already exists, and would continue doing so even in the absence of foreign aid.
No, anything you manage to defund is incremental progress by reducing the load of coercion imposed on you.
And especially if you target the most effective programs first, you're doing more to undermine the legitimacy of the tax system/the establishment, that runs it, than if you targeted something obviously wasteful. This will help you make progress down the line. Though in this case, I think it's mainly about a spite stratagem, detailed in my other comment.
What you're doing here is essentially a circular argument. The loop of "Ah, we shouldn't defund thing X, because it's nice and taxes will always be there anyway", which is obviously fallacious.
But people do use this kind of hopeless reasoning (or maybe the existence of the state reassures them, instead of giving them nightmares?) which is part of why the government sector during my lifetime and long before has only ever gotten bigger, more powerful and more expensive.
EDIT: Wait... is it a circular argument? Eh... not really as stated. Had something more complex in mind, but it got too long. So... not circular!
yes, it is.
by the way I totally concede that the moral case for this aid is far stronger than that for most intra-country programs
I agree that this is the key point raising toxicity. Coercion vs Voluntarism. If there’s any difference between morality and legality, it’s that one is compulsory and the other is continuously debated and, in turn, informs what’s legal. However, when we blur the line between the two and call charity/aid, an “obligation”, then people will pushback (sometimes viciously) against the principle.
Trying to convince people of giving more is great but when you call them evil for not doing it, you might undermine your goal. If charity is non-negotiable then make it an official tax.
Of course, this will just change the goalposts, and other preoccupations will become the new moral obligation. Repeat the process and people will start talking about how socialism always ends badly.
There's a recurring core problem in American politics where partisan liberals will say it's insane Republicans are prioritizing (small budget item) instead of prioritizing entitlement reform.
Then you nod in agreement and ask them if they'll work with Republicans on entitlement reform. They politely explain they would prefer to successfully bully Republicans in every future election with the entitlement reform topic so they can win and repurpose some of the growing entitlement spending on new partisan spending items instead of reducing the deficit with it. Say what you will about morals, this is tactically shrewd.
However, tactics aside, this is far more powerful immoral conduct than a schizo rightist screaming on Twitter about how our deficit is primarily caused by alleged Godless NGOs for African child rapists. In practice, the demagoguery around Medicare is obviously doing far more to corrupt our society and its values, in addition to blowing out the spending side. But it is respectable and baby boomers vote and healthcare industries donate. So it has that going for it.
I support entitlement reform.
No you don’t. You vote democrat and support immigration. You are what you do.
You know there are studies on immigration hurting the popularity of welfare?
Welfare was pretty unpopular amongst the whites paying for it in many of the blue states I've lived, but they got overwhelmed by the non-whites at the polls.
California used to be Reagan country before the Mexicans. Same happened to the Northeast and Illinois. If you import two Dems for every one person who goes Rep in response, the Dems gain ground.
That's good, and I don't consider you in the partisan liberal camp from my experience reading you. Although perhaps it would better if you were, then you could convince them to change their minds!
What's the rationale for cutting access to Medicare and lowering Social Security (which increasing the retirement age would do), while simultaneously arguing for foreign aid on effective altruist grounds? Middle America should cop higher out-of-pocket costs and lower pensions to save the global poor? Some of the most highly redistributive, foreign aid funding states (per capita) are the Nordic countries which have high taxes and big welfare states. They even have high rates of private donations.
At the very least, I can understand why the anti-EA right so smugly mocks the pro-EA right. They're evil and stupid, sure, but they know that cutting benefits to the elderly and increasing global health/development aid would be political suicide.
I didn't say it was politically feasible, I think it's not. I'm in favor of welfare! But social security is a welfare program that goes mostly to well-off rich elderly people, who have way more wealth, on average, than the young.
Yeah that's fair, I'd just be more in favour of the universalist program (high taxes, universal welfare programs) as opposed to more targeting or cutting retirement benefits.
I'm tempted to say that cutting tax concessions to private retirement income accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs would avoid people being excessively worse off while young and better off after retirement. We have a similar scheme in Australia that massively exacerbates this problem and people end up oversaving during their working years, worrying about running out when they retire and almost inevitably passing on a giant nest egg to their descendants.
Medicare uses scams to siphon money from the US tax base. The system is and has been thoroughly gamed. That's the rationale. If it can't be reformed so Joe Citizen isn't dishing out a $1,000 for ineffectual Paxlovid subsidy it'd be better to be rid of large chunks of it.
Surely it can be reformed like every other public drug insurance scheme to cover the most (cost) effective medication. Public drug insurance certainty does a better job in this regard than private insurance.
That's an ongoing conflict including RFK Jr. vs Pharma lobbyists. I don't think we're there yet, if at all.
EA is retarded and its proponents largely clueless and removed from reality. This also isn’t a ‘right’ or ‘left’ issue.
What does that mean? Austerity neoliberalism?
Raising the retirement age for social security and the medicare age.
We need to replace the entire health care system as it exists with universal health care guaranteed for all citizens. This system could take many forms and doesn’t necessarily have to be completely nationalized. As for retirement age, why not lower it? More people than ever are unable to retire at all and will be working until death.
> As for retirement age, why not lower it?
Because the entitlement system is driving every Western country into bankruptcy as is.
No, ‘entitlements’ aren’t at all doing those things provided these are limited to native citizens and not racial aliens or ‘refugees.’ What is destroying western economies is neoliberal capitalism, race to the bottom policies, neglect of domestic infrastructure, deindustrialization. When you move to Israel and make Aliyah you can lobby for a libertarian economy where the poor and elderly of your people can live in and eat of out dumpsters. Just the way you like it.
Great book review on that option:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-work-retire-repeat-by-teresa-ghilarducci
And a neat alternative way to look at the entire question:
https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2024/10/04/how_to_balance_the_budget_1063073.html
I have a theory. People lie on a coordinate plane of intelligence and rationality. Not all highly intelligent people are highly irrational, or vice versa.
People who are high in intelligence but low on rationality are over represented on the very far left. They often seem to care greatly about elaborately constructed ideals and principles but don’t feel a strong need to square them with reality or human nature.
People who are low in intelligence but high in rationality may be over represented on the far right. They are pretty consistent in favoring common sense narratives that appeal to “the way things are.” They intend to be rational but due to their limitations suffer cognitive distortions in their interpretation of what’s rational. They find it hard to appreciate nuance, counterfactuals, and cost-benefit, so rationality takes them only so far.
Those high in both intelligence and rationality probably tend to the middle of the spectrum, whether on the left or on the right.
This is not "low IQ". Many genuinely dim people can grasp all these ideas, I have met people who would probably be genuinely diagnosed as "retarded" when doctors still use that word who did not need to be told why charity exists. The people you are arguing with deliberately choose not to grasp them; their stupidity is not lack of intelligence but the presence of cruelty and sadism. They could have a 190 IQ for all it matters, the real issue is they're arguing in bad faith and pretending not to understand because it is not (yet) acceptable to say "I don't care about n---- kids".