Macaquin
10mo ago
This article just presents the trivial fact that many liberals strongly -believe- they're under threat of persecution and silencing. So what? That's not evidence they're right. How much Swalwell spends doesn't matter without evidence he needs it. If a wide range of business leaders believe this, it could be a different story (and we have conveniently few details here), but this is nothing new. All major social media sites altered their policies at the behest of the previous administration's pressure. Boo hoo.
"The wicked flee when no one pursueth" is how this reads to me.
Macaquin
11mo ago
Which effectively means that if you start acknowledging the “do no harm” principle, you effectively cannot ever cut spending. So heartlessness is the only defense against the weaponized empathy. It doesn’t work on people who state openly that they don’t care about the empathy puppy.
How exactly did not eliminating something like PEPFAR prevent any further cuts to spending? The State Department did exactly that weeks before your comment and Rubio still managed to fire the majority of USAID's workforce.
No one, as a matter of the practical reality, has ever had to commit to some totalizing "do no harm" principle, you can simply (to the extent "you" have discretion over the matter) weight the cost of aid cuts against the benefits of doing so. Those benefits certainly include the strictly political and strategic value that defunding partisan enemies involve, but if those are being alleged they need to be specified in concrete terms. "The left will use any morsel of moral thinking against you in some unspecified and indeterminate way" is a useless thing to say without information about what this amounts to in concrete legal or organizational terms, and nobody insisting that we desperately need to halt every last cent of aid has given such an account here.
Macaquin
11mo ago
This kind of posturing is very hard to take seriously absent a compelling case that USAID funding is a meaningful obstacle to conservative victory as such. Your pro-life vs pro-choice analogy doesn't work because the pro-choicers' victory necessarily depends on pro-lifers' defeat.
You can't really enjoy South Park and take exception to your own sacred cows landing in the crosshairs; the real offense is that they hit our Resplendent Golden Poet-Emperor with predictable Simpsons-tier recycling rather than something worthy of the show.
Old, tired, washed up.
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