WandererintheWilderness
No bio...
User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
All this is sensible. I'm not trying to debate its merits as a coherent position.
I was specifically complaining about FistfullofCrows' pithy "if it was so important to have these millions for the poor people dying of TB then maybe soros or the whole of the EU can pitch in a few millions to go cure people", which I think is a bad and kind of baffling way to frame the question. It's really the "if it was", as opposed to "if it is", that sticks out to me. It seemed to be saying "we can prove, right now, that all this foreign aid isn't actually important, because the EU & Soros aren't taking up the slack". Which is bonkers and not the point. It can be genuinely important and still not a reasonable burden for the US to shoulder indefinitely, for all the reasons you cite. Or indeed the EU's or Soros's. People's unwillingness to do a hard and costly thing might be circumstantial evidence that it is indeed intractably hard and costly (duh) but it's just not some kind of gotcha that proves that the hard thing was never important. At the end of the day humanity can just collectively and intractably fail at doing an objectively important thing, because it's too hard and coordination problems are a bitch. That's life.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
I see what you're going for - but this seems to start from the premise that it's the other countries slash charitable billionaires who are positioning themselves as moral arbiters and saying the US should keep doing what it's doing. This seems… wrong? It's mostly American liberals and centrists writing the think-pieces, angry tweets, open letters, and so on. So within the drowning-child scenario I am picturing all of this as an internal debate within the swimmer's warring conscience.
And anyway, the important question is surely whether it is as a matter of fact important to save the child; not whether the outside observers who may or may not wail about it are cowards. As a hypothetical, "The bystanders are, to a one, a bunch of sanctimonious dicks who won't, actually, take over if the swimmer stops in his efforts to save the child" is many things, but it's not exactly a moving reason for the swimmer to stop what he's doing.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
I don't think you wrote it in that spirit but I can see how georgioz would interpret the tone of "get a grip!" as an officer dressing down his men.
I never understand this argument - the "if it was really so important then surely someone else would already be dealing with it" thing. "Someone has to do it, and it happens to be the United States that has, as a matter of fact, taken up the slack" is a perfectly logical proposition. This is like saying "why are you jumping into the water to save that kid? if he was really drowning, someone else would have already jumped in". It's meaningless.
By all means, you can say "even if it is important, the US shouldn't be bearing the cost, someone else e.g. the EU should take care of it". That's very different. And I'm not even making a positive claim as to whether it is as a matter of fact important (though I'm concerned about the kind of global Bystander Effect this kind of bucket-passing might lead to). But I just don't see how 'nobody else is stepping up to do the hard thing that someone is already doing' supposedly proves that the hard thing isn't worth doing and the second guy is a chump for bothering.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
America isn't a direct democracy. The people elect representatives, and then the representatives decide what to do. If the people don't like what the representatives do, their only recourse is to elect different representatives next time; they don't get to simply overrule the representatives' decisions while in office through a majority vote. There would then be no point in having representatives in the first place.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
mandate all office-based male federal government employees (…) wear black oxford shoes to work every day, NO exceptions
No exceptions? What if the gentleman is missing both legs?
Irrelevant joke, but putting "NO exceptions" quite so emphatically just begged for some smart-aleck to find a loophole, and I'm that guy. Besides it adds a bit of levity to my more substantial reply which is to observe that "cruel and wrong", in my book, describes a great deal - though not all! - of your proposed suggestions; and also that trying to implement most of them, particularly the '300,000 temporary ICE agents' thing, would result in an actual literal civil war.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
I'd have parsed it as more of an appeal to fair's-fair ("We're the people who paid for this building, the least you can do is let us in"), or even just "we're not random activists sticking our noses where they don't belong, we actually are involved in the DoE's operations and have legitimate cause to pay them a visit".
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Money means nothing to them, but they know it means something to us, and so they will disingenuously complain that the things we want cost too much to get us to back down
A somewhat more charitable reading would be something more like "We don't care if fraudsters waste money and we don't care if DOGE wastes money; but if DOGE only exists to stop waste, and winds up wasting more money than it saves, then it fails on its own terms and has literally no reason to exist".
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners
Surely that's consistent with the hypocrisy running the other way. They've come to believe high immigration is in their selfish interest, and spend a lot of time pretending they support it out of a deep moral conviction to make themselves look good. It's bad psychology to suppose that "it's in our economic self-interest" is the face-saving cover story, and "it's the ethical thing to do, however painful" is the dirty secret: in leftist spaces the latter is clearly the higher-status thing to say, whether you believe it or not, while coming out and admitting "we need more immigration because it'll make us wealthier" makes you sound like a deeply uncool capitalist.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.
That may be true! But if that is the husband's problem he ought to say so, not pretend that his concern is spending the household's money frivolously in general. It is perfectly sensible to say "I don't really care what you do with those $50 I gave you, just so long as you don't spend them on things I actively disapprove of; by all means buy a dress with it, or set fire to it on TikTok, just don't give it to that smelly nuisance over there". But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!".
The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices (…)
I think this is besides Hanania's point. He is gesturing at something like Scott's conflict theory vs mistake theory. His point is: nationalists criticize the mainstream left for advocating for policies intended to help foreigners more than Americans. But, in fact, when you look at their actual policies and the arguments behind them, the left's policy are intended to help Americans first. They have a factual disagreement with right-wingers about whether those policies would work, and they're hypocritical about how they phrase their goals, but making America better off (at the expense of the rest of the world if need be) is in fact also their terminal goal, whether they admit it or not; their revealed preferences, granted their (perhaps erroneous!) beliefs about how economics work, align with right-wingers'.
Saying that the economic studies are bad is neither here nor there. The salient point for Hanania is the existence and prevalence of those studies (however flawed), as opposed to studies actually embracing the left's supposed belief that it would be morally necessary to enact such policies even if they harmed Americans, so long as they benefited foreigners.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Outside of Moldbug's wildest dreams, this is not a position that meaningfully exists in America, nor is it likely to within our lifetimes, or our children's, or our children's children. I don't see why we should skew our common-sense political terminology just to leave a whole quadrant permanently unoccupied.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
What would you say is a natural right-wing movement, if MAGA isn't it? Religious fundamentalism? Ethno-nationalism? But then what would be left to count as far right? (This is a genuine question, not an attempted gotcha.)
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
That's also entirely fair, I just don't think that should be construed as a job.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Again I don't understand why this would be the ethical thing to do for a new agent suddenly given all Gates's resources. Why do you think whoever will replace you will use the money more ethically than you would have done if you stayed? Don't you trust yourself more than a Gates-appointed stranger, and shouldn't you therefore give running it the best chance you've got? I can see why you'd want to hand the reins over to a third party you hand-picked yourself, but resigning, plain and simple, seems like moral avoidance, not praiseworthy behavior.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
A lot of them have a J2 as reddit mods or Wikipedia admins, but you'd have to really work building up a posting history vs their work hours to nail them for that.
Surely that's just a hobby? Not that practicing your hobby during work hours isn't potentially a firing offense. But trying to construe that sort of thing as "working a second job" in a manner incompatible with holding a government job seems very square-peg-round-hole.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
You asked what would it take for me to believe he's changed
No I didn't. I asked what it would take for you to believe that the new person (whom you know to be a new person) in charge of Bill Gates's body was a good person. I suppose another way to ask the same question is, assuming you regard yourself as a good person, what you would do if you woke up to find yourself in Bill Gates's body with access to all his passwords/etc.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Interesting. Why do you expect whoever is next in line to run it (presumably picked by the real Gates) to run it more ethically than Fake Gates?
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
No wiccan feminist ever speaks with an actual Louisiana or Haitian Voodoo witch doctor
? I've never known wiccans to think of themselves as having anything to do with voodoo. If you're going to liken it to a traditional form of witchcraft it's much more like satanism with all the goth stuff taken out.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
If you knew someone had secretly swapped bodies with Bill Gates overnight (with access to all his passwords etc.), what actions would the New Gates have to take to convince you he was a good person?
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
I usually use 'EDIT:' to prevent confusion with the more common meaning of 'ETA'.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Lithium and other such resources being themselves non-renewable make me skeptical of "renewable energy" as a long-term solution. Settling the rest of the solar system also doesn't seem like a real solution; maybe a solution for the long-term survival of the human species, but not for averting societal collapse for us Earthers, unless we're envisioning a full exodus. Even if space-faring tech massively increases I can't see it ever becoming practical to move massive amounts of resources back and forth between planets.
I don't define it in precisely the Confucian way, but there is a lot to this as implementation of Kindness, yeah. Where I would part from these recommendations is that I don't think family can be the root of Kindness. Humans have in-group/out-group instinct, and if you train yourself to be kind to your family only, you might accidentally wind up training yourself to be loyal to your in-group no matter what, without getting any closer to being truly kind to your fellow man in general. Call me a Westerner, but I'm looking for "good Samaritans" (in the original sense of the man who helps a member of his out-group without a second thought), not just good family men. Still, the skill to be kind to your family is certainly a necessary one if you want to live your life Kindly, just not a sufficient one, and if you find yourself having trouble being kind even to your relatives, you're in trouble. I'm just not sure that you're home free and need only extend the line outward once you've mastered that much.
WandererintheWilderness
6mo ago
Is it kind to encourage kids to live as trans people and eventually become sterilized eunuchs? Or is is kind to stop them even if they’re mad today but will eventually become parents? Is it kind to not make your kid do his math homework and play on his computer, or to force tge issue so he learns the material and has options to get into better colleges and better jobs in ten years
That depends. You might treat these questions as practical questions of fact: what will make my child happiest in the long run? In which case, yes, you might come out on either position while having "kindness" as your guiding light. But a lot of people will come down on one side or the other based on very different principles; will say that kids should still go to school or be trans or not be trans even if they were shown hard evidence that on average the other would be preferable in utilitarian terms. That is the distinction I am talking about, and I don't think it's a meaningless one. My personal belief is that any society that places other values above kindness, whatever those values might be, runs a much greater risk of descending into tyranny, because it allows ends other than human welfare to justify means that might entail human suffering. You can still get to very dark places playing the trolley problem on massive scales, but nowhere near so dark as if you place non-human-welfare-related considerations above human welfare altogether.
Well yes, but this is my sticking point: since when is it the outsiders' request at all? The people complaining about USAID are not foreigners in a position to step up to replace it, even if they wanted to. They're American liberals. That's where the wailing is coming from. (Whether because they sincerely think it's import or because it was a useful power-seeking ploy for them; doesn't matter here.) The people complaining about cutting USAID are not people who could take up the slack once America pulls out, because they are Americans. This is why I am saying that what the EU does or does not do about this has no bearing on the validity of the claim.
More options
Context Copy link