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Notes -
The States Unfair
The New Republic reports:
This is, to be blunt, not plausible. It's a pretty obviously not plausible. Pennsylvania is not a small state, nor an economically insecure one, nor a state that leans entirely blue in population or businesses. An individual county was able to find sufficient support for New Jersey's booth; Pennsylvania as a whole has much more resources available. There are, in fact, no small number of Pennsylvania businesses that would drool over the opportunity to represent the state in the most Trump-partisan environment possible, including individual businessmen that have outright donated tens of millions of dollars in Trump-partisan funding.
It appears that Shapiro only began asking businesses shortly before ("the governor’s office approached the chamber less than two weeks out from the start of the fair to help get companies involved", "we were asked by Governor Shapiro’s office in mid June") the start of the event, when it had become both much harder and more expensive to act. Not impossible, since I've personally deployed a small business convention booth literally across the planet with less notice, while driving from the ass-end of Pennsylvania to Washington DC is about seven hours, and no international customs. Still exactly what you'd do if you wanted the request to fail, without admitting that you wanted the program to fail. There are individual high school sports teams who could have gotten this done, including fundraising, had they been given the six months Ohio gave out. It's not even clear that the requests were sincere, rather than perfunctory.
And to spell things out: the Chamber of Commerce businesses did not say they did not want to participate, just that they couldn't manage it. Shapiro's explicit words, that the "None were interested," just weren't true.
There's some fun exploration about where this falls from a Bounded Distrust perspective. Shapiro's office put out a 700k USD price tag that's outright laughable if you've done any serious work like this. But it's also since just been falsified by reality. Pennsylvania's senators put out a call for businesses in the aftermath of the initial reporting, and got response and volunteers and an arranged booth immediately, despite the shorter timelines. So it turns out you don't need die-hard Trump supporters; a variety of mining businesses, crayon merchants, construction companies, and a nutrition supplement seller were quite happy to jump in.
But it got a nice slogan:
This is a trivial matter. The Fair seems to be a bit of a joke, the booth in question is a glorified convention stand, the weather means attendance may be lackluster, and few people will remember it in six months.
It's just that Shapiro, one of the moderates with the greatest reason to want to reach out across the aisle and show de-escalatory competence as an administrator, instead believed it more productive to punt on a glorified convention booth and then give an interview to TNR.
And in that interview, he said things that were false, so as to put the blame anywhere else, and people believed him.
The Shallow End of The Betting Pool
PBS reports:
There he goes, making up conspiracy theories about malicious actors responsible for his own run-of-the-mill incompetence.
... there's (weak) photographic evidence, isn't there.
To be fair, damage to the liner would not, on its own, result in the algae bloom. To be charitable to the point of fault, the liner could both be subject to sabotage and poorly applied or requiring early maintenance. The algae blooms themselves are near-certainly downstream of phosphate levels, and while (contrary to the cited expert) it doesn't take a ridiculous bulk of phosphate fertilizer or a long period to cause an algae bloom even in a pool this size, there are a wide variety of other plausible sources of phosphate. Decaying leaves or grass clippings, run-off from people trying to repair a different vandalism, mechanical failures in a filtration system, or use of water which already had phosphate in it are all possible.
It's just hard to tell what the actual situation is, when the New York Times began with Raise Doubts about Trump's claim at the headline, only to not actually find positive contradictions in the documents, and far down in the story to notice a paraphrased:
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
But that is, ultimately, just a pool liner.
It's not a question with millions of lives on the line.
The Question With Millions of Lives On The Line
The Lancet published:
A better statistician than I has already gone over the modeling problems, and they're significant:
It's a fun read if you like math, and better than I could write on the statistics side, so I'll not try. Instead, I'm going to hammer the model itself.
Some of the faults are simple and direct. A dose-response analysis is fundamentally taking a different perspective than any attempt to cut inefficient or wasteful spending. Some are more esoteric: many of the countries where USAID has the greatest significance are also those with the least state capacity to measure deaths. Instead, the public data sources are models that themselves use aid-dependent variables to estimate mortality rates. This circularity would just be a statistics problem on its own and explains some of the unusually convenient numbers that the LessWrong article notices, but there's a more critical problem: even assuming the aid-dependent modeling was correct, several of those programs were not stopped, only moved under the Department of State.
The Lancet paper does not actually consider a specific mechanism or group of mechanisms, but the underlying drivers of a significant majority are ART provisioning, and that runs into trouble when not all ART was under USAID to start with, and the parts that were had a waiver by February 2025, if not during the initial cuts and freezes.
Some disruption is plausible in early 2025. A complete cessation is not, and was not when the Lancet paper was published. The nightmare scenario that this paper treats as plausible isn't a genuine situation that could happen because of DOGE or the current USAID closure or extant or currently-proposed program cuts.
My problem here is not that this number is, ultimately, made up and dependent on counterfactuals, just as earlier predictions of 600k deaths were made up and counterfactual. It's not the Lancet's reputation: this is the paper that published Wakefield; it knows what it is.
There's a far more serious issue. These aid programs aren't getting less controversial, and they won't get more widely-supported if USAID floats back under the next administration to fund a stack of random scholarship programs and social events. There's no plausible scenario where putting ART programs under the Department of State results in this catastrophic cut from 2025 to 2030.
There is, however, reason to worry about it in the future.
The State Department itself estimates over 20 million people are getting ART through PEPFAR programs. While there's some fuzziness around the edges if you try to track down how they produce that number, since it's at least in part downstream of reporting by organizations that get money based on the number of treated patients, it's probably not off by 50%. Pulling ART from HIV-positive patients produces corpses within a half-dozen years, with very high reliability. And while it might be nice were the relevant governments able to fund their own people's treatment, a large portion of these countries aren't there and won't be there in twenty years.
((I'll caveat that it's not clear how much impact it would have on new infections; the data is pretty strong for it in individual cases, and very lackluster at population levels. While PEPFAR promotes high rates of testing and ART treatment as an HIV eradication tool, in practice even countries that have hit PEPFAR's 95-95-95 metrics officially have only seen modest reductions in new HIV cases that are hard to isolate from other potential causes. Studies have maxed out around 40% reduction. And, of course, ART as an 'HIV eradication' framework has conflict with 15- to 20-million-plus people who would keep having HIV for forty years even if new transmission went to zero.))
And there are a few other programs with other similar body counts and unsolvable problems. It's a little easier for a marginally-capable government to begin handling its own tuberculosis program than handle bulk orders of ART, but many of these countries are not marginally-capable.
The Lancet study is wrong because that ART rugpull isn't happening, yet. What happens if someone does propose it? What, if any, distinction would readers be able to take, when the Lancet gives a panicked paper worried about the next mass murder? Who's going to care?
Most media coverage focuses hard on the trolley problem: whether cutting funding is equivalent to murder. That's an interesting philosophical question, but it depends on a foundation that's falling out of the basement level: whether people would care even if it were.
Because there's a limit. After the third or fourth time you promise your political opponents are going to commit mass murder on scales previously reserved for the biggest genocides ever recorded, and then in the aftermath, have to revise down to unremarkable numbers, that reputation follows you. And it's going to keep following even if the claimed catastrophe's actual meat does show up. Given that several fudge factors that supported the ART program are starting to fray around the edges, with the HIV eradication framework becoming so clearly unachievable that, or the various financial arguments about it being cheaper to avoid infection running head-first into infections that won't go away, that's a concern that needs to be treated seriously, not rhetorically.
But it's more useful to twist the edges of the truth today, to show how one's political enemies are monsters.
I would not call that photo strong evidence. If you want to convince me that the coating is failing in many places due to vandalism, a photo of a person kneeling next to the pool with a backpack and what may very charitably be a knife is not going to cut it.
I think what happened was that Trump made one of his big announcements on how the pool would be the Best Pool Ever, longer than the height of the tallest buildings, painted in American Flag Blue, a monument which will last for centuries. Then his pool guy did a shitty job and the paint came peeling off after a few weeks. Once it became common knowledge that the coating is coming off, of course people wanted to get their own piece of coating, and likely helped the process along a bit.
His reaction was then to blame these people. My pool would have lasted forever but these hateful liberals are destroying it, or some variant. Importantly, we should not update on Trump claiming vandalism. There is no world in which he would say oops, my pool guy did a subpar job, my bad, I will take full responsibility and try to fix the damage.
I agree that the algae bloom is probably more about phosphate levels than it is about the failing coating. Charitably, I do not want to rule out that someone deliberately emptied a sack of fertilizer into the pool just to spite Trump, but I seriously doubt that this is happening every time they change the water. I find it unlikely that before Trump made his announcement, he discussed the matter carefully with aquatic biologist experts (i.e. PMCs) and took their advice on mitigating bloom.
Hm.
The alternatives are, yes, quite plausible. I am not, pointedly, claiming that Trump's position must be clearly correct, or even reflect a good model of the problem. I'm definitely not going to propose that he's competent at anything.
I am, however, noticing that quite a lot of news coverage is insistent that there's no evidence in this case, and quick to imply that there's no plausible world in the general case, where people would damage public property just to spite Trump.
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With Shapiro: Yes, it's totally intentional and yes, he knows what he's doing. Let's look at his options:
He can enthusiastically participate in, as you say, a gesture reaching across the aisle. There's no political reason for him to do this. His entire political career thus far has been defined by his refusal to get involved in counterproductive culture war arguments that only serve to alienate some segment of the electorate. The result of this is that the only people who actively dislike the guy are rabid MAGA who aren't going to vote for a Democrat if it's the second coming of Christ. Given that the chances that this expo or whatever it is not being about the glorification of Trump were always somewhere around 0%, enthusiastic participation would only serve to alienate member s of his own party. Trump is currently in the process of committing political suicide nationally while enforcing strict loyalty among those left in his tent, so there's nothing to be gained by jumping on a sinking ship. Any reaching across the aisle that Shapiro does is going to be towards Republicans in Harrisburg, and is going to involve things that are actually important, such that he appears to be the reasonable one and any criticism of him is further evidence of MAGA incompetence.
He can inform VisitPA, or the Chamber of Commerce, or whoever else fairly early that the state will not be participating but they are free to put an exhibit together at their own expense. This is the neutral option, the one that Illinois and New York chose, and the one that PA ostensibly chose. If he had done this months ago then this wouldn't be a story at all.
He can refuse to participate entirely on the basis that this is an inappropriate politicization of the 4th. This wins him some resistance points among Democrats but has the downside of making him look like a typical culture warrior.
Let's be clear that the Democratic Party, and Shapiro by extension, benefits from this whole thing flopping as hard as possible. I don't want to get into the whole history of the thing, but it's obvious to everyone that the whole Freedom 250 thing is a poorly-planned politicization meant to glorify the current administration, and there's no greater evidence of that than the fact that even Republicans seem reluctant to actually attend, and that even the states that enthusiastically participated only managed to send underwhelming exhibits. Shapiro's little stunt allows him to contribute to the flop while being able to deny responsibility.
If anyone remembers anything about this a year from now, it's not going to be that Shapiro waited until the last minute so that the Chamber of Commerce wouldn't be able to get any exhibitors together in time, but that the exhibition flopped period. In the meantime, people like Stacy Garrity will reflexively make statements about how the state's lack of participation in an event that's an obvious overpoliticized dud is somehow an affront to core American values, making them look like asses, and Shapiro doesn't even have to respond because he already offered a bullshit explanation and pressing him on it further only makes it look like your taking it too seriously, if it doesn't already look that way. Also, never mind the fact that Garrity and her ilk aren't idle bystanders but active participants in state government and had plenty of time (well, four months at least) to at least inquire about what PA planned on doing, though I'd excuse them if, like the rest of us, the first time they heard about this state fair was when the musical guests announced they were dropping out.
As for the reflecting pool, it certainly is being vandalized, though I highly doubt that its woes are due to vandalism, if you can even call it that. I am by no means an expert on this, but I painted in high school, and we would spend more time prepping the surface than actually painting it. A proper refurbish of the pool would have required it to be cleaned and patched thoroughly, and allowed to properly dry (including tarping the "dry" surface to see if any water in the soil is penetrating the bottom and condensing on the tarp, which would need to be addressed separately). It would also require the entire filtration system to be cleaned and disinfected thoroughly before the new bubbler was installed.
Doing it this way would take several months to complete. Trump instead wanted it done in one to two weeks and got results commensurate with that timeline. I have no doubt that there are so-called vandals who are grabbing loose pieces of the coating and pulling it off. There may also be people cutting it. But the only reason they are able to do this is because the coating didn't bond to the surface properly. Suggesting that people are cutting it with a utility knife and peeling off sheets doesn't make sense to anyone who has ever painted anything before, or dealt with a spray-on truck bed liner, or a garage floor polymer coating. If these things are able to be peeled like that, it's usually from something like rust or water penetrating from the rear. It can also because the surface wasn't prepared properly and the coating was applied over top of dirt or grease that isn't bonded to the underlying surface and will prevent the coating from properly adhering. It looks like that is what happened here, and the media coverage caused curious onlookers to start picking at it, who then became a convenient scapegoat for the administration's incompetence.
That's a fascinating strategic analysis about Shapiro, but your three prongs miss the one he actually took: he pretended neutrality, caused problems, and then lied about what the problems were. If he had been genuinely neutral or refused to participate entirely, he still could have gotten the loving tongue-bath from TNR and the leftists. He just would have had to admit what he did, and show responsibility.
He didn't. That means something, especially if he's pretending to be the adult in the room.
I'm less sure on the liner material. That's a plausible model, but it's dependent on the application here being 'normal', and there's a lot of ways it just isn't because of scale. The metal plates in particular are a spot that the normal analysis wouldn't cover because they didn't need to exist, and would survive normal stresses, but would vulnerable to sabotage. Polyurea really isn't that scratch- or cut- resistant on its own, and the reason things like bubbling matter so much is because it does propagate from weak points, especially while the underlying primer is still curing.
But even if vandalism is possible as a major cause for the liner problems, it's compatible with also having poor application, and either option doesn't explain the algae blooms.
So... why is it so important to insist something with photographic evidence is not just implausible as a sole cause, but completely without evidence? Literally the next day someone got indicted for it!
Dumping fertilizer in the pool could explain the algae blooms, and fertilizer could be used to burn the grass over on the nearby lawn.
It's all gaslighting; the idea is to make you think it's crazy to think that someone would vandalize the National Mall just to make Trump look bad.
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The Greenberg family may also have a few opinions.
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I am rabid MAGA and would consider voting for Shapiro at the Governor level. I would never vote for him as a Senator though. A governor job is much different than a national politician. It seems like he’s doing a good as a governor.
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A big problem with USAID is it funds population groups that are not capable of sustaining advanced civilization on their own while having high reproductive rates. If you fund sub-Saharan Africa with USAID you get more Sub-Saharan Africans. Which means in 30x you need to send even more money to prevent deaths. They are humans that can sustain on their own hunger and gatherer communities at low population density.
By actually funding USAID you increase population density and in the future more Africans die because you saved lives today. No matter what you do people die.
This seems a slightly uncharitable phrasing.
For what it's worth, I think most of the populations which are growing very fast are depending on agriculture.
Also, the objection that giving food to the poor will cause them to multiply so you will need to give them more food in the future lest they starve is not exactly new. Any EA intervention will think about unintentional side effects, and I expect that USAID is little difference.
Fortunately, there are a lot more interventions than just changing how much grain we ship to Africa.
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Is this true? Typically lower mortality and higher quality of life are associated with lower birth rates. There are also various programs to lower birth rates more directly, like providing access to contraception and educating women, which could plausibly outweigh any increase in births due to saving lives.
A quick search finds a study saying "USAID was one of the largest providers of family planning services worldwide with almost $600 million for contraceptive services in poor countries." and a New York Times article claiming that $8.1 million in contraception was ruined after being stranded in Belgium due to the cuts. I do not know how much of these programs ultimately ended up being cut vs. being moved around.
This Givewell analysis estimates that each year of contraception prevents 0.3 unwanted pregnancies, of which 45% result in birth. This comment from someone at MSI Reproductive Choices says their average global cost per year of protection is $4.88, though increased marginal access could in some cases be $20 or more. So preventing a birth apparently costs around $36 for a private charity. Obviously USAID contraception could be less efficient than EA-adjacent charities, or more efficient due to increased economies of scale, but just multiplying it out implies USAID directly prevented the birth of around 16 million third-worlders per year, and that the one stranded Belgium shipment meant for Africa resulted in an additional 200,000 africans being born (or more because $8.1 million was the cost of the physical contraception, while $4.88 includes last-mile delivery). Realistically some of those averted pregnancies will probably be delayed rather than prevented entirely, since people might get access to contraception and use it based on how many children they already have, but it gives a rough idea. The Lancet study claims cuts would result in additional 14 million deaths but that's over 5 years, over the same period USAID contraception programs are (by these rough estimates) preventing 80 million from being born. Of course the Lancet's death estimates are based on assuming cuts to programs like PEPFAR that were actually moved to a different department, and I can't easily find whether the same happened with the contraception programs, so I don't know how it actually balances out.
I think this demonstrates the nature of low-hanging fruit/"neglectedness" in international aid and the importance of even very rough numbers over going by vibes. Because places like Africa are very poor, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. Because more people are interested in saving lives than preventing births, there is even more low-hanging fruit in the latter. It's $3,000 to $8,000 to buy enough anti-malarial bednets to save a single african life, but only ~$36 to improve the average well-being of humanity by preventing someone from being born in Africa to begin with. Even though contraception was only 1.3% of USAID's $47 billion pre-cut budget, it seemingly had more of an impact on third-world population numbers than the rest combined. Spending fairly trivial amounts of money on increased contraception funding for the third-world could have a much bigger impact, save money long-term, and be much less controversial than the USAID cuts. Of course left-wingers are not immune to this sort of innumeracy either - consider how estimates of net lifetime costs to the taxpayer for Somalian migrants is over a million dollars per migrant, because doing things in the first world is expensive. Instead of improving the life of a single poor african by importing him to the first world you could save the lives of hundreds of africans by spending the money on insecticidal nets. And then because birth-control is even more neglected, for the cost of saving a single life from malaria you could potentially prevent over a hundred from being born.
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The idea that Trump has done anything wrong ever, in his life, is a baseless, unproven conspiracy theory put out by bad actors with a reckless and wanton disregard for the truth.
This is what some people sound like.
The vast, vast majority of complaints about Trump reveal more about complainer than about Trump.
After a while you notice.
There are certainly complaints about Trump which boil down to him not behaving like someone of the upper middle or upper class.
If I express disgust at the way he decorates the White House with gold, that is a mere complaint about aesthetics.
If I complain that he is a narcissistic con man, you can certainly claim that I am mostly complaining about the fact that his cons are not targeted at my class.
Still, I think that Trump/MAGA is different in important ways from the traditional DC swamp. With previous administrations, the corruption was mostly in the zone of deniability. Hunter Biden being on some Ukrainian board of directors, senators earning lucrative consulting positions in the companies they were previously regulating, the usual. This was bad, but not maximally bad. Presumably, many corrupt deals did not take place not because the politician was honest nor because nobody wanted to bribe them, but simply because there was no good way to do the transaction while maintaining deniability. For example, a rich scammer currently under investigation by the DoJ did not have a good way to bribe GWB or Obama. Even if they were interested, unless he was a billionaire, it would simply not have been worth the political capital for them to meddle with some investigation.
With Donald Trump, there is no fig leaf of deniability. Nobody is under any illusion that he is honest any more than anyone is under any illusion that he is Christian. This means that he has a much easier time coordinating with people wanting to bribe him, to the point where other scammers can just buy his shitcoins to make their DoJ problems disappear.
Likewise, his attitude to truth. Politicians have always lied on occasion. I remember GWB and Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Still, typically politicians tried to avoid outright lies because their voters might vote for someone else if they feel fooled.
With Trump, the lies are priced in since his advent with birtherism. There is still some limited distrust, it seems unlikely that he would have claimed to have captured Maduro if he had not done so, but any lie which will still be believed by 10% of the electorate despite counter-evidence is still worthwhile for him to peddle.
More generally, politicians have to manage both perceptions and the real world. With MAGA, there is very little in the way of acknowledgement that there exists a real world at all, that we are not free to decide what is causing autism. If Trump tweets about the hundreds of wars he has ended and how he deserves the Nobel more than anyone, that feels to me like he is trying to convince the universe itself to start believing his story. Likewise him trying to win the Iran war just by claiming victor, and the universe and Iran somehow just not getting his memos.
The counterpoint to this is that there's no benefit to actually denying. If every single person who has any trust in left-leaning media is going to interpret ant vague, unsubstantiated accusation as a damning indictment, there's no reason to consider the optics. A large chunk of the country has utterly insane beliefs that the man commmitted 34 felonies by raping middle schoolers on Epstein Island.
Do they? "If you like you plan, you can keep your plan." Joe Biden ran because of the "fine people" hoax (see paragraph 1), and generally, his entire life and personal story was all just lies. Mamdami just made a post bragging thjat he'd fixed the NYC economy, when what actually happened is that he got a huge bailout from NY state and stopped paying into pensions.
Trump is playing the meta. Is it a build that feels gross and stupid? Yes. But it comes with psychological invincibility to being lied about, and that's basically a prerequisite for a Republican these days.
Once again, let me know when the other party can figure out what a woman is. Then we can move on to more advanced topics like "the difference between spending money and getting something for that money".
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This sounds like a bad parody of something I’ve written. But I won’t back down from noticing that Trump is infinitely more successful than any of us, across a dozen dimensions. And that to a man the people criticizing him are far less impressive and far less successful. And he ends up being justified over and over again. And I don’t have an obligation to criticize Trump just to prove to your satisfaction that I can.
Sorry, internet poster, but backseat driving is not a real skill and I don’t care how many people who have never driven a car before are telling me I’m doing it wrong.
Will you admit that Shakespeare wrote some bad sentences? Or are you one of those pro-Shakespeare hacks who think Shakespeare did no wrong?
Will you admit that Michael Jordan missed a lot of shots? Or are you —— etc etc.
So are Louis XIV, Wilhelm II, Charles Manson, Harvey Weinstein, Bin Laden, Aella, Stephen Hawking, Kim Kardashian, Obama, SBF, Scott Alexander and a ton of others. Should we stop criticizing them all until we reach their level of success and fame?
"Clearly, they simply prosecuted Charles Manson because they were pissed that he had built a sex and murder cult which was much grander than any they could have built."
First off, who is impressive is rather subjective. Some people are impressed by STEM Nobel laureates, or Hollywood actors, or popes, or athletes, or great Starcraft players, or competitive eaters, or mass murderers, or demagogues, or big-chested porn stars.
Luckily, we have invented these things called arguments. Without them, criticizing someone is just booing them, and then we would indeed have to compare the subjective standing of both parties to find out if we should adjust our estimation of either.
Arguments exist independently of their author. If the worst person in the world, in between robbing an orphanage and strangling some puppies posts a comment on ACX taking issue with what Scott wrote, and her argument is solid, then it does not really matter that she is strangling puppies.
This makes arguments especially well suited to anonymous discussion boards such as this one. I do not need to know how many casinos a poster here has bankrupted or if she is dictating her posts to her secretary on her helicopter or typing them on a cracked mobile screen while lying in her sleeping spot under some bridge or from death row.
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The idea that Trump has done anything right ever, in his life, is a baseless claim put out by his racist idiot supporters.
I think the reality is Trump is pretty mediocre but his supporters exalt him whilst his detractors almost universally degrade him in excess of what they should leading to constant defenses.
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I do sympathise with our own ymeskhout on Trump and his supporters - okay, I grant that certain claims of malfeasance might be false or overstated, but the instinct to defend him, the requirement to defend everything no matter how corrupt or absurd, is profoundly humiliating.
I remember getting into an hours-long argument with Yassine where he insisted that Trump told people to drink bleach, refusing to be swayed despite all evidence to the contrary, going deep into the linguistic sub-branches of every sentence across pages of Trump’s remarks to find anything that could remotely prove his point.
The vast majority of Trump criticism has been like this. I was called a sycophant for not believing Trump colluded with Russia, then it will be fake rape accusations, then some claimed paperwork error, then some policy thing. And maybe Trump has been attacked unfairly, but he also makes mistakes, can’t we agree, why can’t you agree to that? Maybe I could have agreed with Trump’s approach, but, look! — a liberal judge just struck it down, it must mean that Trump didn’t prepare hard enough, because he’s lazy and not very good at politics.
I don’t want your pity. I roll my eyes when people who are never satisfied by anything proclaim that I need to work harder to win their good praise.
I don't know anything about you as a person, so if you are not one of those people who feels reflexively obligated to defend everything Trump says or does, then I do not pity you or have contempt for you. I think of personal friends who voted for Trump on the view that he was the less bad of the options available to them, and who do not make excuses for his bad qualities.
Where I come in - sympathising with Meskhout - is when dealing with people who seem to be committed to the, for lack of a better term, Trump cult. I suppose a simple test is to ask a question like, "Can you tell me some things Trump has done that you disagree with, or that you think went badly?" Every politically sane person has some disagreements or disappointments even with their own favoured side.
I think you have an unreasonably rosey view of the average politically sane person. If you ask 1000 people on the street "Can you tell me some things [favored politician] has done that you disagree with, or that you think went badly?" 800 people are going to fail. Half because they're mindkilled partisans, and half because the well is poisoned and nobody trusts that kind of question is being asked in good faith anymore.
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My dad's a fan of asking the devout Trumpists he knows that question.
He's also a fan of asking the anti-Trumpists he knows the inverse.
I'm a big fan of my dad, even (or perhaps especially) when I don't agree with him on a specific point.
That's a reasonable reversal. What are some of the things that Trump and his administration have done that I approve of, or that I think went well?
I suppose that's an easy one for me, because I approve of most of the anti-DEI stuff. I think that moving towards more merit-based systems of hiring in the federal bureaucracy was generally good. I believe the administration has taken some action toward funding charter schools, which I approve of. Illegal immigration on the southern border has significantly decreased in Trump's second term, and that's a good thing.
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Drinking bleach leftist rant actually costs lives. Trump did butcher the science but what he was actually referring to were things like disinfecting nasal sprays which were very effective on Covid since Covid starts in your nasal system. Blasting yourself with non-toxic disinfectants gave your body significantly more time to build up antibodies to Covid where it causes real problems.
By that logic, the fact that Trump chose the word "bleach" instead of "disinfecting nasal spray" is what cost lives.
https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/mnOqITkvEK1KScAILD2noDKpF9qngCthSkSGP3U4STiWF9U387_taOigvnKGkgH2_o-WZB8OEApoouMghl_8CGmHdR8?loadFrom=PastedDeeplink&ts=2045.52
He did not utter the word bleach at any point in that conference, the science guy from Homeland Security mentionned they tested multiple disinfectants, including bleach, then Trump made some noises about how cool science and UV light and disinfectants are and expressing the hope that they find a way to use it internally to kill viruses. Then later in the Q&A a journalist (Jim; Acosta maybe?) implies Trump suggested to inject bleach and the media ran with this complete and utter fabrication.
mm'kay, you are correct he did not talk about bleach specifically, but "noises about cool science" appear perplexing.
"Light inside the body" "is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside" "it gets in the lungs" I have trouble understanding what he could possibly mean, but it's not like the headlines were a total fabrication as Shades is insinuating. Like, BBC reporting here seems to stick to the facts
I never read this transcript before, so if I am feeling charitable, my interpretation is that he was rambling and made a brain-fart because he heard Bryan use the verb "inject" in a difference sense and he jumped to thinking of injections as medical procedure. But I don't think high-IQ people make that sort of, uh, connections.
Iirc, "light inside the body" was an experimental ventilator that was clear, with an effort at disinfectant UV light emitters on the inside. The idea was to reduce the rate at which the vents themselves gave people infections in hospitals. Never heard anything else about them afterwards, so I guess it didn't pan out.
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IMO, there are 2.5 possible interpretations of what he said:
He asked the scientists whether they were going to test injecting disinfectant as a treatment (and implicitly suggested that they do so); or
He described how the scientists already were planning to test injecting disinfectant as a treatment.
IMO, that makes the BBC headline of "Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment", where the suggestion implicitly is directed at laymen rather than at scientists, pretty close to "total fabrication".
(The second "IMO" is intentional, since there are two separate opinions here, the second contingent on the first. Wasn't there some arguing on this website a zillion years ago regarding how much a person should clarify that he is merely stating his opinion, rather than "building consensus" by pretending that his opinion is just a fact?)
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That was an actual product currently in R&D, and I recall the youtube video by the research hospital working on it -- which predatex Trump's press conference mentioning it -- being triumphantly taken down as misinformation on the report of a journalist. I think from one of the big rags, too, but I don't want to slander when I'm not sure which.
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Wow. This has shades of Trump's speech where he explicitly said he "condemned totally" the neo-Nazis ... only to have journalists spread the meme that he called them "very fine people". Normally he's very sloppy in his speech, but even in cases where he's uncharacteristically precise, he'll get widely misquoted anyway. So where's the incentive for him to clean up his language?
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Yeah, this is a really effective argument technique against people who assume good faith. If you assume good faith, you will think that evidence will change the mind of their interlocutor. Therefore, if it does not, you must be mistaken. So merely by stubbornly holding positions, they can change their opponent's mind.
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Just making fun of the reflexive, incessant, PBUH-style "without evidence" quoted in one of the linked articles. Like 10+ arrests and police reports in the first few days for attempted or successful vandalism.
FWIW, I think ymeskhout made quite a few good points in his crusade against MAGA election rhetoric, and think he provided an extremely valuable service about it. I still suspect there was quite a bit of fuckery to one degree or another, and would not be surprised if there was an eventual Johnson-style historical conclusion that at least one state was steelman stolen, but there was definitely a shitton of irresponsible claims and rhetoric being thrown around.
To @Bartender_Venator, I generally think @gattsuru is one of the best posters on this site.
I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms.
Personally, I found his approach to discussing the election to be one of the biggest factors in transitioning me from a "I'll be back when woke calms down" Democrat to an actual Republican.
He was a good poster but on the topic of the election he went full Darwin+Lawyer fusion. I watched him to willfully misrepresent people, ignore good points and ignore and reframe to where he had more, he refused to accept the possibility that concerns were in any way valid and so on. He acted like a trial lawyer in court. That can be convincing but it's hollow.*
It was also tremendously inappropriate.
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
You needed to allow audits without complaint and go "see, this was fine" you needed to patch some of the common sense problems with the way the election was run so it doesn't happen again. He refused to engage with these ideas and the Dems refused to do these things and now we have a situation where both side barely accept when they lose and the fabric of our country was hanging on by a thread.
Ymeskhout chose this hill to die and crashed out over it. He was also wrong, but factually and meaningfully.
*And later we know him to be wrong about some matters of fact.
I find it bit uncouth that you make a lot of strong claims how he purportedly misrepresented other people without any evidence such as links to past discussions.
If we are doing "remembrances" only, my distinct recollection of the election discourse is that ymeskhout conclusively won most of those arguments and people on the opposing side eventually sought refuge in claims like the election was stolen in some gestalt ephemeral way.
I for one even agree that postal election security in the US is a joke that makes evidence one way or other nearly impossible to obtain, but insinuating that election was stolen without bringing evidence is ... still insinuation without evidence, and if you bring evidence, lawyerly discussion of it is entirely appropriate.
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He did. And in so doing, revealed that a lot of the specific claims being made had little to no evidentiary backing. The "consensus" argument you're making is a final defense after many other ill-concieved efforts failed.
Georgia shows a lot of the claims with little evidentiary backing over time had some backing. Stated differently, people reasonably believed something was off because weird things were happening. Yes some of the claims were crazy. But the overall weirdness shouldn’t have been ignored.
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I remember a lot of exchanges like this.
"None of the complaints had any merit." "Well this example had merit, but it was dropped by the judge because of standing." "Well if it didn't have standing it didn't have merit."
Many of the complaints were not investigated because of legal mumbo jumbo. Now that legal mumbo jumbo exists for a reason, but appealing to it instead of on the grounds of merit is not especially convincing.
I agree that there was a fair bit of that. But it's been 6 years. If there was strong evidence to produce in court, where is it? Why not just publish it after the standing stuff? It can't all be hidden behind a missed chance at discovery!
I mean if an investigation was never done why would evidence miraculously appear later?
Standing issues, the mainstream right hating Trump (especially after Jan events) and other factors left much of this not addressed.
Even with all that that didn't one of the Georgia cases result in something? I've never seen it posted in the MSM ("because ancient news!!") but people have mentioned it.
Everyone moving on is part of why we don't follow-up. When you add on the Trump teaming being incompetent...
That's just for the traditional malfeasance. Personally I believe that the election was stolen in the following way - if you restrict access to the public sphere (COVID restrictions) and censor the private replacements (all the tech companies uniting to oppose Trump) then you don't have a "free" election. I know lots of people feel this way and lots of people don't, but much evidence has come out after the factor about how a variety of organizations that shouldn't have been involved tried to impact the election results without touching ballots.
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That's a reasonable argument now, not six years ago.
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You can't persuade everyone of anything, so this is just the heckler's veto writ large. And your own view can just be flipped, if persuading people is the only measure.
Democracy does require consensus, so YOU (the generic you, not your own personal self) need to be persuasive and to make everyone believe the elections were NOT free and fair. If you cannot convince enough people, then they stand.
See how that works? Republicans pushed for mail in voting when they thought it would help them, then flipped to calling the laws they themselves passed as being unconstitutional (see PA, below), those are not the actions of people trying to build consensus and persuade people objectively that the election was rigged. They are the actions of political partisans seeking advantage.
So they were not persuasive. They failed to persuade the majority the election was rigged. Time and time again expansive claims were walked back. If you want to blame anyone, blame those who claimed they had rock solid proof repeatedly then demonstrated they were untrustworthy. As much as you think Democrats need to persuade you the elections were fair, you also need to persuade them that they weren't. And from Sydney Powell to Rudy Giuliani, to Dan Moul a terrible job was done.
You may be examining this objectively and deciding what would help you trust the process better, but unfortunately many of your fellow travelers were not. So the consensus stood, because your side failed to persuade them.
"Act 77 also had the support of almost all of the Republican state representatives in the Pennsylvania House, including state Rep. Dan Moul, a Republican from Adams County who joined the lawsuit over the mail-in voting law in 2021.
"So my bad. I should've checked the constitutionality of that big bill," Moul says.
Moul is one of 11 Republicans in the state House who are claiming in the lawsuit that the mail-in voting provisions in Act 77 that they voted for three years ago are unconstitutional.
"We pass bills all the time. Do we go back and check every single one to make sure it stays within the confines of the constitution? We'd never get anything done if we did that," Moul says."
Why should we trust Republicans on this matter who vote for a law (because they thought it would help rural turn out and thus Republicans), then "realize" it is in fact unconstitutional and whose excuse is basically: I just voted it for it, I didn't check it was actually in line with the Constitution I was sworn to uphold, right after it becomes a big deal about giving Democrats an advantage? Suspicious isn't it? Almost enough to persuade you that it wasn't anything to do with fairness or election security, just who got the advantage.
And finally. If your argument is that consensus must be reached then:
"Recent polling shows roughly 28% to 36% of the overall U.S. adult population express ongoing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election"
It was. The majority of people do not believe the election was rigged. They were persuaded. It can't be a requirement to persuade everyone, especially when it becomes a partisan issue. 18% of Americans think the moon landings were faked. 20% think the government is microchipping them. A third of Americans think the FDA has a bona fide cure for cancer they are hiding.
Persuading everyone simply cannot be the standard. And if it were, well your side also failed to meet that standard, significantly more so in fact. That's quite a lot of persuading that still needs to be done for your consensus.
"Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"
I'm not sure what this has to do with the heckler's veto, which has to do with a 3rd party preventing 1 party from communicating to another consenting party by physically impeding the communication. This seems more akin to a tyranny of the majority kind of thing, which is also heavily misused (since, in a democracy, a majority must be tyrannical sometimes, almost definitionally) and I'm not sure really describes this situation accurately either, though it's more fitting.
Yeah it's maybe not perfect. But if you must convince every single person the election is legitimate, then one person (the heckler equivalent) is able to unilaterally undermine the legitimacy of the election. Much like a single heckler can unilaterally silence a speaker. It's not quite tyranny of the majority either, I agree.
"In discourse, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced."
The issue is that the "in discourse" is a load-bearing portion of what makes the heckler's veto negative. Because discourse is just consenting people talking, rather than imposing their coercive force on others. It makes sense that there are other standards when coercion is involved, and certainly perfection ought never be the standard. I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
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In a democracy the response needs to be "sure let's calmly and carefully audit the election results to prove things to you." The response was anything but, and in some ways was catastrophically not that. The Democrats acted in a way that was indistinguishable from how you would act if you did do something wrong.
None of what you wrote changes that fact, and much of the negative state of America in the ensuing years was caused by refusing to act as a basic transparent democracy, presumably because orange man bad.
Secondarily, if your penetration tester reveals flaws, you don't refuse to fix the flaws just because nobody has taken advantage of them yet. That's asinine. Meanwhile we still have California trying to act as shadily as possible.
We've had numerous examples of people acting shadily in elections in America that resulted in jail time, and some major instances of people acting in a way that most people agree was sus.
The refusal of Dems to say "okay we won but let's change things so everyone is more comfortable next time" may be the single most important thing behind the future death of America.
I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations]. But it's certainly an important point, and I'm not sure why other Dems don't get this, other than hubris, ego, and blindness by hatred. It seems obvious to me that, for my party to be the party that actually deserves to win, it needs to actually be better in some meaningful sense than the other party, and for them to be better in any meaningful sense requires having enough humility to open oneself to attacks of cheating and fraud and other bad things, taking those seriously, and correcting ourselves based on that, especially when they come from our opponents whom we've judged as being evil or whatever. This is abusable, but also, the reverse is also far more abusable.
Though the saying "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" isn't strictly true in every case, I do believe that when it comes to ideological thinking, it's almost always true. The only way we can have any confidence that our proposed policies are truly better than the other guys' proposed policies - instead of merely policies that we've convinced ourselves is better - is by coming to those policies in a humble, self-critical way (necessary, not sufficient, though), which we can only have any confidence we did if we also treat political attacks from our enemies in a humble, self-critical way. The idea of crushing my enemies in order to forward policies that I've genuinely convinced myself is better than the other guy's just because I genuinely consider the other guys evil seems just completely obviously far more evil than that to me.
My pitch here is that the worst about Trump is and always has been the way that people respond to him. The response concerns about elections created an cavalcade of disasters - selling out objectivity and professionalism to oppose Trump, BLM Riots and the inequality in response to Jan 6, accepting the way that tech and public health put fingers on scales (and that includes governmental agencies messing with the election), media collusion, the tremendous failure that was the Biden administration (and the way that the administration should be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics and just isn't). All of these things are about Trump, but second run is the place that most generated some of them.
America in the mind of many isn't really a democracy anymore after that election and I think it's going to be a long time before the loser accepts the results again.
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As did the Republicans as I showed you an example of.
In a democracy run by rationalists with good faith politicians and rational voters, the responses should be "let's audit" I agree. That is not the world we are in. So it is not the response you should expect. Because it is not what Republicans would do in return as they demonstrated perfectly. That is the the framework everyone's actions need to be interpreted within.
But your point was all about the fact that persuading had to be done, not anything beyond that. And Republicans failed at that harder than Democrats did.
And you may well not fix flaws! They might be too expensive to fix or have other trade offs. Remember there are two competing axes of voting legitimacy, maximizing legitimate voters and minimizing illegitimate voters. Those trade off against each other. There is no objectively correct answer. It's a values choice. And within our non-good faith framework, Democrats would be crazy to do anything to reduce turn out even fractionally if they think high turn out helps them. Likewise Republicans would be crazy to do the opposite.
As PA demonstrated, Republicans took an act they erroneously thought would help them, then flipped on it as soon as they discovered it would not. That is the framework our democracy operates within. No-one is operating in good faith. They are all acting for what will help them most. Expecting the Democrats to rise above when Republicans do not is an isolated demand for rigor.
Your good faith framework might be nice (I'd surely prefer it!) but it is not the world we are in and both Democratic and Republican politicians need to act accordingly. And they largely do.
I think you are massively over-estimating the "future death of America" issue here. Democracy will continue, politicians will continue to be conniving rats (in my direct experience of working with national level politicians!) and that the best we can do is set one group of conniving rats against the other such that they broadly even out, by attempting to out connive each other.
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I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships. As if there were some 3rd party judge or jury observing the proceedings who everyone is trying to convince, rather than the reality that it's just the other person or people who you need to convince. You can't rules-lawyer your way into someone apologizing to you, forgiving you, being grateful to you, liking you, liking someone else, disliking someone else, etc. You need to actually understand what it would take to convince that specific person and do what it takes to do it, including sacrificing values you might hold sacred, if that's what it takes. Or just understand that you can't do the convincing and stop wasting everyone's time and energy.
Though maybe that's my secular atheistic upbringing speaking, and in extremely religious societies where everyone follows the same religion, this rules-lawyering is both effective and healthy. Maybe that's why this tendency to rules-lawyer is so common; our brains might have evolved to survive in extremely religious societies where everyone can appeal to some god or another to convince others.
I find it irritating and honestly sometimes pathetic on the internet (it's almost always not intended, just the rationalist personality style, but it often comes across as "I'm afraid to debate as a debate, so I want to set the exact frame of the argument exactly where my evidence is strongest, declare the win condition which is easiest for me to achieve, then put every burden of proof I can on you, and declare victory if I can claim I keep the 10% of my argument I choose as my win condition"). Note that this is also how ratbetting works, frame control is often much more important than the substance of the bet. It doesn't help that I grew up around lawyers who tended to see that adversarial mode as implicitly a lesser form of lawyering compared to understanding relationships, pragmatics, iterated games, etc. In comparison, trying to "win" a conversation is a little gauche.
What I do understand is that a full debate, where both sides are fully allowed to contest the frame, takes a lot more work on the internet. You have to write instead of speaking, you have to deal with the inherent difficulty of conveying full meaning via posts, and you lack a direct relationship to your audience/interlocutor. Still, people here should recognize the difference between the two, that one is a lower mode than the other, and that winning or losing a rules-lawyering debate really doesn't matter very much unless the specific question of fact is seriously prior-shifting, which it very rarely is.
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Yes, ymeskhout was very valuable in keeping people honest, even if he didn't win every point he made (something to be valued on this forum). His, uh, changes of emotional valence and stability came later. Agreed entirely on gattsuru, he's one of the true motteposters to whom we are the comments section.
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I assume that Iconochasm is making some kind of esoteric point, because gattsuru is one of the last people here one could reasonably accuse of tribal blindness.
Fair enough. Just take me as making an unrelated comment, I guess.
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I have trouble taking the USAID crying seriously. If people really, truly cared about the pullback in aid they would do what they could to fill the gap. The Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis et al have a standard of living most of us can only dream of. Are they sacrificing their luxuries to save these people they are crying about? No. And they'll excuse it by saying a government org can do more blah blah. You know what? When I really care about something, I do what I can about it. I don't throw up my hands and say why bother because I can't do as much as some other way.
It leaves me thinking it's all a bunch of lies. Which is a shame. Because I think some of the programs were good, even if they don't hit my top concerns. So how stupid am I to think the programs were good if people living seriously luxurious lives can't even give up their caviar in order to help fill the gap?
Are they not?
I expect donations did go up after the gutting. Messaging around them definitely did. I’m not sure how to show it, though.
Asserting that nobody cares because Obama still has money is a pretty damn isolated demand for rigor.
Okay, give Kelsey Piper a pass.
99.99% of people complaining about USAID have not changed their behavior by so much as a single penny.
I’m not sure I believe that.
Every foundation that has a press release about the cuts claims they pursued substitute funding. Here is a summary of some of the big players’ actions. Those make up a big fraction of philanthropy.
I know individual giving is up, as might be expected from a year with reasonable economic growth. I don’t know where that increase is going; it’s hard to find granular stats. If somebody here has access to the full Giving USA Report which just came out, maybe they can give more details. In lieu of that, the best I can offer are pieces applauding some of the efforts to minimize the damage.
There are a lot of people out there who really, truly believe what they’re saying. I don’t think you can dismiss them out of hand.
A big fraction of philanthropy is not concurrent with a big fraction of people complaining about USAID.
Perhaps I'm overindexing on personal encounters, but knowing a lot of Elon sucks, TDS, woo Mamdani types- none of them have changed their behavior beyond posting increasingly stupid instagram stories. I like the look when I ask if they're doing anything for Africa to replace USAID but I also don't want to abuse that; I know I'm a hot potato to be dropped.
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I am asserting a much smaller thing - that people who do nothing but complain while they have the means to do something don't care.
I guess those UNICEF boxes I grew up with did something to me. Maybe they lied, but I thought the portion of my baby sitting money I was donating was beneficial. And I thought the helping older folks in the neighborhood with their lawn work/whatever was helpful. But perhaps they were just being kind. My baby sitting money didn't solve hunger. My youngster energy didn't solve aging. Maybe I should have just yelled about it.
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Is this like the common left-wing ideation that you could just take Elon Musk's wealth and solve world hunger, the housing crisis and grandma's medical bills all at once? A quick search says that USAID funding was on the order of tens of billions of $ in a year, while the Obamas' net worth is 70 million. You would need to reduce about 500 Obamas from caviar to dumpster diving to fill the gap for a year.
I don't think a single person could solve the problem but yes, if someone argues that it's a Terrible Thing that Nothing is Being Done I expect them to do something besides whine.
You do what you can about things you feel strongly about or you're just posturing and I don't take you seriously. I feed a few homeless guys. I am not solving homelessness. But I am solving hunger for a few folks for right now. That's more useful than whining the government/church/aliens aren't doing anything. And when I work with larger concerns on the issues I care most about I have skin in the game and I have hopefully learned some stuff from my own small efforts.
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It’s more like saying Elon Musk doesn’t actually care about space exploration because sometimes he spends money on the Trump campaign.
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There are around 24 million millionaires in the US. Some of them are unfathomably rich.
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America is insanely wealthy. What you don’t realize is there are more than 1.58 million Americans with net worth >$10m. Think I saw a Twitter graphic that it was 2.5 m people. So finding 500 Obamas isn’t that hard.
Of course America is insanely rich because America’s federal government is insanely rich and USAID was a trivial amount of the budget. Since citizens fund the government USAID would likewise be a trivial amount of individuals.
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Sure the Obama’s can’t solve everything but they could give away 60m and save so many lives. Why don’t they?
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Musk deliberately implemented the cuts in a way which made that almost impossible in the short term. None of the named individual victims identified by Kristof could have been saved by someone taking over funding - they all died because of the chaotic way in which USAID was shut down. If you remember Musk's bragging at the time, the point wasn't just to cut spending - it was to feed the agency into a woodchipper and create psychological distress in the staff. That had consequences, which were intended, and the people who did it are responsible for what they did. (Clearly the number of people who died specifically as a result of Musk's intentional cruelty is much lower than the big numbers being slung around, but Musk continues to insist that it is zero and threaten legal action against people who disagree). I will enjoy the schadenfreude if the screwworms get him. I will not enjoy the schadenfreude if (as is more likely) all they get is a bunch of normie Texas ranchers who voted for the Face-Eating Leopard Party.
The Clinton Foundation is sufficiently notorious that one might suspect bad faith. It wasn't their own personal money, but Bill Clinton spent most of his time since leaving office fundraising and organising charitable work, either through the Clinton Foundation or through his partnership with George HW Bush. The most visible programme the Clinton foundation ran was providing AIDS drugs to kids in Africa - so the Clintons were doing precisely the thing you blithely assume they were not doing.
The Obama's and Pelosi's considerable charitable donations (hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in both cases) are also a matter of public record that I was able to find with 30 seconds googling. Obama focussed on US domestic poverty and providing scholarships for poor kids. (Like most ex-Presidents, Obama moves far more dollars by fundraising than he can donate himself - but that is just being effective in your charitable work). Paul Pelosi focussed on the usual arts and elite universities bougie philanthropy bullshit.
I find this response puzzling.
First, it assumes that USAID spending money was effective on net. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the money was spent in other ways that was more effective (ie Bastiat and Broke Window theory).
Second, it assumes a moral responsibility for USAID funding to continue indefinitely when there is zero moral responsibility (ie there is no moral duty to act contra Singer; otherwise, you and pretty much all of humanity are rotten evil people). Or at minimum if there is a duty to act it seems like the people complaining are throwing stones from glass houses.
Third, it assumes because USAID did some good things it was net good. The mafia helped the community (ie did some good things). Doesn’t make it good on net. Perhaps USAID wouldn’t have been targeted if it wasn’t funneling a ton of money into lefties for political reasons instead of focusing its mission on just doing good.
One can say that the US was not obligated to continue funding forever but should have been more responsible about disentangling itself from its commitments.
You don't have to jump into a car wreck to save someone but taking that space and then walking off abruptly when others who could have jumped in have left because you had it is pretty fucked up.
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Everything you list was implied (or said outright) in fribble’s initial complaint. I don’t know why you’re surprised that a response disagrees.
No everyone was saying “if they are actually good why don’t the critics step up.” This criticism is basically suggesting the critics don’t actually believe what they are saying.
But that is a different criticism compared to “sure USAID funding was cut but the funding didn’t disappear and some of the funding supported bad stuff; need to prove on net whether things have gotten worse as opposed to looking at one part of one side of the ledger.” This is saying maybe the critics are in good faith but they haven’t really considered everything.
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Actual excess deaths appear to be something in the ballpark of zero. This is probably why Nicholas "Dog Rape" Kristoff used anecdotes.
Screwworm has been a growing problem, creeping closer for years, almost certainly linked to the Biden migrant wave. The US under Trump is putting more effort into combatting it, including building a second sterile-male production facility.
How? Is it not a disease that primarily affects livestock?
Plus a timing issue that bridges between late-Trump 1 and Biden that due to COVID there was reduced focus/capacity for doing things like livestock monitoring, so you had both migrants and cattle herders moving into areas they shouldn't be.
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Human eyes and penises get infested also.
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Mostly in livestock, but it can hit humans too. And there were millions of people trekking across Darien Gap from infested areas, under generally poor and unhygienic conditions. It only needs a small number of infested people to carry larvae past the control zones into areas where it was much more difficult to lock down.
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That's... not likely. And, conversely, the >100k numbers are not remotely plausible.
PrEP excess deaths didn't happen and couldn't happen yet, in bulk. That's just not how the disease works. The higher-end plausible estimates give between 200k and 400k excess undetected infections, but it takes several years for a healthy adult to progress into full disease, and that's assuming compliance and decision-making that you just don't see in this space: more realistic numbers are <10k. Very young children can get sick fast, but they had the clearest and earliest waiver, and immediately after birth the recommendation is ART, not PrEP.
ART excess deaths could happen. People who are otherwise perfectly healthy who disrupt ART can last some time before having serious medical consequences, though viral load and T-cell function tends to get hit pretty early even there. But people who have other viral diseases (especially tuberculosis) or who had very low T-cell function to start with (eg, due to fairly progressed AIDS before start of treatment) rebound much worse, and much faster. That's a relatively small number of total cases, but it's still a lot of people in absolute numbers. In a perfectly naive frictionless-cow world, the academic number is a 1.6x multiplier on top of the normal death rate, for those people who were disrupted, assuming a three-month freeze; extend this over a year and you get closer to 2x as you start running out of the really-sick people. So find the number disrupted, get an approximate base death rate, multiply, and you've at least got a Fermi-Estimate level answer. Not great, nothing I'd write in stone, but at least reasonable.
The trouble's actually figuring out those values.
The highly-publicized analysis tend to assume some portion of people were wildly disruptive based on multipliers pulled from a hat, or in proportion for what HIV programs that PEPFAR or USAID funded. If you read that carefully, you'll notice a problem: ART isn't the only HIV program PEPFAR/USAID funded, nor was PEPFAR/USAID the only source of those programs, nor was everything disrupted. The worst models just assume that basically everything turned off. Some just assume that there's zero ART initiations during the PEPFAR freeze; others assume that existing ART users would be dropped in proportion to PEPFAR spending.
Neither assumption is remotely plausible across all countries: South Africa in particular needed the least PEPFAR support for its existing ART clinics, but even the worst-impacted locations just didn't end up with degree of disruption that even self-described 'light' or 'moderate' disruption models did. There were substitution effects, there was preservation of funding toward higher-priority focuses, and there were successful detection of new cases. The highest-plausible bounds for the actual disruption period is closer to 40k than 600k; a realistic bound is somewhere between 2k and 20k, and that's including excess mortality since the disruption 'officially' ended.
Kristoff might still be making up the names and events -- he is a putz -- but I don't think there's any plausible model without at least low three-digit excess deaths from the initial freeze to today. That’s separate from the questions of whether it ties to moral culpability or utilitarian analysis
USAID did a lot of things. It's possible some of them actually caused more deaths. Whether they did or didn't, the net effect appears to be in the noise.
Do you actually have any examples? Because that sounds like a weak-ass excuse for using a single number.
Funny enough, one side is using a single number (ie those supporting USAID). That number ignores replacement funding and/or negative effects of USAID. Yet when Nybbler says “who really knows but net effect doesn’t appear large” you call that weak ass while ignoring the original claimants who put forth a single weak ass number that was obvious BS and ignored all of the key analysis.
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It's not publicized often, but USAID spending getting redirected or misused toward literal terrorists happens a decent bit. It's not clear how big the scope of the problem is, because oversight is hard in the best of circumstances and the highest-risk areas are also the places with other forces making oversight much harder (UN involvement and corresponding stonewalling, partial evacuation of US non-essential personnel).
Thank you. I saw your other comment about funding a warlord after I’d posted.
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Yeah, that's an ugly issue. There's a lot of mess in USAID, and a single 'whoops we gave a tyrant a half-mil' can get into the kilodeaths range pretty quickly.
That still leaves some counterfactuals. But the response to 'couldn't we cut the splurge without cutting the bone' is that any attempt would have looked pretty similar to this in reporting, even had it been more carefully circumscribed, and that past incidents give Republicans reasons to believe that anything more careful or telegraphed would have been loopholed to nothing.
Hold on, I remember leaving the discussion from a few years ago with the "knowledge" that USAID was just a sneaky sketchy activity slush fund with some legitimate charity on top for optics purposes.
Was that a conspiracy theory or did not enough people hear about this?
That's complicated.
About a third of normal USAID funding was just outright 'soft' stuff, as a program category: economic outreach, democracy, education, 'hearts and minds'. It wasn't necessarily used for bad purposes, but it could get assigned to outright random stuff, and no small part of it was outright democracy-as-liberal-favoritism. And it could be pretty overt, so this is where you get eg anti-Orbon funding passed through as fortifying 'free speech'. That said, while there were a lot of degrees of freedom with this funding, it wasn't infinite. That's why the claimed Ukraine plot supposedly involved trying to get a construction grant and then cycling the money around: they couldn't just write 'fuck Trump' on the grant application. On the other hand, oversight is incredibly weak, so 'ask for a giant construction grant and don't do anything with construction' is more plausible than it sounds at first glance. And some of the democracy, rights, and governance work is just 'regime change'.
Another two-thirds were at least ostensibly focused on central program targets: HIV care, TB medicine, nutrition, anti-malaria efforts, critical infrastructure, that sort of thing. Some of that's required by statute to go directly to medicine buys or palliative care, but it's mostly the stuff that USAID proponents wave as the goals of the program. So from those headline numbers, it's most legitimate charity on top than sketchy slush fund underneath.
((There's also a few years of Ukraine-specific funding; it's both far enough out of scope and unusual that it's even harder to break down.))
... but it's not clear how real the headline numbers are. There's a lot of HIV care funding that went to, as an example, LGBT de-stigmatization efforts. There's an epidemiological argument, since it's hard to get people to go to a testing clinic if they're going to be lynched afterward, but it's also conveniently the exact political target that a lot of the program leads wanted, regardless of how much of "don't get patients lynched" they actually needed and how much was setting up posters for a cause they supported.
And virtually every USAID program was metered and scored on gender equity. Even for core programs, it's hard to tell how many were using actual outcomes as a metric, and how many were like NASA, where it'd be nice to have a working spaceship or a functional bit of infrastructure, but the program is more focused on making sure spending got to the right people and anything else was a plus-up.
The uglier question is deaths. Most USAID slush fundy stuff was just inefficient, or, at worst, one of those matters where the negative ramifications were three or four steps removed: even if USAID funding to an anti-Orbon movement precedes a riot, it's not really responsible for the deaths. Giving an al-q affiliate five million bucks isn't direct, and you could theoretically imagine counterfactuals where it doesn't matter, but it's a lot closer.
The difficult one is whether a lot of USAID money made its way back to political causes directly. People are making a lot of hay out of DNC funding shortfalls and a stunning drop in support for left-wing politicians in many parts of The Global South, and that's some evidence, but it has enough alternative explanations that it still feels reaching to me.
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Given the inaccuracy of African demographic statistics, "something in the ballpark of zero" and "100,000 dead kids across the countries where USAID used to operate" are compatible. The numbers in the millions are not plausible given the lack of a visible macro-demographic effect.
Sure. But that same logic also applies to all positive claims that USAID was doing good.
Exactly. I'm sure that making such a large change probably technically killed >0 people, but I also feel that massive amounts of USAID funding had been commandeered over the years on absolutely massively exaggerated claims of efficacy and 'We cut programs that claimed to keep millions of people alive' =/= 'They were keeping millions of people alive and they instantaneously died'. An organism of that size is going to have a large amount of ineffective altruism (even if it's actually attempting to be Altruistic as opposed to a political slushfund) and the galaxy brain takes that every single dollar that USAID spend was equally effective in saving lives and there was no marginal benefit fall off is inherently silly.
What needs to be considered isn’t just the lost good re USAID but the replacement spending (ie thr funding didn’t disappear). That is, Monzer is looking at only one side of the ledger.
Maybe he is right in the end but right now he ideologically is coming to a conclusion that Musk’s actions were on net bad; he hasn’t shown any work whatsoever.
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From The Lancet paper, "Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis":
US thought leadership and Overton window-setting for the win!
Saving US and European taxpayer money and a reduction in low human capital population counts? Don't threaten me with a good time.
Women most affected, especially those of reproductive age. I'm amused by how the finiteness of the female reproductive lifespan suddenly becomes self-evident and paramount when talking about Western taxpayers subsidizing (or not) the reproduction of low human capital populations.
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It's worth pointing out that there was originally a non-partisan body operating under the name "America 250" created in 2016 to oversee the celebration. The process for creating the commission was that the congressional leadership of both parties would each get to select an equal number of members, two from each branch of Congress and then eight private citizens. A bunch of non-voting members were added in 2020. Obama and Bush are both honorary co-chairs. Of the $150 million appropriated for America250 they received $25 million, much of the rest was then routed to Freedom250, an organization headed by Trump and Vance and consisting of members they appoint.
I think that's important context for why Shapiro found a plausible reason not to participate.
America 250 had ten years to plan something, achieved nothing, and kicked out the Trump appointees who tried to get anything moving.
This is all just pretext. If Trump hadn’t created Freedom 250, there would be some other excuse for why Shapiro couldn’t participate. It’s politics short and simple.
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That's... not quite the congressional authorization:
Okay. I still think "Trump took advantage of a broadly worded congressional funding bill to defund a bipartisan commission and fund his own organization instead in a way that was completely legal" is still important context for why Shapiro also found a completely legal pretext not to participate. The whole reason Congress created a studiously bipartisan planning commission is that if you want broad bipartisan buy in for such an event, you need bipartisan planning to assure everyone of neutrality. Trump broke from this arrangement and Shapiro's response is the predictable tit for tat.
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It was obvious by January of this year that committee had no plans to do much of anything at all.
They're throwing a free concert series around the country (because most people can't travel to D.C.). The biggest one is in LA with Smashing Pumpkins and Chris Stapleton. My guess is that will be better attended than when Kash Patel's Girlfriend performs at the Freedom250 event.
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That sounds like a totally unrealistic claim to me. Can you imagine this all-star lineup failing to deliver? They had important bipartisan Senators, Senators from the Bridge to Nowhere State and the Bakersfield-to-Fresno State, on board. They even had Kellyanne Conway to keep Trump happy. To me, this looks like a focused group practiced in relentless goal-driven executing, and they would have delivered us a wonderful celebration of patriotism and fireworks, maybe even multiple fireworks, up to a whole box of fireworks - look, these are busy people...
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I just don’t care about prepfar. AIDS in Africa ends if they quit having dry sex. The spread rate in heteros is too low to spread HIV in communities that just don’t do dry sex. The US responsibility is nothing more than handing out pamphlets saying don’t do dry sex and you will be safe. If a community of people can’t do modest behavioral modifications to eliminate a disease then it’s not my problem.
I never bothered to look up what exactly the cancelled program did, and it being supplying preventative medication for the "done sex spectacularly wrong award" disease certainly adds a dimension to the discourse
There was a meme or saying on the internet that conservatives struggle because when they just tell the truth the rest of society thinks they are lying and clowning.
But actually it turns out the entire USAID program is preventative medication for Africans doing sex not only spectacularly wrong but in a way Americans would find to be barbaric and inhumane.
Personally I don’t like that prep is required on US insurance because it’s like $20k a year and probably adds 300-1 dollars a year insurance costs to all of us not doing anal sex.
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From a prevention side, there's also just not that strong support for PrEP for heterosexuals in Africa, regardless. There were two major trials of traditional PrEP for use in heterosexual contexts for PEPFAR countries, and they were both shut down early because adherence was so low it wasn't even ethical to continue it. Even the combination of extremely high claimed detection rates, heavy ART usage, theoretically very strong viral load reduction, handing out PrEP, and even goofy stuff like voluntary adult circumcision, haven't been able to get transmission rates down that low. The information of dry sex is less robust (and more gross), but if the existing infrastructure isn't getting serious drops in new infections by discouraging it, it's not going to do so in the future.
There's been some efforts toward an injectable and long-lasting PrEP formulation, but even if that does work better, it's not likely to have significant impact on the broader epidemic, and the very ease of application that makes it useful also means it doesn't need PEPFAR-like administration to deliver.
But that still leaves the problem of ART. Even if you dropped current transmission rates to zero, there's still going to be over fifteen million people with HIV; you can't unfuck that goat. You don't have to bite that ethical bullet, but it's a major part of the PEPFAR program, probably the most clearly effective in terms of QALY improvement, and it is an ethical bullet.
Adherence rates to ARVs once AIDS has hit a point that ARVs are imminently lifesaving are low enough to be one of the biggest complaints you'll hear from doctors in Africa. I know someone - a lovely and thoughtful woman - who's nearly died twice because she wanted to stop taking her meds, because taking them was admitting to having the disease. Africa is just a very weird place.
Honestly, noncompliance is one of the more consistent and understandable bits: both PrEP and ARVs have unpleasant side effects, disruptions to supply chains or mobility give a lot of excuses, and the stigma is pretty present even in countries where it'd be possible to take the medicines privately. People with chronic illnesses 'forgetting' their meds because they're doing fine now is really common in the West, even for diseases that are hilariously unpleasant. PrEP has the further problem where it's perceived as accusing your sexual partner of infection or infidelity in a space where that's a serious insult.
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FTFY.
If we go off the notion that America is a Christian nation with Christian values (which as an atheist I don't agree with but many do say it should be) then the US responsibility is really high to help those in need, as it follows the teachings of Christ. Which we can see in how religious charities are some of the most helpful around in the third world. Many of the most ardent believers understand their religion as a helpful one.
What meaning would being a Christian nation hold if it doesn't honor God through kindness?
Since we are a Christian country I imagine you don’t mind us having prayer in schools, the prohibition of non Christians from public office, prohibition on gays, elimination of abortion, etc.
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Fine, we're a Christian nation. Aid comes with conversion, abortion and gays are banned, leftism and the gayer parts of libertarianism are now illegal.
Meanwhile, in the real world, most actual Christians are not meme Buddhist monks. They understand that those parts of the religion are not a suicide pact or an unlimited line of credit, unlike the heretical schism branch called Progressivism.
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Did you just do the meme?
PEPFAR was started by the Bush admin and partnered with many Christian organizations. https://www.devex.com/news/pepfar-s-top-10-faith-based-health-partners-99501
I'm pointing out that this follows exactly what Christians say they believe in and what many Christians did. Ironically Musk as an obvious atheist destroying PEPFAR should have been a criticism from the right, except of course modern "conservativism" is mind virused away from the bible and towards TrumpDoesNoWrong personality cults. Another part of how the average religious person can not be taken seriously in their claimed beliefs, they are hilariousy inconsistent.
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Having theory of mind of people who don't think like you is evil and wrong, actually. As is trying to reach goals you think are mutual.
"I believe principle X should be followed."
"You seem to be ignoring principle X in case Y."
"I won't agree with you because you are coming from different first principles."
If anything makes me have contempt for backwards beliefs it's this. But go on and expose how you discard what you profess for tribal reasons further.
Having a theory of mind is good. Attempting to use said theory to exploit such people as if they were automata is bad.... and often doesn't work.
I persuade in good faith to arrive to an objective truth.
You are mistaken about my beliefs.
They are trying to exploit us as if we were automatons
powered by neurotransmitters.Your Russell conjugation fails because your middle line does describe the same thing. In any case, just because something can be put in the form of a Russell conjugation doesn't mean that's what's going on.
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I'm not sure if it's me or kittycat you are jeering at, but okay boomer.
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It isn't, not anymore if it ever was.
Only if you accept the hidden premise that the government is a moral avatar of the individuals it governs, which I've seen little basis for in Christian teachings.
It's not obvious why people on the other side of the planet who are intentionally and willfully giving themselves sexually transmitted diseases would fall into that category. You're wrapping in utilitarian concepts of "need" wherein saving the life of a fool you will never know or meet is a greater "need" than, say, mentoring a young man in your neighborhood so he doesn't end up in prison. And that's putting aside whether most of the help is even reaching those who need it.
Indeed, and who funds those I wonder?
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Fair opinion.
But I am fine with like helping out Venezuela when they have an earthquake and they can’t help themselves.
But spending US money so Africans can do genital mutilation is much worse. HIV is a solved issue in Africa.
I'm not opposed to offering help under unusual circumstances. But that's a reflection of our virtues, and I want a hard cutoff (or at least intense pushback) on anyone who treats it like an entitlement.
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States should participate in the fair, because if they don't, a private company might do it for them and embarrass the rest of us. Like the morons that put up a confederate flag for NC. Really, the bar isn't very high.
As for the pool, it seems implausible that anyone could do that much damage with a knife. The liner is supposed to be industrial grade epoxy; Trump bragged that it was impervious to cutting. If a woman could do that much damage by dipping her arm in the pool, sounds like the installers didn't do their job.
I don't know those specific material, but I'd be surprised if the primer coat were intended as the main durability aspects, rather than acting as a bonding agent.
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