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There is no reason why my tax dollars should be spent on anything in Africa. Not medicine, not food, not anything.
Cut them off. This is not crude, it's deliberate. Cut everything off, the useful stuff will bubble back up eventually.
Disease eradication is good for everyone. It is bad for global health to have a giant reservoir of AIDS, Malaria, Ebola, and god knows what else just waiting to make the jump to the developed world.
AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).
Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.
Realistically speaking, people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs. The reason is simple: those things feel good. In order to make a major dent in the rates of either of those two things, you would need massive social change that, realistically speaking, could only come from some kind of massive shift in consciousness that, let's be real, is not going to happen - or it would require massive government intervention that would bring its own host of problems. For the latter, you'd basically need the entire US to become like Singapore, and let's face it, probably all but the most ardent social conservatives would hate that once they saw the downsides of having such a massively interventionist government.
Even if one somehow got rid of those things, the fact would remain that the deadliest diseases in human history were not caused by either promiscuous sex or drug use, so it would not even do much to address the overall issue of disease.
Uh, what skin off the back of upstanding citizens is it to just let them die?
It's bad karma.
You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.
Isn't this just triage? I don't think anyone has suggested rounding up people who have promiscuous dangerous sex or use intravenous drugs to send them to death camps. It's rather just letting nature take its course while devoting scarce lifesaving resources elsewhere, which I think is a pretty standard thing to do in medicine.
They may not be suggesting it now, but if you normalise regarding certain people's lives as a less sacred value than property....
A principle which, if carried to its ultimate conclusion, leads to 40-50% of babies dying before their fifth birthday.
Given those grim statistics, I hardly think that Nature is a good guide to right and wrong.
There is a difference between "We're at 200% capacity right now, and getting more resources will take longer than our patients have" versus "We will be over capacity some time in the future, we can get enough resources to save everyone by the time they will be needed, but we don't feel like doing so"; there is also a difference between "prioritising Alice over Bob because Alice has a 90% chance of survival while Bob has a 2% chance" versus "prioritising Alice over Bob because Bob is a member of a group we don't like".
If you show up with a mob and try to burn my house down, I'll kill you, and I will almost certainly not be prosecuted for doing so. Is this an example of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?
Drivers have an elevated chance of dying or being crippled in car crashes. Wingsuit enthusiasts run a much higher chance of dying or being crippled in wingsuit crashes. We maintain an insurance system for drivers, but do not maintain one for wingsuit enthusiasts. Is this an examples of "regarding certain peoples' lives as a less sacred value than property"?
Do you believe that choices made shouldn't influence apportionment of consequences of those choices?
Handy that we are not restricted to ultimate conclusions, then, and are entirely capable of balancing competing interests.
One of Nature's more useful qualities is that it IS. It provides a default. We can diverge from that default if doing so seems preferable, but that does not give you or anyone else grounds to demand a divergence. You do not get to claim that Nature is unjust in any meaningful sense.
Just so, though I get the impression that we differ on who Alice and Bob are, and to what degree they are culpable for the percentages in the first place.
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