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Scott-featured global health philanthropist and activist John Green made a video about TB treatment and USAID. tl;dw, TB is the brick-shithouse of bacteria, so treatment takes 4-6 months, but the good news is that people mostly aren't contagious during treatment. Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance, including the spread of newly-treatment-resistant strains, so interruptions in the supply chain are a major global health problem. Yes, it's bad that global health was overly reliant on the USA, but it requires government-level funding and logistics. (Unsaid, his family pledged $1m/year 2024-2027 for a USAID TB program in the Philippines, in addition to $6.5m for Partners in Health, so he's literally put his money where his mouth is.) His contacts in confirm that drug supplies are being interrupted.
Even if one wants to cut USAID, a stop-work order, rather than a phase-out, was likely a net-negative by most measures of utility.
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.
Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.
This kind of posturing is very hard to take seriously absent a compelling case that USAID funding is a meaningful obstacle to conservative victory as such. Your pro-life vs pro-choice analogy doesn't work because the pro-choicers' victory necessarily depends on pro-lifers' defeat.
I believe that the entire US federal government and civil service is an obstacle to conservative victory. There's only so many times you can play kayfabe and watch your politicians be devoured by DC and come out as creatures of the American imperium. It was a mistake to believe that the institutions would abide by the popular will and not act in their own self-interest. At some point Elrond has to push Isildur into the volcano instead of hoping he won't be tempted.
Except Tolkien's point is that no-one had the strength of will to do that. Not even Elrond, not even Gandalf. The ring could only be destroyed by someone not trying to destroy it but to possess it and destroy it by accident (or by divine intervention).
"Tolkien wrote that no one could have willingly destroyed the Ring, no matter how good their intentions were. He also wrote that the Ring was "beyond the strength of any will to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it"
Elrond would have rationalized why he should not push Isildur because he would not have the will to destroy it. Indeed, that might exactly be why he didn't! (well in the book they don't even enter Mount Doom so even more effort would have been required). Note that Isildur in the book is in fact on his way to destroy the ring when it betrays him and falls off his finger so he can be killed. But Tolkien is clear when it came down to it, no-one on Middle Earth had the will to destroy the ring.
Everyone will be tempted. Everyone will succumb at the end. Even the wise, even the pure. If you think the federal government is like that, then logically your prediction should be that Trump/Elon will not destroy it, but instead take it for their own. Or that Isildonald, heir of Fred and Elond of Tesla will turn against each other and in fighting over it, one will fall into the volcano and be lost with the government.
Hopefully in this analogy the volcano is not one of nuclear fire!
To continue the analogy, what we have here is a case where the ring betrays Isildur... but he survives! Then the ring tries even harder to finish Isildur off, lest Isildur ever get it back again and finish what he was talked out of the first time. And somehow, someway, Isildur just doesn't stop, and just keeps winning. Now he has the ring, and he's hammering away at it with every tool and faculty, because a judge told him he can't just cast it into Mt Doom without a 4 year comment period.
Will a wiser, more battle hardened, once betrayed Isildur let the ring go undestroyed a second time, after all that?
I mean, sure, Tolkien would say "Yes" because that's the mythology he wrote and it's his world and he defined the metaphysical parameters of it to be exactly that way. Analogizing to Trump's current destruction of the deep state, hopefully they have not been created to have such absolute authority regarding the nature of reality.
Although Mike Benz has been going off about how USAID has basically created an entirely false Truman Show-esque reality we've all been living in. So I guess there might be that.
I guess the analogy falls apart a bit here, I don't think they are actually trying to destroy the federal government, just size it down.
So I suppose the better analogy is the ring is at the jewellers getting resized. Which isn't really as dramatic. Unless the jewellers is Sauron's Discount Rings and Gems of course.
A reveal that Musk was part of the deep state all along would be a shocking twist worthy of Sauron deceiving Celebrimbor.
One DOGE to rule them all, one DOGE to find them, one DOGE to bring them all and in the Deep State bind them. In the Land of D.C. where the bureaucrats lie.
I wonder. Maybe it's performative, but Trump seems to angrily blurt out things from time to time indicating he believes the deep state tried to murder him. The axe he's been taking to various departments seems to be driven by vengeance. And the array of ideologically heterodox misfits he's arrayed around him have one thing in common, the destruction of various tentacles of the deep state they've spent their lives combatting.
I don't think he's resizing the ring. I think this is more deeply personal than we appreciate. This is Caesar returning to the pirates who ransomed him and crucifying them to the man.
But the ring in the OP's post is the entire federal government not just the deep state. I simply don't see Trump trying to destroy what lets him govern. Downsize it sure, target the bits that have been problematic for him, absolutely. Take a chainsaw to agencies and NGO's? Yes.
But taking the whole thing down? Shuttering every three letter agency? Getting rid of the military, national parks, ICE?
I really do not see Trump as wanting to be the President who essentially ended the United States of America by delegating every single power to the states, including his own, somehow. Does he really want New York or Portland having control of immigration in their state?
Draining the swamp still leaves you with the land under the swamp. If you didn't want that, you wouldn't have to drain the swamp at all, just blow the whole thing up. And I don't see evidence despite much outrage, that he wants to do that.
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