It's a lot more than "shenanigans": he's likely responsible for the deaths, via starvation and illness of hundreds, thousands, or more. The quick and sudden DOGE cuts ripped those programs that were keeping people alive away, without any chance to phase in replacements.
Sure, but while the world waits for another super power to step up lives are being lost. The US could have announced a phase down with a hard pressure campaign to get the other countries to take over with no loss of life.
Instead these are just numbers in a statistic and opportunities for leverage in geopolitics instead of real lives with as much depth and meaning as your own.
> Instead these are just numbers in a statistic and opportunities for leverage in geopolitics instead of real lives with as much depth and meaning as your own.
I didn’t vote for this, it’s not about me, I have no control over this. I live in California, we never voted for Trump. Please don’t lecture me about how I feel.
Ofc this is overly simplistic. There is hard power enabling soft power and there are alturistic extreme radical leftists actively seeking out and staffing such programs.
From that URL: our estimates of “lives saved per dollar” from US aid are, at best, ballpark estimates
I can't help being very suspicious of up to a million dead without identifying a single dead individual, or country or even continent where these mass deaths are supposed to have occurred.
> There is on-the-ground evidence of resulting impacts: Rising malnutrition mortality in northern Nigeria, Somalia, and in the Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar border and rising food insecurity in northeast Kenya, in part linked to the global collapse of therapeutic food supply chains. Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon, again linked to breakdown in the global supply of antimalarials, and a risk of reversal in Lesotho’s fight against HIV, part of a broader health crisis across Africa.
"Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon" links to an article[0] which states:
> BOGO, Cameroon, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Nine-month-old baby Mohamat burned with fever for three days before his family took him to the closest health centre in northern Cameroon, but it was too late. He died of malaria that day.
Mohamat's death was part of a spike this year in malaria fatalities that local health officials attribute to foreign aid cuts by the United States.
Before the cuts, Mohamat might have been diagnosed earlier by one of more than 2,000 U.S.-funded community health workers who would travel over rough dirt roads to reach the region's remotest villages.
And at the health centre, he might have been treated with injectable artesunate, a life-saving drug for severe malaria paid for by U.S. funds that is now in short supply. But the centre had none to give out.
So the URL very directly identifies a dead individual, a country and a continent, while also mentioning other cases that we hopefully all can agree will also directly lead to deaths.
Do you take issue with this example? Or why are you stating that they're not "identifying a single dead individual, or country or even continent where these mass deaths are supposed to have occurred"?
By that reasoning you should be suspicious of the claim that cigarette smoking has caused any deaths from lung cancer, since no one has ever identified a single individual whose lung cancer could be proven to be from smoking.
Fun fact : there are poor people in America who need help. Some of which served in the military, or they come from families which several people served in the military. Do these people not come first?
Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world. How many billions have been sent to Africa? People need to make their own countries great instead of waiting for more Gibs from the USA.
> Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world.
This is an overly simplified perspective. Work at this scale requires impressive logistics and commitments that are haphazardly "rug-pulled" can have catastrophic consequences, regardless of whose "job" it is.
When I was looking at being a bone marrow donor, they talk about this. The process for such donation is involved, including minor surgical procedures for the donor. But they talk about autonomy and consent, and one of the topics is this (paraphrasing): Do I have the right to change my mind about donation at any time?
The answer: while you always maintain the legal right to withdraw consent, at a certain point in the process, the recipients existing bone marrow is destroyed in preparation for your donation. At that point, there may be considered a moral obligation to continue the donation, as without your donation, the recipient will die, due to the destruction in preparation.
> How many billions have been sent to Africa?
Speaking for myself, I'd rather continue sending billions to Africa than contributing ~1.5% of Israel's GDP in foreign assistance to it.
If you are curious, the number #1 beneficiary of USAID is Ukraine, by far, and just behind #2 is Israel.
Sounds more like foreign influence than actual survival help. Maybe USAID even funded wars, and caused more death and chaos, who knows. Difficult to predict what's next. Perhaps it will be good because countries will adapt and shine, instead of having local dictators surviving on these aids, etc.
Also, there is a thing about people depending on you:
I am feeding birds during winter, so at some point they depend on my food. Should have I had started feeding them at all or not ?
If I didn't feed them, technically less birds would have died because they would never had a chance to live...
Except Israel is an economically sound and undamaged country who has the upper hand against its enemies and Ukraine has been invaded and is the underdog of in this war ?
It doesn't look that weird to me that humanitarian assistance would go to people who need it the most ? Do Israelis currently need heaters not to die from the cold after their energy system has been destroyed ?
It's as if helping populations in need would buy you goodwill and popularity. Crazy to thing about it. I don't see how program trying to contain the spread of AIDS or preventing people to die from the cold is "funding" war. Not sure what you are on about. People will not adapt and shine, they will die or be more miserable, or revolt and probably be crushed. Civil war is always an option too.
But your bird comment tells me you just don't care. You should have started with that.
The comments above mine were blaming USAID saying that it caused more damage because it existed and made people became dependent on it, and (in their logic) that it would have been better if it did not exist.
If you look above you can see the whole concept “people die because of USAID”. It’s not my concept.
I am showing with the bird analogy how this is absurd. That you always have the choice to feed the birds or not.
At the end, it’s still a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of dilemma, like all important political interactions.
Nobody knows if the long-term impact will be positive or negative. It can push countries to take care of their population, to have new coalitions of countries (what if China double-down and offer more aid ?), etc.
Pretty much unknown. I hope it will eventually work out for the innocents who are victims of politicians who are in comfy places.
The comment above you made a much more apt analogy with being bone marrow donor.
In your logic, you should have never "fed the birds" to start with but the people giving birth to children in f** up places are not going. "Mmmm I may wait for having that child on whether humanitarian aid will come" or "The likelihood of civi war is big in my country, I will wait for a safer period". They just have the child. Also those people may want to live too since they are already alive.
So just like for birds, not feeding them because it would create a population that cannot sustain itself would mean having lots of birds dying.
Also I like to live in a world where some humans are not considered as birds.
> Nobody knows if the long-term impact will be positive or negative. It can push countries to take care of their population, to have new coalitions of countries (what if China double-down and offer more aid ?), etc.
Sure but that's besides the point the whole point of the parent was introducing the complexity of, once you have given some aid, you are responsible for the deaths you caused if you pull it out too quickly for the recipients to adapt. As others have said it's not like the US have coordinated themselves and given time to have other countries to share that load more evenly. Also it seems with administration, a lot of the time, cruelty is the point: Showing your base you are hurting their preferred target instead of actually being efficient. An example of that would be the handling of illegal immigration. A big spectacle but a needlessly cruel and inefficient one.
Not to republicans who have repeatedly voted down measures to take care of people getting straight up cancer from abysmal practices during the middle east wars that they started.
Those same republicans also voted down support for the aid workers of 9/11 dealing with absurd health issues from all the dust.
Literal heros and innocent victims, but republicans don't want to spend pennies on them.
I hope such egotistical zero sum thinking leads to the economic isolation of the US. 4chan Fun fact: You and only can make america great again, amirite. Who needs steady deficit funding when you have freedom.
What help for these Americans did the Republicans put forward and approve along with these cuts? All I saw was a cut to the affordability of healthcare for those people. Did I miss some help that is coming that they didn't have before the USAID cuts?
>We don’t (didn’t) do it because it’s our job, we do (did) it because it’s the right thing to do.
We didn't do it because it's the right thing to do, we did it for soft power, to spread our political and cultural influence and have leverage against those governments to serve our interests. Nations are not moral actors.
And to be clear, there is a difference between America not being obligated to save lives and tearing away treatment once you’ve started providing it. DOGE did the latter, and some of the cases are horrific, experimental devices being left implanted in study participants.
There's also a difference between winding down a charity program and abruptly pulling support overnight such that even if other entities or organizations wanted to take up the mantle, doing so would be 100x more difficult (or in some cases impossible)
Atrocities can be repeated. There is nothing wrong with reiterating the negative outcomes a specific person has unleashed to towards societies greater good.
Yet we're still downplaying it all with words like "shenanigans." The comment above didn't even get onto the subjects of election interference, MEGA or MechaHitler/white genocide.
When a comment starts with "Even ignoring Y, there's also Z" or "Setting aside Y, there's also Z", it shouldn't be read as downplaying Y. It's a way of introducing a secondary issue Z without first needing to write a 1000 word essay that gives due weight to issue Y and any other issues that are more important than Z.
This is useful to do when issue Y is widely known and well-explored elsewhere, but issue Z hasn't received as much attention. It my no means is an attempt to downplay the importance of Y, merely to create a space for conversation about a more niche issue Z.
It's disappointing to see so much attention put into replies attacking the OP for not giving adequate weight to Y, when the very premise of their comment was to create a space to discuss Z.
No, you've abstracted it too far. I understand the grammatical construction, I'm not sure what suggested that I don't. The issue is referring to the spread of fascism in the world as if it's a little mistake anyone could make.
It's a lot more than "shenanigans": he's likely responsible for the deaths, via starvation and illness of hundreds, thousands, or more. The quick and sudden DOGE cuts ripped those programs that were keeping people alive away, without any chance to phase in replacements.