[mandmandam]

Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and should be around 10% instead.

The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.

Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.

[yadaeno]

I agree but condemning government budget cuts because USAID seems reactionary. I think the spirit of cutting budget is still overall popular, and is impossible to do painlessly.

Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.

~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.

[oezi]

I don't understand why the US is forgetting that it isn't alone in the world. Spending a little money on international aid has been exerting American soft power for decades and likely flowed back multiple times in additional trade.

Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?

[jwkpiano1]

That’s for _Congress_ to decide, not the executive. That’s the issue here.

[insane_dreamer]

> ~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.

if only that's what they would spend it on. Instead, it's going to go to the military.

[refurb]

USAID is not "international aid". It's an arm of the CIA that uses "international development" as a cover for it's activities.

Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.

That doesn't sound like international aid.

Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".

One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.

[corimaith]

The two are not mutually exclusive, providing HIV assistance or maternal aid both is definitionally international aid while also furthering US interests. If you define international aid as purely unconditional or even counterproductive to self-interest then you'd be hard pressed to find any sort of example, nor would it be a definition I would think many agree with.

[refurb]

If you're arguing other countries will suffer with the end of USAID programs, that will be a hard argument to win.

Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability is a high price for other countries to pay and I'm sure is a net negative for them.

[corimaith]

>Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability

You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.

[refurb]

> You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.

I should rephrase that to "political instability with regards to the perspective of locals".

I agree the US is seeking "political stability" with these activities. But it's on US terms which is often in direct opposition to the locals.

And I'd argue my view is not "dubious paranoia". The purpose of USAID is to use development activities as a cover for interference in other country's politics.

[MisterKent]

People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first"

The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.

[mandmandam]

> We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.

Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.

And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.

[FireBeyond]

We have this myth of the founding fathers as wisened, street smart old men. In reality, many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.

[Dracophoenix]

Past a certain point, age has little to do with prudence. There are rational and knowledgable teenagers just as there are middle-aged dullards.

One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.

[FireBeyond]

Of course. Although being self-sufficient does not mean that you have a fully developed brain and cognition, either.

And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.

[Keyframe]

many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.

really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).

[FireBeyond]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-the...

"As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than 40 years old in 1776 ... more than a dozen of them were 35 or younger."

Peter Salem was the youngest signatory at 16.

Alexander Hamilton, 21. Thomas Lynch, Jr, and Edward Rutledge, 26. George Walton, 27, and Thomas Heyward, Jr, 29.

[Keyframe]

Are we talking about signers of the Declaration of Independence or more broadly.. not sure what Salem has with Declaration or if he's counted as a Founding Father. I'll give you Hamilton though since he was involved and neither did George Washington nor James Madison sign the Declaration but are still counted as Founding Fathers - https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/signers-factsheet

[corimaith]

What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past? I don't think there are any, the frenzy of the masses has never ended well, and ironically just ended up in actual dictators taking power in the end. Social media just inflates the problem even more.

[mandmandam]

> What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past?

I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].

What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.

And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.

[corimaith]

>populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people.

I'm asking in retrospect to the overall well-being on the nation in actual policies and results, not in it's political dominance. As recently as the Cultural Revolution we can see what happens the excesses of the mob are released.

>What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals

Well I think you're attacking a strawman here, there will be situtations where their writings are not so relevant, but this situation of populism very much falls into category where their writings are relevant and specfically designed to anticipate for.

If you don't believe that, well then explain what are your alternative solutions to populism and if they are more poltically viable than what the founders proposed. I suspect if you weigh them all, the founders' ideals will come out on top.

Don't underestimate history, don't think you are really that different from our past. Plato might have lived 2000 years ago, but we still influenced by him today precisely due to the timeless quality of his ideas. Same as the Founders, you might disparage them for slavery that was common at the time, but their sincere devotion to republican ideals were acts of extraordinary moral upstanding that were rare both then and today. That's why we greatly respect them, not just in USA but around the world.

[mandmandam]

You think republican ideas are "greatly respected" in the USA? And tell me not to underestimate history? ... I think we have been reading very different history books.

Are you familiar with Nicaragua's history? Iran's? Italy, Guatemala, Congo? Chile, Argentina, El Salvador? Brazil, Honduras, Haiti? Bolivia? ...

Internally, are you familiar with the history of gerrymandering? Voter suppression? Disinformation campaigns? The fight against campaign finance reform, or against winner takes all voting? Ballot access laws? Legislative and judicial manipulation against third parties and progressive candidates? Debate exclusion across corporate media, unchallenged smears, media blackouts, expensive lawsuits...

[jfengel]

They didn't seem to reckon that against representatives who are sent to reflect the will of that same general public. They are not incentivized to contradict their constituents. In particular they do not have the responsibility to represent the demographic of their losing opponent, and in many ways are encouraged to do exactly the opposite.

It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.

[rayiner]

“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas.

The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.

[derriz]

How is soft power is a fake concept?

At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.

Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.

It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.

[rayiner]

“Soft power” as a term of art used by liberal internationalists is bullshit. It’s just a way to proselytize foreign countries in a way that makes them resentful.

E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.

[alienthrowaway]

> Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so

This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.

Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?

[oezi]

This is the same way to say that friendship is a fake concept just because it is intangible.

Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.

[insane_dreamer]

If you think "soft power" is a fake concept, you have very little understanding of how American foreign policy actually works in other countries.

For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.

[ergl]

Is this comment satire?

[actionfromafar]

It's the most unhinged thing I have read all week, and that's saying something these days.

I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.

[ok_dad]

No, this is the type of thing that MAGA folks have been fed on their media and social media feeds. They’ve been taught that everything complex in government and in politics and in geopolitics are deep state conspiracies and lies in order for the left to maintain power. They think that what’s going on now is a turn to normalcy and that America was hindered by the policies of the left. They truly believe this stuff. It’s insane how different their world is, they don’t live in the same reality as the “other side”. I’m not sure how to fix this, how do you convince someone of reality when they insist on some hallucinations being real?

[TomK32]

It'd be fantastic if surveys would allow those surveyed to do a minute or two of research before answering or correcting their answer.

[jfengel]

They are voting based on their opinions without doing additional research. Getting at that opinion via a poll is informative, and letting them research it would actually be counterproductive.