The Human Cost of DOGE's War on USAID | Hacker News Reader

The Human Cost of DOGE's War on USAID

newyorker.com

44 pointstastyface17 comments

The part that's indefensible is the illegal and sudden nature of the cuts. You have absolutely no moral obligation to pay for bungee jumping lessons for your friends, but if you cut the cord after he jumps, you're still a murderer.

Also, USAID seems to have been replaced with MAGA-AID: "US to fund Trump-aligned Europeans building ‘civilisational bonds’" https://www.ft.com/content/e2addd88-4361-43f1-94e2-9f0a808dd...

A totally expected result from an administration that considers empathy weakness, friendship exploitative, facts optional and every verb transactional.

Why were Americans paying for transgender clinics in India?

Yes.. Add the term transgender and obviously it needs to go.

I don't know the specifics, but i'm sure it's like canceling (and calling) a hospital in a small town a trans clinic because they happen to have a trans patient

It's interesting (by which I mostly mean "fucked") how some proponents are acknowledging the consequences after the fact, even for selfish reasons--like Musk "believ[ing] he’s going to be held accountable by history"--but it's obviously too late to undo the damage, and they'll still never outright admit "you were right and we were wrong" to everyone who predicted exactly what would happen.

I don't know if there's a word for it, but the mentality or personality trait or whatever that makes people hand-wave away completely predictable outcomes until they actually happen is beyond infuriating. It's bad enough when it's just a shitty team lead who's steering a project off a cliff. At this scale I can't even think about it for too long or I get lightheaded.

>I don't know if there's a word for it, but the mentality or personality trait or whatever that makes people hand-wave away completely predictable outcomes until they actually happen

We used to call this stupidity, but nowadays it's said to offend and thus alienate the idiot snowflakes who just want a strong leader with simple answers.

Archived: https://archive.ph/20260712222347/https://www.newyorker.com/...

The people who cheer the USAID cuts fail to grasp the moral necessity of sending their already inflated away tax dollars to other nations while there are still problems aplenty at home.

As it looks, the tax dollars came back home and yet every price and cost and younameit continued to increase. Maybe, just maybe, USAID was not the problem? Maybe cutting USAID was just a pretext, a pretext some people still buy in front of the - maybe not clear cut - evidence that it was only a pretext?

I confess it has been awkward to see the pearl clutching on this one. Like, the folks that were flat out proud of the implications are now offended at being tied to them. Just, what?

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