Your problems are not all caused by foreignersThe Trump administration does not have much in the way of coherent ideology. Trump is not principled and goes along consistently with whatever the people who flatter him say. This is why, despite ostensible concerns about AI taking American jobs and long-standing opposition to China, he approved Nvidia chip sales to China. The whole world knows this fact, which is why world leaders like Putin and Zelenskyy make sure to flatter him non-stop, and Qatar was so brazen as to give him a jet.But insofar as there is any ideology behind Trumpism, it is populism. Trump’s opposition to immigration, foreign aid, and trade are motivated by the same core worldview: America is getting ripped off by other countries, and this is the cause of most of our problems. As a result, we should seek to cut ties with other countries to whatever extent possible, being especially keen to stop doing whatever benefits other countries.This worldview is almost a pure inversion of mine. I think it is demonstrably wrong on every front. America’s problems are mostly the result of bad institutions. To the extent anyone is doing the ripping off, it is us. It is also immoral. The richest country in the world has an obligation to try to improve things in other countries. Even if foreign aid made us slightly worse off which I don’t think it does if it prevented lots of people from dying unnecessarily, it would be worth keeping around.
>>523850723>The Trump administration does not have much in the way of coherent ideologyYes it does. Zionism and Hindu nationalism
>>523850723I find there to be something extremely grotesque about the populist moral worldview in that it seems to take as a given that the interests of people in other countries count for nothing. People like Vance and Walsh repeatedly say that America’s sole focus should be helping America. But why would this be? If a foreign child was drowning in a pond, would we have no duty to pull him out because he was not American? Perhaps we have somewhat greater obligation to help Americans than foreigners, but is helping foreigners really the source of no moral reasons at all? None?Was the only reason to intervene in world war two for our own benefit? Was the fact that it prevented the massacre of millions of extra Jews no consideration at all, so long as they weren’t American? Would it have been wrong to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda to prevent teenagers from being hacked to death? Suffering and death are bad things, and we have moral reason to stop them whenever they take place. If you make 30,000 dollars a year, you make in a week what hundreds of millions of people make in an entire year (and that’s controlling for the divergent price of living).The golden rule says that we should do unto others as we’d want them to do to us. If another country could save millions of American lives at the cost of a tiny slice of their budget, of course we’d want them to so. It is only because we neglect the interests of those who are far-away that we even consider a moral calculus that ignores most of those affected by our actions. It is insanity to hold that we should care vastly more about financially enriching those who are wealthier than almost anyone who has ever lived than those living on two dollars a day.John Rawls famously proposed the veil of ignorance as a method for making decisions impartially. >>523850837Those are just bribes not principles
>>523850877You’re supposed to imagine making the decisions without knowing which of the affected parties you’d be thinking of yourself as just as likely to be any specific Ugandan as any specific American. Behind the veil of ignorance, no one would dream of entirely neglecting the interests of foreigners.But it is also completely mad to think foreign aid is the cause of a significant portion of America’s problems. A world that is wealthier and more prosperous is one better for America. We benefit when the world has more innovation and productivity. The 3 million people saved annually by foreign aid programs programs that have now been majorly gutted can go on to make contributions to the global economy. https://ourworldindata.org/us-foreign-aid-saved-millions America has more soft-power and influence if more countries are grateful to us because we’ve benefitted them enormously.Foreign aid takes up less than 1% of the budget. Because voters aren’t informed, they think foreign aid takes up an entire quarter of the budget. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-every-american-should-know-about-u-s-foreign-aid/ Populist politicians can easily use foreign aid as a scapegoat, coasting on our ignorance. But the idea that our financial woes have to do with foreign aid does not survive even brief contact with reality. It is not a thing you can think while being aware of the facts. This is what I mean when I say the populist worldview is both moral and intellectual rot; it is impossible to believe the core pillars of the populist worldview if you are informed.Populists also blame free trade for America’s woes, claiming that we are needlessly allowing other countries to take our jobs. This judgment does not survive contact with econ 101. Because of comparative advantage, increasing trade between two countries boosts the wealth of both countries. They can both do what they’re better at comparatively and as a result, they both benefit.
>>523850935And we don’t have to speculate. Economists have empirically analyzed the effects of free trade and they’ve been almost unanimous in their result; trade benefits both countries. Free trade is almost entirely uncontroversial among economists. One study, for instance, reads: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25402 We study the macroeconomic consequences of tariffs. We estimate impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963-2014. We find that tariff increases lead, in the medium term, to economically and statistically significant declines in domestic output and productivity. Tariff increases also result in more unemployment, higher inequality, and real exchange rate appreciation, but only small effects on the trade balance. The effects on output and productivity tend to be magnified when tariffs rise during expansions, for advanced economies, and when tariffs go up, not down. Our results are robust to a large number of perturbations to our methodology, and we complement our analysis with industry-level data.This is another example of the populist worldview being intellectually untenable. If you just listen to the one sentence slogan “trade ships jobs overseas,” it sounds bad. But that initial impression crumbles upon sustained exposure to the facts. It only works if you don’t think too hard, preferring to blame foreigners and elites for your problems.
>>523850877Shalom
>>523850723>Your problems are not all caused by foreignersNO BUT ALL THOSE EXAMPLES THEY GAVE ARE TRUE, IT'S CALLED SUPPLY AND DEMAND, ECO 101 SHIT YOU BLACK GORILLA NIGGER
>>523850986It is also morally bankrupt. https://benthams.substack.com/p/tariffs-are-evil-not-just-bad-economics?utm_source=publication-search Tariffs uncontroversially impose harms on the countries that they’re imposed on. They’re often imposed on very poor countries. It would be wrong to impoverish people in Mexico, Laos, Cambodia, and Lesotho, to slightly increase the wages of people who earn more in a few weeks than they earn in a year. So even if tariff supporters were right about the facts, their view would still be morally wrong. Their view is that tariffs amount to a tax on other countries. But it would be morally wrong to tax people in Lesotho and give the money to American construction workers.Similarly, the populist worldview blames immigrants for many of societies greatest ills. This recently reached comical levels with the DHS Twitter account claiming that immigration is responsible for nearly everything bad in society.But this is completely ludicrous. Illegal immigrants aren’t eligible for welfare barring very rare circumstances, https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/dont-blame-immigrants-bloated-welfare-state and have a positive fiscal impact. https://www.cato.org/white-paper/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-states#annual-fiscal-impacts-immigration-status While immigration likely raises housing prices, immigrants also do lots of construction labor. Immigrants are responsible for a huge amount of innovation and other economic benefits. And why the hell would illegal immigrants make it harder to buy a car?>>523850998I'm a straight cis white male and I'm not ethically or religiously Jewish. I fully denounce the Talmud permanently and irreversibly for eternity. >>523851007Try reading the article and it's citations
>>523851111Treating the absence of jobs as a reason to restrict immigration is a classic example of the lump of labor fallacy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy where you treat labor as a fixed quantity. Immigrants consume goods and services, opening up the need for more jobs. Additionally, if there are more people in a country, then new jobs will open up to make up for the influx. If that wasn’t the case, then the best thing to do to boost wages would be banning people from having kids so that the kids don’t take the jobs. America’s population has increased many-fold over its history and yet remarkably we’ve found new jobs. Almost as if there’s some mechanism by which the number of jobs tracks population size…Alex Nowrasteh has pretty comprehensively rebutted the standard objections to immigration. https://www.libertarianism.org/sites/libertarianism.org/files/2021-04/The%20Most%20Common%20Arguments%20Against%20Immigration%20and%20Why%20They%27re%20Wrong.pdf In light of the fact that immigration is responsible for a huge portion of innovation and productivity gains, makes countries wealthier and more prosperous, and hugely benefits the immigrants themselves, https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-case-for-immigration?utm_source=publication-search the case for more immigration is quite robust. But at the very least, the simplistic populist worldview that claims we live in hell world because illegals have destroyed everything good about America doesn’t hold up at all.
>>523851180It is also a mistake to treat the only question about immigration as being whether it benefits America. Even if America was made slightly worse-off by immigration, it is wrong to use harmful coercion to immiserate tens of millions of people for slight benefit. https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/immigration.htm To justify immigration restrictions, the benefits would have to be very massive. It is disturbing that in virtually every case, the alleged benefits are non-existent; the standard arguments against immigration, when carefully examined, turn out to backfire and make the case for more immigration.America is the richest and most powerful country in world history. Alabama is richer than the UK per capita. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-columnists/3824090/all-50-states-richer-than-britain/ It would thus be surprising if we were constantly getting ripped off by dirt-poor foreigners in Lesotho and immigrants coming to America searching for a better life. The unfortunate fact, the one that politicians won’t say, is that many of our problems are self-inflicted. Hanania put it well, in an article comparing the Vance worldview to Ibram X Kendi’s worldview:
>>523851244Every time you ask Vance about any topic in the world, he will return to some story about how elites or immigrants hurt regular, working-class Americans, particularly those who live in the Midwest or Appalachia. There is rarely a hint that human beings have any agency, unless he’s talking about the need for conservatives to use government power to crush their enemies.Victimhood sells. It is easier for a politician to succeed by blaming America’s problems on greedy mega-corporations and nefarious foreigners than on the decisions that Americans make. The mechanisms by which free markets leave people better off are subtle and complex. It is easier to demagogue than to explain them.With the internet eliminating gatekeepers, America’s expert class is increasingly fading. Decisions are made carelessly and ham-fistedly. It takes finesse to understand which institutions are optimal. Yet the people who understand those things are increasingly being replaced by ill-informed populists with a politics purely centered on misinformation and resentment.This is bad for America today, bad for the world, and bad for the future. Having the most powerful country lose its ability to think carefully and devolve to a populist uniparty that sees the rest of the world as its enemy will leave America worse off and the world ill-equipped to deal with global problems that demand global solutions.
>>523850723But many are, and the ones decrying this populism tend to be part of it.It's not just the muslims and migrants, it's that the rest of the problems volunteer to be taken out too if you target those.
>>523851389Europe is a bit different it has a lot more welfare than USA and takes a lot more radical Muslims. Islam is really bad
>>523850877>If a foreign child was drowning in a pond, would we have no duty to pull him out because he was not American?No because that's not our pond or jurisdiction.If you want us involved in other countries don't whine about colonialism.There is no moral form of interventionism.Either there is oppression and submission.Or there is not.
>>523850877Also no one knew about the holocaust.Stopping it was a side effect of the US choosing to aid in maintaining certain political powers through the war.
>>523852021You can help others without colonizing them, you can save the life of a child under 5 years old by donating 10k to against malaria foundation
>>523852215>You can help others without colonizing themNo you can't because the issue is their way of life in the first place.The reason you can go help is because of a superior way of life giving increased agency.Simply abetting a failed way of life is immoral.
>>523852398perhaps donating to effective charities that save lives will produce overpopulation. This will hold the nations they affect back economically and socially. Now, it is true that donating to life-saving charities likely raises the population somewhat, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.11388 but I don’t think this means that they’ll hold the affected nations back.First of all, being stricken by horrendous diseases tends to hold nations back economically. This effect seems vastly more significant https://blog.givewell.org/2013/05/15/flow-through-effects/ than the negative economic impact of a slightly larger population, particularly because it’s not clear whether a larger population will develop more slowly or more quickly. America is better-off economically than we were in the 1800s, when the population was lower and disease was a greater burden.Second, it looks like effective charities tend to lower the fertility rate somewhat but this effect is counterbalanced by the lives saved. But things go much better in society if fewer people are born and die, rather than if more people both are born and die. Vast amounts of resources are wasted if people die shortly after birth.Third, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities. Give to charities that make people’s lives better—e.g. by curing blindness— https://www.givewell.org/charities/helen-keller-international or that help animals on factory farms. https://www.farmkind.giving/ If you end up concluding that charities saving lives are bad, then just give elsewhere! It would be shocking, and suspiciously convenient, if every single charity on the planet did more harm than good!
>>523850877>If a foreign child was drowning in a pond, would we have no duty to pull him out because he was not American?Why don't his countrymen save him? Your worldview leads to us wasting all our time saving foreign children from drowning in pools while their own brethren won't lift a finger. Meanwhile the child we save grows up to hate us, because the very same people who did not save him teach him falsely that America put him in that pond to begin with.It is therefore better to leave him be. We shouldn't be spending time, money and energy saving and uplifting our future enemies and competitors.
>>523852497A final concern: aren’t scholars unsure if foreign aid works? Aren’t there lots of smart people who think foreign aid backfires? If so, shouldn’t we be skeptical about efforts to provide foreign aid?It’s true that some kinds of foreign aid are controversial among scholars. Some people think that economic development aid entraps countries and leaves them in poverty. But crucially, none of the kinds of foreign aid promoted by GiveWell are controversial. Among scholars, there is no serious debate about whether, say, anti-malarial bednets are good. https://blog.givewell.org/2015/11/06/the-lack-of-controversy-over-well-targeted-aid/ The most prominent critics of foreign aid support these kinds of programs. High quality studies have been done on them and have confirmed their efficacy. There is not serious room for doubt.And, once again, if you’re concerned about this, just give to other charities, like the charities https://www.farmkind.giving/donate that prevent animals from languishing in a cage for ten years per dollar they raise. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/lewis-bollard Or give to the organizations working to prevent the extinction of life on Earth. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/long-term-future-fundtaking the Giving What We Can pledge is very likely the best thing you will ever do, and hundreds fewer people will die and hundreds of thousands fewer animals will suffer https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-bone-chilling-evil-of-factoryhttps://benthams.substack.com/p/every-objection-to-taking-the-giving
>>523852509Sometimes they do save them! Not every child who gets malaria will die from it! Most survive it, but distributing thousands of bed nets saves lives. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
>>523852497What does charity have to do with anything?Civilization and society should be structured to remove impediments of survival from life in a systematic way.The ability to implement these functions in a self sufficient manner shows the success of that civilization.Blindly throwing money at symptoms is idiotic and does improve society.Modern ideology also accepts that there is no responsibility in forming these functions because to hold certain people accountable in creating these functions for themselves is racist.
>>523850723They are caused by nonwhites, not what you term as 'foreigners'. Racial interests exist no matter how much you want to deny it. Blacks are aware of black interests. Jews are aware of jewish interestsmexicans are aware of mexican interests. And they act on them. And they vote for them, and do so at the expense of american interests. There is no way you can have a single government with a single set of laws and a single leader for a people who have nothing in common, not in their cultures nor in their racial characteristics, nor in their preferences for how to live. Leftism is a gang of thieves working together to rob a country
>>523850723>America’s problems are mostly the result of bad institutions.yes>To the extent anyone is doing the ripping off, it is us.no. those institutions create transfer payments from the american middle class to everyone else> It is also immoral. The richest country in the world has an obligation to try to improve things in other countries.why? and how is india improved by their engineers working for us instead of them
>>523850723everytime
>>523852681Then let them handle their own business. Let them make their own bed nets. I don't want more Africans. I don't want to contribute our resources to causing more Africans to exist.
>>523850723>let's solve our problems with an elegant and easy solution>NOOOOOO
>>523850986>Economists have empirically analyzed the effects of free trade and they’ve been almost unanimous in their resultThey also almost unanimously agree that the economy is run by animal ghosts. Economists are retarded, and even if free trade maximizes one particular economic metric, game theory and geopolitics predict grave outcomes for nation states that cannot provide for their own basic necessities. Especially if their enemies can.This of course isn't even considering the fact that our fractional reserve system only vaguely resembles a free market.
>>523851111>It would be wrong to impoverish people in Mexico, Laos, Cambodia, and Lesotho,so the dogs have a right to the childrens bread now? whose responsibility is it to confiscate and redistribute?
>>523850723Damn, look at all that gay shit I'm never going to read lmao
>>523854673Yes non human animals interests matter I think moral realism might be true but like I said in the thread a dozen times already they're evil according to themselves because they're hypocrites. They lack internal consistency and they don't care about becoming consistenthttps://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/NameTheTraitThis dialogue tree has been used by vegans many times in live debates, (feel free to comment on one of their videos, email them, message them on Instagram etc to challenge them to a debate on NTT )https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JiGT6ox0Y-Mhttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gJR5vsrkr9Ahttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oQLjgo2TfcMhttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrtziO8Ffc4&pp=ygUjRHIgQXZpIGRlYmF0ZSB2ZWdhbiBuYW1lIHRoZSB0cmFpdCA%3DIf someone says it's okay to kill a animal and turn them into a burger but not okay to do that to a human and the reason they give is that animals can't reason but humans can they'd have to bite the bullet and say it's okay to turn severely permanently mentally handicapped humans who can't reason into burgers. Or go vegan. Or name another trait(s)
>>523851292>Having the most powerful country lose its ability to think carefully and devolve to a populist uniparty that sees the rest of the world as its enemy will leave America worse off and the world ill-equipped to deal with global problems that demand global solutions.Well Republicans are sounding the alarm and Demokikes are already taking a midterm victory lap so the only reason you could write this is to further demoralize white males to accept their stolen future. You should just fuck off and die.
