Those numbers always crack me up. If you do the math that way (US funding cuts kill people), imagine how many people we’ve killed by not confiscating all the wealth of our nation and shipping it to Africa!
Harvard (as credible a source as there is in the world): USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
> The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.
So about half a million children died, children who had no other recourse but to depend on this system which was already in place and for which there is no alternative.
If you "crack up" over the death of children, you're lacking some basic humanity.
Yes, and imagine if we doubled the USAID funding! Or even quintupled it! Why, if we borrowed a(nother) trillion dollars, imagine how many lives we'd save!
My point is that it's all fake math. If we're killing people by not funding aid programs, then we're killing even more by not funding more. How much are you personally sending to Africa? How much more could you be sending? Imagine if you borrowed to do it? You can't do the math that way. While tragic, those people have no demand on our treasury any more than Vladimir Putin does. We may be less benevolent than we once were. We are also much further in debt than we once were -- to the point of threatening the Republic's viability. The US didn't kill a half million children any more than France, or Spain, or Great Britian, or China did by not sending the same money. It's all fake math.
Even if we agree with the premise that cutting funds to save people is the same as killing people (I do not believe this), those don't include how many deaths were reduced by cutting USAID. The funds wound up fueling awful things around the globe.
Once you factor in everything, the cuts are a huge net gain in my estimation.
I know that this is a tall order, but consider that this might not actually be “objective”, and that instead, you’re substituting your opinion for facts.
(You don’t need to enumerate all of the things you believe justify the statement. I’m well familiar with them. I’m just trying to make you understand that there’s a layer of subjectivity here.)
You are wrong. I understand the sentiment, and I do not use the word lightly. Elon has an incredibly long track record of showing us who he is. He is a racist, unequivocally
Scroll through his twitter account and you won't make it more than a couple days without something racist
Also, after Elon bought Twitter, when people called me the n-word and I reported it, moderation said no rules were broken and no action would be taken. Before he bought twitter that was not the case, they'd be banned. So you can buzz off with this nonsense. I won't break any rules and say what should be said.
No he doesn't. There's a lot of bullshit surrounding him. Things are taken out of context.
I will say this, he believes in things about race that are controversial. For example that races may have different IQs. But you have to realize we don't actually know if races have different IQs. The idea fits common sense though... if races can LOOK different... what black magic suddenly makes them completely equal in intelligence when the same genes that govern looks also govern intelligence? We don't have hard evidence on this so right now the best we can say is we don't know but measured evidence and common sense points to the possibility of intellectual differences.
This, in itself, is not actually racist.
He does believe individual meritocracy so meaning even though he believes race correlates with certain stereotypes (like intelligence) he feels that people on the intellectual level need to be judged by merit and not by race.
Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
The genes that control skin color don't control fast twitch muscle, but we know sub Saharan Africans have more fast twitch than the rest of the world. What magic skin color gene affects fast twitch muscle? None.
It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
>Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
I mean the same genes on the entire DNA strand. Wholistically all of those genes define who you are.
>It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
Uh yeah? So.
>What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
What do you mean individuals? We CAN measure genes of an individual FYI. And if we can measure genes of an individual we can also measure them for groups and come up with generalized figures and correlations.
True. But you are voted down because not everyone can face the truth. So just lie a little and say "we don't know" even though the truth is we know enough to know that some races are on average more intelligent then others.
People have biases around this stuff and most people can't think critically so if you want them to be receptive you have to lie a bit.
