No no, Big Balls was carjacked while with his girlfriend.
This type of crime is obviously bad, even when it happens to people like Big Balls who are directly involved in the likely deaths of a couple hundred thousand to a couple million people over the next few years, but regardless of that: this was not him stepping up to defend some random person.
He was carjacked and injured during the carjacking.
Either that, or he happened to unexpectedly encounter his girlfriend getting carjacked and unbeknownst to him, stepped up to defend her, only to discover later in the glow of the police floodlights that she was in fact his girlfriend the whole time! I'm doubtful. I think it's more likely the world's most prolific bullshitters were bullshitting bits of this story.
You are absolutely wrong. People have died as a direct result of USAID cuts and will continue to die. Here's some reporting on the subject: https://archive.is/YknTv
There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
Sorry, I did not make myself clear enough. I'm not disputing that there exist people whose lives depend on USAID. I'm disputing the claim that there is a direct moral culpability on the part of the people who work for the administration that cut USAID funding, or the American electorate that empowered said administration, for those deaths; and that said moral culpability means it's fine when those people are victimized by criminals.
> There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
The nature of government-funded programs is that the actual source of the funding, the taxpayer, has very little direct say in it, and the people who are involved have very little incentive to remove it. Politicians love attaching their names to bigger and bigger budget numbers in headlines, and of course the people whose salaries depend on that budget aren't inclined to make it go away.
Every now and then the taxpayer gets fed up and elects some boor to make a hatchet job out of it, and intellectuals remark on how heartless it all is.
To me, the true ethical blame is on whoever it is that allowed these millions of people to be permanently dependent on aid.
Sorry, but no: the person pulling the trigger does not get to shirk ethical culpability, especially if they're sadistically relishing their hatchet job.
There is no trigger being pulled, metaphorically or not. USAID isn't a force of nature that would have continued to flow, as though water going downhill, if only it weren't for those sadistic meddlers at DOGE!
It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
In the BBB, they deferred tax hikes on poor people to after the midterms (we all know why, but that's an aside), meaning they didn't feel they needed the budget balanced immediately.
Yet with USAID they cut it the next month, meaning people have died, without any warning.
If they had done this by saying "We will cut off this funding starting 2027, other countries, foundations, organizations, etc would have time to plan/divert/ramp up to fill the gaps.
Your argument fails, not on principle, but on details.
Evil is stopping all aid immediately without a tapering period. Evil is letting life-saving medicine and food rot in warehouses because somebody was horny about taking a chainsaw to the federal government, saving nothing and wasting billions in the process. Evil is making a cruel decision to let people die solely for the sake of political theater.
You can talk about this in the abstract all you want, but at the end of the day, someone chose to let people suffer and die when a far more humane approach with the same financial outcome could have been taken. For flash. For pizzaz. For revenge, perhaps.
He knows that. That's why he's fine if someone were to shut off the water supply to his city. Simply shutting off access to something necessary for survival is totally different from killing someone! /s
Huge portions of the United States do in fact have a very similar relationship with their water companies, because their water companies are given water rights by the relevant state governments.
I think if someone decided to save money by shutting off water to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they will have some portion of the relevant blood on their hands. That's especially true if they did so with zero effort toward a smooth transition.
This type of crime is obviously bad, even when it happens to people like Big Balls who are directly involved in the likely deaths of a couple hundred thousand to a couple million people over the next few years, but regardless of that: this was not him stepping up to defend some random person.
He was carjacked and injured during the carjacking.
Either that, or he happened to unexpectedly encounter his girlfriend getting carjacked and unbeknownst to him, stepped up to defend her, only to discover later in the glow of the police floodlights that she was in fact his girlfriend the whole time! I'm doubtful. I think it's more likely the world's most prolific bullshitters were bullshitting bits of this story.
https://www.wired.com/story/edward-coristine-big-balls-assau...