• wpb@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    I never understood why they ended USAID. It has been such a fantastic tool for destabilizing non-allies, so democrats and republicans alike should love it. And aside from that, it also did some actual good stuff like medical aid, so even progressives like it. It seems like such a win win, yet here we are. Is it just incompetence?

    • ReHomed@lemmy.cafe
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      6 hours ago

      The right ended USAID because the right hates the thought of helping others

      They quite literally CANNOT compute empathy, they’re narcissistic apes who only care about themselves

    • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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      8 hours ago

      The destruction of USAID killed around 60,000 people in just a few months and could kill over 30 million over the course of several years due to the lack of basic (and extremely cheap) care.

      As far as I am concerned, any bitching they claimed about the death toll of communism needs to be shut down with simply that.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      9 hours ago

      The GOP was putting out a lot of bullshit about how the US spends so much money on other countries and doesn’t help people at home to get votes for a long time. Eventually some people that actually believed the bullshit got into power and killed it.

      Really USAID was about soft power. The US provides aid and that allowed the US the threaten to cut off aid if a country didn’t go along with US interests. Way cheaper than threatening to use military force to get your way.

      USAID had a lot of problems and definitely could’ve been made a lot more efficient. But eliminating it was a stupid move.

      In many places China stepped in when USAID was gone. Not because of altruism but because China wants that soft power the US abandoned.

      Yes, it was incompetence.

      • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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        8 hours ago

        The obsession with hard power is their undoing. If your only means of coercion is shoving a gun against their head, it makes it very, very easy for the coerced to say ‘fuck off’ and ally themselves with your enemies. Chinese soft power is something that the USSR only dreamed of having but could never achieve.

      • wpb@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Yeah, and destabilizing regions with brown people in them is a very effective way of doing that, hence my confusion.

        • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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          10 hours ago

          no they want to see them die as a direct result of their giant penises pulling the boom boom trigger