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@interfluidity I sure wish it was.

@Phil it is. it's probably not murdering the people you mean it to, though (which would include me, i guess). i don't think you have any particular animus against the kids who are dying in Burundi for lack of high nutrient peanut butter manufactured only in the USA, distributed by USAID. https://time.com/7258248/us-foreign-aid-burundi-patients-essay/

@interfluidity

well that isn't murder, its also probably bullshit. USAID mostly distributes aid thru NGO's that have other sources of funding and shame on us if we have fostered this kind of depedency.

Lastly there is an exception process for anything that may result in the loss of life.

Whats happening is the NGO's are letting people die to make political points

I am unmoved. We can't feed the whole world and if people can't feed their kids they shouldnt have them.

@Phil you are living in denial. USAID works via NGOs and also directly. the US distributes food, operates, funds hospitals, does myriad things. there was a humanitarian waiver by Rubio, but logistics is disrupted because providers who think the waiver applies to them can't get resources via more intermediate workers.

there is a lot of dependency. if we were going to break it, we could have planned a transition, made space for other providers.

these people are murderers of absolute innocents.

@interfluidity I am feeding 2 families right now, besides my own. I can afford it, but if another comes along and needs me to feed them, the answer will have to be no, because I don't have the resources. If they were then to starve to death, I would not be guilty of murder, as IT WAS NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY.

The US is Broke and we are stealing from future generations and most of it is is ludicrus bullshit.

So the murders are the democrats that funded all the bullshit and took us to the brink.

@Phil if you suddenly stopped feeding one of the families you feed, without any notice at all, when you were perfectly capable of continuing for some time, so that other arrangements could be made, and people starved, yeah, that'd be something like murder. if you did it while committing some other crime — like taking a Congressional mandated agency to the woodchipper — it would be felony murder.

@interfluidity
We've been through this, it is nowhere a congressionally mandated agency. There is no law that makes it so. Congress has agreed and the lawyers of the DOJ have agreed and now it seems that the SC agrees also.

@Phil we have been through this, and you are delusional. Congress has not agreed, USAID remains law, and the Supreme Court has not weighed in at all other than to stay a requirement to restore some funding pending a hearing Friday.

perhaps Congress *ex post* will bless this lawlessness, we'll see. but as for now, it is black letter plain obvious illegal.

@Phil No, it's not, at least not unless the Supreme Court takes us all the way to "unified executive" madness in defiance of all of our history and the plain text of the Constitution, which gives Congress clear roles in the structuring if the executive branch.

As for now, you're just mistaken, but I have no interest in wasting another day going around on it.

@interfluidity That unified executive madness, is exactly what is in the constitution. anything else makes the idea of being self governing a joke.

Your analogy brakes down, since I wouldn't be relying on somebody else to pay for my treatement and I have agency, I'm not just sitting around waiting for somebody to take care of me. I'd either find another one or die, that's just the way it goes. Death is a part of life.

@Phil yeah. you see, i'm not so zen. death awaits us all, but in the meantime, we build societies, which give us extraordinary benefits but also impose upon us positive obligations. when we destroy the sinews of that society, when we shirk obligations we easily could fulfill, i think that's called doing evil. i'm not so zen about it.

@interfluidity
Why don't you buy the peanut butter?

@Phil i do what i can. but we join together in the provision of public goods, supported by compulsory taxation, because it is impractical for us individually to do these things and relying solely on voluntarism encourages free-riding. why don't you buy your own nuclear deterrent?

@interfluidity
See, I think it is completely immoral to use tax money to give to charity. It makes it compulsary to support things that are to me morally repugnant.

I would like to see a constitutional ammendment blocking such things.

Though the government could be free to raise money, through voluntary donations to for humanitarian purposes.

@Phil see, i disagree! i think we do extraordinary things by collective action, which can be enabled only by some degree of compulsory contribution.

i certainly support the nuclear deterrent. i also support the work of USAID.

how should we resolve our disagreement? people can have different philosophical and policy views.

that's what CONGRESS is for in our Constitutional system.

@interfluidity

So you are in favor of slavery.

@Phil no. it is no more slavery to tax to support USAID than it is to tax to support our nuclear arsenal. (LOTS of people object to paying for our nuclear arsenal.)

@interfluidity
Regardless it isn't the same thing as giving the money away, to somebody that isn't contributing to it.

@Phil in some ways it's similar in some ways it's different. to a lot of people, the existence of nuclear weapons is a moral abomination, it's much worse than, say, merely burning the money or wasting the resources. and yet those people do have to pay too. that's life in a shared political community. i oppose the Federal death penalty. i still help pay for the chair.