It was only a matter of time before the racists amongst us...

[Soph0571]

...started banging the ‘stop international aid’ drum as a response to this crisis.

Put the radio on this morning and was confronted by a radio host on a national radio station suggesting that as the UK is going to go through a difficult time economically that we should stop our international aid budget. That we should be taking care of our own, period.

Never mind that this virus is a freaking global pandemic. Never mind that it does not respect borders. Never mind that mankind in the developing world will have extremely limited access to adequate health care and projects that are funded through international aid are literal lifelines to some of the most disadvantaged in the world. Never mind that a public health crisis on this scale in developing countries will lead to a death rate unimaginable in the West. Never mind that the coming global recession will impact the most economically vulnerable countries the most.

For fucks sake. It is the same isolationist, xenophobic, racist hard line Brexiteers that blamed Johnny Foreigner for all the ills of the UK, now pushing for this measure, when the world should be pulling together. Wankers.

[Sherman A1]

1. Seriously?

There is enough with which to deal currently without the need to pose some "What-if" scenarios at this point.


The moon might turn to green cheese as well, but I suspect that is rather unlikely........

[Igel]

2. Yeah, I can see it.

My wife managed to rack up $13k in credit card debt that we've been paying off for a while now.

A few thousand of that was to help the poor--donations to one cause, helping her church, providing food and clothing to the homeless. Tents. That sort of thing.

And still, we've paid thousands of dollars in interest on that debt.

How much debt do you want to incur to help strangers? Not debt on somebody else's account, or some abstract collective account. Your personal debt. Knowing that it would create friction in your family because the money and interest on that money would have gone for, oh, a family vacation or maybe stuff for your kid?

It could be worse: This happened when we were both employed. Now imagine it happening when one of us was laid off. "Charity begins at home" shouldn't be replaced with "Sacrifice your own for strangers." Universal altruism that pisses on parochial altruism starts looking like contempt for those closest to you in pursuit of virtue through ideological purity. (Or, in my wife's case, religious purity.)