@JayLJeffers I will read it, but ONLY out of epistemic and not moral obligation

@rose_rsj To be fair I would 100% support the first athlete who did blame their superbowl loss on God

@DustinRomney Or, to put it another way: If your taxes had a little box you could check to spend four dollars a year to help save millions of human lives, would you check it?

@DustinRomney But the money wasn't stolen, of course. It was taken legitimately through taxation. The idea that no tax funds can ever be legitimately spent on foreign aid that provides long-term benefits to the US anyway is absurd and unjustified.

@Morgan_Scape @caesar_pounce @orlando_marc @kittypurrzog Again, transparently dumb argument - "You don't sacrifice your entire life to save everyone, so I'm allowed to claw back four bucks a year from AIDS orphans." Idiotic. Just admit you can't defend the specific insane position political tribalism has pushed you into here.

@Morgan_Scape @caesar_pounce @orlando_marc @kittypurrzog This is what I find so disingenuous about you guys - you always start by taking some principled stand but it's just such an obviously evil position to take that eventually you have to start pretending the consequences won't really be that bad. At least own the evil, come on.

One fun thing I just learned is that Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" is actually a cover and that the original song was a Godfather-ass traditional Italian crooner:

@Morgan_Scape @caesar_pounce @orlando_marc @kittypurrzog PEPFAR costs about four bucks per American per year. Do you think the world would be better if tens of millions of Africans were dead from AIDS but every American had four more dollars a year?

@Morgan_Scape @caesar_pounce @orlando_marc @kittypurrzog It absolutely is - it's taking active effort to shut things down, much more than is required to keep it running.

I've become addicted to neti pots. I do like five a day. I can feel the amoebas in my brain as we speak. My children

@Morgan_Scape @caesar_pounce @orlando_marc @kittypurrzog It's like you're going out of your way to disconnect the fire sprinklers in your apartment building and then whenever someone complains you say, "Oh, so you think we should have fire sprinklers in *every* building? What if it cost a billion dollars? What about in closets?"

@DustinRomney Like, even if you believe all taxation is theft and the program is horribly unjust from that direction... if there's any time to "not resist the evildoer," it would be when they're taking four bucks a year from you to save children from horrendous agony and death, right?

@waldenpod Honestly that's one of its strengths

@DustinRomney I mean, I do donate a fair amount of my own income to global charities, including some that help with conditions in Africa. But that doesn't matter - even if I didn't, I would still be justified in saying it was evil to intentionally destroy a life-saving program like PEPFAR.