I’m a supporter of helping protect Taiwan, but it’s useful to know the Chinese view is that Taiwan is a part of their country going back to the civil war, one they have never officially conceded as having ended and have never acknowledged Taiwan as anything but an internal issue to them.
Sure at some point it gets kinda silly to keep insisting “someday we’ll get them” instead of just giving up, but that does mean it’s not a good example of China being hostile towards foreign powers.
Not to be overly political (although how do you avoid it with a topic like this?) but I think it’s just another part of “MAGA maoism” as it’s been called. The idea of the Republican party as a small government free market pro liberty group died with Trump, who painted over that whole philosophy with his focus on culture war grievances, state control, and “owning the libs”.
Matt Yglesias had a good piece two years ago about how the tariff regime essentially makes a mini central planning department and we’ve seen Trump expressly use it as such, trying to bend the economy to attack companies and nations over personal grievances.
And Scott Lincicome of the CATO institute has covered this new brand of “state corporatism” as he calls it quite well IMO, about the nationalization of various companies and the various market distortions it creates.
“First they came” is a famous poem about the oppression of people, but it’s also a good general warning for all sorts of behavior. What someone will happily do to another is what they can happily do to you if you ever cross them. Whether that be the chick who cheated on her husband for you cheating on your new relationship, stuffing people into camps, or using the full force of government to smash your company into bits if you aren’t compliant.
There’s likely to be more of this behavior coming in the future. They’re trying to unlock themselves a new power, and what hammer doesn’t seek out a nail?
A substantial amount of the files are redacted, and there’s apparently a lot that hasn’t been released at all yet either. It’s hard to get a good idea of something if you can only see a small percentage of it, especially when that small percentage has been curated. Right now it feels kinda like going to North Korea, seeing a show village and declaring the country a rich and free democracy. The play looks great, and you’ll never know otherwise if you don’t get a look behind the curtains. And when the curtains do open, surprise there’s even more curtains!
And one of the big issues here is with trust. Maybe a redaction is personal information of a victim, or maybe it’s something else that needed to be covered up because it looked bad. The unknown is unknown after all. I’m not sure how much I can trust the Trump admin here at all when there’s already been multiple controversies with unwarranted redacting and the multiple u-turns that have already occured around the files, so “nothing to see behind the curtains” is not particularly convincing. At the very least the behavior has been very very suspicious.
There’s also some really interesting things to consider about the arguments around the files. One common claim was “if there was anything potentially damaging for Trump in them, why did the Biden admin not release it”. Now we know there is tons of stuff about Trump. Nothing that is definitive proof of criminal behavior, but things like the birthday book letter and accusations certainly seem like they could have been harmful for his campaign.
So now we’re stuck with “There is potentially damaging material about Trump in there, so why did the Biden admin not release it?”. Perhaps they’re more ethical than the argument makers thought and didn’t think it fair to leak those files. Or maybe there’s something that both admins don’t want revealed, whether it be a third party or a MAD scenario. I don’t know, but it again sure is weird!
For much of the twentieth century mass media was policed by The Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument.
The issue is that arguments often have more than just two views. Like let’s say someone goes on TV and argues for a 50% vice tax on alcohol, there’s a number of different possible responses here.
Keep the status quo
Vice tax but a lower amount
Vice tax but a higher amount
Prohibition again
Some other type of new limit on alcohol
Some other other type of new limit
Some other other other type of new limit (and so on for as many potential methods as exist)
Subsidies to encourage alcohol instead.
Who gets to demand a response here? And if the “I want more people to drink” guy gets a response, does it use up the opportunity from the prohibition one? Heck even “same side” responses could be difficult cause they still differ too. Does a “I prefer a 40% vice tax” response count the same as a 20% vice tax response? Does “I want drinking alcohol to require a drinking license” count the same as “I want alcohol consumption to be illegal if consumed over X limit?”
Maybe we try to solve some of this by only allowing “mainstream” views a response, but now we have to determine what is mainstream enough and what isn’t. And we still have the problem of determining how to separate out different views to begin with. Maybe we collapse the status quo people with the pro alcohol subsidies people because they both reject the tax, and then the guy who gets up on TV and actually gets to talk is the subsidies guy despite not actually being popular.
And I’m sure many can relate to seeing a person argue something on the internet you generally agree with, but then use bad arguments and behavior that you think are terrible. Maybe you believe in a 20% vice tax for X and Y reasons, but the guy who gets on stage to represent the view says “I support 20% because the voices in my head told me to.” Would you feel represented by that? I wouldn’t, and I would think it bullshit if the government tried to say that man gets to take the place of my well thought response.
The fairness doctrine just doesn’t seem very workable as a concept. To even do a somewhat decent job, government will have to get into and sort out the most niche debates on everything said on TV or radio, and there will still likely be tons of mistakes that happen. And I’m not even gonna get started on how much corruption/bribery/dealmaking/etc is going to be encouraged by this level of bureaucracy and decisionmaking.
It might not be intended this way but the discussion being centered around domestic surveillance of Americans does have a possible implication that foreign communications are already being covered by Claude without protest from Anthropic. If that’s the case then attempts by the government to turn it domestic shouldn’t be much of a surprise to them IMO.
One of the big issues with IQ discussions is that you end up taking the public’s struggle with statistics which is already terrible even when they’re trying and then add on a whole bunch of bad faith intention and discourse on top.
Like this is just anecdotal but the amount of people I’ve seen in this and similar discussion seemingly unable to recognize that averages aren’t necessarily that meaningful to any individual experience is crazy. A group with an average of 95 IQ is still going to have lots of individuals within it that are over >100! If you take a random person from average 95 IQ group and a random person from average 100 IQ group, there’s a not that far from equal chance that the former person is higher than the latter! Less than the 50⁄50, but it’s close. “Less than a coin flip” is not equivalent to rare.
A simple steelman is something like “if we’re very wrong about A[G/S]I, then birth rates are a big issue, so we better invest some resources into it, in case we’re wrong”.
This would be understandable if it weren’t for the timelines here. Let’s say AGI takes ~10x the amount of time (40 years instead of 4 years from the 2026 date) and the few billion people (which to note is just the population of the 1900s) happens in 100 years instead of 200, that would be 2066 vs 2126.
Despite being absurdly friendly on the timelines, it’s still not even close! That suggests to me a very rocky confidence level being held about AGI actually happening, unless one believes that the superintelligence smarter than all humans put together wouldn’t be able to help the birthrate.
Edit: Actually I’m messing up the math a little because I’m mixing up scenarios and hypotheticals. If the whole world had South Korea levels it would be much lower than a few billion in 100 years. But that’s already the unrealistic worst case scenario, the world overall right now still has a positive replacement rare and estimates put around 10 billion people by 2084 which is still two decades past our order of magnitude AGI predictions.
Yes and I have a major example, one of the leading CEOs in the AI industry. He believes that AI will be more intelligent than all humans currently alive by 2030 while also saying birthrates are a top priority for all countries.
But birth rates aren’t that bad that they’re ending civilization anytime soon. Even if every nation was at South Korea levels in 200 years we’d still have >2 billion people. If he believes AI will be more intelligent than all humans combined in less than a decade, then why worry about something centuries out with easy solutions presented by the thing coming in just four years?
A lot of the rationalist discourse around birthrates don’t seem to square away with AGI predictions.
Like the most negative predictions of AGI destroying humanity in the next century or two leaves birthrates completely negligent as an issue. The positive predictions with AGI leave a high possibility of robotic child rearing and artificial wombs (when considering the amount of progress even us puny humans have already made) in the next century or two which also makes natural birthrates irrelevant because we could just make and raise more humans without the need of human parents to birth them.
And stuff like say, the concerns about old people consumption outnumbering youth worker production don’t work well if one also believes that the upcoming AIs are going to make most work and labor obsolete to begin with. If pretty much everything is done by robots, then the issue of not enough young labor pretty much ceases to exist.
I don’t know if this is just the result of hedging against the possibility that this sort of AGI doesn’t happen, or if people just haven’t thought it all through much.
How many incidents will an LLM find of a president ignoring a court order?
To my knowledge at least, there hasn’t really been an actual time this has “truly” happened even now. It’s often said that Andrew Jackson did but the situation is complex enough that it’s arguable it shouldn’t count and the famous quote of “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” seems to be apocryphal.
Now there are lots of ways to essentially get around the court order for a long while without actually violating it like a favorite of modern presidents to go “ok X justification doing thing was ruled unconstitutional, but that doesn’t mean Y is, and if that gets ruled it doesn’t mean Z is” or dragging things out in court exhausting as many appeals and pauses as possible to delay for months/years but I’m not aware of any direct violations at least. Even something like this list I found not only gets the facts wrong about Jackson but openly contradicts itself in the parts about Lincoln and Roosevelt where the executives “victory” is not because they ignored the court, but because Congress acted.
“The Supreme Court ruled the act unconstitutional as the government could not levy a tax on companies merely to have that money paid back to farmers. However, the act was adjusted two years later and continued in its new form.”
Like that’s literally not defying the courts. That’s the previous act being ruled unconstitutional and a new act being made that didn’t contain the specific unconstitutional part in it.
Which is to say that you also need to be careful about what is actually happening. Biden’s quotes about how the supreme court “didn’t stop me” looks like the admin ignored a court order, but they were really just did that workaround in the previous paragraphs of doing Y and Z. The Trump admin right now is talking about their tactics with tariffs if they get ruled against and many make it look like they plan to defy the ruling, but it so far seems to just be the same exact tactic of pivoting to something else and claiming it gives authority.
I assume 3 and 4 are the main reasons. If you want to know what’s happening locally, join a Facebook group and you’ll know things way faster than your local paper most of the time. Also parts like the classifieds/job information/etc are all replaced by the Internet so a huge function of local newspapers has become obsolete.
National news is also slowly dying too, just not to the same degree. I think the loss is mitigated now by distribution. National news appeals to basically everybody, so something like NYT and WAPO can pick up subscribers from the other side of the country or even across the world (like how I read the BBC sometimes as an American). Meanwhile I don’t care about the local happenings of Raleigh or Wichita or other places I don’t live that much.
I also think there’s another point that news agencies have learned tragedy and controversy sells more, and local papers just can’t generate as much of that as the national news can. There’s just not that much bad and controversial stories going on nearby most of the time.
Yeah what caused it is definitely still up in the air, although I doubt it’s going to end up as an either/or situation. Even if we can point to social factors as a major cause, how environmental stimulus impacts people differently still depends on their preexisting biology so it’s going to be a mix there regardless. Just how much? I don’t know.
Because the answer to this question has massive implications for what healthcare should look like for trans people.
Now I’m very libertarian so I don’t think it should impact much at all for adults. Trans people already have the freedom of choice and they’re using it. In terms of bad healthcare decisions, there’s a lot worse going on where people can even straight up die from foregoing useful stuff in favor of magic herbs and other snake oil so it’s not even a major priority if we were to crack down on bad healthcare. Which to be clear, I’m against doing even for that worse stuff.
Regarding children is definitely a harder choice but that gets into the messier topic of child freedom vs parental authority.
I’m trans so I have a motive to search for evidence that suggests I am ~biologically valid~ and not subject to some kind of psychosocial delusion.
I’m personally not a fan of viewing things this way to begin with because I believe all differences in human behavior is “biologically valid”.
If two people are exactly the same in every way except one prefers purple and the other prefers green, I expect we would find a difference somewhere in the human body and brain that matches this and explains it. Whether favorite color comes from a single part of the body or a complex emergence of various parts, I still expect a difference. I expect if Omega were to come down and examine a person’s body/brain, they would be able to predict basically everything about that person. “This guy likes green, likes to wear shorts during winter, has a crush on Heather at work and is still embarrassed about that time he peed himself in fourth grade”. We are not Omega, human understanding of our own physical existence is poor and we can’t tell the sorts of things it could but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t exist.
Trans people are “biologically valid” by default in the sense that their behavior is explained somewhere in their physical self the same way the green fan buying a green shirt is “biologically valid”. Omega could look at someone and tell “this person will call themselves transgender, take cross-sex hormones and present the cross-sex social role accordingly”. Omega also could tell if someone was gay. A similar pet peeve of mine is the debate over whether or not homosexuality is a choice. The issue to me is that we can always go up one step further on the free will ladder “ok that’s a choice, but why did they make that choice?” and eventually end up, always, with that their biology made it so.
Of course other people have different views on free will especially those who believe in metaphysical existences like a soul. Even Omega could not determine the difference between the soul that prefers green and the soul that prefers red just by looking at their physical body, but I’m not religious or spiritual. And I’d argue that a soul doesn’t even really change the discussion, because I assume Omega with a Soul Reader should be able to do it again.
That doesn’t mean anything has to be viewed as morally acceptable. I still think there are people who are immoral and bad even if I believe it’s the result of their biology. I still think there are people who are dangerous and need to be locked away even if in the far off abstract it’s not “their fault” that their biology drives such behavior. And that doesn’t mean that trans people have to slot into man-made category A instead of man-made category B, or whatever.
But I do think “is it biologically valid” a silly argument to be having to begin with.
The CDC started lying about the effectiveness of masks to convince people to stop using them so service workers would have access to them as political pressure on them mounted.
That’s the common explanation given, but from my understanding at least it’s (at least partially) incorrect and the original recommendations were due in part to not understanding Covid was airborne. And that was because of a major communication error ~60 years ago from “Alexander Langmuir, the influential chief epidemiologist of the newly established CDC” who had pressed back on airborne viruses being common as he thought they were too similar to miasma theory.
Like his peers, Langmuir had been brought up in the Gospel of Personal Cleanliness, an obsession that made handwashing the bedrock of US public health policy. He seemed to view Wells’ ideas about airborne transmission as retrograde, seeing in them a slide back toward an ancient, irrational terror of bad air—the “miasma theory” that had prevailed for centuries. Langmuir dismissed them as little more than “interesting theoretical points.”
Langmuir seems to have finally accepted it after a period of time, but the focus was on <5 micron particles and that got snatched out of context and only particles smaller than that being airborne became the medical gospel.
A high school coach who has to choose whether to allow a trans student to compete in female sports is faced with a difficult social dilemma. If they deny the request, then the student- who wants badly to be seen as female- will be disappointed and might face additional bullying; if they allow it, that will be unfair to the other female players. In some cases, other players may be willing to accept a bit of unfairness as an act of probably supererogatory kindness, but in cases where they are aren’t, explaining to the student that they shouldn’t compete without hurting their feelings will take a lot of tact on the part of the coach.
One big part of the issue here is that sports doesn’t have a single goal. At the top of top levels, winning is basically all that matters and you’re trading players around, kicking off people who suck and doing basically everything you can to see who is best.
But most sports isn’t at the top of top levels. A friend group’s weekend pickup basketball game isn’t likely to kick one of their friends out because he sucks unless it’s so massively disproportionate that they’re basically not even playing the game anymore. The YMCA soccer teams I was part of as a kid would field me for part of it despite obviously being a weaker player (in part because I was scared of getting hurt going after the ball cause all the kids just crowd around it).
With casual games like at schools, we typically even shame people who take it too serious and make fun of the behavior like this South Park episode. A quick search on why to play sports comes up with the Google AI recap of
People play sports to improve their physical and mental health by increasing fitness, strengthening bones, reducing stress, and releasing mood-boosting hormones. Sports also provide social benefits, such as developing teamwork, leadership, and communication skills, while building confidence, resilience, and a sense of purpose. Additionally, sports teach valuable life skills like time management and problem-solving, encourage healthy lifestyle habits, and offer a fun way to socialize and make friends.
Interestingly, none of these many reasons chosen by the AI overview is “racking up wins”. After all, the majority of people doing sports will by basic logic not be in the top 1%, or top 10% or even top 49%. And almost every single person participating in school sports will not make it to professional. They simply can not get to the Top of the Top. And yet, they play anyway, so clearly there must be other reasons.
For the majority of actual play, skill level matters mainly for keeping the game feeling like a game. A top 1% basketball player vs your average Joe is such a a wide gap that the average Joe might as well be sitting on a bleacher. A grandmaster chess player vs a novice is going to fall asleep from boredom. A challenger League of Legends team could probably end up 100⁄0 against a Bronze one. But as long as things are equal enough that the game can be maintained, most play doesn’t need to be too concerned about skill level because the truth is that they suck, they will always suck, and they’re playing for a different reason than just getting wins.
One issue with underdog narratives nowadays is that they tend to be applied to large groups of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people. Even if there are general statistical truths, by their very nature those large groups still tend to be very diverse and dynamic at the individual level. And the most standout of those tend to be the rich and powerful elites, which the average Joe is comparing themselves to.
“My group” = all the normal hard working people in my personal life
“Their group” = the rich and powerful elites I see on Television or in the news
But of course the perspective is the exact same for the average Joe of the other group! Their group is all the normies in their life while your group is the elites of your side mentioned on TV and in the news. My left wing father would talk about the Koch Brothers and other right wing millionaires/billionaires/elites and some of the right wing adults in my life would mention people like George Soros and other left wing millionaires/billionaires/elites.
I don’t know if this is a big part of the explanation, but I do think it’s a meaningful part at least.
The hostile media effect is particularly striking because it arises in settings where there’s relatively little scope for bias. People watching media clips and sports are all seeing exactly the same videos. And sports in particular are played on very even terms, where fairness just means enforcing the rules impartially.
If your beliefs about the world = base reality then any straying away from your beliefs is inherently going to be interpreted as biased against (your) reality. We can all generally agree on the obvious stuff like when a tennis ball is clearly outside the lines but if it just skirted the paint and it’s hard to really tell then motivated reasoning starts to kick in, and your reality is whatever you want it to be.
And you don’t see “ok your tennis ball skirted the line but I think you got it in” as biased towards you, you just see it as them making the obvious correct acknowledgment of the world. Each ruling with you is a ruling that’s just going with obvious truth and each ruling against you is a biased denial of facts.
The incident that supposedly taught Spider-Man that with great power comes great responsibility was him refusing to stop a criminal and the criminal killing Uncle Ben. But in that story, he could have stopped the criminal easily, with negligible loss to himself.
In the original Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-man declines to stop a burglar in a building earlier that day. A police officer is like “hey mister, all you had to do was trip them for me” and Spider-man is like “no, all of that is your problem, I’m through doing things for other it’s all about me.” He wanted to be a TV star.
Then later (days later), Peter arrives home one evening to find a police car stopped in front of his house. Uncle Ben was shot in a burglary and it was the same guy as he learns in the warehouse. (Interestingly enough, Ben at the time did not say his famous line, the text is there as commentary but Ben himself did not say it).
Uncle Ben would have lived if only he had stopped some particular criminal 20 miles away at 1 AM during the fourth month
So it’s actually a lot closer to this. His failure to stop the random burglar at the store led to Uncle Ben dying.
The lesson that Spider-Man took out of it—that he has to help people at great expense to himself—doesn’t match the actual event—where he should have helped someone at no expense to himself.
It’s not like the criminal was aiming at Uncle Ben and Spider-man just refused to save him, it was an incident multiple days (maybe even weeks) before where he refused to intervene! And Peter doesn’t want the pain he experienced to happen to others.
It’s very similar reasoning to Batman, he has no reason to take up the mantle and fight crime past his parents murderers but he does so anyway. They are empathetic and caring people. They are aspirational stories about the moral responsibility to do good for others, they’re pretty blatant about it and even Stan Lee literally says that is what makes a hero.
Are you a religious person? Do you believe we should run society according to the Bible? I am not, and I do not.
No I am not religious, but in a general point about American society America’s main religion is extremely relevant. The guiding moral philosophy of most Americans says helping out others is what God wants of them.
And the main problem with USAID, as others have pointed out, is that helping people was entangled up with promotion of left-wing politics. Saying that we are forced to keep promoting the left-wing politics because otherwise we wouldn’t be saving people is a hostage puppy.
That’s a perfectly fair argument if you think it’s not being done properly. Why exactly getting rid of the left wing parts requires the killing off programs like PEPFAR and other very useful and helpful programs that even major charities (like the Vatican which isn’t some incredible left wing propaganda group) say are helpful is beyond me, but if your argument is that it is necessary then fine.
I never said USAID is perfect, and there are potential reasons it needs to be dismantled even at the possible costs of millions of lives. Just that “We shouldn’t help others out” is a very niche view in the US to the point of basically being a weakman argument, even Republicans still seem to poll 5% of government funding going to foreign aid.
Yes. And in the context of Spider-Man, it was about a situation where Spider-Man should have helped people when it had little cost to himself. It was, of course, used to explain why Spider-Man went out superheroing, but as such it didn’t actually make sense.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say but Spider-Man goes out saving people because he has the power to save people. Like much of early superheroes, they’re aspirational. And Stan Lee was pretty blatant about this https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/13/superpower-luck-stan-lee-quotes-comic-characters
“Another definition of a hero is someone who is concerned about other people’s well-being, and will go out of his or her way to help them – even if there is no chance of a reward. That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.”
A hero to Stan Lee is a person who helps because they feel it is right to help.
Not many people think that helping others is wrong. But “wrong” and “not an obligation” are very different things.
That’s true they are different, but helping others being inherently good is imbedded deep in American culture! Also not just media, the most believed in religious text of our country has plenty to say about helping those in need for the sake of it
And USAID was something that many religious charity groups worked with due to similar goals.
C.R.S. is governed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops with the mission to serve the poorest and most vulnerable overseas. In 2023, it worked in about 120 countries serving over 200 million people through 1,000 projects. It serves people on the basis of need, not creed. U.S.A.I.D. has provided funding and non-financial support to C.R.S. for decades, accounting for about 50 to 60 percent of its budget, or between $500 million and $700 million per year. C.R.S. works with and through 2,000 field partners, about half of which include local Catholic parishes and dioceses. U.S.A.I.D. has been a significant and longtime partner of the U.S. and global Catholic Church.
A final defense: why spend money helping out people in other countries? A nation’s obligation is to its own! The people saved by foreign aid aren’t Americans, so why should we bother to help them? In response:
I think the big thing to me is American culture kinda says we should. Think of some of the most famous uniquely American cultural icons in modern history, the Superhero. People with power above almost every other person who protects and helps other just because they believe it’s the responsible thing to do with power. One of the most famous American media quotes ever is Uncle Ben’s “With great power comes great responsibility” line.
Or take Star Trek. Starfleet and the federation runs humanitarian programs all across the galaxy. From providing medical supplies to war torn areas to helping Bajor recover in DS9 (although that is helped by the discovery of the wormhole in the area). As the Star Trek wiki itself points out
One of Starfleet’s primary duties was to offer humanitarian aid whenever possible. (VOY: “Learning Curve”, “Counterpoint”)
In the TOS episode Whom God Destroys Kirk talks about the humanitarian dreams of these founders
They were humanitarians and statesmen, and they had a dream-- a dream that became a reality and spread throughout the stars, a dream that made Mr. Spock and me brothers.
So much of the positive optimistic American culture and media is dedicated to a similar idea, that it is good to help people just for the sake of it, especially when you’re powerful.
That doesn’t mean you should do everything everywhere all the time. For example the Federation officially maintains a non-interference rule for less advanced civilizations, and while it’s often breached in the goal of helping others, it is an acknowledgement that involvement isn’t always the correct option. And in Sanctuary the topic of helping refugees find a new homeworld clashing with the resource struggles of Bajor at the moment is treated with respect to both sides, though siding more towards aid as the correct solution there.
And in media like The Amazing Spider-man issues #31-33 and the movie Spider-Man 2 Peter’s struggle balancing his personal life with his superhero is a central part of the plot.
And reflecting this, the US has a strong history of bipartisan aid efforts. PEPFAR can only be cut because it existed to begin with, and USAID was made in the 60s surviving all the way till now! Heck even now the main arguments out of the admin aren’t that we shouldn’t help people, but instead that the programs are corrupt or counterproductive or hurting us too much in giving (like the Bajor refugee example). They say “America first”, not America Only.
Now I have my disagreements about these claims, and I think the way we went about it even if they were true about some parts is still irresponsible but even in rhetoric they can’t find themselves saying that helping others is wrong! I don’t know what they do and don’t personally believe, but it suggests something there.
And polling also seems to suggest that Americans are pretty pro help, they just don’t really have a grasp on the reality of foreign aid.
the November poll finds the median estimate of the percentage of the federal budget most Americans think is spent on foreign aid is 25%. When you ask Americans how much would be appropriate to spend on foreign assistance, the median response is 10%. In fact, only a little over 1% of the federal budget currently goes to foreign assistance.
Like yeah if I thought a quarter of my taxes (or even more for a pretty good portion of respondents) were going to foreign aid I would be in support of scaling that back too! I think a lot of other people advocating for programs like PEPFAR would feel the same way. But even with that Americans still name a pretty hefty amount of aid they want to provide. Now I don’t think we can take the exact number too seriously, the American public is bad with percentages and likely doesn’t realize just how big that is either but the direction is there towards helping people in need around the world.
In that sense your question of “The people saved by foreign aid aren’t Americans, so why should we bother to help them?” is practically a weakman, because it seems most Americans do believe we are obligated to help others and their opposition is mostly operating under the idea that we spend insanely large amounts of money to do it, that our country is in such a state of emergency that we need to focus everything on ourselves first (like the Bajor refugee example), or that it’s corrupt/fraud being used to smuggle in unrelated things like “leftist propaganda” (like Musk highlighting the spending he considered woke) rather than an actual opposition towards aid to those in need. The people saying we shouldn’t help anyone are small in number and not representative of the general population.
Edit: This last point I think is actually the case with a lot of these topics. For example Americans are still pretty favorable of immigration. Trump’s [previous] popularity on the topic might seem like it comes from a strong “we hate foreigners coming here” perspective, but polling + actual talks with people suggests it’s more like a foreign aid situation. They don’t want zero immigration, in fact they quite like accepting legal immigrants. They are just concerned about the ideas of criminals and bad actors sneaking in through loopholes or people being lazy and living off aid instead of working. The opposition to deporting those seen as hard workers here in the country is shown with Joe Rogan for example, one of America’s most popular podcasters who had endorsed Trump this very election! Likewise, I imagine the average person’s perception of immigration is off with reality but they don’t seem to be against immigration nearly as much as the admin is.
Edit2: And I live in a Trump+20 rural area! My talks with people seem to suggest that even quite a bit of supporters are still generally favorable of immigration as an idea. Many seem to be happy overall because they think Trump is removing lots of dangerous criminals, but they do seem to think the removal of workers is just unfortunate collateral to this. Maybe it’s a selection bias of what type of Trump supporters I interact with in my life, but they are still Trump supporters. Like the lady who runs the cleaning company I use, she was boldly in support of Trump and yet many of her workers are Mexicans and she speaks Spanish.
I think a lot of politicians and pundits see victory as support for going all out, but in reality a lot of people are only marginally favorable. They were scared of criminals and welfare thieves, not farm workers and house cleaners and landscapers.
One of the required secondary powers of OCD is this, a disordered ability to shut down your intrusive thoughts and feelings. If they could just make it go away intuitively, they would.
Maybe it’s possible for many to train their feelings away with enough sustained effort still, but it’s clearly far more difficult to stop the thoughts than most people face.