This is a bad take, even if we step away from your comparison of a body of millions of people to a someone living in Brooklyn with a trust fund.

> Perhaps the American taxpayer could be incentivized to continue financially supporting the DR Congo in other ways? Maybe they could apply to become a protectorate or somesuch. You can't have your sovereign cake and eat it, too.

We weren't asked about the abrupt change. I am sure that the average taxpayer supports maintaining lives overseas at minimal costs. She also probably wants pandemics not to infect her children on US shores.

> In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion.

On a geopolitical sense, this is absurd. Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?

▲

gottorf 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> even if we step away from your comparison of a body of millions of people to a someone living in Brooklyn with a trust fund

The article claims 57 cases and 35 deaths. Globally, Ebola killed 15k people over the past 50 years[0]. In the last big outbreak in the DR Congo, it infected less than 4k people in a country of roughly 100 million.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but your way of phrasing ("a body of millions") seems to dramatically overstate the impact.

> We weren't asked about the abrupt change.

There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo. It's really not like they were hiding their intentions. Broadly speaking, the electorate wanted to take a wrecking ball to what they saw as Washington excess, whether that characterization is fair or not.

> Just consider Poland: do they wish Ukraine didn't exist because of the amount of resources they expend on Ukraine's defense?

Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7326525/

▲

bonsai_spool 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but your way of phrasing ("a body of millions") seems to dramatically overstate the impact.

You compared a sovereign nation to an apartment, sorry I was unclear.

> There was a hotly contested election with one side promising abrupt change and the other side promising a maintenance of the status quo.

There's good polling about this sort of thing - Americans don't want to cause the death of other people. You may construe the electioneering to mean otherwise, but I was not alluding to this.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/05/01/majorities-of-...

> Poland shares a border with Ukraine, who is being invaded by a nation that has also been a historical aggressor against Poland. I don't believe this is a good comparison to the US funding healthcare in the DR Congo.

I disagree, because allowing infectious disease to fester slowly allows the development of antibiotic resistance and magnification of problems that could otherwise be contained.

In a sense, we're all closer to infections in the developing world than we recognize - despite the US efforts to dismantle the system that has surveilled these infections up to now.

▲

gottorf 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> a sovereign nation

A sovereign nation in name only, who cannot adequately protect its people against disease without Uncle Sam's backstop.

> Americans don't want to cause the death of other people

Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar?

	▲	bonsai_spool 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Your concept of causation here is tortured. Americans are not spraying Ebola from airplanes. Can you equally say that you caused the death of a beggar who you passed by without sparing a dollar? I can say that, having promised to deliver medication to someone, a capricious cut in medication supply will be causative in whatever change may result. And that is exactly the setting in which this poll was conducted.