The original frame for the US-AID debate was: "Evil space Nazi Elon Musk killed 14,000,000 people!!!" *I and others pointed out that this is not possible, given that the global death rate only increased by 100k between 2024-25, and is expected to grow at ~that pace near future. *Citizens then started pointing out that the cuts may have directly killed a few hundred people, and named some of them. In response, more rightist writers like @arctotherium42 noted that they also saved some lives, by decreasing the pool of fungible money used to foment violence in the LDC world. Notably, the cuts also saved billions of dollars. Good or bad, in sum? THAT debate is interesting. But, getting there specifically required moving past the "14 million" sort of nonsense.