WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
You may be interested in TracingWoodgrains, lately of this parish, 's essay on a similar case. The problem is certainly not unique, though I wouldn't say it's universal either.
I do also want to say that, while this Lorenz person seems like a pretty tiresome outrage-bait-manufacturer, one has to laugh at "as reported by the Daily Mail", which it is perfectly sensible of Wikipedia to ignore as a source. It's tantamount to a tabloid.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Surely a critical mass of left-wing Twitter has moved to Bluesky now. There's no one left to tempt over to the Shiny New Guaranteed-Fascist-Free Twitter unless you find a way to kneecap Bluesky.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
What do you make of Scott's answer in God's Answer To Job, out of curiosity? It's the only one that's ever really convinced me, though it hasn't made me a believer.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
(see how he brought along his four year old son to the White House)
I mean, maybe he is, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that. It's a photo-op. You may as well conclude "Trump does seem to enjoy making burgers in his spare time".
As far as St Clair's motives, while I don't doubt money was involved, many women are sincerely sexually attracted to powerful, successful men, let alone geniuses. And, while no Hollywood star, he's not exactly ugly. I don't have difficulty believing a woman with a shot at him might genuinely have wanted a night with him in its own right, whatever came of it.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Yeah, this feels like an exaggeration. Tumblr was always its own wellspring of memes (though, of course, it might be dying too) and nowadays, TikTok and the like have a lion's share.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
That is not what has happened, and I believe that there is zero compelling reason to believe that it will happen.
That is perfectly fair, and I agree it's unlikely (though not quite out of the question for people who do more than post on Bluesky, on causes as sensitive as Israel/Palestine). But I am still uncomfortable with the MAGA base's unwillingness to denounce the scenario as beyond the pale. I think Trump - or Vance, or someone else who speaks for him - ought to be making the point clear. Ought to be actively pledging not to deport citizens. Instead, they're dodging the question. I think this is for PR reasons, to avoid looking soft, not because Trump actually intends to deport liberals by the plane-full. But it's still not a good look.
I think our other point of disagreement is that I see a much starker difference between someone with mere residency, and a naturalized citizen. I'm totally with you on temporary residents needing to abide by the rules of hospitality and remaining broadly apolitical. But as a matter of fact, I consider the most important part of citizenship to be that it's a license, and indeed an encouragement, to get involved in your country's politics. Involvement in the affairs of the polis isn't just a privilege, but also an expression of a citizen's civic duty. If we don't want an immigrant to get involve in politics then we shouldn't naturalize him in the first place.
And in a similar way, I think one of the things that go hand in hand with legal citizenship is the right to be tried and sentenced as a citizen. An immigrant who has earned American citizenship, then takes political action perceived to be against the American state and/or in the interest of a foreign power, is not a hostile alien. He is, instead, a member of the opposition so long as he abides by the law, an ordinary ciminal if he doesn't, and a traitor in extreme cases. But never again can these actions be judged as those an alien. (And of course, that's a double-edged sword! In many cases, actions which would be perfectly expected of a foreign national are despicable if they come from a traitor. But the difference is massive and meaningful.)
It's the difference between a babysitting gig and adoption. If you agree to babysit a kid and he's a bratty little hellion who breaks all your furniture, then with reasonable notice you get to send him home to his parents and refuse to take him in again. But if you've adopted the kid outright, however much he misbehaves, however much you regret your choice, that kid is now your son, and you would be culpable to treat him any differently from a biological child who misbehaved in the same way.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Trump actively liaised with El Salvador, and apparently paid it to imprison these people. This isn't a case where we flew the deportees to El Salvador, and El Salvador separately decided to indict them upon their arrival. It's not clear to me that Garcia has been formally charged with anything specific in El Salvador, and I would be astounded if he had gotten a fair trial there. Had America taken the handcuffs off him at the airport and let him go where he pleased from there, it's not clear to me that El Salvador would have any desire, let alone just cause, to arrest him unless he started committing crimes there. This is what I propose we do; it seems like a pretty clear middle ground between "refuse to deport anyone who might be imprisoned by their home country" and "actively ask for and facilitate their imprisonment once they're returned".
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
This doesn't assume that; in fact, it doesn't assume anything whatsoever about illegal immigrants because it's not talking about them. Please reread my post. I am very specifically talking about Democrats' fear, whether unfounded or otherwise, that Trump intends to start violating the rights of citizens if they happen to be his political opponents, and treat them like he's started treating illegal immigrants. This is not the only reason people are upset about the Garcia case - they also care about the rights of illegal immigrants qua illegal immigrants - but it is the one we are talking about right now.
You might be worried about a canary in a coalmine dropping dead because you care deeply about birds, and think it's terrible that a bird has been needlessly killed by poison gas. Equally, you might find concern for the bird secondary at best to the sudden fear that you, yes you, are at risk of choking to death. I am talking about the second thing, and saying that, at the very least, Trump's rhetoric has been less than reassuring.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Well, for example, you could minimize damage by not sending deportees to foreign prisons. Just fly them out and let them off at the airport and don't let them back in again. Whether the country to which they've been returned wants them locked up is its problem and they'll have to arrest them by their own means and prove a case against them within the local justice system to do that.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
What's ugly is that it amounts to "sure, the government can violate any citizen's rights at any time, but I support the regime, so I'll be alright", which is, you know, tyranny. The racial angle @sun_the_second mentions is part of it, but it's not the fundamental issue. It's the favoritism, the "one rule for the ingroup, a different rule for the outgroup".
I am certainly not saying you are obligated to extend your circle of concern to "everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction". But I do think that if you care about justice and democracy and the Constitution, you are obligated to care whether two US citizens are being treated differently purely based on political affiliation. People on the left are, in fact, afraid that we're not far away from Trump using Salvadoran prisons as an all-purpose gulag for American citizens whom he finds some way to define as criminals and enemies of the state - pro-Palestinian activists, say - whatever their ancestry.
And when they voice those fears, they get the feeling that the MAGA crowd doesn't so much say "oh, that would be utterly unconscionable, and we're absolutely certain he won't do that; but don't worry, we'd turn on him if he tried". The vibe is more like "yeah, well, maybe he will and maybe he won't, but it's not our problem. have you tried not being an unpatriotic shit-stirrer?".
Which doesn't prove Trump will actually do it, but it doesn't reflect well on his base either way.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Alas, you do not get to redefine what words means to get around your different, less pejorative, and more defensible choice of words when challenged.
I did not intend "awful" to be less pejorative than the long version, and I'm happy to defend the long version in the exact same terms. I am confident the three posters I linked above would agree with "hell-hole" or "torture-prison" just as much as with "awful".
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Nothing seems to have been done about the claim in the time since, though. I think the idea is that the claim was made and logged but everyone had long deemed it to be a nothingburger; and it was dug up again when files were scoured to find the requisite number of people to deport.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
What makes you think El Salvador is the only country in the world willing to take the deal? Why would it be? This is a wild take to me.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Ah, but that wasn't your original claim now, was it?
Yes it was. My original claim which you disputed was "Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole". "The Salvadoran prison is awful" is a shorter way of restating the same thing: "awful" is short for "a human-rights-violating hellhole" and anyone who runs human-rights-violating hellholes is, ipso facto, a dictator.
After all, the claim of being a gang member comes from the deportee
…?? Source, please? I thought everyone here agreed that the claim that Garcia was a gang member originated with an anonymous informant for US law enforcement in 2019.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
I don't think it's reasonable to ask for a list of people who've agreed to an offer that hasn't been made. But I'd be surprised if Bukele was the only guy in the world willing to say yes. The US is very rich, most countries are very poor. I'm not saying "send him to Belgium", here. Send him to Nigeria or something. Bribing the relevant Nigerian authorities would probably cost less than the plane flight itself.
There are people in this thread saying that they approve of the fact that it's a torture prison, that we should make American prisons more torturous, and even that getting a death sentence in the US is probably preferable to being sent to the Salvadoran prison. "The Salvadoran prison is awful" does not seem to be a claim exclusive to a left-wing media bubble.
To put the question another way - I mean - are you confident about your chances of seeing daylight again if you were thrown in jail by the Bukele government on vague, spurious suspicion of being connected to a gang in some way? I'm not sure there's enough money in the world to make me chance it.
careful about admitting that a human-rights-violating hellhole run by a dictator strongman can actually fix a country's crime problem with minimal side impacts.
The side-impact is that you have torture-prisons. Torture-prisons are bad. We shouldn't have them because they are unacceptable in and of themselves to anyone with a conscience; not because they wouldn't work, or because they would have unacceptable second-order effects. As with most things in life, there is a classic British comedy sketch about this.
(Although as side-effects on non-criminals go, people who lived under Soviet regimes tend to agree that living with the gnawing fear that you might get thrown in the torture-prison yourself if an apparatchik thinks you gave them a funny look is a pretty heavy toll on any innocent citizen's everyday well-being.)
In any case this isn't meant to be an argument that we absolutely must free Garcia. Just that the oft-repeated "he should be petitioning the Bukele government, not America" thing is delusional at best and bad-faith at worst. If it's not America's responsibility to save some possibly-innocent Salvadoran from being tortured in El Salvador, fine. "There are plenty of other Salvadorans being tortured right now, Garcia should never have been allowed on US soil, once he's been sent back his fate will be the same as any other Salvadoran's and if we don't intervene to save the others we have no reason to intervene to save him; que sera sera" is a coherent position. But let's not pretend he has some other way out. Pleading for American help and hoping the US will bite is the only thing anyone in his situation can do, whether or not he's actually entitled to it.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
There are other countries in the world with provisions for accepting asylum seekers. Besides, Trump was already paying El Salvador to take him and the other deportees; if all else fail you could pay a different country to take the guy.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
While there are other levels of disagreement, you're missing the one where Trump supporters might be confident that although some citizens may indeed be affected, it wouldn't be people like them but naturalized immigrants, children thereof, or at worst, shit-stirring far-left activists. In this, I fear they'd be correct, though it's an ugly thought.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Yes, but it may not result in a stable reversion to a healthy weight. Some people's absorption rate might be dysfunctional such that they lose any middle ground between "obesity" and "starvation". If all you care about is making them thin, you can technically keep them forever balanced on the razor's edge of starvation, but this is neither a practical solution (because their willpower will crack) nor a good one if what you want is to make the patient healthy.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
If a foreign national is being held in an El Salvadoran prison, then their home country ought to be the one they're contacting to seek release.
Well, okay, but, like. Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole, right?
We're clear on that?
Because it feels relevant to the case. "Apologies to the guy who we mistakenly paid for Stalin to put in a Siberian gulag, our bad. However, being from the Baltics, he should really be seeking redress from the legitimate Soviet government for any wrongful imprisonment and torture, not from us" is… kind of a non-starter?
Like, I get the US Gov can't really acknowledge this point on an official, diplomatic level. Nobody wants to go to war with fucking El Salvador. "Third World prisons are horrible torture-gulags and the POTUS is still expected to shake the President's hand on camera when we need a trade deal signed" is a fact of life. But when it comes to ordinary truth-seeking citizens like ourselves discussing the ethics of the case, we should really drop the pretense that Garcia has a snowball's chance in Hell of getting genuine due process from Bukele's government. It's either help from the U.S. or he never sees his kids again. Let's be realistic.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Specifically, the argument is whether he was supposed to be removed to El Salvador. This whole thing could have been avoided if they sent him somewhere else with no torture-prisons.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
No, but we might want to reform it if they kept accidentally killing people, then saying "yeah, we weren't supposed to do that, sorry. we won't make any reparations or apologize or nothing, though. yeah, it'll probably happen again. no, we don't care".
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
I do not believe that to be the case
We could trawl through old posts if you like, though I don't have the energy right now. But from what I saw, the rhetoric was very much trying to build outrage about Those Poor Innocent Girls and how uniquely revolting it all was; which isn't consistent with only caring insofar as it's a very minor victory for The Middle-Eastern Threat against The White Race on a global level. The gang members would have done more damage to ethnic Britons' long-term thriving if they'd assassinated a bunch of adult male investment brokers and computer scientists, or simply burned a lot of infrastructure, but I don't think the responses to such things would have remotely had the same emotional stringency. I can only conclude that they care, in part, because - or pretend to care because - of the actual suffering of the actual little girls, not just the greater-scope racial warfare.
I agree with you by and large, but to play Devil's Advocate - are gender-segregated showers mandated if you're running a swimming pool in England? The ruling only seems to ban trans women from showers designated for "women"; not to say that women-exclusive showers must exist. Presumably swimming pools can choose to bill showers for "biological women + transfeminine individuals" if they like, and that wouldn't violate the new law. (Not that I think they're likely to do so.)
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