WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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 claim that the calculus is the same. When it comes to caring whether perfect strangers live or die, suffer or thrive, in ways that will never affect you - either you do, or you don't. Those of us who do, I'm confident are, in an overwhelming majority, applying the same drives in the same ways. Sure, some of us care about the suffering of our countrymen, others about the suffering of our whole race, others still of the whole human race, and others still about the suffering of all animal life. But the only thing that changes between all those cases is how you draw the border between the people you care about, and the people you don't. It's still altruism even if it's race-specific, much as someone who cares about other humans but doesn't give a fuck about animals is still an altruist.
This isn't to say you can't have genuine non-altruists who, by coincidence, have similar practical aims to altruists. For example, you might object to rape gangs not because you care whether the victims suffer, but due to a deontological objection to rape. Or you might value the survival of your ethnic group, without caring about the suffering of any specific members within it per se, and treat the Rotherham gangs as one facet of a genocidal attack against your race as a whole. I wouldn't call those people altruists. But once you start talking about the suffering of random girls an ocean away as something which in and of itself should make your blood boil, something which you have a moral impetus to stop if you can, even though it's in no practical sense your problem - then, sorry, you're an altruist. Albeit a narrow altruist. And a lot of people screaming about the British rape gangs were using that kind of rhetoric.
(Of course, they may have been lying — perhaps Scott was too optimistic in taking those fragments of altruism as glimmers of an underlying better nature, rather than disingenuous, cynical attempts to play on actual altruists' emotions and win them over.)
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
I would, actually, say that "altruist" objectively, etymologically describes anyone who cares about other people. It's what the "altr" means. Altruism is a broad church. Some altruists care about shrimps and others only care about humans. I see no reason why altruists who only care about white humans should act like they're something completely different.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
(or his ghostwriter if you prefer to continue believing that Trump is illiterate)
I don't think you have to believe Trump is unintelligent, let alone illiterate, to believe The Art of the Deal was ghostwritten. Ghostwriters can be used by someone who doesn't have the capacity to write a decent book, but more often than not, they're used by someone who can't be bothered to write a book although, if they hunkered down, they could. I'm perfectly willing to believe Trump could write a book by himself. I'm less willing to believe that he'd go through the trouble when he can pay someone to do it for him and rubber-stamp it.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
I'm aware actual-Nietzsche is more nuanced. But the guys Scott was debating aren't serious Nietzschean scholars, nor do they claim to be. Perhaps I should have just stuck with the tongue-in-cheek Based Post-Christian Vitalist coinage. The point is that these are people who sneer at the entire concept of Effective Altruism and indeed charity. You can't do that and care about Rotherham. It's untenable. If you're an American and you care what happens to the Rotherham girls, albeit only because they're white, then you're not coming from a completely different paradigm than the EAs. You just have an unpopular opinion on who the most relevant moral patients are.
Suppose a man loves his pet rabbit, and finds pictures of rabbits abstractly cute, but happily eats rabbit meat without a twinge of guilt, and has never lifted a finger to campaign to ban the hunting or industrial farming of rabbits. Suppose that he has a personal enemy. Now suppose that he learns that this enemy sometimes goes rabbit-hunting; and suppose that, having found this out, he makes a stink, ranting to all who'll listen about how it's outrageous, how the guy must be brought to accounts, and now won't everyone see how much of a monster he is, like I've been saying all along: he's been blowing cute defenseless bunnies' brains out for fun, you can't deny it now.
In such a case I think it's fair to accuse this man of using the rabbit thing as a convenient weapon against someone he hated anyway; and to say his anger has very little to do with a sincere concern for rabbit welfare. Even if he really does love his pet rabbit.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
It's perfectly possible to not-care-if-individual-Xs-comes-to-harm without hating Xs in general, or indeed, if you like Xs. Plenty of people like bunny rabbits, and might even sincerely love their pet rabbits, without turning into animal rights activists.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
While his criticism kinda missed the mark, I do think there's something inconsistent about it. You can have a consistent ideology of supremacy for your own ethnic group, but in a globalized world it's not really compatible with being a Nietzschean individualist who sneers at caring about the weak in general. The archetypal ubermensch is a pre-Christian warlord - an aristocrat who strides above the petty concerns of his own nation's peasants and paupers. The 'master' isn't interested in whether the daughters of the slaves two counties over are getting raped and tortured, white or otherwise. Unless he considers those counties part of his holdings and, therefore, his alone to rape and pillage.
A guy who's concerned about tortured little girls an ocean away because they're white girls and he considers the fate of the white race his business, whether or not he stands to gain anything from it, has more in common with a guy who's concerned because he considers the fate of all Homo sapiens his business, than with a guy who actually only cares about himself, his kin, and maybe his nation.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
One might argue he cherrypicked for stupid usages the moment he chose to get his example from tweets.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
It doesn't have to be to be worth bringing up, though. This started as a tangent about whether Trump 'should' take Caesar-style dictatorial power or not. If someone says "I don't think he should, because morality", it doesn't matter whether morality is an eternal absolute of the universe or a bunch of fuzzy drives encoded into the human brain by natural selection. A Caesar or Trump's ruthless ambition is also a fuzzy drive encoded into his brain by natural selection. Everything is, and the stars will keep on spinning regardless. That's life, at least if you're an atheist.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Not black and white. But black and grey.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Humans like harming the outgroup, and are very good at rationalization.
That they are. But mark the difference. Clean assassinations targeting Bad People(TM) is what people are openly in favor of. "Vicious terrorist murder" like Oct 7 will certainly be rationalized away or swept under the rug completely - but it's not openly endorsed.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Sure. I was just making the admittedly slightly pedantic point that the phrase "fake asylum claimant" is misleading and I hate it and it needs to die. Anyone claiming asylum is - by definition - a real asylum claimant, whether or not they actually deserve to have their claim recognized. They might very well be a spurious asylum claimant, but a spurious asylum claimant is still a real asylum claimant, in the same way that in a spurious lawsuit, a spurious plaintiff is still a plaintiff.
A "fake asylum claimant" properly defined would be someone who, say, faked paperwork about having recognized asylum-seeker status without actually submitting a request to the government. That kind of fraud might exist, for all I know. But it's not the same thing.
(Does this matter? I think so. A fake asylum claimant, in the proper sense of the phrase, would be willfully committing fraud. In contrast, many an asylum-seeker whose request should be turned down might, nonetheless, be acting in good faith; we can tell them no without lumping them in with the actual criminals. A toy example would be a guy suffering from pathological paranoia, who sincerely but irrationally thinks there are people after him. A serious example would be the scores of claimants who correctly believed their case met the criteria which have applied in recent years. It's not their fault our recent standards have been bullshit, and even if we start turning them away now, we shouldn't treat them like fraudsters.)
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
You've misread me. I said, if they had the power to nuke America with impunity. This isn't about nukes qua nukes. My point is simpler than that. When Side A ideally wants me to pay all its bills, and Side B ideally wants my entire civilization blown to atoms, I know who I'm siding with. "They're both crap and I don't care if they all kill each other" doesn't cut it, it's apples to oranges. Israel is an ordinary foreign nation acting out of ordinary self-interest, Hamas is representative of a festering ideological blight on humanity.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Maybe they will. I don't think the SCOTUS decision prevents them from doing that.
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.
…?? 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.
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