Yes.
I keep poking around for any indication that there's real repression of opposing parties or resistance to his regime from actually aggrieved groups. I come up empty. Happy to read firsthand accounts of abuse, but I really want to know if the country is doing 'better' or not in the aggregate.
The Wikipedia page for his most recent election doesn't even suggest that he had to fudge numbers to win overwhelmingly. There were active protests against him that didn't get arrested or repressed. No political opponents were arrested.
I don't know what 'side effects' you're suggesting came downstream of the crackdown, ESPECIALLY with regard to the average citizen's daily experience in the country.
And as stated, the U.S. has its own black spot in Gitmo, and the left has virtually stopped even mentioning these days.
I would accuse them of very, VERY selective criticism on this point.
On a purely practical basis, if your choices are between a 'tyrannical' gang that kills 4000+ people per year, or a 'tyrannical' president who imprisons the guys who were doing the killing, even if it sweeps up some folks who probably don't deserve it, what is the OBVIOUS choice for the citizen who has been terrorized by the former for years?
"oh no El Presidente might abuse all this power he's being handed, better to let the completely unaccountable and aggressively violent gang continue operating than risk a dictator!"
Am I suggesting that there's no in-between options? Nah.
I am suggesting that liberals have failed to present such a workable option and it is not surprising that the El Salvadorans have been delighted to have the gang problem solved.
faceh
7d ago
"I got pig iron, I got pig iron, I got ALL pig iron" pops up occasionally despite making no sense in almost any context.
faceh
7d ago
If that's the position, 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.
And of course, the U.S. will negotiate the release of its citizens from Russia itself while Russia is public enemy numero uno, the Soviet example falls kind of flat.
And of course of course, the U.S. had its own secret impenetrable dictator prison for foreign nationals in Gitmo, so we should be showing just as much objection there, no?
Yep.
I still remain a bit confused as to why the onus remains on the U.S. to seek his release.
Even if a U.S. Judge asserts jurisdiction and El Salvador chooses to humor this, a non-U.S. citizen being held by a non-U.S. country is not something we'd expect U.S. Judges to devote resources towards without some strong U.S. interests at stake.
The actual basis on and circumstances under which he was arrested and removed might bear scrutiny, but let us say that the Judge does determine he was wrongfully removed. Seems like the remedy is to release him and he can find his own way from there.
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.
The emotional component becomes clearer to me when I flip the script. Imagining some random U.S. citizen sneaks into, I dunno, Italy. They catch him but a judge rules he can't be removed for the time being, and he marries an Italian lady and has some young kids in the meantime, but never goes through the naturalization process.
Then the next Italian Prime Minister comes in and actively starts deporting migrants, but not necessarily to their home countries. If the U.S. Citizen ends up in an Albanian prison, do we actually expect him to cry to the Italian government to bring him back? Does anyone really feel like a U.S. citizen is entitled to activate the Italian Justice system to come to his rescue?
OR more absurdly if Italy ships him to the U.S. and has the U.S. agrees to hold him in prison, do we really, REALLY think he's going to succeed by asking Italian courts to intervene, rather than taking it up directly with the U.S. government to get himself released and, lets say, his wife and kids brought over here?
The weight of the argument in favor of bringing Abrego Garcia back seems to be
- The emotional argument that his wife and kids are suffering due to his removal;
- The emotional argument that he'd just be better off here because the U.S. is a better place to live, it would be cruel to 'make' him live elsewhere.
If we discard those arguments, if Garcia is released, only "LEGAL" positions (not really moral ones) that make sense are that he could try to return to the U.S. on his own dime and through legal channels, or he can return 'home' and bring his wife and kids with him to reunite the family.
faceh
19d ago
Ya know, I'd actually agree it would be nice to have clarity as to how these countries can respond to quickly get the tariffs dropped, the attempt at opacity seems odd.
But I ascribe that to the mix of goals Trump is pursuing, which is to say he needs flexibility so tying himself to an algorithm means he can't maneuver much.
That's maybe the concerning part, aside from Trump's temperament. He is trying to optimize along a few different dimensions instead of merely seeking one blunt policy outcome.
faceh
19d ago
Or potentially agree to grant access to your country's natural resources, or make investments directly in American manufacturing.
Like Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively.
https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-us-tsmc-chips-investment-71d3aeb2bc403a92ce8eccdd8c51c0c8)
Now I actually would NOT like an overly complex patchwork of trade deals.
I'd prefer the world where everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.
As I intimated upthread, if these countries do NOT come to the table to attempt negotiation, I will have to seriously rethink my model of the world at large.
faceh
19d ago
Ultimately, long term is 10+ years out, for me. But even 5 years is a pretty long time horizon given the massive pace of change going on in many sectors. We could have the beginnings of a Mars colony by then.
faceh
19d ago
The benefits of lower-skilled farm workers do not in fact accrue primarily to the upper and political classes; it makes food cheaper, which helps basically all consumers, and it helps the farm workers.
I also makes nannies cheaper, house cleaners, delivery drivers, etc. etc., but those services are definitely more keyed for the upper classes.
And it also places upward pressure on housing prices in specifically the areas where lower/middle class homebuyers would be looking. And if its true that migrants get more financial assistance to find housing than average citizens, they can actually outcompete those native citizens!
Migrants aren't buying large mansions in upscale areas, by and large, they're going for the same single-family homes that your average twenty-something couple might want, too. So they place upward pressure specifically on the housing that would be accessible to middle class and down, not the top quarter of the economic stack, who can afford to live in communities far from migrant populations.
Of course, they provide labor to build more housing, so I'm willing to accept that it might be a wash in that regard.
I find it hard to believe Martha's Vinyard couldn't absorb 50 migrants if they were willing to put them to work (probably under the table)
They presumably wanted to avoid any APPEARANCE that migrants would be welcome to move in there, lest it attract a larger crowd. I agree they probably have tons of them employed in the area, maybe some that even live in it, but that state of affairs persists only if they can control the flow.
faceh
19d ago
Offer access to your country's natural resources, like was proposed with Ukraine?
Make direct investments into American manufacturing like Taiwan?
I expect that the deals reached by each country will look different, with the outcomes being the result of some creative horse-trading.
Now, I'm also concerned that this will result in an overly complex patchwork of trade deals and potentially contradictory obligations between various countries, when the simplest outcome would just be everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.
But this is not some historically unprecedented diplomatic endeavor.
On this basis literally anything Trump does can be explained as a brilliant negotiating tactic.
Yes.
He wrote a book on this. To the extent you believe the words on the page, you can use it to make insights into his mind and his preferred strategies. He's not some completely mysterious, inscrutable chaos demon, but when people react to his actions with such alarm, its easy for him to build a reputation as one.
We can make judgments based on his behavior during his first term, which so many people seem to treat like ancient forgotten history.
I AGREE that you can't pretend every Trump move is a 4-D chess move that will inevitably result in whatever his desired outcome is. I prefer to model him as a shark, with finely-honed instincts for survival in his cutthroat environment.
But it would be stupid to assume he does things without some goal or strategy in mind, after all he's successfully outmaneuvered many experienced political actors and avoided a multi-pronged attempt to send him to prison to win a national election. Twice. (maybe three times, but that argument isn't worth rehashing). Other than him just being the favorite of the Gods, the best explanation is he is more canny than his opponents want to give him credit for, or his opponents are genuinely that incompetent.
Here's a question: can you point out any actions he took in the foreign relations arena, from his first term, where he straight up 'lost?' i.e. where he capitulated with absolutely nothing to show for it or maybe even gave something up?
Because he racked up some actual wins. People said moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would trigger chaos and reprisals from the Muslim world. Instead it went smoothly, and many Arab countries lined up shortly thereafter to improve diplomacy with the U.S. and Isreal!
I mean, the Middle East did eventually fall back into increased chaos... during Biden's term.
Oh, and remember when he Went to North Korea, the FIRST President to do so, and got them to at least verbally agree to denuclearization talks?, and NK has been substantially less uppity since then?
Apparently that's still their stated intention!
Look man, I'm trying my best to disentangle my feeling about Trump's persona and actually look at his actions and their outcomes, and end of the day, the guy usually brings home some kind of bacon when he's locked in, no matter how distasteful you find his tactics.
So we could just pretend that THIS time he's acting completely out of pocket and flailing around randomly or see where it actually goes. Yes, there's some cause for concern! Trump can be temperamental! But I'm also modelling the other countries in this situation, and it seems obvious they almost all have good reasons to reach some kind of deal in the very near future, and failure to even try to do so would be irrational on their part! I don't think they're irrational, so I think the pressure from Trump will get them to the table, at least.
I can see the argument that 'labor' as a class is somehow fungible and that it is best to allow labor to flow to where it is most needed/most cost effective, even across borders. If there's farm work that needs to be done in the U.S., and ample farm workers in Mexico, then you can acquire mutual gains through trade! So 'free trade' does, to some degree, imply free movement of laborers, which implies some level of immigration.
But the apparent reality is that the benefits of most immigration, particularly lower skilled, accrue primarily to the upper and political classes, while costs are borne by the relatively low classes and strains infrastructure for everyone. That time Desantis flew 50 migrants into Martha's Vineyard and the entire town basically declared a state of emergency to get them out ASAP really drove that home. The Migrant hotels in New York also bolstered the point, we don't even have to get into exaggerated stories of Haitians in Ohio to see the issue.
But this should still be easy-ish to fix within the rules of our system, just be willing to deport troublemakers, and shift some of the burdens/costs to the upper classes too so they internalize the cost of their policies and adjust them to make them more efficient. But like almost every other Liberal Shibboleth, it became a HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE that ISN'T SUBJECT TO DEBATE.
At the risk of speculating TOO much, its what you might expect from a "Door in the Face" negotiation tactic.
Which Trump absolutely has employed in the past.
As I said if he's too temperamental to actually negotiate, articulate demands, make some concessions, and reach a deal then yeah, we're in trouble.
We'll probably be getting the first whispers of offers and counteroffers over the weekends. The administration has been much more leak-proof (Issues with Signal chat notwithstanding) and moving much more quickly this time around, indeed the details of the tariffs didn't leak in advance, hence it catching many by surprise! It's absurd to assume there's not a lot of active discussion happening behind closed doors already.
But I think that a guy who knows he's only got about 3 years to impose as much of a policy impact as possible (probably less than 2 if the midterms don't go well) is going to be more aggressive up front.
Remains to be seen, the one interesting thing is that Tariffs are just paper barriers to trade. A 'social construct,' if you will.
We haven't physically built a wall or blown up any bridges.
If countries are willing to play ball and lower all (their) paper barriers to trade, then goods can 'instantly' start flowing again, and possibly under better overall terms. Like, just last week Trump committed to bombing the Houthis in hopes of restoring safe access to the Suez for global shipping. He clearly WANTS goods to flow smoothly.
I will precommit now, that if other countries actively take steps to reduce tariffs and otherwise appease Trump's demands and Trump is too temperamental to accept these offers in good faith and we still have most of these Tarriffs in place at the same levels come May 2nd 2025 (unless real deals are pending come that date), it is a bad thing and we will be in for some rough times. I will criticize/condemn Trump and Co. in no uncertain terms.
If other countries DON'T take active steps to reduce tariffs or otherwise negotiate, I will have to admit that my model of the world is drastically misinformed.
So my full expectation is that there will be a couple weeks of rapidfire and rough negotiations with some touch-and-go moments, but ultimately other nations will do the needful and come the end of April Trump will make a YUUUGE fanfare about signing Tariff reductions and trade agreements with those countries that capitulated, and markets will 'correct course.'
Trump has given himself a lot of runway to try and land this plane relatively smoothly, but there's going to be a lot of turbulence on the way in, that seems certain.
I'll also grant that this causes substantial uncertainty for American investors and entrepreneurs which is 'bad.' But, uhhh, what other country could they find that is inherently more stable and inviting for investment?
I'm extremely leery about the potential short or medium term impacts here.
Yet, I find myself willing to see what happens, because the revelations of the past 6ish years is that the Experts WERE pushing buttons on the control panel, and were getting paid very handsomely to push the buttons, but weren't particularly motivated to push buttons that would benefit the people they nominally owed allegiance to. I'm not even talking strictly about NGOs and such, but that's a symptom of it. Hell, during Biden's term, we can't even be sure WHO was at the controls while Biden was half-cogent.
Lets push some buttons that will break some things in the short term, and then (hopefully) quickly build some replacements that are generally better for parties other than elites in the political class.
And I'm young enough I can wait to recover from any short or medium term losses before I'm forced to retire. I grew up during and in the aftermath of the '08 crash. Mentally I've been braced this sort of event for like 10 years. I do feel for those who are stuck in a position where their livelihood is reliant on stock prices, but if you're at or near retirement age you should be in safer assets anyway.
The (classical) Liberal World Order was premised on free trade and financial/industrial interconnections between various countries disincentivizing wars and conflicts and fostering greater cooperation. I sincerely believe that they do have this effect, but I can see and admit there are parts of this order that are causing major issues and yet are not being corrected. I'd point to mass immigration as one example, and collapsing global fertility as another. BOTH of these should in theory be addressable without attacking the foundations of the order itself... but we've not been allowed to even have the discussion.
I would suggest that we're in a particularly unfavorable equilibrium that could collapse into an even worse equilibrium in the nearish future. Whether this is due to irrational/malicious actors screwing with things, or due to inexorable historical forces is a good discussion. But taking a gamble that if you start wrenching on the controls now you can steer away from the iceberg and not crash into something else, well, that is not a thing to be done flippantly.
I can certainly understand people who would rather not have Trump and Co. be the ones at the helm, but the system itself wasn't going to let us have anyone better.
Trump benefits from comparison to every other politicians' SOP.
Trump says many things that are false. Other major politicians say many things that are false, and very, VERY often lie by omission. Its generally accepted that they don't have a theory to operate under other than "say whatever I need to in order to get re-elected."
Trump is the one whose statements get treated as critical emergencies and as a practical matter people notice when the media keeps declaring emergencies that never actually materialize.
Your credibility for going after Trump relies on you also going after other politicians, including those on your team, with comparable enthusiasm.
I'll remind people that media credibility was heading to the toilet BEFORE Trump arrived on the scene. It dropped below half in 2005.
So as much as people want to make this a problem about Trump, its a problem that plagues our whole political/media complex and it does seem appropriate to point out that obsession with Trump's behavior is probably the result of dysfunctional thought processes. I don't think I've ever actually used the term "Trump Derangement Syndrome" towards anyone, though.
faceh
19d ago
Management, up to and including C-Suite, should really be the ones on the hook as they're the ones with authority and responsibility.
faceh
19d ago
I wondered for a second why he has to pull the trigger himself and not a trusted, very steady-handed compatriot.
But it actually occurs to me he probably didn't want anyone to risk ending up with a death on their conscience, or worse a manslaughter charge, if something goes wrong.
faceh
19d ago
Probably made up and didn't actually happen, but its the exact kind of idea that would align incentives.
faceh
19d ago
Perhaps, but look at the exact context of the incident that led to this.
George Floyd died while he was in handcuffs, face to the floor, with a grown man kneeling on top of him. He was 'unarmed' by any fair definition of the word.
A lot of people believe the cop's actions killed him, a lot of people believe it didn't, and say it was probably the drugs. Indeed, the mainstream conservative position is turning into Derek Chauvin deserves a pardon.
The rule proposed by Yudkowsky cuts the knot and just removes any 'bad' cops from the job even if we don't know for sure they're bad cops, so as to restore trust to the police as a whole, where the people who believe ACAB at least see that there's a consequence for the death of 'innocent' (yeah, I know I know) people in police encounters, and the "law and order" people can see that its the simple application of a facially neutral rule that holds the police to a 'high' but not unfair standard.
I think the best 'consequences' are those that follow naturally/intrinsically from failure to be honest. Lying must have a cost, one that cannot be avoided if you lie/defect consistently.
If you're flying a passenger plane, you probably shouldn't have an ejection seat or parachute if your passengers don't have such an escape option. That way you will be extra sensitive to possible danger. The norm that The Captain is the last to leave a sinking ship operates similarly. And you can also surmise that the more responsibility inherent to your position, the more severe the consequences should be for misuse or screwup.
Sometimes you can't make the consequences that immediate but you can still align incentives. Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence. Boeing should probably take this idea.
For politicians, I'd suggest that they must be forced to endure the direct consequences of rules they impose. If you are supporting criminal justice reform, you should probably be required to live at least part-time in the most crime-ridden districts in your jurisdiction. If you want to drastically increase police authority or make penalties for crimes harsher, you should be subject to 'random' investigations where you will be arrested and tried for ANY crimes discovered. "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide," right?
The penalty for publishing bad science or bad statistics, especially if you intentionally hide the stuff that would destroy your conclusions... well that's tricky. We discussed this a while back and I admitted to not having a solution. Prediction markets are a decent mechanism, require scientists to put their money at risk on a market betting on whether their results will replicate or not.
Many institutions seem to have failed or been corrupted by introducing 'false' consequences, where a member who is caught screwing up is 'publicly' reprimanded but privately, they're not punished, or maybe they're even rewarded, and rather than removed from power, they get shuffled off somewhere else in the system and hope that nobody notices.
Partially this is due to a 'circling the wagon' effect, if someone is part of your ingroup you don't want to let the outgroup hurt them so that you, too, can be protected if they come for you. Even a 'good' person would want to insulate their fellows from consequences since they are insulated in return.
But I suspect a lot of it comes from malicious actors FIRST convincing members of a group to remove the factor that actually punishes malfeasance, and then grabbing up as much power as they can for their own purposes... and other bad actors see that there's power to be grabbed and minimal consequences, so it becomes attractive to bad actors.
So the REALLY important factor is that the consequences actually have to filter out bad actors or incompetents from the system entirely, which allows the system to improve via iteration. You can't have consequences that ONLY inflict pecuniary loss, for example, if the person can afford to pay the 'fines' and yet continue to maintain their position of influence and authority.
faceh
19d ago
There's probably a pretty solid essay or law review article to be written (probably already has) pointing out that empirically, it is better for the courts to stick to textualism/legislative intent when interpreting the law, as they have an extremely dubious track record when it comes to interpreting science and statistics while reasoning about what laws mean or 'ought' to mean.
Recent decisions the go into the form and function of various firearms/ parts of firearms when ruling on gun control laws suffer from similar issues.
Yep. I think it was Yudkowsky who had a list of possible police reforms in the wake of the Death of George Floyd that included immediate and permanent removal of any police officer who is involved in the death of an unarmed person during an interaction. They just cannot work in law enforcement thereafter.
Drastic, but if there's an extremely low rate of deaths in police interactions (that's a claim the pro-police side usually makes) then it restores trust to know that no cop will ever be put back on the streets after killing someone without justification. And of course, prison time can still result if there wasn't justification. Minimal cost overall.
It would be really handy to remove the massive 'benefit of the doubt' that goes in favor of on-duty cops that allows the actual nasty/predatory ones to act with impunity for far longer than they would if they were held to the standard of a normal citizen. And it aligns incentives so that cops are really motivated to avoid doing anything life-threatening to unarmed persons.
At its core, that is what feels like is the major problem. Incentives aren't aligned in a way that points towards outcome everyone wants. We'd all like to be able to take scientific research seriously and NOT have to be immediately skeptical. Scientists would like to believe they're pushing boundaries of knowledge forward and have some social prestige from that pursuit. We want policies to be informed by good, accurate, reliable information, while accounting for uncertainties.
But that requires screwups to be uncovered and corrected quickly and bad actors to be removed before they cause too much damage. It ain't what we have currently.
How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.
TAPS
THE
Although admittedly this is not about 'elites' doing things on behalf of a whole society. A lot of blame can probably be ascribed to people who spread this information without checking it or by uncritically accepting it and parroting it as if it is true.
Which, it turns out, includes a SCOTUS Justice. Its in an actual, published SCOTUS opinion now (albeit a dissent, so it probably won't be used as precedent).
Should she formally retract that, somehow?
The previous problem was having literally thousands of people murdered on a yearly basis.
Having literally thousands of people murdered is bad.
And probably worse than torture-prisons, since the people doing the murdering had even less accountability.
Convince me that moving from "unnaccountable warlords murdering innocents" to "warlords and their subordinates [and probably some innocents] getting tortured in a hellish prision" is actually NOT an improvement in pure utilitarian terms.
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