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Trump voters I know of speak glowingly of Nayib Bukele's law and order in El Salvador, which is to say, arbitrary roundups on police discretion.
Whether supporting uncuffing the police for crackdowns on violent crime can coexist rationally with opposing selective prosecution of political enemies is difficult to say. I'm not sure. It seems it should be possible to square those two stances, but I can see why @FiveHourMarathon sees it as obvious hypocrisy.
El Salvador went from a lawless shithole run by cartels to the safest country in Central America. What does locking away murderous criminal gangs have to do with what we're talking about? FHM's comment is about the growing power of the state to imprison anyone. The El Salvador case is simple, don't join a gang that kills people!
The point is that El Salvador achieved that by not stressing too much about absolutely proving that the people they were locking up were in fact murderous criminals.
I think that's a perfectly fine public policy choice - the old saw about "better to let ten guilty go free than punish one innocent" is a nice line but it's completely reasonable for a country with extreme crime problem to say "actually no, we're not gonna let the ten guilty go free".
But of course if you're happy to be gung-ho about locking up the people who seem bad and not being super-meticulous about making sure they get the absolute duest of process, it does seem hypocritical to complain when that standard gets applied to the con man heading your party.
I was with you, and then you lost me. There is obviously a world of difference between locking up a bunch of gangsters who run cartels that kill people in the streets, and supporting an FBI state that spies on everyone and arrests you for praying in front of an abortion clinic, or "mislabeling" records.
Besides, your characterization of Trump as a "con man" is doing a lot of work here. Which of your politicians do you want to hold up as honest and good? You know good and well what the double-standard is here, and that nobody else is being charged for these non-crimes. Maybe if Hillary and Obama and Biden were also facing jail for writing the words "legal expenses" you would have a point.
I think it is worth noting that both the Democratic President's son and a Democratic Senator are also currently being prosecuted. Many other Democrats have been prosecuted for crimes, often successfully. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was prosecuted in a case very similar to the one Trump has just been convicted in. So I don't buy any of this nonsense about how Trump has to get a free pass to make it fair.
Of course, it's entirely reasonable to think these prosecutions do not capture the full spectrum of criminal behaviour within the Democratic party, and I would agree with that proposition. I think it would be wise and just for state level officials or federal officials in a future republican government to aggressively investigate and pursue charges against corrupt Democrats. Politicians should be held to a higher standard rather than a lower one, and vigorous enforcement against them is a good thing. That goes both ways.
Hunter Biden had the DOJ doing everything they could to ward off actual crime (he clearly inter alia committed knowing tax fraud). It was so unusual we had IRS whistleblowers. The senator from NJ basically was getting bribed by a foreign government.
These are real crimes; not fake ones.
Trump's crimes are also very real.
They are real in a humpty dumpty way.
You have already shown yourself not to be serious by citing Merchan’s judge instructions as instructive on FECA. I won’t be engaging with you further on this since you are either bad faith actor or just woefully ignorant here.
If you don't want to engage someone, then stop engaging. That means stop before you take your parting shot calling them bad faith or ignorant.
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That and the gangs helpfully announce who they are by putting a bunch of distinctive tattoos on their bodies. I’d wager that for every 1000 incarcerated there might be one innocent person
There was an old trope on neoreactionary forums, I don't know if it was common in rationalist spaces, that went like this: First Peace, then Order, then Justice, then Law. They form a hierarchy, you can't have one without first having those that came before. Trying to have Law when you don't have Justice first doesn't work, for example, because without Justice the Law is just a series of rules. And likewise, you don't have Justice without Order, because how could any secure justice be acheived if people are fighting in the streets?
By this argument, I think it's perfectly fair to support draconian state brutality in El Salvador, and worry about state brutality in the US.
Totally agree.
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Also, murdering anyone who wears those tattoos without going through the necessary gang initiations. I could see the false-positive rate being a little higher, and I'm skeptical that El Salvador's actual murder rate has dropped as far as the reported murder rate, but a lot of the due process concerns are... misplaced or based on poor understandings of the environment (or, conversely, what due process looks like in the United States).
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Bryan Caplan speaks positively of Bukele’s “round em up” policy on the basis that given what is known about the gangs the false positive rate is crazy small and the gangs are very dangerous.
That criteria doesn’t appear here.
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