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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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What caught my eye in recent filings is the accusation that the Salvadorian Government refused to accept female deportees, even going so far as making the US Government return female inmates to the United States.

I can sort of see how this could happen. The original Alien Enemies Act of 1798 only applied to males aged 14 and up. The amended version currently on the books was updated during WWI to include all persons aged 14 and up. Maybe they accidentally cited the 1798 version during negotiations with Bukele. That would only be the second most embarrassing foreign policy blunder this week.

That would only be the second most embarrassing foreign policy blunder this week.

Third or fourth in my mind, after insinuating that purchasers of the F35 cannot trust it because the Pentagon can shut down critical systems within it.

In fact, that should probably be the #1 foreign policy blunder of the decade.

Monkey grade arms are extremely common in the international defense trade and the F-35 doesn’t really have competitors. Typhoons, Rafaels, grippens, etc are not stealth and Russian stealth jets are probably even worse.

All the worse when they get into an actual shooting war and none of that shit works

It’s certainly not the kind of thing you advertise but it’s also certainly the kind of thing any allied government would flag as a risk during procurement. For the most part it’s irrelevant since allied militaries rely utterly on the US for all but the most basic operations. In a Falklands-type situation it could get dicey but the logic would be that the US would probably sit it out rather than actually shut down an ally’s capability.

They would flag it, sure, but as an exporter you would do everything in your power to assuage that risk, not to throw fuel on it.

Given the astronomical fixed costs of US defense projects, without an export market they just don't pencil out appropriately.

What catches my eye in that filing is that one of the men so deported was actually Nicaraguan. Venezuelan women could be subject to deportation under the AEA and Trump's proclamation (though apparently not to El Salvador), but no Nicaraguan would be. These are the people the Trump administration argues have no right to have any kind of hearing or due process before they are deported under the AEA, even if they legally can't be apparently.

Surely it’s just because the mega jails are for male inmates only, they likely don’t have excess capacity in the women’s prisons.

Yes, but one would think that this is the kind of thing that would be discussed in those “nonpublic, sensitive, high-stakes” negotiations.

My read is that it was, but someone goofed on the US side.

Accidentally gulagging Nicaraguans is less obviously embarrassing then shipping women to an all-male gulag, but it is actually worse, in that even on the Trump administration's reading of the law, they shouldn't be gulagging Nicaraguans at all.

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