This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
Do you genuinely believe the self-declared "World's Coolest Dictator" enforcing a 3-years-and-counting "State of Exception" to defendants' rights (6 or 7 years after the homicide rate had begun its rapid decline) had "minimal side impacts?"
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.
What about this guy? Perhaps not directly related to the election... but perhaps had a chilling effect.
Some travelogues that may interest you:
Matt Lakeman's Notes on El Salvador
Snowden Todd's Sojourn
A video travelogue by an ethnonationalist or enthonationalist-sympathist (I don't care enough to figure out his precise views) who's even more adventurous than Lakeman (the website is a somewhat reliable proxy for youtube - if none of the backends are working, when you try it, there's a link to the youtube url, below the video)
My impression is that "the man on the street" considers "mano dura" to be a net improvement, but not an unalloyed good. What side impacts are major or minor is a matter of opinion, of course, so I don't care to quibble about the appropriate threshold.
More options
Context Copy link
The initial sweep may be justifiable with "desperate times deserve desperate measures". But once the immediate murder-emergency is over, he should be trying to separate out anyone who just got caught up in it; of course he is not, saying anyone he put in CECOT stays there for life. And he certainly shouldn't be imprisoning someone who was supposedly in a gang in the US on the say-so of some US confidential informant; that can't be justified by the emergency.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link