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If the alleged gang members had been treated more humanely (e. g. at or above the Geneva-Convention standards for POWs, long-term plan for their release following the dismantlement of the gangs), one would have been able to make the argument that the Salvadoran Government's actions were justified.
The actual conditions to which the alleged gang members have been subjected would not have been justified even had they been convicted beyond any doubt in regular trials, and were definitely not justified given the looser standards of evidence allowed.
Ok, ES tries a different, more humane method, BUT, for every gang murder above the current base rate, one Humane Prisons Advocate gets executed. You first.
Would you accept this deal?
No. Your proposal is based on two assumptions which I reject:
the assumption that detaining gang members under the same standard as invading soldiers would significantly increase the murder rate, and
the assumption those arguing against human-rights violations are somehow responsible for anything that can be attributed to not committing them.
There are lines that one should not cross though the heavens fall, and those arguing against crossing those lines do not thereby assume culpability for the actions of others.
Zvi Mowshowitz:
MS-13 literally has a motto of "kill, steal, rape, control". Do you think they treat their sex slaves better than Bukele is treating them? When your choice is "do X, or state failure and warlords do X anyway", you need to be exceedingly-invested in not personally sinning, to a degree that I'd argue is selfish, to pick the latter. This is not to say one should not look for third options, or try to create them, but no, do not actually let the heavens fall.
Fortunately, they don't have to let the heavens fall, or let the gangs run rampant, in order to not be evil. Just treat the detained alleged gang members as POWs under standards akin to the Geneva Conventions.
Bonitas non est pessimis esse meliorem. (Being better than the worst is not goodness.)
Which is what I'm saying he ought to have done, and objected to his not doing!
You said these:
I responded to those, because they sketch out a policy which I think to be insane (i.e. "one should let the state fail rather than take the gloves off").
This is The Motte, where you're supposed to "always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed". Either defend your claim or retract it; don't deflect and yell at me for responding to what you plainly said.
I think you're misinterpreting me here. My point here was that if the only way to stop MS-13 from imprisoning sex slaves in abominable conditions is to imprison MS-13 in slightly-less-abominable conditions (which also stops a bunch of other crime), the latter option strictly dominates the former.
Fine. I will lay out my Views on the matter plainly.
As I have said elsewhere, I do not like MS-13. They are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, and Something Needed To Be Done About Them.
However, Mr Bukele's chosen approach was both
not necessary to solving the problem, and
not justifiable.
The former is demonstrated by the possibility of more humane methods, such as the methods I would endorse if my area were suffering similar depredations. (If someone is probably a gang member but has not been convicted beyond reasonable doubt, detain them under a regime akin to that applied to POWs [conditions no more severe than those extended to our service-members, Red Cross access to detainees to verify humane treatment, release anyone not convicted in a court of law after crisis is over].)
The latter derives from the concept of the 'ethical injunction'.
Tthere are certain things such that, under a purely act-utilitarian-consequentialist framework, the circumstances in which $THING is justified are vastly outnumbered by the circumstances in which $THING looks justified, but isn't. Thus, if from the inside view, it appears that one is faced with only the options of 'Do $THING' or '$WORSE_OUTCOME', it is nevertheless highly probable from the outside view that you are wrong.
One therefore ought not to do $THING even if it seems necessary; this in practise works out to ruat cælum. (cf. "Sacred Values Are How Ethical Injunctions Feel From The Inside", Thing of Things, April 2016.)
(There is also a game-theoretical explanation, which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Some further thoughts:
theMotte seems like it's kind of intended as a place for people to play on simulacrum level 1, not level 2 where you're telling lies to children to make them behave in the way you've explicitly reasoned about without (yet or ever) being able to do that explicit reasoning themselves. @Amadan am I barking up the wrong tree here?
I think "prison conditions" is much less susceptible to Ozy's argument than torture, because prison conditions up to a point have at least one tradeoff that is always in play i.e. expense. Like, at one end of the Pareto frontier you are basically Auschwitz, enslaving everyone who can/will work and incinerating those who can't/won't; this is maximally cheap (indeed, potentially cheaper than free) and also horrifying (though not maximally horrifying; you're not doing "rape them to death, eat their flesh, and sew their skins into your clothing, and not in that order" because holy shit that's a lot of extra work). At the other end, jail is basically a hotel, with maintenance; this is maximally nice, but also horrifically expensive due to all the stuff that gets broken or stolen (raising the cost well above the already-substantial cost of a hotel that can actually kick people out). Nobody can currently afford the good end; if you look back in history a lot of societies couldn't afford better than the horror end (though as you look back further, you don't have incinerators or scalable oversight, so this starts to tend more toward "summary execution, (mass) unmarked grave" which AIUI was nearly omnipresent in prehistory). Thus, any "though the heavens fall" seems like an obviously contingent principle which for most values of "okay" that modern Westerners accept would, if applied to a pre-Black-Death society, not work; you'd be overthrown if you tried to implement them by a) peasants starving from your taxation and/or b) other elites trying to avoid a) in order to save their own skins, and if you somehow weren't overthrown then the law-abiding populace dies in plague from undernutrition and the criminals either escape or starve. You are thus, in a sense, always talking price, in a way that doesn't play nice with injunctions; you can argue that 2025 El Salvador is wealthy enough to comfortably pull off better conditions, or you can argue that it's importantly not at the Pareto frontier ("these conditions are worse than death; summarily executing them all would be more humane" is an example of such an argument, because summary executions are cheaper than any prison where the inmates can just sit around) - and the reason I'd not have commented there is that I literally don't know enough about the particulars to participate in either discussion about this case - but if you think there's a one-size-fits-all correct answer you're committing the just-world fallacy.
You will note that I haven't contradicted the claim that there are things worth letting the heavens (literally or metaphorically) fall to avoid, because obviously there are such things even for a first-order utilitarian; the heavens literally falling is not maximally bad, and the heavens metaphorically falling (e.g. WWIII) is generally less bad still, so it's worth WWIII to prevent the Earth being destroyed and it's worth the Earth being destroyed to prevent Allied Mastercomputer.
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This is a better argument, and if you'd been plain about this rather than engaging in hyperbole I'd not have chimed in.
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You never answered that question the other day about exactly how incredibly privileged and sheltered you are. Why do you believe that you have shared values with the murder-cult warlords who were terrorizing a nation less than a handful of years ago? Why do you think that you know better the exact line that can be drawn on exactly how rough one must be to repress the murder-cult, compared to the politician who actually accomplished that? Have you ever successfully spearheaded any kind of harm reduction effort comparable to reducing a nation's murder rate by 99%?
And once again, please explain what the purportedly inhumane conditions are. When I looked, CNN said it was "spartan rooms" and the machismo-fueled murder-cult prisoners were made to kneel while their heads were shaved, which probably didn't make them feel very good.
That wasn't so much a question as an insult.
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What bloodless cowardice! You won't even risk yourself in a hypothetical. And yes, yes, it's very easy to proclaim bold words about though the heavens fall... when they'll be falling on someone else.
Those lines SHOULD NOT BE CROSSED. What lines? Well, a google search and CNN indicate that it's "the rooms are spartan" and "the machismo-fueled murderous warlords are subjected to minor submission displays". Your unbounded concern for their heads being shaved is truly... something.
Consider that your first rejection dismissed. For the second, you are responsible for the outcomes of your actions - including advocacy. If you advocate for a policy, you bear some moral burden for it's results. And you're, by revealed preference, not willing to even pretend to bet your life that your actions to comfort the guilty won't fall ruinously on the innocent.
I want you to take sixty actual seconds and think about your life. Have you ever been punched in the face? Ever feared for your life by the actions of another? Known serious, frightening Maslow-bottom want? Have you ever actually been face-to-face with someone willing and able to deliver grievous harm? I implore you to consider the possibility that you're actually one of the most coddled, protected and privileged creatures that has ever existed on the face of this earth. Consider that employing your ideals, stringent and untethered even by the standards of the safest and most secure society ever built, may not actually be directly applicable to a different society that was subject to widespread warring-bands raider-ism within the last Macbook development cycle.
It was very easy for Sir Terry to hold such lofty ideals in the unsurpassed safety of post-war Britain. Now that country intimidates and jails people for tweets.
Not when the hypothetical is 'you face execution for your political opinions.' If the hypothetical were 'you live in San Salvador and face the same risk as everyone else' or 'you meet me on the field of honour at dawn', one might be able to justify arguing whether it is unreasonable to refuse such a risk.
Point of order, but the hypothetical was "you have actual skin in the game, and face the risk you're so righteously demanding El Salvadoran citizens endure". After all, if your policy advocacy doesn't result in more El Salvadorans being murdered, then there's no risk to you at all!
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Why? These gang members made ES a living hell for the people. Why do we have such empathy for evil people but effectively zero empathy for good people who had to endure the wrongs brought about by evil people?
ES is a relatively poor country. They tried for decades applying “human rights” and all it got them was a country run by gangs. Now the average person can actually live a normal decent life. And the rate of mistake on gang members is incredibly low (thankfully for ES the gang members decided to cover themselves in specific tats making their appearance obvious).
I just don’t see the moral argument that ES ought to treat these gang members okay.
I have empathy for the victims of the gangs; that's why I don't insist that detaining the alleged gang members at all was absolutely unjustifiable. However, once they are in custody, their not being subjected to inhumane conditions does not harm anyone, nor allow them to harm others; the same applies with captured enemy troops, thus the Geneva Conventions.
Which is why one could make the argument that they couldn't afford the normal standards of criminal trials. It does not have any relevance to how people are treated in custody.
The argument is that
They are human beings, made B'tzelem Elohim, and endowed with certain inalienable rights.
If you establish a category of 'people it is justifiable for the State to torture', you create the temptation for others to expand that category to include persons or groups whose existence they have long resented.
Except you miss the fact that jail was not historically able to stop these criminal organizations from operating in ES. The criminals simply controlled parts of the jail and easily communicated with the outside.
These new jails break the ability to communicate with the outside AND serve as strong deterrence (ie don’t want to go to a bad jail don’t be a bad hombre).
Making jail nicer fails on deterrence, fails on incapacitation, and fails on just desert.
Nice jail is fine for things like drunk driving or white collar crime where going to jail at all is terrible for the perp. But for gangs? They need tough hardened jails.
Which could have been done in a more humane manner, much in the way that countries at war are expected to stop captured enemy troops from coordinating with the outside without subjecting them to inhumane conditions.
We have a precedent for 'organisation is trying to harm us; we have members of that organisation in our custody; they are or might be motivated to continue their malicious goals from inside'. We monitor their communications with the outside, set minimum standards for their conditions, and allow the Red Cross access to the facilities to verify that the standards are being upheld.
PoW is just entirely different concept. They aren’t expected to be there for years at a time. There is a reciprocity angle here (we will treat your PoWs nicely if you test ours nicely). Most PoW don’t have significant control over people in the same country nor are the PoWs expected to circumvent their captors in spreading drugs etc in the captor’s country. Also the deterrence angle isn’t really there either (indeed a belligerent might want opponents who are willing to surrender since it reduces the harm their troops are facing).
These situations just aren’t remotely similar.
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the identification with evil is a recurring theme that surges periodically on social media, be it orcs in D&D, Bugs in starship troopers or Demons in Devil May Cry. At some point it becomes obvious that we don't share any more fundamental values that would enable coexistance.
I do not identify with the gang members. I do not even like them. However, I remember enough of the past to recognise certain patterns, and one of them is the grave danger in declaring certain human beings to no longer constitute moral patients.
the thing is that this isn't a moral question but a legal one. And there are enough points against this fellow than worrying about it happening to citizens is a non starter and to me just a sign of virtue signalling.
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When the left identifies with orcs it's usually about the orcs being less evil than they are pictured.
When the right identifies with orcs it's usually about behaving exactly like the orcs do against the Others.
I don't think normal people identify with orcs so much as act like orcs due to being a Role Playing Game.
but first they have to see themselves and their client minorities in the brutish war like Orcs, and THEN comes the new editions with Orcs no different than mexicans without a dental plan.
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I don't think the right identifies with the orcs or their equivalents in whatever media. What I see from the right is that they identify with the people holding back/fighting/exterminating the orcs, even for satirical works like the Starship Troopers film, which was clearly meant to poke fun at the fascistic nation the heroes of the film were part of.
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When I see cheering for Luigi, or claims that people killed by Stalin had it coming, I don't see a lot of "being less evil than pictured", why should I believe it's different for orcs and Starship Trooper bugs?
When have you seen that?
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