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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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I criticized the “Handmaiden’s Tale” chicken little-ing on “my team” for years, because unlike the MAGA cult, I don’t feel any compulsion to twist myself into defending whatever insane bullshit “my team” decides to push any given week.

Well, you didn't do it here under that name. If you can link a single example elsewhere, I'll be thrilled to be wrong.

Nobody is crying about an alien simply being improperly deported, don’t be disingenuous. Administrative errors happen, I get it. The problem is that he was sent indefinitely to a torture-prison without due process, while the the government is arguing at the same time that 1: they want to send citizens to the same place, and 2: if they fuck up, there is literally no remedy.

Sorry, just need to stop to clarify here. The prison you're talking about is the one that turned El Salvador from a murder capitol of the world to safer than Sweden, right?

Do you hate the El Salvadoran people? Do you want them to be tortured and murdered en masse by rapacious warlords and banditos? Victimized and preyed upon in even greater amounts? Or is this just the meme?

If not, then maybe that stark difference ought to be taken into account.

And even then, I still don't buy your take. Let's establish some facts. He was deported to his home country, and his own government imprisoned him, as they do with everyone affiliated with the rapacious warlords who murdered and terrorized a fuckton of their people. He already had multiple days in court before judges, and had a deportation order.

Imagine if the US government had caught the "not to El Savador" clause in time, then had a quick hearing where it was determined that his asylum claim was obviously false, and the grounds for the "not to El Salvador" clause were obviously voided by the changed facts on the ground (e.g. his mother no longer owned the business, and the gang he claimed would harm him no longer exists).

Would you suddenly be OK with him being deported?

If we deported him somewhere else, and that country then deported him back to El Salvador, would you be OK with that?

Because your actual logic looks a lot like "We can't deport this criminal, because his native country will do normal things they do to criminals to him", and that might be literally the most perverse logic I've ever heard. Again, it comes back to endless empathy for offenders, and none at all for the people they hurt. It's so fucked up I'm not even appalled. I hit some overflow error and ended up reluctantly impressed at the evil clown logic.

And again, NONE OF THIS justifies being worried about citizens being deported.

I’d just like you to imagine if Biden or Obama were advocating this sort of thing. The people on this website would be calling for armed rebellion.

Per our prior correspondence, which you ignored, Obama did things many times worse (e.g. assassinating a minor citizen for fun) and I never heard anyone call for armed rebellion over it.