ffrreerree
8mo ago
from where he'll be repatriated straight into El Salvadore's "black site prison", hopefully for life
Honestly, why the cruelty? I confess, I don't understand it. If some guy, at the age of 16, invaded my very own home and lived in my basement for decades without my knowing, siphoning my electricity and water or whatever, I would not wish this on him.
If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed?
Yes, I think that would be amazing. The guy came to the country illegally, and he was also deported illegally, by the government's own repeated admission, given the withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador. If the government took steps to only send him to El Salvador after getting the withholding order revoked by due process, that would be a dramatic improvement to the current state of affairs.
If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?
I think that would be also be a dramatic improvement, for obvious reasons.
Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?
Given that we are paying El Salvador to hold him, presumably we have some say in this. For starters, we could stop paying.
I'm honestly baffled how people justify this to themselves as anything other than naked "rules for thee but not for me". Does it actually feel, inside, like standing on principle and not just grasping at any procedural trick at hand?
And I'm honestly surprised to read this, since I could say the same about those putting forward technical arguments in defense of the government. It frankly did not really occur to me that the government might actually believe in or care about the legal merits of its case.
Perhaps we can agree that the vast majority of people on either side of this are using legal arguments as soldiers, and that the real disagreement is about something else - something to do with whether we ought to have any sympathy for this man and whether the US has any obligation to him, morally.
ffrreerree
8mo ago
ffrreerree
10mo ago
Uh, it mostly scans. When did that happen? Last I recall LLMs couldn't quite get meter down. Oddly though it does a poor job of analyzing the meter of its own poem in my opinion.
ffrreerree
11mo ago
Speaking as an East Asian - in my experience our verbal abilities as a group are so strikingly poor that I sometimes wonder that people don't generally think that we are kinda dumb. All the more so since verbal intelligence is the most apparent form of intelligence; you generally aren't going to be able to judge someone's math skills in casual conversation. In the workplace, among friends, at school, I find it hard not to notice the general inability of otherwise competent Asians (including myself) to put together coherent, grammatical sentences on the fly like everyone else does. Sometimes one has the pleasure of meeting startlingly articulate people. They are never East Asian. I'm not sure I can name a single very articulate East Asian. Even writers I enjoy, like Dan Wang, turn out to be not great at speaking. On the other hand there are plenty of very articulate black public intellectuals, for instance (and I say that not in a condescending way).
If a Frenchman has a kid with a Chinese woman, he'll be genetically more closely-related to a random French kid on the street than to his own child.
Based on my non-expert investigation, I think he might be more related to his own kid than a random French kid, but more related to the random French kid than his grandkid.
Edit: but I would have to think that genetic testing would still be able to detect the grandparent/grandchild relationship based on which genes are different
ffrreerree
11mo ago
This isn't quite the right metric since it's a different one, on the population rather than individual level, and presumably using SNPs
The entire conclusion hinges upon this point, and I'm not convinced.
A quick search turned up this master's thesis (ok, not the most impressive source), according to which two random Europeans' genomes have 3.8 million differences. A random European and a random African have 5.5 million differences. (Numbers are from pages 14 and 15.) So a European/African mixed child would have 2.25 million differences with each parent, still a bit closer than two random Europeans.
I think this has gone a bit beyond what one could claim with a straight face to be a good analogy for the American illegal immigration situation. And even so, I would not wish the basement hobo were sent to a harsh, overcrowded prison for life. I would resent him and my parents for sure, I'll give you that.
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