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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.)
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.
OK. So, I'm going infer from this response that you've never personally experienced a threat in your life, and your entire understanding of evil/harm comes from reading other extravagantly comfortable, myopic nerds playing sterile word games. On top of that, you have the classic complete absence of second order thinking, and refuse to even notionally entertain utilitarian calculations with more than one variable. Non-utilitarian considerations are quantum physics in Klingon.
Most of your posts here amount to calling someone a pussy, using more words. Stop it.
I honestly don't think that's the relevant label. I think the guy comes off as very provincial and inexperienced. My whole point is that I suspect he's never been in a situation where being a pussy vs being brave would even come up, to an extremely unusual degree.
I'm suggesting he check his privilege, while actually bothering to explain why that's relevant. But there's no reason to continue belaboring the point.
TBQH, I was actually one of the volunteers rating some of your posts in this thread, and one of them (four upstream from the one I'm replying to now) I did actually rate as "deserves a warning". Not so much because of the amount of heat (which was quite high), but because you went cross-thread to keep after CBNOS. There's this bit explicitly in the rules:
...which is intended to reduce yelling matches via giving an escape valve when somebody can't be civil anymore. I use that valve now and then, which is part of why I have zero warnings here. When you go cross-thread to keep after someone, you're jamming that valve.
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