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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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in particular they claim the reduction in crime precedes his throwing gang members en masse into CECOT.

Which it unquestionably does. CECOT opened in January 2023 as part of the gang crackdown that began at the end of March 2022. The official homicide rate for El Salvador (not counting killings inside CECOT or killings by police, which look like they would increase the 2023-4 numbers by an order of magnitude) was 106.3/100k at the peak in 2015, 53.1 in 2018 (last full year before Bukele took office), 18.1 in 2021 (last full year before the crackdown), 2.4 in 2023, and 1.9 in 2024.

So it is simultaneously true that:

  • Most of the murder decline under Bukele happened before the state of emergency.
  • The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects has led to a dramatic further drop in the murder rate.
  • The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects is harmful at the margin (incarceration has risen from about 1.3% at the end of 2023 to about 2% now, with negligible decrease in gang activity)

The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects is harmful at the margin (incarceration has risen from about 1.3% at the end of 2023 to about 2% now, with negligible decrease in gang activity)

This is your brain on managerialism. The point of mopping them up is to ensure they don't recover after laying low for a while, this isn't going to show up on your KPI's.

If you think it's so undeniable, liberal human rights enjoyers should be able to implement their solutions in whatever is the current murder capital of the world and show us how it's done.

No - this is my brain on utilitarianism. Sending 40,000 people, many of whom are innocent and none of whom are bad enough to make the list of the first 50,000 gangbangers you rounded up, to a torture-prison is a big deal, and needs some more-than-speculative benefit to be morally justified.

The decline in crime isn't just a KPI - it is the whole point of what Bukele is doing. If more prison isn't reducing crime at the margin, then it is just hurting people for funsies. Which you appear to find funny because the people being hurt are outgroup. I don't.

No - this is my brain on utilitarianism.

Not really, you can justify either policy with utilitarianism. Your argument works only with the assumptions added by managerialism.

The decline in crime isn't just a KPI - it is the whole point of what Bukele is doing. If more prison isn't reducing crime at the margin, then it is just hurting people for funsies.

You are literally telling me it's not just a KPI doing managerialism, while telling me nothing useful is achieved until it shows up on the Key Performance Indicator called a "crime rate".

Which you appear to find funny because the people being hurt are outgroup. I don't.

I find the idea that this happened hilariously absurd.

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