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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans

There isn't a Latin American ummah. Brazilians aren't going to care very much if you blow up Venezuelan drug dealers.

the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

US foreign policy has caused bad blood in South America for at least half a century, but as far as I'm aware this hasn't led to revenge killings of American tourists being common. I'd be much more worried about the local criminal population than righteous pan-Latinx avengers.

There's a difference between "bad blood" (even on the level of sponsoring coups and what-not) and "you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you". I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals, in the way they do with Middle Easterners.

I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Yeah it’s not like the Reagan administration had a school in Georgia where they taught Latin American right wing death squads how to torture and murder people. Oh wait they did. Latin America is already well aware that America has no baseline rules of conduct. This boat stuff is absolutely tame by the standards of the 1980s.

Yes, during the Cold War extrajudicial executions in Latin America were largely outsourced from the USFG to local governments.

"you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you"

That's a weird expectation. There's no baseline rule limiting what most people would do to you if doing so was necessary to achieve something they deem sufficiently important.

I don't think that [...] there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Is it better to get tortured and killed by an American proxy than by Americans directly?

Do the several hundred civilians killed during the US invasion of Panama count as average South Americans killed directly? Should they consider themselves lucky if they weren't killed lawlessly?

How is killing suspected drug traffickers on the high seas supposed to be an escalation here?

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