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The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

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Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#91

Post by hayst4ck »

dawatchusay wrote: post #85
morkalork wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans, not content with learning from others' mistakes, will now be learning them first hand. The horrors are just beginning.

Europe is also seeing far-right ideology spreading and taking over mainstream politics so this really isn’t an American problem only right now.

It is the unholy union of a new unregulated form of communication, social media, and unregulated privatized intelligence companies, such as Palantir and Cambrdige Analytica.

Ironically China implemented the GFW because they correctly predicted this exact scenario being used to destabilize themselves.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#93

Post by rayiner »

tepalmnagon wrote: post #81
rayiner wrote: post #49

The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-... . The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a…

>It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous s…

[flagged]

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#94

Post by beej71 »

grandiego wrote: post #80
maxerickson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending people there and then saying you don't have jurisdiction over them anymore is dysfunctional by any reasonable measure.

Writing from a country with dysfunctional judiciary, I think this is a logical way to overcome crime, at least temporarily. There isn't a "hygienic" alternative when judges are continuously bribed or blackmailed by gang members.

Not in the US, it's not.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#95

Post by gotoeleven »

hayst4ck wrote: post #11

I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes. In a world without law, the only restriction…

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Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#96

Post by rbetts »

rayiner wrote: post #49

The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-... . The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a…

So easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#97

Post by hayst4ck »

ixtli wrote: post #86
hayst4ck wrote: post #11

I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes. In a world without law, the only restriction…

The problem with Americans is that they believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In its original context we find this a funny if depressing cliche but when applied to our current context I think it explains in a very dark way why no one does anything and collective defense never forms.

That's too simple and unsympathetic which only serves to divide. They don't literally see themselves that way. That's a liberal pejorative of their belief system.

There is (or was) a strong culture of self reliance, which is born out of a concept of freedom being focused around "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."

They see a billionaire's freedom being taken away and worry that if it can happen to someone that powerful, then it can happen to them to. A billionaire being muzzled is a clear statement that there is a power strong enough that everyone must bend to it. Which is a cogent and rational assessment.

What they don't see so easily is that if they don't have money or have to work 2 jobs to support their life, they aren't free. They can't afford to do things, that's not freedom. If they are confined to a bed because they are too poor to afford healthcare, they are not free. Those same billionaires are hoarding wealth and materially damaging people's "freedom to" by paying them the absolute minimum possible. Those same billionaires would enslave them if they could. "Freedom to" is born out of restricting the most rich and powerful.

Unfortunately, the rich and powerful can pay for entire industries that exist to manufacture consent. So they are able to pay for scary content that gets people to focus on other people being dis-empowered, rather than getting them thinking about how to empower themselves.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#98

Post by tastyface »

voidspark wrote: post #78
maxerickson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending people there and then saying you don't have jurisdiction over them anymore is dysfunctional by any reasonable measure.

[flagged]

"Neri Alvarado Borges was told by ICE officers that he was arrested in February for his tattoos — one of which is a rainbow-colored autism awareness ribbon with the name of his brother, who is autistic."

"The Trump administration admitted in court documents that 'many' of those sent to El Salvador did not have criminal records. As more information about those deported was unearthed, it became clear that some of the 'evidence' against them was as absurd as a tattoo of a Real Madrid CF logo, or an autism awareness tattoo."

"These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, 'I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.'"

No, they are not violent criminals. The authorities don't even bother to check.

"There is zero probability that a normal innocent US citizen will be sent there."

I'm 99% sure that we'll start seeing US citizens sent there in the coming months for crimes as basic as vandalism of Trump or Tesla properties.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#99

Post by _tik_ »

curt15 wrote: post #74
hayst4ck wrote: post #11

I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes. In a world without law, the only restriction…

>I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. Maybe not many people in the US have, but people in CCP China are plenty familiar. That is an example of "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law". Remember the melanmine milk scandal? Barely a slap on the wrist for Sanlu (the vendor). Or, did anything happen after the c…

Where do you get your news from? I cross-checked your comment with Wikipedia. In the Sanlu case, the executives were sent to jail, and they were ordered to destroy their stock because Sanlu was on the brink of bankruptcy. Life imprisonment and the death penalty don’t exactly sound like a slap on the wrist to me.

The school molestation cases began as rumors from two parents, but real abuse was found and the teachers were jailed. The CCP launched a nationwide kindergarten audit—seems like a fair response, especially with so much fake news online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYB_Education

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#100

Post by rayiner »

defrost wrote: post #87
rayiner wrote: post #49

The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-... . The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a…

> England punished all felonies by death for centuries No. For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death. A large number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statutes specified death as the penalty for property offences (even minor ones), meaning that the vast majority of the people tried at…

Interesting, thank you for that clarification. It looks like execution rates were as high as 30 per 100,000 in 1600, dropping to under 5 per 100,000 by 1700: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5955207/

The US in 1700 was about 1 per 100,000: https://www.cato.org/blog/despite-federal-return-capital-pun...

The number of executions in the US annually today is only 0.008 per 100,000.

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