HN Reader

Heh, even the extrajudicial imprisonment camps can be outsourced now. Why look bad having your military run Guantanamo when you can do the Uber model it for a cheap price.

Heh, or is a pun on AirBnB the more apt name for it.. "Concrete Floor & Indefinite Detention"?

At this point you have a better chance of being freed from this prison camp being a citizen of any other nation than the US which is sending people there without giving them a chance to prove that they are innocent or a citizen of the United States.

At least another nation will do whatever they can to get you home unlike the US that just doesn't care. "We made a mistake but we don't care. Nothing we can do." Truly abhorrent especially when the US can do so much to get someone if they really want.

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 on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people.

We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen.

There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no.

Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?

The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law.

What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?

I came across this article[1] the other day, after reading about the US sending people to a prison in El Salvador and wondering what we actually know about the place.

An incongruity that I didn't notice at the time but realized a bit later is that the prison is called "The Center for Terrorism Confinement" and it has a capacity of 40,000 people. Why would El Salvador or any country need a terrorist detention facility that holds 40,000 people?

According to wikipedia, El Salvador has a population of about 6 million.

The United States famously kept people accused of terrorism charges at Guantanamo Bay, and 780 prisoners have been kept there over the last couple decades since GWB established the prison. There are currently 15.

Presumably there are a lot more people who would fit the description "domestic terrorist" being held in jails in mainland US, but certainly not 40,000 of them.

Presumably president Bukele's administration is using it as a detention facility for regular criminals as well, but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a lot of people there that shouldn't be in jail in the first place.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-prison-t...

It's like the UK Rwandan exile program, but somehow worse.

Hey is it still too early to call it fascism you guys.

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 tax on the whole country, on the economy, and on kids’ futures. It’s system that beats down builders and cultivators and makes them subservient to the sociopaths.

As someone from a dysfunctional third-world country, the revolution in El Salvador gives me hope that change is actually possible in some of these places. 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. Your ancestors did the hard things (England punished all felonies by death for centuries) so you have forgotten how your lives became so comfortable in the first place.

“It can’t happen here”

This is just the outsourcing of something the US has been doing for a long time.

Responsibility laundering

This is pretty sad as a headline. It's not a warning, it is business as usual.

Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.

Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.

We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.

Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.

At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."