• OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Yeah if you think Bush was an acceptable choice and not a fascist then you don’t really have a leg to stand on with this “commies love gulags” nonsense. You think this El Salvador shit is new? Those of us who were paying attention know that Bush did the same shit, while they did their fair share of torturing alleged “terrorists” with no due process in our own black sites, the worst abuses were conducted in foreign countries like Egypt, when we sent prisoners there knowing full well how they’d be treated. Some of us have been fighting this battle for over 20 years, nice of you to finally wake up and notice now that someone you hate is doing it, but it would be nice if you’d notice when the people you like are doing it too.

    It’s so stupid when liberals, defending a system with the largest prison population per capita in the world, with indefinite detention without trial, mass surveillance, etc, still try to take the moral high ground on that issue just because the word “gulag” sounds scary and foreign.

    • TheFudd@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Yeah if you think Bush was an acceptable choice

      Compared to Trump? Absofuckinglutely. Bush had no desire to be a dictator. Trump absolutely has ambition to be a dictator, and if you can’t figure out how one of those is worse than the other then you’re too clueless to participate in an adult conversation regarding this topic.

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Just a non-dictatator doing very non-dictatator things like stealing the election, operating secret extrajudicial torture dungeons where people are detained indefinitely without trial, illegally spying on innocent people en masse, and starting multiple wars of aggression.

        I wonder how long it will take y’all to start rehabilitating Trump once he’s no longer the current thing.

      • IttihadChe@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Libs will always believe the “it’s not ‘Torture’ it’s ‘enhanced interrogation’” until they are the ones being interrogated. Then, suddenly, it’s ‘torture’, and it’s everyone else’s fault that we got rid of ‘enhanced interrogation’, not their fault for preserving the system.

    • AbsentBird@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      The prisoners Bush had sent to Egypt were not sent from the US, they were sent from different countries that allowed extradition to Egypt. It was disgusting and abhorrent, but it isn’t the same thing as what we’re seeing now.

      Flying people from the US to foreign prisons without due process is a blatant violation of the constitution.

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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        23 hours ago

        The whole point of having extrajudicial torture dungeons is that they are extrajudicial. They may not have sent US citizens to them (although US citizens were killed in extrajudicial drone strikes), but the only “lawyers” they had access to at Guantanamo were people like Ron DeSantis who posed as a lawyer to try to extract information about which methods the victims found most unpleasant, to be shared with their torturers. If that sort of system exists, it can easily be turned against US citizens, as has happened.

        Mass surveillance is a blatant violation of the constitution as well, and when the illegal programs were exposed, not only did no one involved in them get punished in any way, they kept doing them and the person who exposed them was hunted to the ends of the earth.

        And meanwhile, immigration courts are basically kangaroo courts where young children can be made to defend themselves with no right to an attorney, and that’s been going on for a long time.

        There hasn’t been anything close to rule of law in this country for a long time (if ever). Trump is just continuing the path we’ve been trending towards for a long time in a very overt and rapid way.

      • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Do you not realize that Bush literally established the Guantanamo Bay DC? The modern GOP are just running plays from Bush and Reagan’s books.