White House Under Fire for Human Rights Abuses Again

I'm not required to post a protest concerning every event in the world I disapprove of. Why is it that you make a virtual career out of insulting my country on this board but remain about 99% silent about the most horrible faults of other countries?

Walter, as a specific person, may be innocent. I addressed him only because he posted in my thread.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Contrary to what you imply, it's perfectly proper for me to defend my own country without attacking other countries.

... and yet you complain about other people attacking your country without attacking other countries. Hypocrisy?

Brandon9000 wrote:

but I can assure you that I don't take anything that happens here very seriously.

Well, thanks, nimh, but I really don't want to built more on my virtual carreer here.

So, Brandon, you asked about my attitude towards those happenings in St. Petersburg, I not only give an answer but a link to a couple of photos made by someone who took part in that demo.
And now you say, you don't take it seriously.

So obviously you only wanted to publish openly something about me and what you think my attitude is.

Well done.

Since I'm postimng under my real name, since I've some functions which include a membership in an organisation initiated by the USAmerican embassy, I see no reason to get discredated by some Brandon-Joe in public.

It has been nice to have met you.

This is my country too and I criticize it when I think the people running it are doing something against what our country is supposed to stand for in the hopes the wrongs will be righted.

old europe wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:

Contrary to what you imply, it's perfectly proper for me to defend my own country without attacking other countries.

... and yet you complain about other people attacking your country without attacking other countries. Hypocrisy?

I don't see any similarity.

In the first case, defending my country does not obligate me to attack other peoples' countries. Why would it?

In the latter, for someone to incessantly criticize my country yet give a pass to other countries for much worse problems amounts to a double standard.

This strikes you as hypocrisy?

You figure that if I defend my country, I'm under some kind of oblition to criticize other countries????

Walter, as a specific person, may be innocent. I addressed him only because he posted in my thread. [..] As I say, I did not start this post to refer to him in particular, but A2K liberals in general.

Brandon9000 wrote:

old europe wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:

Contrary to what you imply, it's perfectly proper for me to defend my own country without attacking other countries.

... and yet you complain about other people attacking your country without attacking other countries. Hypocrisy?

I don't see any similarity.

That is sad. For the sake of this discussion, I will assume that you're not being wilfully obtuse, though.

Brandon9000 wrote:

In the first case, defending my country does not obligate me to attack other peoples' countries. Why would it?

Exactly my point. Defending the United States of America or President Bush does not require you to simultaneously attack other peoples' countries.

Brandon9000 wrote:

In the latter, for someone to incessantly criticize my country yet give a pass to other countries for much worse problems amounts to a double standard.

Why would it? There are 1069 posts where you, Brandon, have mentioned Iraq. My guess would be that the vast majority of those posts (maybe 98.5%) was dedicated to attacking Iraq's actions.

Now you seem to argue that criticising only one country without dedicating equal time to "other countries for much worse problems" amounts to a double standard. Now, it's a matter of personal opinion what countries were worse than Saddam's Iraq, but I doubt you could argue that Iraq was the worst country on Earth.

For example, there are only 122 posts of yours were you have mentioned North Korea in one way or the other. Is the conclusion to be drawn that the summary of your posts here on A2K amounts to a double standard, too?

Brandon9000 wrote:

This strikes you as hypocrisy?

Of course it does. You are attacking other posters for criticising only one country (the United States), without dedicating equal time to all those other countries that have "much worse problems". Yet you dedicate an enormous amount of posts to criticising only one country (Iraq), without dedicating equal time to all those other countries that have "much worse problems".

If this doesn't strike you hypocrisy, could you maybe explain why?

Brandon9000 wrote:

You figure that if I defend my country, I'm under some kind of oblition to criticize other countries????

Of course not. What a ridiculous notion.

So you are reducing your attack on me now to ...

- that I did post about Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrghizistan, etc or even created threads about problems there but left out last Saturday's events in St. Peterburg?

The basis of your position seems to be that if I were fair I would have made posts which I have not made, right?

However, all I'm doing is defending my own country from criticism, when I think the criticism is unjust, which no reasonable person could take to be a sign of hypocrisy or to obligate me to post on some other topic to be morally consistent.

There is nothing whatever morally inconsistent about defending my country from what I consider to be unfair criticism.

On the other hand, were I to spew out a lot of posts putting down Sweden for a variety of its actions, but remain utterly mum about far worse actions by other countries, that really and truly would be a double standard.

The logic of your argument is very twisted and, in fact, false.

My position is what it has been since I started the thread - that most of the A2K liberals post incessantly about how bad the US is, but rarely mention the transgressions of other countries. [..] How about answering what I actually am saying?

How about answering what I actually am saying?

Why is it that you make a virtual career out of insulting my country on this board but remain about 99% silent about the most horrible faults of other countries?

Brandon9000 wrote:

Walter, as a specific person, may be innocent. I addressed him only because he posted in my thread. [..] As I say, I did not start this post to refer to him in particular, but A2K liberals in general.

And on that, you are still wrong - and you could have known that just by making that one click necessary to see the "International News" forum.

Yes, the overwhelming majority of topics on A2K deals with America. Thats a frustration for all of us non-Americans and for everyone with an international horizon, but it has to do with the membership being largely US-based.

However, and this is why your thread is so ridiculous, if you take a peek in any of the threads that do discuss affairs elsewhere in the world, the overwhelming majority of posters there are in fact liberals and leftwingers.

In Walter, you picked a particularly silly example. Of the regular political posters here, there's nobody who devotes a greater proportion of his posts to non-domestic and non-American affairs except for fbaezer and, well, me. (All three, from your perspective, liberals.)

If you are sincerely interested or concerned over affairs in the former Soviet Union, take a look in the main Russia thread. The Ukraine thread. The Georgia thread. The Uzbekistan thread. The Kyrghizistan thread. They're all there, if you're interested. And in most of them, the only conservative who shows up is Lash. (For Latin-America, it's Georgeob1.) Otherwise the people who come in to read up and express concern about democracy and human rights there are almost all either neutral or liberal posters.

So your accusation that A2K liberals in general are only interested in bashing the US and dont give a peep when other countries do wrong, is outright false. If anything it is exactly the liberals and the non-Americans who do speak up.

It's people like you who dont show any concern whatsoever as long as the topic doesnt focus on the US and is not to do with Muslims or perhaps N-Korea.

What it comes down to here is basically this.

• On the one end of the spectrum, there's people who speak up about human rights issues and threats to democracy wherever they see it, at home or abroad. (Walter is one of those.)
  
• On the other end, there's people who only speak up about human rights abuses if they see it on the playing field of their enemy of choice (in your case, roughly speaking, the Muslim countries), and who resent such issues being pointed out on their home field. (You are one of those.)

It's the relative positions of you and Walter in this spectrum, and generally of A2K-liberals and A2K-conservatives, that makes this thread such a joke.

Brandon9000 wrote:

How about answering what I actually am saying?

Still referring to this?

Brandon9000 wrote:

Why is it that you make a virtual career out of insulting my country on this board but remain about 99% silent about the most horrible faults of other countries?

1. The US, the UN, and Iraq, Eleventh Thread
2. Long Knives Out for Federal Prosecutors
3. Seymour Hersh: US Developing Contingency Plan to Bomb Iran
4. Immigration and Racism in Britain and USA

and not one single identifiable post criticizing any other nation. How does that fit in with your claim that other countries are being criticized according to the same criteria as the US?

Frankly, I was unaware of the threads you cite criticizing other countries, but when I look into the International News Forum, they seem to most often receive about a post a month. I can't even find any recent Kyrghizistan thread. The activity isn't comparable to the frequency of criticism of the US here.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:

How about answering what I actually am saying?

Still referring to this?

Brandon9000 wrote:

Why is it that you make a virtual career out of insulting my country on this board but remain about 99% silent about the most horrible faults of other countries?

You have many, many posts in threads critical of the US. You may have posts that I was unaware of criticizing abuses by other countries, and, if so, I am sorry for unfairly characfterizing your posting habits, but I certainly don't seem to see them much when I search for new posts. As I said, this thread was not started to refer to you personally. You're just one of the first people to post in it expressing disagreement.

Now, will you PLEASE respond to my actual primary assertion that the frequency of threads criticizing the US dwarfs the frequency of threads criticizing other countries, or do you simply refuse to respond?

Brandon9000 wrote:

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:

How about answering what I actually am saying?

Still referring to this?

Brandon9000 wrote:

Why is it that you make a virtual career out of insulting my country on this board but remain about 99% silent about the most horrible faults of other countries?

You have many, many posts in threads critical of the US. You may have posts that I was unaware of criticizing abuses by other countries, and, if so, I am sorry for unfairly characfterizing your posting habits, but I certainly don't seem to see them much when I search for new posts. As I said, this thread was not started to refer to you personally. You're just one of the first people to post in it expressing disagreement.

Now, will you PLEASE respond to my actual primary assertion that the frequency of threads criticizing the US dwarfs the frequency of threads criticizing other countries, or do you simply refuse to respond?

3

But, we're on a forum discussing US politics. There are naturally going to be many more discussions of the US than other countries.

You're making the same argument my old boss did, when he complained that he had looked through the records and 40% of my sick days were on Monday or Friday. I just stared at him the way I'm kind of just staring at your theory about anti-US bias on A2K.

Cycloptichorn

Now, will you PLEASE respond to my actual primary assertion that the frequency of threads criticizing the US dwarfs the frequency of threads criticizing other countries, or do you simply refuse to respond?