I hate these maximalist "unless you do X and Y and Z, you have no right to criticize ANYTHING, because I say so, so shut the fuck up" ideas. It's startlingly close to the USSR's "and you lynch negroes" response to any criticism of its policies by the USA: it brings up an irrelevancy, and it's made in bad faith. The only way to escape it would be to detach entirely from the system.
Would you have criticized MLK for only choosing convenient, media-visible targets for his protests? Hell, he ignored so many places, and even stayed in hotels that were segregated. What a fucking hypocrite.
Cesar Chavez? Loser: he only called for people to boycott some agricultural interests. Sure, anyone can give up grapes, but anyone who does that is worse than contemptible--they should have given up all food that's harvested in exploitative conditions!
Mother Teresa? Lame. She only helped people in India. What about people in Namibia?
Lech Walesa? He seemed so myopically focused on government in Poland. It wasn't even the worst communist country! If he were really freedom focused, he'd have left Eastern Europe to try to overthrow the Khmer Rouge.
Your criticism amounts to an incredibly lazy attempt to sidestep the issue. Condi Rice is a war criminal. Second only to Cheney, she is the person most responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people. She broke numerous laws; authorized illegal torture; and engaged in illegal violations of Americans' rights. In a just world, she'd be brought before a jury, convicted, and put behind bars for life.
You have no right to criticize me for trying to reduce how implicated I am in one of the most evil acts of the 21st century.
And if you disagree, well, I can name a thousand other forums for you to post your comment in before you come here to Hacker News. Otherwise you're just being wildly inconsistent and deeply morally corrupt.
I hate political posts on Hacker News because they lead to petty, histrionic bickering like this.
What is intellectually gratifying about mean-spirited sarcasm like:
> You have no right to criticize me for trying to reduce how implicated I am in one of the most evil acts of the 21st century.
> And if you disagree, well, I can name a thousand other forums for you to post your comment in before you come here to Hacker News. Otherwise you're just being wildly inconsistent and deeply morally corrupt.
Political threads make people forget how to make positive contributions and instead they compete to express the most outrage. Nobody wins from that.
Would you have criticized MLK for only choosing convenient, media-visible targets for his protests? Hell, he ignored so many places, and even stayed in hotels that were segregated. What a fucking hypocrite.
Cesar Chavez? Loser: he only called for people to boycott some agricultural interests. Sure, anyone can give up grapes, but anyone who does that is worse than contemptible--they should have given up all food that's harvested in exploitative conditions!
Mother Teresa? Lame. She only helped people in India. What about people in Namibia?
Lech Walesa? He seemed so myopically focused on government in Poland. It wasn't even the worst communist country! If he were really freedom focused, he'd have left Eastern Europe to try to overthrow the Khmer Rouge.
Your criticism amounts to an incredibly lazy attempt to sidestep the issue. Condi Rice is a war criminal. Second only to Cheney, she is the person most responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people. She broke numerous laws; authorized illegal torture; and engaged in illegal violations of Americans' rights. In a just world, she'd be brought before a jury, convicted, and put behind bars for life.
You have no right to criticize me for trying to reduce how implicated I am in one of the most evil acts of the 21st century.
And if you disagree, well, I can name a thousand other forums for you to post your comment in before you come here to Hacker News. Otherwise you're just being wildly inconsistent and deeply morally corrupt.