Ahh the good odl “my version” of democracy. We go through this with every single thread about Singapore.
Fun variants to play:
- Show me one instance of my country performing extrajudicial killings by drone that take out an entire unaligned wedding party (Russian? American? Afghan wedding party probably doesn’t see the difference)
- Show me instance where “my country”’s law enforcement kills random people in their bed because they were in the wrong house
- Frequently chokes people to death because, uh, definitely their skin color, religion, sexual orientation? (Plenty of candidates here)
- At least my country doesn’t force down planes in contravention of international law because there’s someone on board we don’t like (Belarus? Any takers for more?)
- Randomly grabs people off the street and tortures them in black sites around eastern europe. (This is a fun one, so many competitors)
- Or “definitely doesn’t punish family” as long as you don’t count separating children from their parents in internment camps and losing them (Fun family game of “Things that happen along which border for 20$ ? Ukraine or Mexico?”).
I get it, I get it, it’s less bad than outright torture killing, so one can still feel morally superior to the Nazis or Russians. Unless one remembers the picture from the extraordinary rendition blacksites.
Seriously. It’s extremely well documented behavior of “regimes” all over the world, but …
One can absolutely be proud of their country for whatever reason of their choosing, not much wrong with that, but when you’re forced to narrowly cherry-pick definitions to arrive at “phew, still less bad”, you’re pretty deep down the rationalizing game already and may want to ask yourself what your redline is. Because the Reich set a pretty damn high bar in the last century when it comes to comparative rationalization.
The point here isn’t to make you feel bad about your country, you can do very little about these things, whether you are an individual Russian or American - I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons that play these inane games of “if you position the lens exactly this way, how dare you imply my country is as bad as yours”.
Ah the good ol’ “I don’t have a response so I’m going to just throw mud into the conversational waters.” This has nothing to do with “is my country better than yours.” Someone asked a specific question about a specific dimension of comparison and I gave a specific example as to why they’re treated differently. It’s clear as day.
> I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons
If you think the world has “slipped” to some local minima exemplified by modern US behavior, you haven’t been paying attention to history at all.
Fun variants to play:
- Show me one instance of my country performing extrajudicial killings by drone that take out an entire unaligned wedding party (Russian? American? Afghan wedding party probably doesn’t see the difference)
- Show me instance where “my country”’s law enforcement kills random people in their bed because they were in the wrong house
- Frequently chokes people to death because, uh, definitely their skin color, religion, sexual orientation? (Plenty of candidates here)
- At least my country doesn’t force down planes in contravention of international law because there’s someone on board we don’t like (Belarus? Any takers for more?)
- Randomly grabs people off the street and tortures them in black sites around eastern europe. (This is a fun one, so many competitors)
- Or “definitely doesn’t punish family” as long as you don’t count separating children from their parents in internment camps and losing them (Fun family game of “Things that happen along which border for 20$ ? Ukraine or Mexico?”).
I get it, I get it, it’s less bad than outright torture killing, so one can still feel morally superior to the Nazis or Russians. Unless one remembers the picture from the extraordinary rendition blacksites.
Seriously. It’s extremely well documented behavior of “regimes” all over the world, but …
One can absolutely be proud of their country for whatever reason of their choosing, not much wrong with that, but when you’re forced to narrowly cherry-pick definitions to arrive at “phew, still less bad”, you’re pretty deep down the rationalizing game already and may want to ask yourself what your redline is. Because the Reich set a pretty damn high bar in the last century when it comes to comparative rationalization.
The point here isn’t to make you feel bad about your country, you can do very little about these things, whether you are an individual Russian or American - I think we all should rather hang our heads in shame about where we managed to get the world to slip, forgetting the hard learned history lessons that play these inane games of “if you position the lens exactly this way, how dare you imply my country is as bad as yours”.