Of course the US should do nothing. We can’t do anything. We don’t have the moral authority.
From now on, North Korea can do anything they want, to anyone they want, and the US has to shut up about it. No matter how right the principle, we have no right to say word one about it.
North K. could skin these people alive and stream it live on the Internet. The US doesn’t get to say anything. Ever.
And by the by, unless you have lived a perfect life, and never done anything at all wrong -
Except that’s not what you said. You said “such a country has zero moral standing to dictate to anyone how they should treat their criminals.” That doesn’t sound like “Our ability to be effective is seriously weakened.” It sounds like “We don’t have ‘moral standing’ to even try.”
Does the fact someone might tell us to go pound sand mean we should make no attempt to confront injustice? And if your answer to that is “NO,” meaning we should still speak out and work against injustice on a government level, then why is it so difficult to have a conversation about how to do that effectively and constructively in this context (North Korea, journalists, prison) without the conversation inevitably circling back around again to Guantanamo? IOW, why the fuck does everything have to be about Iraq and Guantanomo? I get it: Hands dipped in blood. Morally bankrupt. Mass murderers. Let’s just assume I fully grant you all of that. Is it even possible for you, and others like you, to move past that and talk meaningfully about anything else on the geopolitical stage? Ever?
My problem with The U.S. is worse! as an argument has nothing to do with the injustice of Guantanamo or the Iraq war. But when you allow yourself to be so focused on your own brand of hair-shirt-wearing, self-flagellating conviction of our country’s hypocrisy that you literally cannot even acknowledge, let alone meaningful discuss, another issue – then IMO the do-nothing-ness that stems from that obsessive focus is itself immoral.
Well, we participated in the Nuremberg trials despite the internment of Japanese-Americans. We fought the Cold War despite segregation at home. And so forth; the conduct of the Afghanistan/Iraq wars isn’t really anything unique in our history. Our ideals always outstrip our actions, but that doesn’t invalidate the ideals.
No nation ever has clean hands in protesting another’s behavior. Frankly, though, I suspect that moral authority doesn’t really matter that much. NoKo provokes international incidents, kidnaps people, counterfeits money, etc. because it believes that these actions somehow serve its own national interests, and it backs down, compromises, or not based again on its own interests. I’d be surprised if it seriously weighed the other nation’s human rights record in that calculation.
Isn’t that what you argued the United States could do to the detainees at Gitmo?
Anything we like? They’re terrorists, and this is a war? So torture away?
We’re not talking about perfection. I don’t think sailor demands that the US prison system be perfect. But how about we have a policy against torturing prisoners? And if it turns out that guards tortured prisoners, we punish the people who tortured prisoners, and also anybody who told those guards to torture prisoners?
If you don’t want people to complain about the US torture policy, maybe a good way to avoid that would be to have a policy that we don’t torture. Instead of setting up a prison that carried out tortures that were copied from the Soviet Gulags. We literally copied Soviet torture techniques. And it’s kind of ironic that we’re complaining that these journalists will be sent to a Stalinist Gulag system when we maintained our own Stalinist Gulag system.
I’m against Stalinist gulag systems, whether they are run by the United States government, or the North Korean government. How about you?
So if we institute that policy, can we pretty please attempt to get the two reporters out of North Korea, which by the way does things that make Guantanamo look like summer camp? This point about “the U.S. has no standing” is coming across as incoherent bullshit. Right now, as best I can tell, it sounds like some posters believe these women should be sacrificed to North Korea because that will make Bush look even worse.
The point about the U.S. having little leverage left in this situation is, at least to me, not polemic but factual. While the affairs at Guantanamo and elsewhere do sadden me in and of themselves, it also saddens me that we are now in a less capable position to get these two citizens-- who have committed no actual wrong-- back.
I think many Americans who didn’t care about the ethical implications our treatment of foreign citizens previously are unfortunately, in the near future, going to realize the pragmatic implications of these actions-- throwing law out the window is safe when it’s your guy doing it, but as soon other countries can legitimately claim that technique as their own too, it’s open season.
We can hardly know if it’s factual or not, because AFAIK nothing at all has been done yet, so your doom-saying predictions of failure are at best premature. Even if your point is factual it is also polemic in that it diverts the discussion from what we could do/ should do/ must do in this particular situation back to completely unproductive ruminations of American hypocrisy vis a vis Guantanamo. It adds nothing to the topic under discussion and risks hijacking a thread about a specific international incident into yet another screed about Bush/Iraq/Guantanamo. Just in case there haven’t been enough of those threads.
No. What some posters are saying is: The US spent the last several years kidnapping and torturing people on trumped up charges. Now two US citizens have been (sort of) kidnapped and (possibly) tortured on trumped up charges.
What some posters are saying is that if the US tries to generate any international pressure over this, the US is unlikely to receive anything but a shrug and maybe a tee-shirt with the words, “Karma’s a Bitch!”
Some other posters are saying that if the women were in NK territory and breaking NK law then we shouldn’t turn it into an international incident.
I agree with both those points but I don’t think it means that we shouldn’t try to appeal for humanitarian relief on behalf the women themselves…
If it “sounds” like that to you then you might want to have your hearing checked. Or your comprehension synthesizer.
Did I say that? No, I didn’t.
My point is that this thread was started not about whether America should or should not do something (the answer is obvious and unanimous). This thread was started as recreational outrage against those barbarians who would take foreigners prisoner and not afford them a fair and impartial trial. I am shocked! Shocked I tell you! Such a thing could never happen in a civilized country.
Or could it?
Let us keep the recreational outrage at a minimum. Please.
Can you name names and quote posts? Because … well… who has named Bush? And who has said the women should be “sacrificed to North Korea”? Is it the voices in your head again?
Being worked to death in a North Korean Gulag makes Guantanamo look like summer camp? Really? The only difference is the scale. Guantanamo was a gulag run on Soviet lines, the only difference is that it had only a few hundred prisoners rather than thousands or tens of thousands (or millions if you count all of North Korea). You think you’d get better treatment at Gitmo? Honestly? Tortured to death is tortured to death.
If that’s the best you can tell, you’re a retarded fucking moron.
I believe that the US should exert all diplomatic pressures to have the women released. The question, i guess is where you draw the line, and what you consider “sacrificed.” If we decline to nuke North Korea in order to free these women, is that sacrificing them? What about sending an aircraft carrier to sit of their shores? What exactly should the US do in order to get these women out?
It’s also not about Bush, despite the claims by you and a couple of other dopey cunts. I don’t give a flying fuck about making Bush look bad; he made himself look about as bad as a President possibly could. In fact, right now i’m most concerned that some of the abominations carried out by his administration might actually continue if Obama keeps back-pedalling on his campaign positions.
My main point in this thread, which i’ve reiterated a couple of times , was in response to the OP’s fucking absurd assertion that US citizens should be able to do pretty much whatever the fuck they want, with no consequences, just because America is the biggest bully on the block. Anyone who thinks that is fucking retarded, and is emblematic of the sort of American hubris that so many people overseas get angry about.
Then they must make it all the way to the South Korean Embassy in Bangkok without being caught. There have been numerous incidents of police raids on clusters of Koreans housed in close proximity who turned out to be sheltering such refugees. They get arrested, sometimes scores of them at a time, but despite threatening to send them back to North Korea – maybe to satsify the North Korean Embassy? Thailand does have diplomatic relations with the country – I’m not sure any have ever actually been returned, but rather quietly sent to third countries instead after things have died down. But by all accounts, the Koreans are not treated well while in custody, and the threat of return always hangs over them.
There are an unusual number of Korean restaurants up on the border with Laos in northern Thailand, and whenever the refugees get popped up there, a Korean from one of them always seems to show up at the police station with a lawyer. The wife and I were up there in a bus one time, in Chiang Rai’s Chiang Saen, when the police pulled a group of non-Thai-speaking, Korean-looking ladies off at a checkpoint and spirirted them away. Maybe half a dozen. There was one lady who could speak Thai with an accent who seemed to be their leader. We speculated maybe she was based locally and in charge of getting them to Bangkok. None could produce ID or say where they were staying. Dunno whatever happened to them.
Don’t be coy. You’re the one who specified “recently.” As I noted above, the implication of this position suggests that you think the Bush Administration’s use of indefinite detention and torture in the Iraq War was more damaging to the US’s moral standing than FDR’s internment of the Japanese or, for that matter, the indefinite detention of Haitian and Cuban refugees at Gitmo by the Bush41 and Clinton administrations.
Perhaps you’re right, but it would help if you explained why you think so; otherwise it tends to look, as Marley23 suggests, that your views on Bush43 are coloring your view of history and whitewashing past abuses.
Okay. Nope, still good. Maybe you should check your articulator.
At what point does outrage become “recreational”? Just because you say so? If you don’t like the topic under discussion, why fucking post at all?
Not every goddam thread expressing outrage is “recreational.” Even if it is, who made you the Outrage Police, to decide that it should be “kept to a minimum”? That whole assertion is complete bullshit anyway, since the only one expressing “shock!” at those “barbarians” is YOU. The only one saying “such a thing could never happen in a civilized country” is YOU. That’s the argument you WISH someone had made.
And if you were truly concerned about the “outrage” being too “recreational,” you could have dialed it back yourself by posting a more rational or focused discussion that was still on topic. And if you were concerned about what realistically could be done in this situation, or ones like it, in light of the IYO damanged U.S. reputation on the world stage, you could have posted about that. Instead you post this:
country which has an aggressive and militaristic foreign policy, which has started a war of aggression with trumped up excuses, which has conducted the war with huge disregard for human life and well-being of the invaded country, which has held people for years without any fair hearing, which has tortured people, which has sent people to other countries to be tortured, which has maintained secret prisons, which has secret and unappealable no-fly lists, which wiretaps without restrain, which treats its illegal immigrants like shit, which does not abide by its treaty obligations when it suits them, which uses the death penalty, which … well, I think that is enough, such a country has zero moral standing to dictate to anyone how they should treat their criminals.*
That has fuck-all with the level of outrage in this thread, and it has fuck-all to do with the SUBJECT of this thread, so your protestations that you were ever concerned with either of those, are complete bullshit.
I trust your comprehension synthesizer will allow you to grasp that.
After this thread I have to say that I’m not exactly sanguine about that. I have to admit I always thought sailor was more rational than he’s shown himself to be here. A lefty, but a rational lefty is what I would have said…before this thread anyway.
Not to the best of my recollection. Of course, if you have a cite where I said that we could do anything we like to the detainees at Gitmo, then by all means let’s see it.
And apparently, until you and/or sailor are satisfied with our policy, the US has jack shit to say about what NK does.
That’s pretty stupid. It is, in fact, pretty equivalent to saying that nobody gets to complain about what the US does to prisoners, either.