I wonder if you would be so dismissive if one of your own kids were sentenced to 9 years in a Russian penal colony for a stupid mistake and victimless crime.
Hmm. By that same measure, are all the folk supportive of BG her close relations? 
No, just sympathetic friends. Americans supporting an American agaisnt a totalitarian enemy.
Putin is a known murderer of his opponents. And certainly not above planting evidence no matter what lies and half truths have been told by him or his henchmen.
But what does any of that have to do with whether you feel sympathy? That’s the bizarre part. How I personally act has no bearing on whether I can feel bad that something happened to someone else. It has no bearing on whether I care about an injustice.
That’s what’s bizarre with the way you talk about these things. Your sympathy seems to be transactional, based on some internal merit-based system, rather than the way it works for most of us. Most of us, we have sympathy except in extreme circumstances where someone is so bad we don’t think they deserve it.
Or, conversely, that they deserve what happened to them. Otherwise we feel at least some sympathy.
JFC, we’re talking 9 fucking years in a penal colony. You’re so goddamned smug about how she deserved it because she earned so much money and should have been smarter is just repulsive.
I’m really sorry that your job consists of hearing people, all day long, trying to game the system. It seems to have hardened you to being able to have any empathy to people who aren’t as astute as you. You seem to assume that everyone should be as savvy as you in all their life choices, but it doesn’t work out that way. Not everyone has your many advantages - white, male, smart, etc.
You’re dismissive of why an American black woman would dare to work in a country that until this year wasn’t safe, because you don’t have to be concerned about your retirement. And how dare she make the stupid mistake of bringing an illegal painkiller. Bully for you. Continue to feel smug on your pedestal.
Ah, free shoes! Sounds entitled. Probably just getting what she deserves for living a life of free-shoed privilege that went to her head.
Moderating
This is getting very heated, and you need to dial down the temperature a bit. This isn’t a warning, but insults are not acceptable in GD.
Apologies for my role.
I do not understand the sympathy so many folk have for such individuals/situations, and those folk do not understand my position. But I certainly have said all I have to offer on this topic and will do my best to stay out of it from now on.
WTF? Quite a back-handed apology. Please don’t further explain why “such” individuals don’t deserve your sympathy. If you must, please take it to the pit.
shrug I think it’s pretty easy to understand. Anyhow, I have both sympathy and empathy for BG (as well as the teacher who is being held in Russia for a similar transgression that is being less talked about), while also thinking it was colossally stupid (if done knowingly. I could also see it being a brain-fart oversight, like something I might actually do.) I find it hard to be human and not have sympathy/empathy for what I perceive to be injustices.
I wonder what BG will do whenever she is released?
She’s 32. Even a couple years **inactivity and poor diet will make a come back at 34 unlikely.
**The Pussy Riot women said they sewed uniforms in prison.
$250k puts you in the top 5% of annual income earners. A net worth of $5M is approximately top 2.8%. Among people age 32, these are probably top 1% amounts.
But you have to remember that athletes have a very short shelf life. Especially women. That income has to support them once they retire at 40 with wrecked knees and few marketable job skills. Aging women athletes don’t have the same amounts of opportunities available to them as men.
I hope Brittney has income insurance.
Wouldn’t bother me if the US went in and freed her from the labor prison by bribing guards.
And she’s out.
Good.
Meanwhile Paul Whelan an ex Marine is still in a Russian prison.
While I don’t think he was a spy, I also think “ex marine” needs some context:
After a court-martial conviction in January 2008 on multiple counts “related to larceny”, he was sentenced to 60 days restriction, reduction to pay grade E-4, and a bad conduct discharge.[9][10] The specific charges against him included attempting to steal more than $10,000 in 2006 in Iraq and using a false Social Security number to create a false account on a government computer system to grade his own examinations.
I dunno, that guy just seems sketchy. Personally I’d rather see Marc Fogel released before Whelan.