“When it comes to issues like abortion … I’m about as liberal as your grandmother,” Biden said in a 1974 interview.
He added then that he believed Roe v Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court case that enshrined a woman’s right to an abortion, “went too far”. Then, in 1981, Biden voted for an amendment that would allow states to overturn the top court’s decision.”
Biden has no right to talk about the right to choice.
LGBTQ+ rights
In 1996, Biden voted in favour of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman and allowed states to refuse to recognise same-sex marriages and limited equal access to federal spousal benefits.
Biden has no right to talk about marriage equality.
Biden didn’t support trans rights.
He supports choice and marriage equity - he supported repeal of the Hyde amendment and pushed to Obama administration publicly to move its position on marriage. Biden perhaps became the most important national political voice on the full humanity of trans people.
If Biden didn’t speak, where would those rights and people be?
If he doesn’t speak on and act on genocide - how many people won’t ever get to speak?
It’s revealing how you are so convinced that American war criminals cannot, should not, be punished that you automatically assume that my complaints about hypocricy is all about letting Russia go free, not about getting them behind bars.
This is more like a politician opposing abortion rights right, and at the same time helping his wife have an abortion, because that’s different.
That’s not even a straw man argument. That’s a pile of straw and dung in a burning dumpster floating down a polluted river.
None of what you attributed to @docsoc was anywhere in what he wrote. It’s impossible to argue in opposition to it, because it’s fabricated nonsense. It would be like trying to drive nails into a fart.
That’s really all it takes for ‘evil to triumph’; and therefore, those who actively do nothing in the face of evil inherently cannot be “good,” because that requires being diametrically opposed to said evil.
At the contrary, that’s what "Seriously, it seems as though you would advocate for ignoring the suffering over there on the basis of “we’re no angels.” implies.
I’m not arguing for ignoring any suffering, I’m arguing against hypocricy, that USA should punish its own war criminals. Only if you start by assuming that this will not happen does docsoc’s accusation make sense. Now people complain that “this isn’t the time”, and as I’ve learned over the years, it’s never the time. Oh, there may be some hand wringing, but there is never going to be any action.
Your argument is exactly like saying that people shouldn’t oppose genocide. That the moral imperative in the face of ongoing genocide is to balance all historic ones before trying to stop the ongoing one.
That individuals can’t oppose genocide because of what their governments have done.
Can you oppose genocide? Are you barred from doing so because of things your country may have done that haven’t been prosecuted?
When you are imagining that i said things so you can attack that, because you cannot attack what i actually said, you have lost. Please, answer the question. Who is sufficiently without sin to call shooting bound civilians in the street a war crime? It is, and the fact that American, British, Greek, French, Rwandan, Chinese, Japanese and on and on also have committed war crimes does not make these less so.
No one disagrees about the need for America to acknowledge and punish war crimes. Many of the same people condemning Russia’s acts now were actively against America’s actions in Iraq. Biden, as president, now has the responsibility to act for America as a whole and try to set a moral example. Thus he condemns Russia for its current action. Much of the American population is fully aware that war crimes have been committed by it’s forces and would also like to see some punishment for those responsible.
What then would you have Joe Biden do? Impose sanctions against George W. Bush? Freeze the bank accounts of Dick Cheney? What would be sufficiently non-hypocritical to satisfy you?
America is not a dictatorship (yet) and President Biden is not singlehandedly responsible for everything that America has done in the past two decades. His power to throw America’s war criminals (mind you, these are individual people and not America as a country and certainly not Biden himself) in prison is rather limited. I am not saying to give up on the idea of pursuing America’s war criminals. I am saying what would you have Biden personally do about them before he can take action against Putin?
Because without that side of things, you just come off as contrarian. If two murders happen and the police arrest only one murderer, do you say that they should not have arrested the one because they did not arrest the answer? In this analogy, you treat Biden like one of the murderers, but he is not.
On what planet? As the responses to your post show, you’re the only one who’s come up with that warped inference.
In contrast, what @docosc has stated he implied is to act in the here and now. That’s the imperative.
There are still war criminals from WWII on the loose. We keep finding them in the strangest places. Justice sometimes takes a while. That shouldn’t stop us from fighting atrocities in the present.
It is the default position when civilians are killed by military forces to consider it a war crime unless shown otherwise. The burden is on the people with the weapons. Military forces should always look over their shoulder when they kill civilians. They should be scared to death of letting that happen.
At no point are indiscriminate attacks acceptable in this day and age. Even the UN charter makes it a war crime (passed after the Vietnam War).
Also a war crime. Indiscriminately bombarding a city is to knowingly target civilians. That is how international laws of warfare (Geneva Conventions, Hague Conventions, UN Charter) see it these days.
Its also why landmines and large scale use of incendiaries are war crimes these days.
