Birdseye wrote:And how does your position have a shred of validity, lothar?
You mean the position that I shared in all ZERO of my earlier posts in this thread? Oops...
How am I "sniping"?
An attack without exposing your position = sniping. That's what that one-liner was. (Granted, your position is mostly known from other posts -- but that post was a snipe, as were a few others you made in other threads this morning.) My response was also sniping, because I didn't expose my position in the slightest.
The double standard is clear. If we're talking about America and the word evil is used, it's applied to everyone. If we're talking about another country, obviously it's just the government system.
Nobody has expressed that standard you seem to think is "clear". Nobody has drawn the line between "America" and "every country but America". DCrazy is the only one who's really clearly drawn the line, and he's drawn it between "representative governments" and "non-representative governments". This is a clear double-standard (though it's not the one you identified), but it's also a sensible one: if a government is legitimately representative, and you say "that country is evil", you're probably referring both to the government and to the people, because the government represents the people and the people elect the government -- they're tied together; they share common values and ideals. If a government is not representative, and you say "that country is evil", you may be referring to the people OR the government OR both -- they're not tied together; they may or may not share any common values whatsoever. In this case, the context of the statement is important.
Take, for example, the famous "axis of evil" statement, in context:
President Bush, in [url=http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html]the state of the Union[/url], wrote:North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while
starving its citizens.
Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an
unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to
murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an
axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.
There's a pretty clear disconnect between "the regimes" and "the citizens", which is explicitly stated in each of the 3 cases (see italics.) When Bush calls these 3 countries an "axis of evil", it's abundantly clear that he's referring specifically to the governments, and not to the people.
Look back at your original statement:
Birdseye wrote:Calling any country inherently evil is the antithesis of diplomacy and a hope for peace across the world. I will never agree with the charactorization of a nation as evil. What a better way to turn people against us? I don't believe nations are evil. They have families they love and they want to be happy just like us. Unfortunately we can't figure out how to get along. Leaders and regimes are bad, but nations are not evil.
Clearly, you missed the distinction Bush drew between the regimes and the people in his "axis of evil" speech.
