What was the point of this "aren't they barbaric!" story?
At least the Afghani people in Marc Manson's story have the guts to be honest with themselves about their justice system.
What's worse: cutting off someone's hand for a petty theft, or locking someone up for decades for a crime they did not commit, or for something that no rational person would consider a crime? In our enlightened country we have tens of thousands of people in jail with sentences of 10 years or more for drug crimes they didn't commit, or for things like possession of pot, which clearly does not deserve jail time whether it's a crime or not.
For details on this one great source is Frontline's web site 'Snitch': http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/ They do a great job of explaining how our drug laws put people in jail for the drug crimes of others, while letting off the people who actually committed the crime.
Our justice system is just as public and inhumane as the one described in Carl's post. If we are more enlightened than those Afghanis, what good does it do if it doesn't cause us to even try to stop our own barbaric human rights abuses?
Another angle on this would be to look at the Gulf War as a form of justice. We punished the Iraqi people for the invasion of Kuwait. We bombed the land where "an eye for an eye" was invented, but we took that principal much further. For invading a country of 250,000 people (extremely rich people, most of whom were on vacation) we killed 500,000 Iraqis--mostly soldiers during the war.
Then, we continued to punish the people, and by established estimates a million or so people, mostly children, have died as a result of the sanctions which for a while didn't even let medicine, like penicillin, into the devastated country.
Isn't that justice more barbaric than anything the Taliban have done? A million and a half lives for the crime of invading a country of 50,000. --Especially considering that we committed the same crime by invading Panama only a couple years earlier.
Well, this may seem all a bit out of line. But perhaps people will think it is something worthy of discussing. The left these days is very obsessed with the crimes of other countries like China, and Afghanistan. And it just seems a shame that there is so little energy in comparison, these days, going into stopping the worst human rights abuser: ourselves (i.e. America).,/i>
-Zack
Someone should ask Jean if he agrees with Exley that the US is the world's worst human rights abuser.