Comment by praptak
5 hours ago
"What is the purpose of the American sanctions mechanism?
Initially, it was created to address human rights violations[...]"
Yet here we are: it's being used to harass judges who address human rights violations.
5 hours ago
"What is the purpose of the American sanctions mechanism?
Initially, it was created to address human rights violations[...]"
Yet here we are: it's being used to harass judges who address human rights violations.
Not only judges in the ICC, the USA also used sanctions against a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice that is responsible for Bolsonaro's attempted coup case.
It's even more egregious it used the Magnitsky Act for that...
Correction: it was created to advance own geopolitical goals and harrass unfriendly regimes using human rights abuse as an excuse. So in that sense nothing has fundamentally changed.
Which geopolitical goals was it created for? Certainly not the ones it's being used for right now.
This sort of fallacy, of widening a category such that the initial meaning is lost, and then advancing an argument on that false category, is something I'm seeing a lot more these days in political topics. But I'm not sure I have a name for the fallacy.
It's like people that argue that the US civil wars was "actually" about states' rights and economic differences rather than slavery. It wasn't a war about the concepts of states rights in general, it was about the right of states to do one thing: legalize slavery. It wasn't about the idea of economic differences in general, it was about one specific economic difference: chattel slavery and whether those slaves get paid and have economic freedom.
"Always has been" ;)