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Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
I appreciate this post. Thank you.
At the same time, I am also appalled. Who is it that has been saying these things? I didn't even bring up Whelan/Reed/Fogel and I don't know of anyone on these forums who made the 'deserving their fate' comparison. Or derided releasing a WNBA player. If Griner is guilty of the accused crime - she may have said she was for legal reasons/minimizing sentence etc. so I don't know - that has to matter, and whether these others are guilty of what they are accused of has to matter also, as well as the fact that Bout is indirectly responsible for the deaths of how many thousands of people, but ... this is not at all the conversation that's been brought up. The only way the 5,000 have been brought up on this forum, and not be me, is explicity as an apples-to-apples comparison.
My main question here is, is this how you view discussions on this forum and how you think others on this forum do it? Is it automatically assumed that anyone who doesn't think the trade is a good idea (or whatever other issue) is carrying water for every dumb thing said in popular culture about it by anyone who might agree with some facet of what they said and not just speaking for themselves? That's certainly not how I go about it. When I read you posting something or whoever else on the forum, I assume you are speaking for yourself and only for yourself in expressing your opinion. I think that's entry-level, fundamental decency in engaging with another human individual and that there's really no way to have productive conversations on pretty much anything without doing that.
If saying 'this was a bad trade' causes someone to be lumped in with what Trump said or McCarthy or whomever else, that's just ... there aren't really words that come to mind to fully express how bad I think that is, but one thing it definitely means is that real discussions can't happen. I.e. I don't think you're 'part of the societal group that disagrees with me on an issue'. You're a person who disagrees with me on an issue. That's it, and that's all, and that's how you deserve to be treated.
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Come on now Brian what are we doing here? I specifically said YOU were the only one who were discussing this from a different POV than what I had seen from anyone else both here and on the wider internet. I specifically acknowledged that if this was THE discussion point as opposed to exclusively YOUR discussion point, WE as in the royal WE would have more common ground. If the overall discussion remained in that realm.
That is not where the overall discussion has been had. THAT is what I was speaking of in that part of my post. The debate has been about Britney Griner and the merits of whether she should be part of any prison release. You know we traded a basketball player for the Merchant of Death or I am uncomfortable with her getting released and Whelan staying or uh aren't there other American prisoner who could have gone etc. As long as that is the overall framework of the discussion here and elsewhere as opposed to what YOU said, no there can not be common ground.
It was not meant to be an attack on you. If that is the way it was taken, I apologize for that. It was meant as an explainer as to why I think there can't be common ground with the discussion going down that path. Here is what I said in my first post about this.
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If the preference is for BG to remain in a Russian prison for the next nine years so Viktor Bout can remain in a US jail for the next seven years, well okay I guess. Even if that has remained the case, I don't that has any bearing on Whelan. I think it is pretty clear that Whelan is not on the trading block for anything less than a top level Russian spy at the very least.
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I have no problem with anyone saying it was a bad trade. I have an issue with the idea that among the people who have been spotlighted as worthy of being traded, Britney Griner should not have been one of them.