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Comment by breitling | Hacker News Reader

Get off your moral high-ground. We (USofA) still continue to execute people as well.

Firstly it's presumptuous to assume craigvn is from the USA. Secondly, the USA does not execute people for witchcraft or apostasy, the same cannot be said of the Saudis [1].

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34982154

Get out of your moral valley, get a better vantage on the moral topology around you. The USA executes people, true, but generally not political opponents. Saudi is an order of magnitude worse than the US government.

guess who is Saudi's biggest trade partner?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Saudi_Arabia#List_o...

or who actually sells them guns?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian_Army

Your point that the US is complicit and that our hands are not clean is well taken. There is a moral topology, this isn't black and white.

I originally was going to make the distinction between executions for murder versus executions for acts of political dissidence. Then I remembered a high-profile UAV strike of a pro-terrorism speaker and recruiter. [1]

Anwar al-Awlaki was a conspirator for a deadly terrorist attack, so that would ordinarily meet the requirement for guilt of murder.

The UAV strike was actually an act of war against an Al-Qaeda officer; killing of enemy soldiers not carrying weapons (such as artillery spotters, etc) is permitted under the laws of war.

Anyway, it really muddies the waters and I think the criticism of both US and Saudi practices is appropriate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

So in the eighties, would we (the US FBI) have been cool with MI6 assassinating all those people in Southie funding NORAID?

I would hope that the US would enforce rule of law within its own borders. Using terrorism funding criminal statutes, the extradition process, or enemy-prisoner-of-war exchange (that would be bizarre, but not unprecedented) to mollify the UK government would have been better solutions.

That's another example of a really murky conflict without one side having a moral upper hand.

Those statutes didn't exist in 1985 when Peter King, their biggest cheerleader, was marching down Fifth Avenue with Nassau County's finest behind him.

two wrongs something something.

Moral relativism isn't universally accepted, whether you like it or not.

No, in the USA our executions are cruelty-free.

This is not true. States have been unable to get the drugs they are supposed to use for lethal injection, so they've been substituting others, with horrible consequences. The linked article[0] is one example; there are plenty of others. There's also the fact that the second drug in the cocktail has always been a paralytic:

"But the paralytic also meant that, for years, witnesses could not necessarily tell if something was going wrong with an execution. Prisoners would be frozen, even while suffering immensely. Sometimes, the evidence would only be revealed in an autopsy."

[0]https://theintercept.com/2015/04/30/lockettoneyearlater/

I think you were missing the sarcasm in my comment. ;)

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