Quote:
Originally posted by Sidd Finch
C'mon, Ty. sgtclub asked a very simple question -- will this get a fraction of the coverage that the US torture of prisoners got. While he may have every interest in smearing the UN, that was not the thrust of his post.
The thrust of his post was the effort to blame the media because Americans might actually be more interested in knowing if their government is torturing prisoners in Iraq than in knowing whether soldiers on loan to the UN from Malaysia or whereever are hiring hookers in Africa. His point was silly enough, you don't need to mischaracterize it to ridicule it.
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And so I asked whether he thinks U.S. soldiers overseas don't hook up with prostitutes, and whether he could find any news coverage condemning that as "exploitation" in the same way that this articles pins it on the Moroccans and Uruguayans. The answers, apparently, are "no" and "no." Your point is that what the UN peacekeepers did is qualitatively different from what we did at Abu Ghraib. Of course it is. To start with, no one walked into Abu Ghraib because they were hungry, and the UN peacekeepers weren't forcing the prostitutes to stay.
I just can't get over the fact that a libertarian is complaining about prostitution in a place where the absence of a functional government has left people at the utter mercy of market forces. It's a libertarian's wet dream, except that you have these UN peacekeepers there trying to do a little to make things better. So it's important, obviously, to slam the UN for its little part in the human misery there, but to ignore the rest of the picture.
