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Opinion piece with interesting links.
It’s one of those jokes in which the import seems obvious in retrospect. I think of this exchange often during contemporary discussions of world politics, in which hypocrisy is treated as some kind of cardinal sin — sometimes even to the exclusion of more serious crimes.
This is, after all, an arena that features war, mass killings, ethnic cleansing, punishing economic sanctions, territorial grabs, and more. To emphasize hypocrisy feels like missing the point with a vengeance. And yet it keeps coming up. Most recently, American attempts to support opposition against Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, along with its support of Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks, have raised accusations of hypocritical conduct from a variety of sources.
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HYPOCRISY IS NOT A REAL PROBLEM IN WORLD POLITICS
There’s a now-famous exchange from Norm MacDonald’s appearance on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, in which the two discuss the then-recent sexual assault charges against Bill Cosby.Norm: [Another comedian] told me, “I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy.” And I disagreed.
Jerry: You disagreed with that?
Norm: Yeah, I thought it was the raping.
It’s one of those jokes in which the import seems obvious in retrospect. I think of this exchange often during contemporary discussions of world politics, in which hypocrisy is treated as some kind of cardinal sin — sometimes even to the exclusion of more serious crimes.
This is, after all, an arena that features war, mass killings, ethnic cleansing, punishing economic sanctions, territorial grabs, and more. To emphasize hypocrisy feels like missing the point with a vengeance. And yet it keeps coming up. Most recently, American attempts to support opposition against Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, along with its support of Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks, have raised accusations of hypocritical conduct from a variety of sources.
More:

Hypocrisy Is Not a Real Problem in World Politics - War on the Rocks
There’s a now-famous exchange from Norm MacDonald’s appearance on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, in which the two discuss the
warontherocks.com