Read my post in context with the parent to which I was responding. Original poster used the term "fucking barbaric" to describe a country that executed drug users and I was suggesting they thought a little more about their posting.
Agreed my language should have been more carefully chosen. I completely agree the issue is more nuanced than a short response can provide however felt it would be mostly lost on the original poster, hence decided to give them a blunt response to get them thinking about what they'd written. Perhaps I shouldn't have jumped back at a troll...
Clearly you are more capable of a more rational debate and it would be more pleasant to have a decent conversation and discuss the issues with you rather than User Jaysyn.The issues are indeed complex.
I'd note though that the State of Texas- a part of the USA - apparently still reserves the right to execute under 18 year olds and President Obama has promised to review the failure to ratify the Convention (Ref.)
regards.
I think that it is very strange to defend a blunt response if it can easily be shown to be incorrect. For example, I could call you "fucking barbaric" for murdering children too, but that would be incorrect and certainly unjustified. At very least, your outburst makes you look very silly to me. The context doesn't compare the US to anyone, and the post doesn't imply the author is from the US at all. So your remark about the US is certainly off-topic and not supported by the context.
Your reference from wikipedia is probably incorrect. The citation in wikipedia for the remark, that Texas reserves the right to execute 17 year olds (Texas's previous limit), does not mention Texas at all! I did a search for texas in that article and got nothing, so (unless my browser is malfunctioning) that wikipedia statement seems baseless to me. So I will edit out that reference from the article.
Furthermore, Texas cannot overrule the US constitution, and the supreme court has already ruled on the matter. There was a case mentioned in the wikipedia article where they tried to overturn the ruling in Alabama, but that went nowhere (and rightfully so). So that reference that you cited can not support your argument in any case whether true or not.
Finally, Obama is a politician. He cares a lot about symbols, as shown by his public reasons for "firing" a CEO. I repeat that: he forced a person to retire from his job because Obama wanted to emphasize a point. Doesn't matter if it was justified for other reasons or not - that was the reason suggested by the man himself. Obama also recently suggested a world without nuclear weapons, though there are many reasons that is currently unrealistic. Obama declared it probably won't happen in his lifetime, in fact! So the point of mentioning that goal was also symbolic. The UN Convention is also a symbol. So Obama's support of ratifying the convention is not surprising, but also not a sign that he thinks it is realistic or even possible in the near future. Of course I could be wrong, but I think this is the likely conclusion.