I said:

"Because here's a news flash for you: as far as regimes that one needs to revolt against go, the British rule over their colonies in the late eighteenth century was for all extents and purposes a walk in the park."

Now. "As far as regimes that one needs to revolt against go", followed by "the British rule over their colonies" (which should be read as "the British rule over their colonies in what is now the US and Canada", I will admit, and if somebody had criticized me on that point, I'd have had to admit to badly phrasing that). In other words, what we are talking about here is the British regime prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and its treatment of its citizens during peacetime. And why is it, you ask, that I limit myself to that? Simple, because that's the situation the Egyptians are in now, and Joel decided to compare the two by his mention of "redress of grievances". More specifically, I made that comparison because I wanted to point out that Egyptians engaging in peaceful methods of protest and dissent were in danger of losing their liberty and getting physically abused or even killed. Which to the best of my knowledge has never been the case in the British regime over its American colonies. And that led me to my point that one cannot expect the Egyptians to react the same way as the Americans did.

If my defense is "accusatory", could that not be because you just keep completely missing the point and refusing to even comment on the topic of the thread? You have so far failed to offer any argument concerning my "walk in the park" comment that actually discusses the events I referred to as a "walk in the park" in the first place. You keep going on about war crimes instead - and then you have the temerity to accuse others of straying from the point?

Now since you are so focused on this soldiers thing, I suppose I will answer your question about why I think it's different when done to soldiers, but only under this disclaimer: my answering it does not make this line of argument any more relevant to the actual discussion at hand, nor does it detract from the simple fact that my "walk in the park" comment did not even cover the war crime in question. So if you're going to focus on that part and ignore the parts of this increasingly long post that are actually relevant, I can tell you beforehand that I won't bother with further replies.

As I have previously noted, the British were fighting a war at a very considerable distance from home, which has two consequences relevant to the HMS Jersey thing: firstly, that the logistics of keeping and feeding sizeable amounts of enemy PoWs can be difficult, and secondly, that, considering the technology of the age, the military command at home inevitably has less oversight and awareness of everything that is going on. I rather doubt - though if you have proof to the contrary, I'd like to see it, obviously you know far more about this topic than I do - that the British government would have approved of a policy of intentionally starving or even murdering American PoWs. But presumably local commanders or the supervisors of those prison ships did indeed do that, implicitly if not explicitly. And that would certainly be a terrible crime, and by our - anachronistic - standards a war crime.

But yes, I do think that a government submitting its own innocent citizens to such treatment during peacetime would be a lot worse - after all, it's supposed to think primarily of the interest and safety of its own citizens, that's what it's a government for. And in peacetime, the excuses employed during wartime, as weak as they sometimes may be, can't apply at all.

I was indeed unaware, but since it didn't actually fall under the scope of my "walk in the park" comment, I felt justified in more or less glossing over it for the purposes of this discussion. By which I didn't mean to minimize the suffering of those who were on those ships.