This is not normal. When someone makes a point about conferences in places with terrible human rights and you miss the point completely to talk about something unrelated, it is not normal conversation.

This is the sort of delicate topic that tends to exceed the boundaries of normal hypocrisy, with tangents that are irrational and self-delusional (like the abundance of slightly blunted, sometimes subconscious hate speech), rhetorically illogical and distracting (slavery, precedents of other conferences in other places, etc.), drastically missing the point (e.g. the distinctions between Tanzanian laws and what happens to foreign tourists in Zanzibar).