- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
You must log in or register to comment.
Death penalty is inhumane, uncivilized, primitive, barbaric, and provably ineffective in reducing crime rates. We have countless of studies on this.
So while I agree with the underlying sentiment that corruption should be fought effectively, I would not go as far as to promote the death penalty.
That is just standard practice in corrupt autocracies. The leadership of China is as corrupt, but if you fall out with them, they will accuse you of corruption. As long as you stay on good terms with the rest of the corrupt ruling elite, your corruption isn’t corruption. Same as how it works in Russia.
I’m guessing that this is not an effort to curb corruption, rather a message to pay it upwards or face consequences. He is probably just a victim of his own hubris.
Then again, it took many years and a truly insane amount of money until the government either noticed or started to care. Can’t really see this happening in the first place without at least some willful ignorance being involved from those higher up.
Not to rain on anyone’s parade but China’s been punishing corrupt politicians for decades but it apparently doesn’t really seem to help much…
So don’t bother holding them accountable at all? Why punish crime if it doesn’t bring an end to crime?
It’s the same everywhere. If it’s illegal to do crime and people go to jail why is there still crime.
Well at least for that corrupt politician, it seems like he’ll have a hard time doing any future grifts
On December 3, the Intermediate People’s Court of Guangzhou sentenced him to life in prison for accepting bribes. Qi was also stripped of all of his assets and permanently deprived of his political rights. Under Chinese law, Qi will likely also have to perform prison labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Qi_(politician%2C_born_1961)
Seems like the death sentence is not correct.
If the US executed all the corrupt politicians and officials, would the US have any eligible officials left at this point?
Sounds like a good plan. Start over with a new batch
Until they all become corrupt again and they all get put to death
We obviously need a constitutional convention and reforms after the first round of arrests. We need to reform the system so it never gets this corrupt again or at least in the next couple of generations. Revolution is a part of holding your country to account
Most definitely. Everyone needs to take a leaf from the French people’s book
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of tyrants.”
Is no one gonna ask how the fuck one keeps 36.5 tons of anything in “apartments”? What. thafuq.
People from the cities are banned from buying property in the countryside, and people from the countryside can’t afford city property (banks are also banned from owning country property hence no mortgages). Until recently, property was the only asset people were allowed to inherit, so there was a massive construction boom.
That’s all collapsed so you have a stagnant market and millions of unoccupied or half-finished buildings, often of such poor quality they’re falling apart.
Plenty of spaces to hide tons of money.
Thaaaat’s why there is so much under utilization of buildings!!
I watch a few travel vloggers, often in China, and there are always so many huge buildings that are just abandoned or extremely under utilized, like a 15 story hotel with several unfinished, unused, floors, or large complexes with no people.
Sounds like where the US is heading, NGL. I’m sorry if you’re stuck dealing with that IRL. 🙇🏼♂️
It was because he didn’t kick up the proper amount upstairs.
I appreciate their sentiment but no govt should be allowed to murder its citizens
Counter point - many of greatest society failures were due to insufficient isolation of bad actors. Hitler failed his first coup attempt and came back after 5 years in prison - very few people remember this.
So some form of banishment is required and obviously death is the easiest, full-proof option so this is not a black/white issue as you make it out to be.
no govt should be allowed to murder its citizens
The headline is less sever that it looks at a glance.
In the Chinese legal system, a death sentence with a suspended sentence usually means that in the absence of new crimes, the sentence can be commuted to life imprisonment.
That said, it’s the age-old is/ought problem of governance. Would love to see China abolish the death penalty. But I’m glad to see someone complicit in social murder through the powers of the state is not held to a lower standard than a peer who committed grievous harm to his neighbors through more direct methods.
Lets say a real person, who is doing very well in a job that contributes to society, can take home 150k a year. And lets say they work from 18 to 65, that’s about a $7M career over 50-ish years.
The crook in OPs post stole more than 440 lifetimes of wealth. Even if he were to be put to work paying off that debt in the highest paying position which productively aids society (no lawyering, no managing, no marketing, no internet fame bs) it wold take him over 440 LIFETIMES to pay it off.
You can sentence him to 18,000 years of prison but he will never receive even 0.5% of that punishment.
Why are you talking about punishment when we’re discussing justice?
The crime does not matter. The reason the death penalty should be abolished everywhere is to spare the innocent a wrongful execution. It can never be 100% accurate 100% of the time so it should not be allowed at all.
The guilty can rot in prison. The innocent should never be executed.
Even beyond the fact that they may execute the innocent it’s still wrong. Let’s say a world exists where the government has a 100% accuracy rate. The issue is that by giving them the right to execute their own citizens and the power to make laws it then allows them the ability to create laws designed to kill specific people.
This is fallacious statement - nothing is ever 100% accurate 100% of the time, that’s impossible.
This is called absolute inaction in ethics - if you say that you can’t take action unless there’s utter most certainty and there’s nothing in the universe that is utter most certain -> you can’t take any actions. You’re perpetually stuck in indecision.
So it’s perfectly possible to reach certainty where someone is practically 100% guilty. Would you say that the killing of Musolini was unjustified? Should he be serving a life sentence instead and we ought to risk revival of nazis just for sake of not breaking this dichotomy? Yeah he’s 99.99999% guilty but we can’t be 100% sure.
nothing is ever 100% accurate 100% of the time, that’s impossible.
EXACTLY. So while we need a system to punish and reform criminals we do not need to execute. Thats just not necessary and we can absolutely operate without it. We can ensure that we are not executing innocent people by not executing anyone.
It is not absolute inaction. It is sparing the innocent because the govt cannot be trusted.
I generally agree but there are costs to not executing someone clearly guilty as well and it’s about measuring these costs. For a general murderer - sure the costs of keeping them banished forever are quite low but for someone like Musolini or this mayor? There are real costs of keeping them alive in banishment primarily the risk of them coming back or leaking influence back into the real world so imo death sentence here could be justified.
Though in practice I agree that it’s safer to not give government this power as overall risk of abuse is too high but ethically it’s completely justifiable to kill someone who’s incredibly dangerous even if 100% certainty is not possible.
I dont care about costs. This is about preventing wrongful executions. I cannot accept the arguement that say “well, its expensive to prevent the state from accidentally executing the wrong person” Too bad, thats the cost of justice. Prison is a punishment for the guilty, no one should be murdered by the state.
Why draw the line at execution?
Seems like that same logic could be applied to imprisonment, or any punishment in general. “It can never be 100% accurate, so prison should not be allowed at all”.
Under your proposed system, innocent people willl rot in prison for life.
You can’t bring somebody back to life after killing them. If it turns out they were innocent after all, there’s no releasing or recompensating a corpse.
Agreed that some innocent people will be set free, but again this is not 100% perfect, so it is certain that innocent people will rot in prison until they die.
Why draw the moral line at executing innocent people, but not at imprisoning innocent people for life ?
Your argument is flawed, and they calmly described exactly how for you, but you doubled down? Duuude. 🙄
So youre saying being wrongly imprisoned is just as bad as being murdered? No, I dont agree with that
No, that’s not my argument at all. I agree with the utilitarian argument that imprisonment is better than the death penalty.
What I’m saying is that every moral argument against the death penalty can also be applied to life imprisonment. If you justify your anti-death penalty stance on the moral argument (“innocent people will die”, as the first person I replied to said), then it is a slippery slope to a prison abolitionist position.
Because you can review a case under new evidence or for any numbers of reasons, and figure you got the wrong person.
Ooops can’t un-execute that innocent. My bad.
And the whole rehabilitation thing. But I am guessing your argument is you can’t rehabilitate a billionaire or something. You are wrong btw if you think that.
You’re right to say that life imprisonment is an improvement over execution because some innocent people will be set free. But under the imprisonment system, it is still guaranteed that innocent people will rot in prison until they die.
You can’t un-execute the innocent, but you also can’t un-rot the innocent who die in prison.
Why is one morally acceptable and the other is not?
Both arent good, sure, but how can you say death is the same as life in prison?
That really depends on living conditions in prison. There are fates that are worse than death.
But I am guessing your argument is you can’t rehabilitate a billionaire or something. You are wrong btw if you think that.
You can not rehabilitate the thousands of people who’s lives were worsened by a billionaires actions. They commit crimes on a scale so insane that they need to be addressed in an entirely different way from conventional crime. They don’t rob a business and kill a store keeper, they put thousands of people out of work and leave them unable to support themselves and their families. They destroy lives for the sake of personal gain on an industrial scale.
A single armed man in a stadium couldn’t do as much harm to humanity as a multi-billionaire does from his desk.
Lol, it’s citizens would kill each other if they didn’t, the very concept of government is rooted in the first principle of a Monopoly on violence, the word “should” implies a set of rules above the enforcer they are compelled to listen to, governance itself requires the ability to restrict violence from others you can’t be the first at that without violence itself, a “citizen” is just someone useful enough to let live if that equation changes they will use violence. This is fundamental.
So you are saying that because murder happens the state should also get to do it?
The goal is to prevent wrongful executions and the solution is remarkably simple, stop executing people entirely. Nothing else has to change and we save lives.
I live in a country without the death penalty and believe it or not, we aren’t all murdering each other.
I appreciated the sentiment, but here’s my counterpoint: Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, etc. That’s only one industry and is nevertheless incomplete, but if I kept going it would take too long.
As long as the death penalty exists it will be used against an innocent, as it already has and will continue to do.
As long as there is even a MICROSCOPIC chance of executing someone innocent, it should NEVER be used. And since there’s no way to ensure there is NO CHANCE someone innocent is executed, it should be abolished.
also, fwiw, i don’t think killing someone is the right way to show that killing people (among other things) is wrong. it’s pretty contradictory.
Justice demands it. As a compromise, we could do it as a special military tribunal a la Nuremberg rather than having it be the regular law of the land
Any death penalty will create wrongful executions. It simply can never be perfect. How many innocent people is it acceptable to execute as long as we also execute guilty people?
To me that is none.
Any death penalty also means that there is an incredibly high level of trust in the government to be accurate and thorough and not corrupt. In the US thats the same government that allows the Epstein class to walk free right now. You trust them to wield death penalty?
I don’t think they executed any innocent people at Nuremburg. This isn’t like the death penalty for a given crime like murder, where you can get the wrong guy. We know exactly who they are, there’s no ambiguity or any need for an investigation to find the guilty party.
This would not be the Epstein government doing the executions, in this scenario they would be the ones being executed
and yet the death penalty that exists today and is used today HAS killed innocent people. You know how we can prevent that? stop executing people.
Stealing billions is stealing hundreds and thousands of lifetimes of work from society. When crimes are at that scale they should receive the kind of attention that ensures 100%, that the accused will receive a punishment equal to the lives they have destroyed through greed.
I agree. The government shouldn’t be killing him. They should just make it not a crime if others do.
Right because mob justice has always been free from error as well
I agree. But if a person commits a white collar crime, they are no longer citizens.
Dehumanizing those who have done wrong never ends well. Feel free to find the example that resonates best with you. There are plenty.
Nah. White collar crime is a type of crime done with numbers. You can prove beyond reasonable doubt with this stuff. It’s not like the messiness of DNA evidence or blurry video recordings. I can see the down votes on this.
The fact of their guilt isn’t the issue. It’s the dehumanization that’s the problem.
In Russia this (the confiscation and sentence, not the execution part) happens when somebody becomes out of favor, not because all the stolen wealth was suddenly discovered. Everybody in the government is in on it and doesn’t stop it until ordered from the top. That’s just how mafia works.
The temptation to respond to this with something in the form of a haiku is tremendous…
That sounds suspicious. 36.5 tons of material? That’s the sort of thing a cop would make up to ensure a conviction.
To be fair, 13.5 tons of gold is about 700 L (using a density of 19.3 kg/m3). That’s a lot, sure, but still far smaller than your average cupboard.
You could literally fit this stuff under a decently sized bed (2m x 1.8m, with 20cm elevation), inside a fridge, or behind the clothes in a wardrobe.
The 13.5 tons of gold had me curious. 13.5tons = 27000 lbs = 432000 oz
Gold is between $4700 to $4900 per oz
The value is between $2.03 to $2.12 billion usd
Wow that’s trump levels of corruption. I don’t think you get credit when you’ve got politicians that corrupt in the first place.
This also an example of how some corrupt politicians aren’t thinking big enough
