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patentdragonNot been spending any time addressing news items lately - I've had enough problems of my own - but as the end of the year draws near, we have a couple of surprises in the news. One is another "jolly jihadi" trying to blow an airliner out of the sky, but I'm not particularly troubled by that right now (although anything that makes foreign travel harder certainly chips the points of my rack); the real end-of-the-year stunner is the execution in China of a British man for drug-smuggling - and he was apparently mentally ill, a fact seemingly completely ignored by the Chinese authorities...
The key points in this are...
1) Is execution justified, in any case? If this guy was a child-rapist, would there be such an uproar? Or what if he was a terrorist, responsible for the deaths of hundreds? Rose West? The Yorkshire Ripper? Harold Shipman...?
There are a lot of people who really, genuinely do not deserve to be alive right now, given all that they did - and we, the public, have to pay to keep them alive, in prison, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds EVERY YEAR. In an ideal world, we wouldn't even need prisons, but how close are we to that? And let's be entirely honest here - China use executions as an instrument of oppression, not a justifiable punishment.
2) Do the Chinese have the right to make, and enforce, their own laws? Sure they do - but China has a very iffy record on human rights, and this isn't going to be the only miscarriage of common justice this year, or even on this particular day. They host an Olympics, and everything's peachy - until someone kicks up a stink (a.k.a. legitimate political protest), and they have to be "pacified", and when the rest of the world objects, we should "keep our noses out of other countries' internal affairs". Guess you shouldn't have made an international incident out of them, then!
3) Is "mental illness" a legitimate defence? Don't get me started about that "poor Asperger's victim" about to be "victimised" by the horrible United States - he's capable enough to access US Defence computers, and he didn't just bash away innocently at Mummy's computer, hacking into them "by accident". The boy is a hacker, whatever his "chosen subject", and they're the ones costing all of us innocent computer users MILLION every year for anti-virus software because of their "selfless" actions in protecting us from Microsoft's "shoddy business practices"...
Yes, the guy in China could have had a case, being too trusting of his acquaintances - but just why is someone like that travelling the world on his own, unaccompanied? Shouldn't the family share some of the guilt, some of the culpability...?
In closing... Sometimes, humanity just sucks, in a growing variety of innovative ways...
The key points in this are...
1) Is execution justified, in any case? If this guy was a child-rapist, would there be such an uproar? Or what if he was a terrorist, responsible for the deaths of hundreds? Rose West? The Yorkshire Ripper? Harold Shipman...?
There are a lot of people who really, genuinely do not deserve to be alive right now, given all that they did - and we, the public, have to pay to keep them alive, in prison, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds EVERY YEAR. In an ideal world, we wouldn't even need prisons, but how close are we to that? And let's be entirely honest here - China use executions as an instrument of oppression, not a justifiable punishment.
2) Do the Chinese have the right to make, and enforce, their own laws? Sure they do - but China has a very iffy record on human rights, and this isn't going to be the only miscarriage of common justice this year, or even on this particular day. They host an Olympics, and everything's peachy - until someone kicks up a stink (a.k.a. legitimate political protest), and they have to be "pacified", and when the rest of the world objects, we should "keep our noses out of other countries' internal affairs". Guess you shouldn't have made an international incident out of them, then!
3) Is "mental illness" a legitimate defence? Don't get me started about that "poor Asperger's victim" about to be "victimised" by the horrible United States - he's capable enough to access US Defence computers, and he didn't just bash away innocently at Mummy's computer, hacking into them "by accident". The boy is a hacker, whatever his "chosen subject", and they're the ones costing all of us innocent computer users MILLION every year for anti-virus software because of their "selfless" actions in protecting us from Microsoft's "shoddy business practices"...
Yes, the guy in China could have had a case, being too trusting of his acquaintances - but just why is someone like that travelling the world on his own, unaccompanied? Shouldn't the family share some of the guilt, some of the culpability...?
In closing... Sometimes, humanity just sucks, in a growing variety of innovative ways...
