• Howdy
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    6 months ago

    Meanwhile in the usa… Our very own real estate fraudster with 91 felony charges is the pick of 50% of the country to be president.

    That was bizarre to type. I can’t believe this is reality.

    • Ghostface
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      86 months ago

      Or the fact the other real estate fraudsters who admitted dont convict Trump of the crime we are also doing!

      I can’t say nothing will happen to them as I thought, nothing would happen to Trump and here we are.

      I also have a biy more respect for giving someone enough rope to hang themselves. If Trump would of been stopped before his presidency, due to all of the reason any previous candidate would of been disqualified. We wouldn’t be here either.

      • @Agrivar
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        46 months ago

        Or the fact the other real estate fraudsters who admitted dont convict Trump of the crime we are also doing!

        I keep reading and rereading this “sentence” and I’ve come up empty. Can you clarify?

        • Ghostface
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          26 months ago

          Sure! In summary the political process would of discarded Trump as a candidate before reaching office. For reference there was a politician who dropped from running because he had a weirdish yell played across the air.

          Then you have Trump in office, having never divested from his companies, from day one Trump was in violation of a crime. Now here is where the rope comes into play. Trump was playing the gambit of not bring charged while in office which allowed him to believe he could keep delaying the clock.

          Now due to his corruption, he has taken down the GOP, that party is slowly imploding, judges, politicians he has exposed the entire grossness of the system.

          So short rope, no insurrection maybe… Long rope and it leave a wider wake of destruction. RNC downfall, GOP splitting up…

    • @PriorityMotif
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      26 months ago

      30% of eligible voters didn’t vote in 2020 which had the highest turnout since 1900.

      • @Gabu
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        16 months ago

        Not voting is the same as voting for the winner.

  • @Sludgehammer
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    636 months ago

    The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.

    Wow, when your fraud starts being measured in “percentage of GDP” you know you got too greedy.

    • @[email protected]
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      6 months ago

      According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

      That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

      From a BBC article

  • @[email protected]
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    586 months ago

    I think people like her deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison, but no crime, no matter how severe, deserves a death penalty.

    • @[email protected]
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      -136 months ago

      I think there are certainly crimes that deserve the death penalty (think CP type crimes). Just get those people out of society tbh, but this is just my opinion.

      The only problem I have is with 100% certainly. You would have to be certain, or very very close to absolute certainty, that you have the right person who committed the crime.

      • @[email protected]
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        326 months ago

        If the person goes to prison for the rest of their lives, it will keep society safe from them either way. The death penalty is not making society safer.

        • @[email protected]
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          6 months ago

          People in maximum security prisons can, and do, escape. Sometimes the commit more violent crimes once they escape. A malicious governor can, in most states, pardon any person they want, and there’s no legal recourse. (In my state, the governor does not have the legal power to pardon a person until they’ve served at least 6 (?) years, and have been recommended by the parole board.)

          On the other hand, people don’t get raised from the dead, no one gets resurrected, and there’s no reincarnation. Dead is dead, and is as safe to society as is possible.

          The death penalty is certainly over-used, and applied in cases where it’s not likely necessary, but I absolutely, 100% believe that people like e.g., Gary Ridgeway should be executed as quickly as is possible.

          • @[email protected]
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            146 months ago

            Point about escaping/pardon. I acknowledge that society is ever so slightly safer when exceptionally dangerous criminals are executed.

            About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it’s true… But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don’t deserve to be executed, like Snowden… Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.

            As for escaping prison, it’s already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it’s definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn’t be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner’s location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don’t have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn’t be worth it.

            • @[email protected]
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              -46 months ago

              Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil’s Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don’t want to be prisoners.

              I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there’s not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn’t be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You’d also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you’d have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn’t been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.

              I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it’s currently mostly applied to people that don’t have enough money to get better legal counsel.

              I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I’d take execution.

              • @[email protected]
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                36 months ago

                Yes, people do escape, but it’s extremely rare. I’m far more worried about the state having the legal power to execute someone than an individual escaping from prison.

                Also, giving the prisoner the choice to either be executed or imprisoned for life would give an incentive for the operators of the prisons to treat their prisoners even worse so prisoners would choose to be executed.

          • @[email protected]
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            6 months ago

            The risk of me getting wrongfully convicted of something and getting a death sentence is higher than the chance of some dangerous murder escaping prison and hurting me.

            Unfortunately being absolutely 100% certain is not a luxury we have in the majority of cases. People are framed, new evidence comes up, things like lie detectors and blood splatter analysis turn out to be junk science. Life in prison can get overturned and corrected if mistakes were made, death can’t.

            • @[email protected]
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              -56 months ago

              I think that you can make it much, much more difficult to get a wrongful conviction in a case that’s eligible for the death penalty though. I think that, for starters, all interactions with police should require video and audio, so that suspects can’t be coercively questioned for 16 hours without an attorney before signing a “confession”. I think any claimed evidence should have to have standards that were published, peer-reviewed, and repeatable before they could use it. And I think that crimes eligible for an imposed death penalty should have to take place over a period of time, rather than a single event. E.g., a robbery/murder shouldn’t get the death penalty, but (per an earlier comment I made) a serial child rapist should. I would even say that you should be absolutely required to have forensic evidence in order to get a death penalty conviction; I believe that most exonerations were for convictions that relied on witness testimony, official misconduct, and coerced confessions, usually combined with an overworked and ineffective defense attorney.

              I dunno; even the possibility of someone like Ed Kemper ever getting out–like if he ever tells the parole board that he thinks he’s finally safe–is terrifying.

            • @[email protected]
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              -16 months ago

              That’s an interesting interpretation.

              Yes, I think that Roger Stone should be executed, so that if Trump is re-elected he can’t pardon him.

      • @dvoraqs
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        56 months ago

        Certainty is a dangerous thing when people lie out of self interest or from coercion.

  • @[email protected]
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    326 months ago

    I don’t believe these things happen because of great work or investigations, she must have stepped on someone else’s toes or something, that’s the only way influential people go down…

    • Diplomjodler
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      486 months ago

      There’s your answer:

      Her actions “not only violate the property management rights of individuals and organizations but also push SCB (Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank) into a state of special control; eroding people’s trust in the leadership of the Party and State,”

      • @pdxfed
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        126 months ago

        When rich people get affected, people go down

  • @jwing
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    256 months ago

    Now do Trump

  • @antidote101
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    6 months ago

    Doing a multi billion dollar realestate fraud, in a semi-communist “Socialist Oriented Market Economy”…

    …yeah the penalty is gonna be on the steep side. Landlords, rent seekers, and fraudsters aren’t looked upon nicely anywhere, but particularly so in a country with that relationship to communism.

    Landlords aren’t generally considered communal minded. Fraud isn’t good for the community, it’s not done for the collective good.

    The immune system of the masses has weeded out the what was going on here, and will deal with it via putting the perpetrator to death. Making sure this outrageous and damaging conduct will not continue or be encouraged.

    It’s a tough call, and they’re making it.

      • Sentient Loom
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        6 months ago

        is there a way to approach being a landlord in an ethical and community-minded way?

        One landlord may be more or less “ethical and community minded” than another, but being a landlord is 100% about profiting from somebody else’s precariousness. The best you can say is, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” I appreciate a landlord who fixes the broken pipes and doesn’t totally gouge me… but that always feels like Stockholm Syndrome.

        Would being transparent with the renter about the total cost of owning the property, like the mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, etc., then basing the rent payment off that total cost plus 10% or something be ethical?

        I don’t see what difference that would make. They still get to set the price, and you can either take it or leave it.

        I also recognize that many people don’t want the commitment that comes with purchasing a home.

        I suspect that this number is extremely low.

        How can the need for those people be met without landlords existing?

        Easily with far (far far far) fewer landlords.

        It’s genuinely ridiculous to paint “rental homes” as some boutique service offered as a choice to home-owners who have money for a house but just don’t want the “commitment” (?!?!?!?!?) of not throwing a huge portion of your money away every month. Absurd.

        I don’t hate small landlords. We all have to betray humanity to avoid being homeless. We work at unscrupulous companies, because what other kind of companies are usually hiring? But we don’t have to contort ourselves to the point of breaking every single bone in our bodies to morally justify profiting from the unfair precariousness of people terrified of homelessness.

        • @[email protected]
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          76 months ago

          Yeah, the short of it is if you are a landlord and you’re not undermining your own industry by encouraging tenants to become owners of their own personal property, then you’re not community minded in the socialist (own the means of production) sense. There are exceptions, like one case where a rapper bought a poor neighborhood but did so to keep rent hikes and evictions from happening, arguably giving those families more stability so they have a chance to build family wealth.

        • @[email protected]
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          06 months ago

          The one issue I would raise with your analysis is that if things were very different (like all people who wanted a home had one) a second home rented out not to the desperate but people in a transitional state could be a benefit to the community. Think college students who are attending school somewhere they do not plan to live long term, and who prefer not to live in a dormitory. Or people who are staying for a few months in another city for their work or visiting family, where a hotel would be prohibitively expensive.

          • @antidote101
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            6 months ago

            Interestingly enough, something like 86% of Vietnamese people own their own homes…

            In part it’s because 70% of the population are farmers, and if you live in a rural area and pass a test on raising crops the government will just assign you a plot to farm.

            I imagine home ownership is also very high in Japan, where they’ve had a negative interest rate and deflation for 25 years. Their housing bubble burst with their aged population explosion and the total population being in decline.

      • Tiefling IRL
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        6 months ago

        It’s a simple question. Are you taking away a home that could be bought and lived in by another family, for your own financial benefit?

        If yes, then i have a French friend I’d like you to meet

          • @[email protected]
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            56 months ago

            You are looking at ethics and morality from an individualistic perspective, not a systemic perspective. People opposed to landlords are more concerned with the latter. This is an insignificant edge case needed to construct a situation where the individual and social ethics diverge and has little relevance to policy decisions.

          • Tiefling IRL
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            6 months ago

            I wouldn’t say either is entirely ethical, but the second example is way more ethical than the first. If you buy a house to rent, it doesn’t really matter where the house is, you’re still preventing a family from having a stable home and taking it off the market for your own greed. With the second, at least you’re building housing.

      • @antidote101
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        6 months ago

        Would a community-minded individual buying a second home in their own neighborhood to rent out cause them to become less community-minded?

        Probably, because it would probably cause them to become entitled, or have an overly endowed sense of entitlement or control over the area (by valorisation of the owning more of it). They’d probably bring it up whenever they could, especially at council meetings as of its an act of charity when it’s still rent seeking.

        That sense of entitlement is generally termed “being a Karen” these days, and is a Common phenomena among financially sucessful liberals

        Would being transparent with the renter about the total cost of owning the property, like the mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, etc., then basing the rent payment off that total cost plus 10% or something be ethical?

        What? Rubbing the renters face in the fact that they’ve got them paying off a mortgage that the renter could probably afford themselves if they only had the CAPITAL outlay for a down payment on the place they’re now forced to rent?

        No, the ethical move would be to place the house in the renters name proportionally as they pay it off - because they’re the ones actually paying the mortgage. Making the false claim of “oh look how much of YOUR MONEY this is costing me” isn’t some how more ethical.

        This is the nature of capitalism, it privileges people with CAPITAL. Rubbing the renters nose in that fact doesn’t suddenly make it ethical. Most renters already know they’re paying off someone else’s mortgage - or in some cases second or third mortgage - that’s part of the whole problem. That’s what “rent seeking” is, the creation of a false middle man who collects rent without doing the work of the actual person charged with paying.

        You can’t make it ethical simply by telling the victim that that’s what you’re doing. No.

        A mugging doesn’t become more ethical if the mugger explains what they’re doing and how much of the person’s cash they’re gonna spend on what.

        but I also recognize that many people don’t want the commitment that comes with purchasing a home.

        That’s not a thing. You’ve made something up, and it sounds like you’re feeling a suitable guilt for your rent seeking behaviour.

        People WANT the commitment, security, and stability of owning their own homes, they just can’t find a bank to offer the Capital outlay, or can’t find an available property within their means because HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY. That the wealthy wittingly or unwittingly use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages. So you need to get real on this issue.

        How can the need for those people be met without landlords existing?

        By banks determining who can have a mortgage by who has a healthy record of paying rent on time. If someone is consistently the source of the cost of the mortgage THEY should be trust worthy enough for their own similar mortgage. That’s just common sense.

        But instead HOUSING HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN INVESTMENT COMMODITY that the wealthy (wittingly or unwittingly) use to take advantage of the poor people paying off their mortgages… It’s rent seeking behaviour.

        Would it be through something like cities mandating a certain ratio of SFH’s to apartments/duplexes, then only allowing landlords to own and rent apartments? Although that seems like it would conflict with community-mindedness.

        Yeah, seems like something that just privileges the moneyed Capitalist class.

        More on topic, yeah. Personal feelings on the death penalty aside, this is what a country not bowing to the billionaire class looks like. As an American, it’s honestly refreshing to see someone with that much money held to actual accountability for their actions.

        Yes, it doesn’t happen so much in America because America is a Capitalist oriented feudalist system designed with poverty as a feature of the system. Gotta have someone for the upper class people to exploit.

        I’d love to tell you different because it’s clear you have a conscience even though you’re living your part in the system… But I can’t.

        Thanks for trying to make an “Ethical Capitalism” but there can seldom be such a thing (it’s a bit of a contradiction in terms). Australia is trying to get a thing called HAFF (the housing future fund) up and running, where building unions pay for starting the construction of new housing but the housing is still sold on the open market of Capitalism as a commodity to whoever has the largest Capital outlay… So yeah.

        The UK has more co-op housing, where subsidized housing is owned and ran by the tenants… but it’s still not quite ethical and pretty hard to get into because it’s not a large program.

        Congrats on being a home owner (I assume). Maybe you got lucky and under other circumstances you’d be on the other (less pleasant) side of the equation.

          • @antidote101
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            6 months ago

            No, I’m not really fine with banks profiting of mortgages, but I am more fine with it than I am private individuals. This is for a couple of reasons:

            Banks are easier to regulate.

            Banks are more directly related to the life of a currency, they’re responsible for the buying of government bonds which enables the money supply to be increased.

            A disparity between the wealth of banks and the wealth of private individuals is already an stable established norm.

            It’s not common for banks to be owned by private individuals.

            Banks can be owned by unions.

            Land is a finite resource, and I’m not sure anyone has cracked how best to manage it. I like some of what Vietnam does, where if you live in a rural area and can prove that you know how to raise crops (via a standard test) the government will allocate you a plot of farmland to farm. This has resulted in 70% of their population being farmers, and 86% of the population owning their own homes. So ultimately I think the state and probably a state bank, or state land bank, should probably be responsible for managing mortgages.

            The word mortgage actually breaks down to death’s pledge by the way. It’s the kind of thing designed to take someone a lifetime to pay off.

            It’s all pretty dark, and really I think housing should be a human right. I think if people were responsible for their own homes we’d see better upkeep, and that to some degree housing, shelter, and land should be seen as a nexus point between the citizen and the nation which is made up of the geographical area parceled out and built on to live in.

            The less public housing is made, and the more like a private speculator’s market it becomes, the greater wealth disparity we’ll see. Housing is tied up with homelessness which is a key indicator of how in decline citizen’s feel their society to be. Leaving that up to the free market is insane, and represents just how “sold out” our lives can be.

            It’s part of maintaining the physical, financial and mental health of the population. We shouldn’t leave it up to profiteers.

            I can understand having a death’s pledge to the state. I can’t understand paying off someone else’s death pledge with your life, so that they can buy more and more houses and do more of the same. What are these, soul collector’s?

            Societies with a narrower wealth disparity (a smaller gap between the richest and poorest) tend to be better off, more unified, more humanitarian, more democratically capable, and less tolerant of injustices. Making sure the rental system doesn’t become a speculative investment market is an important aspect of a society’s success, empathy, and of the quality of life and peace of mind of citizens.

            Sorry if I sounded harsh to you earlier. Hopefully one day in the future, neither of us will rent.

            • borari
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              26 months ago

              Sorry if I sounded harsh to you earlier. Hopefully one day in the future, neither of us will rent.

              It’s all good, and thank you for your response. You really gave me a lot to chew on, I’ve never really considered a lot of what you brought up about bank owned mortgages, specially the bit about regulation and pre established wealth disparity.

      • @grue
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        16 months ago

        This thought doesn’t directly pertain to the topic at hand, but is there a way to approach being a landlord in an ethical and community-minded way?

        Sure, by selling the property to the tenants as a co-op and demoting yourself to property manager.

        • borari
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          16 months ago

          So I was imagining more single-family homes than apartment units, but can you explain to me the difference between a coop and a condo?

          Also, how does purchasing a coop help someone who specifically does not want to buy something because they don’t want to significantly establish themselves in the place they’re currently living?

          This sounds like a pretty glib answer to a question that was asked in earnest.

  • @[email protected]
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    186 months ago

    I’m usually not fond of the death penalty, but these are the kind of people it should be reserved for.

      • GarfGirl [she/her]
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        136 months ago

        iirc the death sentence is just being used as a motivation for her to return all the stuff she got from corruption and if she does it’ll be downgraded to life in prison

        • @Gabu
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          16 months ago

          Slavery is cheaper than paid labor, how is the cost a relevant metric?

  • Lad
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    186 months ago

    I don’t support the death penalty, but I do support harsh punishment for this kind of massive scale fraud.

    • @Dasus
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      66 months ago

      Completely agree, the death penalty isn’t necessary, but I am glad of the message this sends to some rich folk. Probably mostly Vietnamese ones, but still.

  • @Zehzin
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    186 months ago

    Vietnam, still undefeated

    • @Gabu
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      16 months ago

      Does it count as undefeated if they defeated themselves?

      • @Zehzin
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        16 months ago

        That averages as a tie.

      • @Zehzin
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        106 months ago

        France lost to Vietnam though, that’s why there’s still a Vietnam and not L’Indochine Française or whatever they were gonna call it

        • @Cthulu_but_gay
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          16 months ago

          I don’t know if this is sarcasm or if you consider six decades of being colonies as a win

  • @[email protected]
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    146 months ago

    Has the death penalty been used for this sort of crime before in Vietnam and has it been effective at deterring others in a measurable way?

    • dalë
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      166 months ago

      Has the death sentence been a deterrent for any crime?

      • @CluckN
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        106 months ago

        Singapore kills drug dealers which is a bit scary.

      • @[email protected]
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        26 months ago

        No it’s a big show for statists to show how strong and dominating they are. It’s not about your lowly practical concerns. It doesn’t even matter of they kill the right one. As long as blood is spilled. The anger of the masses will be sated for a little while and all will know there is no escape from the violence of the state.

    • @[email protected]
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      156 months ago

      In Vietnam? Not sure. The French seemed to have a lasting benefit from doing this to every landlord they could lay hands on in the late 1700s, though.

    • @[email protected]
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      The death penalty in this case isn’t to deter future crime of the same type. It’s to remove a specific type of malignant cancer from society and ensure that it can’t spread to others. All of her cohorts that could be punished were sentenced for a range of time and a fine as is appropriate.