I appreciate their sentiment but no govt should be allowed to murder its citizens
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.
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.
Why are you talking about punishment when we're discussing justice?
So i take it its a no for rehab over punishment?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
So don't bother holding them accountable at all? Why punish crime if it doesn't bring an end to crime?
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.
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
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
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of tyrants."
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.
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.
It was because he didn't kick up the proper amount upstairs.
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.
Common China W
Lol, the idea that China is effective at actually dealing with corruption is goofy AF, many Chinese politicians are corrupt in one form or another, the state just hold off on charging them if those in power like the person or need them. It's leverage against them for when they need to be dealt with as we can see here.
That sounds suspicious. 36.5 tons of material? That's the sort of thing a cop would make up to ensure a conviction.
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
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.
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.
The temptation to respond to this with something in the form of a haiku is tremendous...
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