- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
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Challenging to criticize Singapore if you’re from somewhere with monthly massacres of school children.
well I’m sure he won’t ever do that again!
surely he learned his lesson.
And that’s why I’ll never move to Singapore.
Because you cant avoid repercussions of easily avoidable actions?
That’s an appropriate username.
Yep, thats the typical response when people are backed into a corner and cant make a valid retort.
William Gibson (author of Neuromancer among other things, not all of them good) published an article about Singapore 30 years ago. It’s titled Disneyland with the Death Penalty.
33 years later and much of this is still very relevant. It has dated somewhat, but accurately reflects what I experienced in Singapore during work travel over the past few years.
At the least, if you’re interested in what dystopian science fiction writers think about Singapore it certainly dropped some puzzles pieces into place for me.
Fuck that sounds weird and uncomfortable of a place. I need some sketch to feel comfortable.
I need some scotch to feel comfortable.
Singapore makes it extremely clear this is the punishment for smuggling any drugs.
This is what the paper disimberkment form used to look like before they switched to an electronic version. I think the electronic version says something similar.
That’s really fucked up.
It probably is fucked up. But if you know the consequences of getting caught, why would you risk it? If freedom to do drugs is important either be in a jurisdiction that is lenient.
I mean you can try to change the laws and try to protest and get political change, but that wouldn’t leave you much off in Singapore’s authoritarian air.
So the question is, was the hit of recreational drug that important to take the risk?
I’m not saying what or what shouldn’t be, I’m just saying knowing you know what IS, why would you? It’s like you know lava is hot, but you step in it anyway because it should be a morally a volcanic rock.
The guy was an idiot. Doesn’t change the fact that Singaporean authoritarianism is fucked up. Being an idiot shouldn’t be a death sentence.
Death sentence for being an idiot is exactly what the US needs right now
More than half the population would be executed.
Two pounds of weed btw. A man’s life because he wanted to get high with friends at a party or something. It’s illegal to import so it’s not unlikely that he wanted to get a bunch and use it over the course of a year. Fucking insane. Also fuck this articles’s loaded language and framing.
“Oh that? That’s my personal consumption kilo. Reason for visit? Business.”
Also very likely he was going to sell it.
I’m for legalising weed, but trying to import it to a country that is notorious for executing people for even small amounts is fucking moronic.
144 people for about a week, per the article.
That’s like 1500 dollars of weed. Hardly worth attempting to smuggle it unless it’s for personal use for a good long while.
Are you sure it’s that cheap in Singapore if it’s illegal there? A kilo is about 20 grand here in Estonia, has been for ages. When buying by the gram anyway, I don’t know anyone who buys it by the kilo. Assume it would be a bit cheaper them. And we don’t execute smugglers, it’s just illegal.
I’d assume if they kill smugglers it’ll be way more expensive in Singapore
Then why wouldn’t he import 499g to not risk his life
Imagine killing a human being for possession of a harmless plant. It’s wildly unjust.
a plant so harmless that someone felt compelled to smuggle it into a country thats known to be extremely hostile to it, ignoring hundreds of warnings, bypassing several opportunities to get rid of it, and ultimately being caught with it and facing the very predictable, very openly warned and expressed repercussions?
A plant that drives someone to do that doesnt sound so harmless to me.
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Everywhere that has legalized weed had this same bullshit scaremongering about how cars are going to be running over schoolchildren every 5 seconds because everyone would just be driving around high all the time.
That hasn’t happened at all, so why do you still make the bullshit claim?
Weed + cars doesn’t seem to be a big problem in a state where legal weed is everywhere unlike alcohol.
A great deal of alcohol is consumed out late at night in places one is likely to drive to and from. Almost all accidents happen to people who are plastered not least of which because drunk people get increasingly confident and simultaneously incapable of judging their ability.
Worse drunk people even quite drunk people can reasonably pilot a car which is why most DUIs are given only after hundreds miles of drunk drinking.
People’s false confidence is rewarded right up until they go to jail or kill someone.
Weed rarely produces the degree of impairment and when it does you aren’t going anywhere. Also since there are no legal venues to smoke it you are most commonly at home
so why isn’t insomnia punishable by death or otherwise? That would potentially lead someone to crash a car too.
Do you chose to take insomnia? I’d doubt that.
But to be clear : I am against death penalty. It robs any chance for someone to change for the better, and even the worst criminal can change and try to repair, even partially, the damages he did. In the current case the death penalty is way overblown. But not everyone would be of that opinion, unfortunately.
People choose to “take insomnia” every second of every minute of every hour of every day, in thousands of ways.
I can absolutely choose not to go to bed, yes.
Not going to bed and insomnia are two different things. Insomnia is a condition where you try to sleep, and can’t. Not going to bed, well, is a choice.
In both cases, you can be held responsible if you end up falling asleep on the wheel while sleep deprived, and cause an accident.
In both cases, you can be held responsible if you end up falling asleep on the wheel while sleep deprived, and cause an accident.
But that’s not what you said - you were saying that because people have the potential to cause an accident when smoking weed they should be executed.
Weed shouldn’t be a crime. Driving under influence, or tired, or stressed out, should be, but it have nothing to do with cannabis per se.
I agree with you on that. Weed shouldn’t be illegal, no more that alcohol.
But saying that it has nothing to do with cannabis is a bit like saying alcohol as nothing to do either. The averse effects on attention is a direct consequence of those substances consumptions.
It the choice of the user to consume it or not, but as it also impair said persons sense of danger, the choice to go driving despite said substances consumption can partly be attributed to the substance itself.
lmao as if drivers needed cannabis to be dangerous. Cars should be outlawed, not weed.
Cars should be outlawed, not weed.
Sober drivers kill more people every year than weed alone. If we had to choose between staying home and using weed to get high, or driving literally anywhere, the safest option is to stay home and get stoned.
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Cars should be outlawed
Driving and car ownership in Singapore is cartoonishly expensive and heavily regulated.
It probably will be outlawed in a decade or so.
As a cyclist, I’d agree, but there are many place where public transportation and bikes can’t go, especially in the countryside. So cars make sense. Cannabis too, as it has a lot of medical uses. But cannabis in car are where it becomes a problem.
there are many place where public transportation and bikes can’t go, especially in the countryside
Are we still talking about Singapore?
In that case no. If I remember it well, Singapore is quite small, I suppose bike should be enough for most uses except if you have to move big things, or a lot of groceries, in which case cars makes sense.
In my case I have a cargo bike, and live near a mid-sized city, so I can just go do my groceries cycling. But someone who is further in the countryside wouldn’t be able to. Partly because of the distance, no one want to do a two hours trip (or more) to buy groceries, but also because having cars zooming past you at 70km/h and more is kinda stressful.
Case is, cars have uses, cannabis too, but both shouldn’t be used at the same time.
If you think im dangerous when I’m driving high you should see me sober :3
(just kidding, I don’t drive)
Thank god you don’t 😂
(Just kidding, you do anything you want as soon as you don’t DUI. I’ve seen enough death from that, don’t want anyone else to loose a loved one to one of those assholes)
have such hubris that they believe those averse effect only affect others
TBF there is a lot of variability in how cannabis affects different people. I’ve got a friend who had to quit because it made him extremely paranoid, to the point that he’d hallucinate. That isn’t universal by a long shot. I haven’t experienced paranoia or hallucinations, the biggest side effect I’ve experienced is sleepiness. Meanwhile my friend found it harder to sleep while high because his brain kept playing tricks on him. Very different brains, very different results.
Though I don’t doubt that plenty of people misjudge their abilities while high, just as they misjudge their abilities when drunk. But it’s important to note that it isn’t necessarily hubris that makes a person say, “Weed doesn’t do that to me.” Some of us genuinely experience different effects. You can’t truly know what’s going on in someone’s head unless you’re the one living in it.
True.
That’s just my own experience with my own potheads friends. Some of them who got into accidents because they thought they where better than other, and misjudged how much cannabis affected them.
Not everyone is like them, sure. But to this day I never met someone who act rational when under the influence of drugs. Maybe I didn’t met enough drugs user, who knows.
“importing” … did a Hemp plant write this?
Singapore is such a fucked up place, yet righties love to act like it’s some utopia.
And yet, it’s very socialist.
Singapore’s main party (PAP) doesn’t fit cleanly in the western right-left paradigm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Action_Party
Center-right, Democratic socialist, anti-communist, “Communitarianism”
They are not democratic socialist. They even
got kicked outresigned from Socialist International.The PAP was officially committed to democratic socialism from its inception in 1954 until its resignation from the Socialist International in 1976.
In 1976, the PAP formally resigned from the Socialist International (SI) after the Dutch Labour Party had initially proposed to expel the PAP for the Singapore government’s internment of political prisoners without trial, and accused it of human rights violations.[116][117]
No organization in any place fits cleanly in the “western” right-left paradigm. Not even in the US that’s the place people call “western”.
and it promotes harmony between different cultures in a way I’ve never seen - you can’t talk shit about anyone based on religion, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Singapore
“The Sedition Act also prohibits seditious acts and speech which “promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore,” and the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act (MRHA) empowers the Minister for Home Affairs to take a pre-emptive approach by issuing restraining orders against a religious leader that has committed or is attempting to commit certain acts threatening religious harmony.”
it’s a microcosm of different cultures crushed together with little room for debate, should things go partisan conflict tragedies would rapidly ensue; but the restrictions on freedom of speech seem fraught with potential pitfalls…
I look at Singapore like Taiwan - they seem to genuinely try to do the best for a broader range than most, and each face unique ethnic and geographic complexities that they’ve overcome through enginuity and clever, hard working populaces.
But yeah, murdering people for pot… fuck man…
Maybe it’s modeled after Star Trek: Next Generation episode “Justice”
An otherwise nice planet/society with some really extreme punishments.
FYI, The Straits Times is basically a step down from a state mouthpiece. If you don’t believe me, just read the article:
The cannabis seized from Omar is sufficient to feed the addiction of about 144 abusers for a week.
Here’s a Human Rights Watch article from five days ago not flagrantly trying to justify the state-sanctioned murder of a man convicted of an entirely harmless crime. Fuck TST for this journalistic swill.
144 abusers for a week
By my calculations, that’s about 18 ounces (144/8, assuming an eighth per person per week).
That’s not that much, as far as international smuggling goes.
Still, it’s a bullshit reason to execute someone over.
If you wanna smoke weed, Singapore isn’t the place for you…
Yeah, I saw that and was like, holy fuck, that’s fucked up. What a fucked up country.
I’ll bet AI did that calculation. Either that or a really stoned person.
Yeah, thats about 6g per “addict”, this will not be enough for 2 days if they are heavy smokers…
In other words, a kg is like nothing. And getting killed for it is the real crime.
I’m not in any way, shape or form defending the policy of Singapore, but… given that they do have a death penalty for this, why the hell did he carry 1 kg into the country? I’ve been to Singapore and I was afraid to even let go of my bags for a second, for fear that someone would plant something on me.
People must sign a paper on the plane acknowledging that import drugs carries the death penalty, even before landing.
The result shouldn’t be surprising for anyone.
Why would you give your money to a country that execute people for a plant
Was sent there by my employer, so not my money
could you have refused?
Of course, you can refuse anything your voluntary employer asks you to do! 😉
Disneyland with the death penalty.
So Disneyland.
thats just regular disneyland isnt it?
Don’t fuck with the mouse.
I guess that explains why he and Minnie never had kids.
William Gibson wrote that Wired article years ago in his brief visit to Singapore.
I feel like if you’re going to have Draconian laws such as this, you should have to be able to prove that the criminal knew the consequences of their actions before doing so. If not, they should be given a non-death sentence with an explicit warning on the record that next time it will be a death sentence.
My mom is from Singapore and I’ve visited many times.
I don’t agree with their drug laws (or capital punishment in general), but there are dozens of warnings throughout the airport and on the passport control paperwork (in bold red letters) that you have to ignore to get to this point. They make it as clear as possible that importing drugs is a capital offense.
Considering that the Singaporean border is covered with signs warning about this, as well as at customs, safe to say he knew
Horrifying but not surprising given heavy-handed conservatism the island is known for, as conviction rates are much high, the government will keep order at the pleasure of their prime minister.
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If you care about addicts, advocate for spending money on social services that help these people. Killing (or imprisoning) dealers have no real effect, we have decades of data on this.
