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ytuque
Joined: 29 Jan 2008
Location: I drink therefore I am!
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 Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2009 5:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Adventurer wrote: |
| ytuque wrote: |
One of the few things that I dislike more than the death penalty is how mentally ill people are just allowed to wander the streets of so many wealthy nations.
Perhaps, his life could have been saved if he received support from Pakistan and the Pakistani community in England. I saw a photo of a demonstration outside the Chinese embassy in London. They could only muster 25 people of which a number were clearly not Pakistani.
The manner in which the Chinese ignored appeals from the British government is an indicator of things to come. |
I am not sure how connected he was to the Pakistani community there. I believe he had a daughter with an Anglo-Saxon sounding name. He was probably a very liberal fellow who wasn't necessarily tied to his parents' culture. We don't know exactly. I feel for him if he was mentally ill and then executed. Even if he was guilty, I wouldn't support the execution. |
That's a possibility although I haven't found any news explaining this deafening silence from Pakistan and the Pakistanis in Britain. The fact that it was China versus a western country or Israel might also be the reason. |
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Panda
Joined: 25 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2009 7:45 pm Post subject: |
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| bacasper wrote: |
You need more proofs [sic]? Let's see: his family said he was bipolar, he wrote a song about a rabbit which he took to China and which he thought would bring about world peace and rocket him to international stardom and allowed himself to be manipulated by drug smugglers who set him up. Yeah, nothing wrong with that guy... 
But of course
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| the line between being guilty and being ill is so vague...... |
so let's just kill him just in case. |
Darling, I am talking about proofs............not what his family said...neither can a song about a bunny prove anyone he was bipolar. I have some seriously stupid photos/videos post on my facebook which now I have to consider if I will be automatically diagnosed as bipolar
The truth is he had never had any medical record back home, and his family and lawyer had never provided any convincing evidence showing he sufferred from any mental disease in the past 2 years.
If he was set up by others......yeah, he was stupid, but would being stupid exempt him from any punishment? Would any court in the world accept such an excuse?
Death penalty is inhumane, but I can't tell which is more ......death penalty or connivance... |
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caniff
Joined: 03 Feb 2004
Location: All over the map
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| Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2009 9:32 pm Post subject: |
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| You people should be careful - it's not as if our future overlords aren't watching. |
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Panda
Joined: 25 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Thu Dec 31, 2009 10:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Jeonmunka wrote: |
Studies show that permanently breaking the nicotine habit is harder than breaking that of heroin.
That is, as a percentage (many more) addicts successfully quit heroin than do addicts quit nicotine.
I think nicotine pushers should be sent to China. |
LOL, whats your point? Do you mean using heroin is actually less harmful than smoking cigarettes? Because statistically its easier to quit?
| shinramyum wrote: |
| This happened in CHINA. A nation that oppresses freedom giving a death penalty to a mental disorder patient isn't considered a news. |
Universally, it is a dilemma for the public (especially the victims) to accept exemption given to grave criminals, whom even proved to be mentally illed...
If you do a little bit research, you can find several similar cases that happened in the UK and US, usually it would be a huge pain for the jury to make decisions...
Also, the public security situation in China now is far from satisfactory...I am in China and news on TV tells stories of murder, theft, robbery, blackmail, etc...everyday...heavy penalty seems to be a compelling choice...situation would be much worse if the corporal punishment looses up...
I would say its a matter of time...for the society to become more civilized...  |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 4:33 am Post subject: |
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| Panda wrote: |
| bacasper wrote: |
You need more proofs [sic]? Let's see: his family said he was bipolar, he wrote a song about a rabbit which he took to China and which he thought would bring about world peace and rocket him to international stardom and allowed himself to be manipulated by drug smugglers who set him up. Yeah, nothing wrong with that guy...
But of course
| Quote: |
| the line between being guilty and being ill is so vague...... |
so let's just kill him just in case. |
Darling, I am talking about proofs............not what his family said...neither can a song about a bunny prove anyone he was bipolar. I have some seriously stupid photos/videos post on my facebook which now I have to consider if I will be automatically diagnosed as bipolar |
No psychiatrist would diagnose you as bipolar just on the basis of your Facebook photos. However, on the basis of all the facts we know about Akmal Shaikh, a good number of psychiatrists would guess he were bipolar or psychotic.
If psychiatrists waited for every patient's diagnosis to be "proven," many would deteriorate for a long time without treatment. Best diagnostic judgments must be made with only the facts before us.
My money's on Bipolar. |
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jmuns
Joined: 09 Sep 2009
Location: earth
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 9:07 am Post subject: |
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| bacasper wrote: |
No psychiatrist would diagnose you as bipolar just on the basis of your Facebook photos. However, on the basis of all the facts we know about Akmal Shaikh, a good number of psychiatrists would guess he were bipolar or psychotic.
If psychiatrists waited for every patient's diagnosis to be "proven," many would deteriorate for a long time without treatment. Best diagnostic judgments must be made with only the facts before us.
My money's on Bipolar. |
and the Chinese guessed he wasn't. what's the difference? |
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donducky
Joined: 02 Dec 2009
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 9:11 am Post subject: WE NEED CARS AS WE NEED DRUGS! |
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| Fox wrote: |
| wesharris wrote: |
| The punishment DID fit the crime. Drug addiction creates crime, crime creates death. Indirectly he created death for others. |
Building cars creates drivers, drivers create car accidents, car accidents create death. By your logic, car manufacturers should be put to death.
This man didn't deserve to be killed. No one deserves to be killed. The death penalty is totally unreasonable; the purpose of a criminal justice system should be keeping citizens safe, not taking revenge against criminals. |
Excellent argument!
And worthy of much dilation. Tens of thousands die every year in car crashes. If anything else--anything else at all!--were this lethal, it would be banned a thousand times over, with death penalties attached, in every country on earth.
And yet . . . we keep driving.
BECAUSE WE NEED TO!
Think about it! |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 9:14 am Post subject: |
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| jmuns wrote: |
| bacasper wrote: |
No psychiatrist would diagnose you as bipolar just on the basis of your Facebook photos. However, on the basis of all the facts we know about Akmal Shaikh, a good number of psychiatrists would guess he were bipolar or psychotic.
If psychiatrists waited for every patient's diagnosis to be "proven," many would deteriorate for a long time without treatment. Best diagnostic judgments must be made with only the facts before us.
My money's on Bipolar. |
and the Chinese guessed he wasn't. what's the difference? |
You don't know that they even gave that any consideration whatsoever, and in any event, the Chinese are not a psychiatrist. |
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Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 10:41 am Post subject: Re: WE NEED CARS AS WE NEED DRUGS! |
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| Panda wrote: |
| Jeonmunka wrote: |
Studies show that permanently breaking the nicotine habit is harder than breaking that of heroin.
That is, as a percentage (many more) addicts successfully quit heroin than do addicts quit nicotine.
I think nicotine pushers should be sent to China. |
LOL, whats your point? Do you mean using heroin is actually less harmful than smoking cigarettes? Because statistically its easier to quit? |
Actually, heroin is absolutely less harmful than cigarettes. In particular, if heroin were regulated for proper content and potency under something like the US Pure Food and Drug Act, there would be very few bad things you could say about the substance aside from "it's addicting."
Even more messed up is how pain pills like Vicodin and Percocet only cause organ failure and deaths each year among abusers because acetaminophen (Tylenol) is added in massive quantities to-- get this-- prevent abuse. Pharmaceutical companies and government regulatory bodies are willing to maim and kill people to prevent them from being addicted to otherwise largely benign psychoactive substances. Atropine AKA deadly nightshade extract, is added in with the anti-diarrheal Lomotil for the same reason (the active ingredient is an opioid like heroin and most prescription painkillers).
So I guess never mind what I said in that first paragraph about content regulation because your kindly neighborhood drug warriors would probably manage to get some horrible poison thrown in the mix to help show us why drugs are dangerous.
| donducky wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
| wesharris wrote: |
| The punishment DID fit the crime. Drug addiction creates crime, crime creates death. Indirectly he created death for others. |
Building cars creates drivers, drivers create car accidents, car accidents create death. By your logic, car manufacturers should be put to death.
This man didn't deserve to be killed. No one deserves to be killed. The death penalty is totally unreasonable; the purpose of a criminal justice system should be keeping citizens safe, not taking revenge against criminals. |
Excellent argument!
And worthy of much dilation. Tens of thousands die every year in car crashes. If anything else--anything else at all!--were this lethal, it would be banned a thousand times over, with death penalties attached, in every country on earth.
And yet . . . we keep driving.
BECAUSE WE NEED TO!
Think about it! |
By the way, I actually believe car makers should be held responsible for the some 40,000-50,000 deaths and countless more injuries in America alone each year.
I hate how I keep on seeing people promoting points I agree with by suggesting satirically that we ban cars for being too dangerous. I'm a total right to bear arms advocate and I obviously support the end of the prohibition of certain drugs (EDIT: as in certain drugs are prohibited for no good reason while others aren't and I support the end of all prohibition, not as in I only support the end of prohibition for some of the drugs that are already prohibited), but cars are actually dangerous in the worst way. At least people are aware with guns that they can and are meant to kill and treat them accordingly. In contrast, almost every single one of those car maimings and deaths were complete accidents. With guns, we can hold the shooter accountable and move on. If anyone's to blame in a car accident though, it's an issue of a mistake, or at worst, negligence. In a reversal of the "guns don't kill people..." quote, these car accident victims aren't killers, their cars are.
Drivers should be allowed the expectation of safety and survival in spite of the driving skills and conscientiousness of those around them-- not contingent upon them. Going after drunk or otherwise poor drivers is counterproductive victim blaming at the expense of a healthy awareness of how dangerous cars are even for the ideal driver. |
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Panda
Joined: 25 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 11:04 am Post subject: Re: WE NEED CARS AS WE NEED DRUGS! |
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| Street Magic wrote: |
Actually, heroin is absolutely less harmful than cigarettes. In particular, if heroin were regulated for proper content and potency under something like the US Pure Food and Drug Act, there would be very few bad things you could say about the substance aside from "it's addicting."
Even more messed up is how pain pills like Vicodin and Percocet only cause organ failure and deaths each year among abusers because acetaminophen (Tylenol) is added in massive quantities to-- get this-- prevent abuse. Pharmaceutical companies and government regulatory bodies are willing to maim and kill people to prevent them from being addicted to otherwise largely benign psychoactive substances. Atropine AKA deadly nightshade extract, is added in with the anti-diarrheal Lomotil for the same reason (the active ingredient is an opioid like heroin and most prescription painkillers).
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Sophistry!
Illogic |
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Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 12:41 pm Post subject: Re: WE NEED CARS AS WE NEED DRUGS! |
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| Panda wrote: |
| Street Magic wrote: |
Actually, heroin is absolutely less harmful than cigarettes. In particular, if heroin were regulated for proper content and potency under something like the US Pure Food and Drug Act, there would be very few bad things you could say about the substance aside from "it's addicting."
Even more messed up is how pain pills like Vicodin and Percocet only cause organ failure and deaths each year among abusers because acetaminophen (Tylenol) is added in massive quantities to-- get this-- prevent abuse. Pharmaceutical companies and government regulatory bodies are willing to maim and kill people to prevent them from being addicted to otherwise largely benign psychoactive substances. Atropine AKA deadly nightshade extract, is added in with the anti-diarrheal Lomotil for the same reason (the active ingredient is an opioid like heroin and most prescription painkillers).
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Sophistry!
Illogic |
You conveniently left out this part:
| Street Magic wrote: |
| So I guess never mind what I said in that first paragraph about content regulation because your kindly neighborhood drug warriors would probably manage to get some horrible poison thrown in the mix to help show us why drugs are dangerous. |
I was playing devil's advocate to show how regulation probably wouldn't work in practice because of drug warriors with insane morality agendas. In other words, the same people who wouldn't allow the end of drug prohibition and the beginning of effective regulation to take place are the same people who would do everything in their power to screw up regulation if it ever did somehow start to happen with recreational substances. It was one of those rhetorical deals like with Marc Antony sarcastically giving props to Brutus for Caesar's murder. If recreational drugs were regulated and the regulatory body in question started trying to add Tylenol or whatever to the drugs in question to "prevent abuse," it would be great if everyone could be made aware that the resulting deaths would be due to crazy drug warriors and not the original pure drugs themselves.
EDIT: Or to make this clearer, I was fully aware I was contradicting my original point; I did so intentionally to make a point about the likely problems associated with my first point. Regulation itself is a good idea. If heroin were properly regulated so that only heroin produced, marketed, and sold in the purity and dose it were labeled as would be sold legally, then there would be little to no problems with this hypothetical heroin market. If, on the other hand, heroin were produced and sold with extra ingredients to prevent abuse through harm, then the good of regulation might be outweighed by the danger of said extra ingredients.
Furthermore, the public might be manipulated to believe that people were getting sick and dying from the heroin itself rather than the extra ingredients added, which is already the case with the public's general perception of prescription painkillers. The way to combat this would be to point out to people you know or otherwise have access to through an internet forum or whatever that it's not opioids that injure and kill people most of the time, but rather the added ingredients in prescription drugs (or the random quantities and purities of unregulated drugs for that matter) that do. |
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ontheway
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Location: Somewhere under the rainbow...
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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| ytuque wrote: |
| Adventurer wrote: |
| ytuque wrote: |
One of the few things that I dislike more than the death penalty is how mentally ill people are just allowed to wander the streets of so many wealthy nations.
Perhaps, his life could have been saved if he received support from Pakistan and the Pakistani community in England. I saw a photo of a demonstration outside the Chinese embassy in London. They could only muster 25 people of which a number were clearly not Pakistani.
The manner in which the Chinese ignored appeals from the British government is an indicator of things to come. |
I am not sure how connected he was to the Pakistani community there. I believe he had a daughter with an Anglo-Saxon sounding name. He was probably a very liberal fellow who wasn't necessarily tied to his parents' culture. We don't know exactly. I feel for him if he was mentally ill and then executed. Even if he was guilty, I wouldn't support the execution. |
That's a possibility although I haven't found any news explaining this deafening silence from Pakistan and the Pakistanis in Britain. The fact that it was China versus a western country or Israel might also be the reason. |
It seems quite likely that this man was set up. He may have had no idea he was being used as a drug mule. Successful drug lords do not smuggle the goods themselves - they use others. If he was poor, unemployed, living on the street, how could he have funded this operation?
It is also quite likely that the Chinese know that this man was just some loser, not a drug kingpin, no powerful friends and family, no money, no support system so ...
The Chinese government has used him too. They wanted to send a message to the West that they will continue to violate the basic civil liberties of their citizens at their whim and that they will even execute citizens of Western nations if they so desire. They wanted to show their own citizens that they will continue to kill anyone they want to and the West is unable to do anything about it.
China killed this poor human slug, possibly an innocent man, in cold blood, to send a political message. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 2:50 pm Post subject: |
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| Mr. Pink wrote: |
Too many bleeding liberals.
...being tough on drug dealers...The cost to the general public due to drugs is also high. You need more police, more border guards, more jails, more prisons, more hospitals, more doctors, etc.
If the liberal West would take the same tough stance that some Asian countries do on the importation of illegal narcotics, there would be billions saved that could be put into things like education or health care, or wait, perhaps even the taxpayer themselves could get a break.
I am a firm believer in the death penalty, and I like the Chinese/Russian style of justice... |
Aside from this being a good brief summary of the authoritarian mindset, it's enlightening to hear that 'more police, more border guards, more jails, more prisons' would lead to 'billions saved'.
I for one find it remarkable how attractive the Chinese/Russian systems are to so many conservatives. |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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Street Magic didn't state his position that well, but his basic message is mostly correct. Unfortunately (and I don't mean you, Street Magic), since heroin is a scary word, and since heroin-prohibition is such a catastrophic plague on society, it means wannabe social commentators dispense priceless pearls of unwisdom on the matter, clearly while knowing absolutely nothing about the topic.
Anyway, heroin v tobacco:
These two substances are pretty much the exact opposites of one another. Certainly, on one hand, heroin can cause overdose and death and addiction easily, but, on the other, it causes no organ or tissue damage. Tobacco: It's impossible to die instantly from smoking a cigarette, but there are 400,000 deaths annually in the US due to the long-term and permanent damage to organs and tissue smoking does.
Thanks to legalization, tax revenue from tobacco sales comfortably pays for the expense to healthcare in countries with government systems and makes a tidy profit. In the UK, revenue is 10bn and costs to healthcare 2bn. Potentially, we could cut compulsory income tax by 8bn thanks to this voluntary tax.
**Sorry to go offtopic, but someone else raised the topic and I find it interesting and figured I'd comment** |
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Blockhead confidence
Joined: 02 Apr 2008
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 7:15 pm Post subject: |
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The Chinese may, as Kuros said, have a chip on their shoulder and find it satisfying that they are irritating the West by executing this guy: 'no special treatment'.
Kuros wrote of his Chinese lawyer friend as having said this and it doesn't surprise me. At a guess I'd say the lawyer was young and might be among the ranks of the 'angry youth' who are, to generalize broadly, the generation too young to have memory of Tiananmen.
This resentment felt by many Chinese, and which is taught in textbooks, roughly comes from China's 'century of humiliation' which spanned from the Opium Wars through to 1949 when the Communists took control. You would, I think, have to be a very strong supporter of commerce to believe there is no guilt on the West's part for having 'opened up' China. This resentment therefore has some justification.
It's worth remembering however that the Chinese have a talent for humiliating themselves, which they did expertly in the Cultural Revolution. While Chinese speak freely of the West's shortcomings, their own during the late 60s and 70s are rarely spoken of - my several Chinese friends attest to this.
Likewise with China's cultural artifacts that the state-run media, as we call them, frequently announces are up for sale in private auction houses. It is ironic that these same artifacts would have been under threat of destruction during the Cultural Revolution by red guards. And who doesn't like seeing irony in the actions of their rivals?
This post may seem like a cream to soothe the hemorrhoids of China worriers but my real point is that China will sort itself out as the facts to refute its arguments are so glaringly obvious. They are just going through a political adolescence and patience on our part has got to be a good thing. |
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