4 ms·

Singapore certainly has an ideology. You don’t just start publicly caning people for smoking a joint out of pragmatic logic.

zozbot234 3y ago
Caning people is way more humane than letting them rot in prison for decades on end, as is done in the "civilized" U.S. And no one can deny that it's pragmatically effective. The main problem if anything is that it's too cheap and effective, which is bad since you're sometimes going to beat up some folks who will later turn out to be innocent. You want criminal punishment to be costly to the authorities that are going to impose it.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  You get caned as well as sent to prison sometimes. You also get hanged for just a pound of weed, a pretty typical yield for 1-2 outdoor plants.
cs702 3y ago
Many people made the same argument to Lee Kuan Yew when he was alive. His response: "Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they're educated and they're properly brought up, then you don't have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It's like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it's got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate. No, we are not that kind of society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts."[a] [a] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/187723.Lee_Kuan_Yew https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/187723.Lee_Kuan_Yew
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  That explains a lot if he saw his constituents as little more than dogs to be beaten and trained.
  - nataliste 3y ago
    Singapore has an HDI of .939, twelfth highest in the world, comparable to Germany and the Netherlands. They began to climb those heights since 1965 since Lee Kuan Yew took over. Have you considered that your pithy emotional pleading is wrong and frankly demeaning to the common discursive space? The strategy worked, regardless of it being considered demeaning.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      I’d love for you to reference a study showing a relationship between caning and hanging for nonviolent offenses and HDI. That would at least support your argument.

zozbot234 3y ago

Caning people is way more humane than letting them rot in prison for decades on end, as is done in the "civilized" U.S. And no one can deny that it's pragmatically effective. The main problem if anything is that it's too cheap and effective, which is bad since you're sometimes going to beat up some folks who will later turn out to be innocent. You want criminal punishment to be costly to the authorities that are going to impose it.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
You get caned as well as sent to prison sometimes. You also get hanged for just a pound of weed, a pretty typical yield for 1-2 outdoor plants.

cs702 3y ago

Many people made the same argument to Lee Kuan Yew when he was alive. His response: "Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they're educated and they're properly brought up, then you don't have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It's like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it's got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate. No, we are not that kind of society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts."[a] [a] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/187723.Lee_Kuan_Yew https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/187723.Lee_Kuan_Yew

kjkjadksj 3y ago
That explains a lot if he saw his constituents as little more than dogs to be beaten and trained.
- nataliste 3y ago
  Singapore has an HDI of .939, twelfth highest in the world, comparable to Germany and the Netherlands. They began to climb those heights since 1965 since Lee Kuan Yew took over. Have you considered that your pithy emotional pleading is wrong and frankly demeaning to the common discursive space? The strategy worked, regardless of it being considered demeaning.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    I’d love for you to reference a study showing a relationship between caning and hanging for nonviolent offenses and HDI. That would at least support your argument.