A couple of decades ago an American kid in (I think) Singapore was caught spray painting graffiti and was sentenced to the lash. America was scandalized. But on the plane into Singapore there was an orientation lecture. No gum, no graffiti, etc. The laws and penalties were explained. The sentencing was on the news nightly and the whole thing was followed like the OJ trial. After the sentence had been carried out the news commentator, who had flown over special so he could have local color in the background, was explaining how barbaric it was, but he ended his piece with, “Well, I bet he never does THAT again. Back to you, Walter.” It hit me that, no, he wouldn’t. And that should be the point of any punishment.
What scares me is there will be attempts to ‘balance’ the punishments by including a sufficient amount of Caucasians, for example, to ensure “fairness;” whether it is Caucasians committing the offenses or not.
Close - it wasn’t the lash it was the Cane.
I agreed with Singapore 100% - and we NEED that here, as well
To their surprise, the two nations of the world that graded at the very top were Denmark and Singapore. It was a surprise to the researchers because they initially couldn't find anything in common between them: Denmark was known for being democratic, laid-back and libertarian, while Singapore was known for its fast-paced economic climate and its pretty repressive government run by a ruling family.
The two countries that ranked at the bottom of the list were Iraq and Italy.
When they looked a little closer, what the researchers found was that "happiness" was not primarily a function of freedom vs. repression in a society, but by a sense of objective order. Despite the perception among outsiders that Singapore's government was repressive (or even brutal, in some cases), what gave its citizenry a sense of contentment was that they lived under a legal system that was governed by an objective order in which all people would be treated just as harshly as the next if they violated that moral/legal code. They were perfectly fine with that, and the presence of that underlying objective order was the one key element that was common to both Singapore and Denmark.
Iraq and Italy, on the other hand, were marked by large-scale discontentment because most of the people in those countries went through their daily lives with the expectation that their government -- and even their entire social order -- was rotten to the core and corrupt beyond repair.