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China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty
formaggio writes "According to the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government is now allowing courts to punish those who commit environment crimes with the death penalty. The new judicial interpretation comes in the wake of several serious environmental problems that have hit the country over the last few months, including dangerous levels of air pollution, a river full of dead pigs, and other development projects that have imperiled public health."
Good. About time someone did this.
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Boy, I sure hope they catch and kill the worst pollution offender in the entire country: the Chinese government.
In Communist China, pollution kills you (literally)!
I'll bet a truckload of dead pigs that it won't result in any measurable improvement in China's environmental quality. China's environmental crisis has been brought about with the blessings of the Communist Party. Expecting them to now fix it by executing a few factory owners is very naïve indeed.
I don't know. If you have the death penalty I can see pollution being a worthy offense. If you dump toxic waste into the drinking water and dozens get sick and die of cancer-- how is that any different from murder.
Good for China. Here in the US we would just fine them a few million... they would shift their assets to a sub division... sell that to themselves and declare bankruptcy without paying a dime. Then keep on doing what they were doing until they got caught the next time.
This isn't saying you are executed for littering. This looks to be establishing the maximal punishment.
Think more along the lines of "knowingly poisoning hundreds of thousands of people."
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I wonder if they're targeting the news worthy polluters, the ones who "accidentally" dump hundreds of tons of toxic waste into rivers.
I doubt dropping your pencil shavings on the ground will warrant execution. Bhopal type incidents should absolutely be dealt with extreme prejudice.
The Chinese can't even effectively fine polluters and now there's talk of capital punishment for polluting? What next? Decimate school children when their class average isn't up to par because the instructor's scolding has no effect?
There are several key problems here that are the real underlying problems: 1) the Chinese government is not unified in their vision of the environment and I'm talking differences spanning across provincial & federal levels as well as between federal ministries. 2) they collectively refuse to accept that their abuse of natural resources is part of their winning equation against other capitalist nation states and, as a consequence, no one can talk about how this will hurt their bottom line even though several parts of the government realize it (we pay them to import our pollution). 3) there is widespread corruption at all levels which is why fining is ineffective -- it's so bad that I'm sure if capital punishment is meted out, it will be given to the fork lift operator who dumped those pig carcasses in the river after his supervisor told him to "make them disappear or you'll disappear." No one up the chain will be held accountable and if they are, they need only grease some local wheels and they can consider themselves shielded.
It's disgusting and it's why I tell people where they can shove it when they complain that the EPA is destroying jobs. It's not perfect but we have to cling to things that kind of work when so many other "solutions" are abysmal failures.
The Chinese government is threatening to kill polluters but they can't see that they're part of and dependent on and benefiting from a system of habitual polluting. Increasing the impact of the punishment is a poor and maybe even more detrimental substitution for actually bringing to justice the true criminals up and down their ranks.
My work here is dung.
It must really suck to be the operator of a coal power plant in China these days.
Not just environmental stuff. What about the wallstreet guys that stole or in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars.
Death penalty. Think about it like this.... that is the life savings of how many people? Guy robs a liquor store for 100 dollars and gets 20 years. Guy that steals 100 million gets 5 years in a minimum security prison.
Many cases of fraud, theft, vandalism, etc need to carry stiffer sentences. While of course other sentences need to be reduced radically. All the drug related crimes need to be looked again. Consensual adults and all that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Nah, this will be reserved for people who do not have sufficient political connections...or more likely for people who fall out of favor with the political powers that be.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That scenario really isn't different from murder. In the US you could be tried for second degree murder for something like that.
The death penalty has never been an effective deterrent for any crime.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Driving should result in having your hands chopped off?
China is saving more lives abandoning communism and heavy socialism, as we are witnessing. Would that the west keep that in mind as it rockets in the wrong direction, living off past glories of economic freedom.
Murder people? You've gotta be kidding. There's a reason you don't execute rapists or failed attempted murderers -- "If you're gonna be exected anyway, well, dead women tell no tales."
Presumably dead inspectors tell no tales, either. :(
By the way, if your impulse to the OP is "Good!", you habe serious problems, wanting to murder political opposition. Eh, these people are in favor of censorship, so it's not surprising.
Go ahead. Censor me because you don't like being accused of having a desire to censor people who claim you like censoring.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Seriously, China? WTF. Going back to medieval values here? Executing people for pollution?"
What do you mean, "back to"??? They never left.
One of the reasons I do not care to do business with China.
> joe schmoe that was thrown under the bus
Yep. That's my prediction. Certain death by starvation if you don't do your job or possible death if you are caught polluting. Meanwhile the boss keeps the money rolling in.
...off with your head!
Seriously, China? WTF. Going back to medieval values here? Executing people for pollution?
They should be punished, but death is a bit much.
Yeah, the death penalty should be reserved for angry guys who stab one person with a knife. The civilised punishment for poisoning the water drunk by thousands of people is a slap on the wrist and a fine that looks large to newpaper readers but causes no material harm to the perpetrator....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
If you accept the legitimacy of the death penalty(obviously, if you don't, that's another story, and you aren't likely to approve of it for this purpose, or any other) serious pollution is actually highly logical:
The death penalty is usually assessed in cases of murder(esp. premeditated) or grievous bodily harm(especially premeditated or particularly gruesome in some way).
Well, guess what? Serious pollution is usually called 'serious' because it does, albeit at some epidemiological remove, cause some mixture of death and serious chronic health impairment, sometimes also nasty birth defects and the like.
It doesn't have the emotional punch of a nice juicy murder or a photogenic teenager getting raped or something; but pollution is a totally logical thing to punish by death(if you accept the traditional uses of the death penalty). Probably even better, in fact, because polluters are highly likely to be committing their crimes out of pure greed, not out of fear, passion, or other possible-to-rehabilitate/unlikely to reoffend motive.
Even if that were true, this law is 100% effective at preventing repeat offenders.
I don't know. The folks who were caught putting melamine in pet food (and some people food, too) were executed. As have been LOTS of other people. Punishments in China tend to be rather arbitrary, and seem to change on an almost daily basis.
blame lethal injection, if we would just decapitate and then incinerate they would stop coming back.
I seriously doubt it will be implemented against any company or person that is sufficiently connected to the PRC government - this list would include pretty much every existing big company HQ'd in China.
Now potential competitors to the aforementioned companies, and anyone who the PRC government doesn't like? Oh hell yes it'll be implemented - even if the offender has to get a little governmental 'assistance' in generating pollution sufficient to warrant execution.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
On the contrary. Dead people are less likely to commit crimes.
I don't know. If you have the death penalty I can see pollution being a worthy offense.
So who do you execute, then? The entire board of directors, the guy(s) that did it directly, or all of them?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
When free trade with China was originally promoted it was always promised China would become more like America with open markets and civil liberties. But I believe the opposite is true with America becoming more like China. Some examples are exemption of clean water act for oil and gas exploration, promotion of the keystone tar sand pipeline, and monsanto protection act. While these crony capitalism arrangements would not be surprising in China they are becoming more frequent here. Abolition of labor unions, total government surveillance of all communication, widespread incarceration, and glorification of militarism are other areas where America appears to be moving towards totalitarianism. Wlll someday the scale tip and will China become more progessive than America?
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
China is regularly executing people for large scale bribery and embezzlement. It makes sense to assume that someone whose activities are potentially lethal or health-threatening on a large scale wouldn't get a lesser penalty from the judges than a white collar criminal, if the Chinese have any sane system of preferences.
Ezekiel 23:20
Whoever you feel like. Including the fellow who happens to have not been involved, but can't pull the strings to get out.
I second this. I spend a good portion of graduate school in Beijing and Manchuria, and you hit the nail on the head. The only people who will pay the price for pollution are the dumb schmucks whose guanxi is not powerful enough to shield them from scapegoating.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
"Going back...?" srsly? Haven't they been squarely in that mindset for the past 150 years?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
The death penalty has never been an effective deterrent for any crime.
Well... it will deter that person from committing another crime.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I think you don't know what "deterrent" means. Otherwise, your comment suggests that everyone should be preemptively executed just in case they might pollute. The idea of a deterrent punishment is that a potential criminal will consider the consequence of getting caught (death, in this case), but even in countries that still have the death penalty it's been shown over and over that it doesn't lower the incidents of that crime. Furthermore, the potential for executing an innocent person is a non-zero percentage. The risk of doing so is not worth the arguably dubious reward of lowering crime.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Will they go after the low level works or the people calling the shots?
Of coruse they also throw the people that reported the contimaniation in jail.
Arbitrary indeed.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I don't know. If you have the death penalty I can see pollution being a worthy offense. If you dump toxic waste into the drinking water and dozens get sick and die of cancer-- how is that any different from murder.
Good for China. Here in the US we would just fine them a few million... they would shift their assets to a sub division... sell that to themselves and declare bankruptcy without paying a dime. Then keep on doing what they were doing until they got caught the next time.
I don't believe in the death penalty, but I see the logic, it's in effect attempted murder in severe cases (or actual murder). Several coal mining companies have commited what amounts to manslaughter in the US.
Well, I can only speak for myself. If I were executed for a crime, I would definitely think twice before committing that crime again. It's just not worth it.
In the US you can be a scapegoat without fearing for your life. What a great country.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
A prison sentence is sufficient. With a bread and water diet.
Guess where we got the water.
Have gnu, will travel.
Has that ever happened? (Honest question)
Since this is Slashdot, you might as well just refer to Larry Niven's "Known Space" series, where the punishment for large-scale pollution (e.g. using nuclear rocket engine in the atmosphere) was exactly that.
This is deeply ingrained in Chinese society. I read about ancient Chinese civilization that forbade people from turning in their family members for crimes. The family member would be punished for the crime of course, and the person who reported them would be publicly whipped or something like that. Good shit. If you went around the office talking smack about someone or defaming them they would also whip you publicly--god knows how many times I've wanted that to happen.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I don't know, you can't have 100 million people dropping pencil shavings--best to set an example.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
There is no legitimacy to the death penalty for the very simple reason of abuse or just fair mistake or freak coincidence. The fact that people trust the chain of government, law-enforcement, forensic investigators, prosecutors, witnesses, jury as input for enforcing an irrevocable and terminal punishment such as the death penalty is baffling. There's so much that can (and does, and will continue to) go wrong there that the death penalty is just an overall dumb idea.
If someone tries to seriously harm you then shoot that son of a bitch dead but passing the same authority to a bureaucracy... I don't know what to say to that.
the lowely pee-on ordered to do it in all probability anyone else has power and money.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
What do you mean, "back to"??? They never left. One of the reasons I do not care to do business with China.
Exactly. We may all be forced to buy Chinese garbage in lieu of alternatives in this global race-to-the-bottom but I refuse to deal with people who behave as the Chinese do.
No amount of money would make any difference to my opinion. In the same way I feel an obligation to conduct honest business with the rest of the world, I feel an obligation to avoid China until they grow up a bit. Because I have no power beyond that available to everyone, I choose to vote with my feet.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
You ever seen a Chinese execution? They use to do it in public and then parade the body around on a cart with a large sign indicating why they were executed.
If you were thinking of doing a serious crime and saw that would it make you reconsider?
That's only true if there is no scapegoating occurring.
Yes, but a high profile enough environmental disaster will cause people to fall out of favor. Look at the tainted infant formula, you think that CEO got where he was without connections? It comes out that he allowed "bad thing" to happen, bad enough that it made China and the Chinese leadership look bad and he's tried and executed in a matter of weeks. The thing about buying politicians is that they don't stay bought, especially if your baggage suddenly costs more than your bribe.
Rant about pollution, sent from my iPhone, charged on the power grid, while driving in my car.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"Knowingly poisoning hundreds of thousands of people." isn't called pollution, it's called mass murder.
We don't recognize it as murder if the affected person lives more than 1 year after the incident.
And the difference between increased cancer risk and MURDER is pretty damn obvious. One *might* take a few years off the end of your life, while the other ends your life immediately.
If somebody dumped arsenic in the river, okay, that would be murder or at least manslaughter. But slightly increased chance of cancer? Death penalty for that? Give me a break.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't know. If you have the death penalty I can see pollution being a worthy offense.
So who do you execute, then? The entire board of directors, the guy(s) that did it directly, or all of them?
Start with the lawyers.
Be seeing you...
That's not deterrence, that's recidivism. Different words, for different issues.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Right, because life in prison is too lenient, and there's nothing in-between a slap on the wrist and the death-penalty.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Wrong dude, this is something every liberal green freak can believe in trust me. Go global warming do goobers.
Aww...somebody got lost on the way to Fox News.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
When the punishment for a crime is determined by "think along the lines of..." there is a serious problem with the law. Especially in an authoritarian government with little oversight or judicial checks.
I suppose that one way to deal with pollution....
Well ok Mr. Dictionary... as long as you agree that I would think twice AFTER I was executed. WTF???
I don't know, but I'm curious too. I was speaking more theoretically. I think that practically you're far more likely to see deaths directly resulting from pollution to be tried as involuntary manslaughter. The difference between involuntary manslaughter and "depraved indifference" murder seems kind of nebulous to. Both cases result in a death, but in neither case was the death the actually intent of the person being convicted. I think the difference is a matter of degree. If you do something dangerous that you know could end up killing someone that's manslaughter. If you do something so dangerous it probably will kill someone and you just don't care, that's murder 2. I guess in pollution terms that's something like dumping all your asbestos in a drinking well to avoid paying to dispose of it. I think there was a pollution manslaughter case with the BP oil spill wasn't there? Or was the manslaughter part about worker safety?
Good luck with that. I bought some apple juice a few days ago. Made in china. Their stuff is *everywhere*. Stuff that was once made in mexico is suddenly china...
Indeed, that was largely my point: I avoid made-in-China wherever I can but I expect it is actually impossible to live China-free at this time.
However there are plenty of businesses reaching out to embrace China to make more money. Myself, money is nowhere near enough of an incentive for me to do business with the Chinese. Not for a while, at least.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Capital punishment western liberals enthusiastically support.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
You do not know the meanings of the words you're using, which resulted in absurdity in your statements. Allow me to help you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism
These concepts are VERY different, and you used the word "deterrence" to mean "recidivism" which caused your statement to look absurd. The fault lies entirely with you.
Also sometimes called 'class struggle.'
Or a Great Leap Forward.
Or a Hundred Flowers Cut.
Many American companies have pulled their tooling, production equipment, etc. out of China. It's all shipped to Mexico, of course, but it's not in China any longer.
By that logic, how can you justify ANY punishment for crimes? Surely the time wasted in prison is irrecoverable as well? Opportunities lost due to the expense of fines and being branded a criminal?
Many American companies have pulled their tooling, production equipment, etc. out of China. It's all shipped to Mexico, of course, but it's not in China any longer.
Well, that's a start. I have in the past wondered why the US preferred to hand its IP over to China on a silver platter when they could be exploiting handily-located Mexico. I guess the pollution might be a bit close for comfort.
I guess now that China has been so generously assisted in this way by our collective greed it's only a matter of time before we're all 0wned by Beijing. Was it Marx who predicted the Capitalist would cheerfully sell you the rope to hang him with?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
And how would you assess this? Saudi Arabia has the death penalty for drugs. They have a VERY low rate of drug trafficking.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
We need stronger laws against companies to make them more accountable. Prove to me you did all you could to avoid polluting, I might be lenient.
If I see that there is a flagrant denial for the law and pollution was done with no thought what so ever., you die! Not just you, but all the board members and employees delivering the sludge to location xx
I like it, I like it alot!
Wow. I thought like that when I was a Freshman, too.
Don't spend so much time in the Student Union. You'll flunk out.
You know, serious criminals are usually convinced they never will get caught. If you don't expect to get caught, why should the question what happens to you in that case bother you?
If you believe you can fly, you'll have no reason not to jump out of the window in the 100th floor. Certainly not the warning of the bad things that happen to you when you hit the ground.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The purpose of the death penalty is not to prevent recidivism. You could easily achieve the same outcome by sentencing them to life in prison. The purpose is to deter people from committing the crime at all. My argument is that it DOES NOT deter people from committing the crime for which the sentence is death. And furthermore, the risk of convicting and executing an innocent person is too high.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
That's a bullshit statement. Not for career criminals or repeat offenders. They damn well care if they have a chance to kiss goodbye for a specific crime or not. Only random criminals who commit a crime in the heat of the moment might care less about death penalty. Still, in the back of the minds of most of them but complete psychos there will be a reminder that if you cross the line, you will have a good chance of leaving this world before the creator intended, and most of them will try not to cross the line.
I'm not the one saying nonsensical crap here.
Your first reply confused recidivism with deterrence, so your statement was literally that we should KILL EVERYBODY, BEFORE they commit a crime, just to be safe. That's the "WTF" here.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I mean who would they execute in the company? CEO? COO? Every culpable person? That could easily be dozens and dozens of people, if not more.
Maybe it should, IF cancer worked that way, but it almost NEVER does. It's astronomically rare for someone under 40 to exhibit signs of cancer, let alone to DIE of the disease.
http://users.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/publications/ppaper789.pdf
Other illnesses don't tend to result in multi-year affliction before death. With other kinds of poisoning, you generally either die quickly, or completely recover, with few lingering symptoms. There's always some space in-between, like just the right amount of toxicity to cause some organ failure, but that, too, is quite rare.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
OTOH, it also means that if you are polluting, there's no downside to killing people to keep it hidden.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"The death penalty has never been an effective deterrent for any crime."
I would certainly be deterred from letting a parking meter expire if there were a death penalty involved.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Every leftie, every Democrat, every Obama supporter just doesn't know which hole to blow out of. Quick! They need to know what to think! Slashot, you have a mission!
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I expect (a) you're wrong, (b) it's the reverse, and (c) that will only happen when the bank/politician gets in the way of the politicians who actually run the show.
"Start with the lawyers."
How Shakespearean.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
That may prevent more crimes, but it's not deterrence. Deterrence means that someone who did not commit the crime decided not to, not that someone who did commit it is not able to repeat the offense.
The worst pollution offenders in China are a LOT worse than here. The "bad ones" have probably been responsible for more deaths than Timothy Mcveigh (sp?) So the "worst offenders" probably deserve it. Look up the blue river sometime...
There is no almost certain chance it will never actually happen. Over 3/4 of people sentenced to death row are actually executed eventually. Most criminals newly arrived on death row rate their chances of eventually being executed at less than 1%, despite the actually figures.
The typical person who gets the death penalty in the US has great difficulty imagining they will still be the same person in six months, let alone 20 years. More than a third of them can't pass the tests used to see if fifth graders are learning to project long term consequences as far as the month level. A t least half typically have little to no ability to empathize with anyone not very like them in race, gender, age, and even accent. By some studies, up to 60% of them have a mental health history involving incidents of psychosis. By others, over half were abusing a psychoactive drug at the time of the offense.
If you want to deter them with the death penalty, you need the time from the actual comission of a crime to execution, to be less than two weeks, with all appeals. You need to show them somebody sufficiently like them being executed, within two weeks of the time they consider a death penalty crime of their own, and what you show them needs to be substantially for the same crime, as in, they won't shoot the clerk at the all night gas station, if they have seen a man who looks like them shoot a victim who looks like that clerk,in a similar setting, at night, for similar reasons, and then be given the death penalty for it. Show them a realistic dramatization of the crime and follow it immediately with showing the actual execution, and you have a good chance of deterring them from committing that particular style of crime for a few weeks to a few months. show them something with differences, including ones you probably think should make no difference, and that chance drops.
I don't really want to live in a nation where we have to televise 10 executions a week to cover all the possible combinations, and always sentence somebody within a week of the crime so that we have a week to squeeze in the appeals and actual execution. I don't think that's a workable deterrent. Considering that the time for deterrence basically is between the crime and the execution, not from arrest to execution, deterrence sounds like it just can't work with the typical subject.
A good starting source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/CunninghamDeathRowReview.pdf
For the mental ability assessment and mental state portions, try starting about page 198.
Who is John Cabal?
They have same problem with aging population as we do, need the organs. So expect a lot more use of the death penalty there, and here as soon as our ruling elites figure out how to get this supply working.
That's definitely just for you. Just look at all the places that have the death penalty for drug offenses. Doesn't stop it one bit.
WOOFYGOOFY = Off his meds...
After some of these responses I was about to decide never to post on the internet again. Can people really not get that I'm joking? See... dead people can't commit crimes! Ugh.
Then I just saw "Score 5: Funny". (sigh of relief) Thank you. My faith is restored. sheesh!
Phht. I've been executed three times for the same thing. No deterrence at all. Last time they got pissed cuz I was giggling the whole time singing 'you can get anything you want at alice's restaurant.'
Well, the obvious 'when that one human being is a corporate officer who makes the decision in favor of "serious pollution"' and "Sure, hang the fucker high" respectively.
They mean failing to bribe the government to overlook it.
In the real world cancer is not the only possible way pollution can shorten lives. And no, you don't "either die quickly or completely recover". The in-between outcomes are far more common.
Melamine in milk is not toxic in the way that you seem to be meaning, but it damages kidneys, shortening lives. Certain pesticides disrupt liver function and/or endocrine system function, causing grwoth and development problems. Air-borne particulate pollution triggers and exacerbates chroninc lung disease, shortening lives. Mercury and lead pollution have all kinds of effects that shorten lives.
Please stop subtracting value from the discussion.
Please point to any one of those that's likely to kill a 12 year old child, several years after exposure.
You're the one cheapening the discussion, taking statements wildly out of obvious context.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sure, remember that time someone was poisoning drinking water with hexavalent chromium for years and years? They all went to prison and share same cell with HSBC executives. ..oh wait
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
So in summary we should execute people who don't want to try and save everyone. Does that include people who think we should execute people for not trying to save everyone?
Even callous, willful disregard for the safety of innocent bystanders can't be murder or manslaughter if you don't actually kill anyone, and if you're going to try someone for them you need good evidence of death as well as good evidence that people knew what they were doing would likely lead to death. The most you have realistically tried them for would be more akin to public endangerment.
"Likely" (in the ordinary sense, roughly p > 0.5) is too high a bar for any discussion of the consequences of pollution. That's a straw man.
One of the consequences of mercury poisoning is hypertension. That shortens lives.
One of the consequences of asthma is proneness to lung infections. In turn, that is statistically life-shortening.
Really, this stuff is ordinary general knowledge.
Reparations can be made to a living person, and dead people cannot exercise habeus corpus.
People screw up when dealing with each other, it's a fact of life. One can even argue that that's the entire justification for government existing in the first place: to provide a means for resolving interpersonal conflicts. The government, being human, has the capacity for error. And so governments need to be held accountable for their actions which is the point of checks and balances. Those checks and balances become meanlingless in death. A person who was falsely executed for a crime he/she did not commit has no access to habeus corpus and cannot hold the government accountable for the mistake that ended their life.
Morally, a person who murders another deserves to die. But under that same principle it is better to sentence 9 murderers to life in prison than it is to execute 1 innocent person, as it only takes that one false execution to turn the state itself into a murderer by definition.
Mod Parent Up. Studies show that career criminals do consider the risk of being caught, the risk of conviction, and the size of the penalties. Example: when the crime of assault with a deadly weapon was reclassified as a capital offense, murders rose. Why? Now that the penalty for either crime is the same, the difference between the two is that murders leave people dead, reducing the witnesses who can testify and thus reducing the likelihood of conviction. I regret that I don't have the citation handy; it's been a decade since I studied that stuff.
How do we then punish or reward the people who do things that incrementally affect many folks? If I have a barbeque, which releases some amount of toxic smoke into the air, it possibly shortens someone's life by a number of days in return for me getting very tasty meat. Who will be the judge, jury, and executioner? Because this is a very slippery slope. Will you sue your parents for giving birth to you though you were genetically likely to develop certain diseases?
One can dream that Monsanto management visits their Chinese offices...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I mean I can belch out methane from my nether regions with some serious attitude. Does this mean that if I ever go to China (not very likely) and the kung pau chicken doesn't agree with me, does this mean that my life is threatened? Well, maybe. Considering how people smoke tobacco like a brush fire over there all it'll take is one smoker getting to close to me and *boom*!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Look, I'm not in favour of the death penalty, but if it's there, why should cold, callous, heartless, multiple murderers be exempted?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
In that case, it's at least 100% effective at preventing repeat scapegoats.
Ezekiel 23:20
I would just never park at a meter again - most things are not worth risking a death penalty for. Parking is certainly one of them.
Uhm...yeah...Anyone who believes it, just form a line and go stand on your head over there in to corner to be counted.
More like, any manufacturer out of step with the Communist overlords will be executed for "littering" for lack of a better tag to use for "official reports" published for the world to see. Kinda like their policy of aborting excess children, retroactive up to 5 years old, which doesn't officially happen, as far as you know, because if it is reported, a reporter would be executed for "polluting" or whatever tickles their nipples that day.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You want to know why the meltdown happened? Your first thought will be "greed". I'd be more abstract and call it "pursuit of money", but tomato/tomahto. Anyway. GREED! Right, but! It's not enough. Greed happens all the time in the corporate world without causing meltdowns. All businesses are out to pursue money all the time, doubly so in the financial sector, and it doesn't cause meltdowns all the time. The difference here? The reason that the meltdown happened? The system was giving them money for doing the wrong thing. And it started when the Washington, DC establishment combined negative real interest rates (subsidizing the housing bubble) with federal homeownership programs that paid the banks top dollar to make shaky mortgages -- and when federal rules gave ratings from a few firms with clear conflict-of-interest problems special preference in the regulatory system, and thus encouraged all banks to buy AAA-rated mortgage junk to maintain their regulatory capital requirements.
Of course banks caused the crisis. They were paid to do so, and paid handsomely, and chased into doing so by regulators when they weren't overtly paid. But don't worry!!! We've solved the failures with Dodd-Frank and it'll never happen again!!!11 *coughcoughcough asif cough*
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
That scenario really isn't different from murder. In the US you could be tried for second degree murder for something like that.
No. You'd have to establish causation between the dumping of waste and the people getting cancer. Unless it's a very rare form of cancer that can only arise due to exposure of chemicals, there's no chance that this will happen.
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"Shortens lives" is not good enough. The whole point of this thread is that pollution will either kill someone immediately, or will otherwise ONLY shorten lives by a few years. You're the one jumping in and saying my statement was wrong (when you took it out of context) and now you're continuing to assert that I was wrong, while refusing to even talk specifics about the topic.
Quit making a fool out of yourself.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I know that last part is sarcastic, but...finding scapegoats seems to be human nature.
Which should NOT be construed as saying it's good, or even good enough. But it is preferable that scapegoats not get executed.
This just goes to show that contrary to public opinion the authoritarian regime of China has very little control over the people that it calls its citizens. Whenever there is some kind of problem, they are unable to fix at grass roots level, usually because nearly all kinds of civil society is completely banned. The education system is so worthless that trying to instil civilized behavior in people from an early age, is in direct conflict with all the other propaganda messages. Rather than try to fix preventable problems before they occur, their only solution is to wade in, in a very heavy handed fashion and start killing people. This is the sign of a desperate, unstable regime. In other places, incentives would be offered, education would be used and the media would be co-opted, but this is China so only death threats are the perceived solution. No wonder that everybody wants to leave.
If you read your link, you would see he did more than report it: he spent a year running a website that made more of an issue of it than the government saw fit, and encouraged others to consider the government compensation inadequate.
Arbitrary, yes; but it wasn't for reporting the contamination. It was for publicising it.
You do know Chinese parents now buy foreign milk for their babies, even 5 years after the scandal? Milk import is so high the Chinese custom has special rules for them. Looks like the government of your Megacorporate States of America and industrialist overlords did a much better job than the murderous Chinese government and its corporations (You do know the government owns the corporation producing the melamine milk, right?)
You do realize that the government pressured lawyers not to file for compensation for the victims of the milk scandal? That's the justice you want?
Yeah the only people who are off their meds are the deniers who are , if that thing we call science is to believed, are preventing the political action needed to prevent the worst calamity human kind has ever faced, bar none, with all the attendant consequences that that implies.
Read history. Read what happen to people who take seriously that their imaginary ideology can prevail over reality. Read what happens to people whose thinking permits a shared, deeply felt delusion to guide their actions .
Believe me, it's not all our fault. It's not a societal sin, or human nature or anything else *collective8 that brought this on. It's conservatives plain and simple. Glad you believe so strongly in the assignment of individual responsibility because this isn't going to be chalked up to "society" or "our greed" or "our shortsightedness" or any other collective noun phrase.
The record couldn't be clearer . Conservatives were the ones who systematically lied about and prevented society from taking corrective action while we still could.
You're consigning hundreds of millions of millions of people to death and murdering the ecological basis of basis of civilization itself and when you encounter someone who is processing reality what do you think? Wow that person is nuts!
Reality is one thing, one way. It's not a Rovian poitical construct. It's not a post modern masturbation fantasy. It is what it is and it doesn't give a fuck about what you think about it. Your exercise in magical thinking, that reality can be made different by just believing very strongly is going to doom you and all the rest of the subhuman psychopathic conservative filth into what history calls "losers".
It doesn't matter what it takes. It doesn't matter what level of barbarity we need to sink to... ion the end, when it comes down to action or your *rights* guess what? Society will fuck your civil rights and fuck your freedoms, we're going to survive and we're going to do that by neutralizing the threat.
You and the republican party and the bankers and the heads of the environmental-raping corporations need to read history Feast your motherfucking eyes on how the powerful and well connected, the people who thought it couldn't never work against them ended up when they overreached
Yeah it's s not illegal to be a conservative today and you can believe whatever reality-defying thing you want to and teach your kids to do the same. But that is now, before the climactic feedback events that devastated 3/4 of the world's food supply over the course of half a decade have kicked in. or similar event.
When this is over, we will be pitiless with respect to anything that led is to this point. Conservative forms of religion? Forget about it. Free market? Forget about it. Freedom to assert anything you want pm matters of scientific fact without reserve? Forget about it.. It's going to be a different , sort of hellish world and your kind, the people who brought it down on the heads of billions of innocent people will live through it in chains , if you live through it at all.
I simply jested at the limit which I think is shirking the problem. They get to say there is healthcare and pat each other on the back in DC while real people are getting shit healthcare and cut off while in the fucking hospital. Calm down dipshit. Real healthcare or no healthcare---anything in between will be used as a quite means to eliminate the undesirables.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The elite know this and have taken on the task as a practical matter. I'll take government healthcare intervention seriously when Congress, the President, and his family are all on Medicaid.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Because abstractly, potentially taking a few weeks/months/years off of several people's lives, is quite a long distance from murder.
People who smoke cigarettes, over-eat and don't exercise, share needles, or spend too much time in the sun, aren't generally charged with attempted suicide. Would you like to change that, too?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not only does that not make it right... that makes it worse.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Reminds me of the news story years ago about the Canadian woman that was caught trafficking cocaine in Vietnam. She as sentenced to death by firing squad AND fined 100,000$ dollars.
As a comedy news show commented "If I were her, I wouldn't pay the fine..."