I'm getting really tired of hearing about it, particularly the pathetic attempts at rationalisation by every bleeding heart lefty and hippie who collectively think that nobody should ever be responsible or accountable for their actions.
But they're Australians!
No actually, they're not. They're a pair of asian immigrants who we were silly enough to grant citizenship to, and they repaid this by trying to smuggle drugs into our country. Sorry, association officially revoked, sport.
But they're rehabilitated!
Bullshit. For starters, how can you tell? Because they painted a few pictures in prison? Rehabilitation is something that can only be determined in retrospect, which comes down to letting a convicted criminal free just so you can see if they reoffend. Great plan. Let's do that with bank robbers and rapists too, shall we? Does it apply to pedophiles too? When Dennis Ferguson was released the community was happy to hound him to death, which they did.
(Note: I'm not defending Dennis Ferguson for a single second, in fact I think he's a poster child for why Australia should have capital punishment too - the prick deserved to be shot. I mention it as a glaring example of the cynical double standards that some people hold when all of a sudden it involves them personally.)
Secondly, letting someone off their punishment for crime means there's effectively no punishment at all if they say they were sorry and they were bad and they promise not to do it again. Gee, that's a deterrent, isn't it? Also, bear in mind they're convicted criminals who have already committed crime - at what stage do they pay for that?
Thirdly, isn't it amazing how willing our precious duo are not to commit crime.... after they've been caught? If they're so willing to be upstanding citizens, how about they not have committed the crime in the first place? Would Sukumaran have voluntarily committed himself to a life of painting, and Chan to selflessly extolling the lord's word and the benefits of a saintly existence? Bullshit. At best they would have reaped the reward of bringing in drugs that impact the lives of many more, bought flash cars and houses, and gotten away with it. At worst they would have done it again.
They made the choice out of free will, and actions must have consequences.
Tourists will boycott Bali!
No they won't. Half a dozen lefty hippies and airchair activists might, and they're the glass-of-water-and-four-straws scruffy backpacker mob who wouldn't spend any amount of money worth having them as tourists anyway. Everyone else will be back there for the same reasons in a few weeks - not that it will influence most people's travel plans anyway, because they're not smuggling drugs so frankly they don't care.
Capital punishment isn't a deterrent!
Yeah? Says who, someone grasping for an argument? I'll freely admit that criminals are stupid, if they were smart they wouldn't be committing crime in the first place. Or at least they wouldn't be getting caught doing so. This is a rubbish point of argument that depends on the fallacious view that something should only be done if it works 100% perfectly. Sorry, but no - as long as it helps then it's worth doing, and you can't tell me that the thought of consequences of being shot doesn't deter some people from being idiots and trying to smuggle drugs in the first place.
And even if execution *doesn't* scare them off, then what precisely are we supposed to do to stop them? What's the alternative beyond that point? Wow, no answer - funny that.
The worst case scenario is that the least we achieve is to get rid of two people already caught smuggling drugs, and that's still two less fuckers who will ever be a problem to deal with again other than running a weed eater around the plot so it looks neat. Lefties seem to forget that little point - it cuts right down on the recedivism rate.
They're not the ones ultimately responsible for drug smuggling taking place.
Never said they were. Those people are smart enough to stay well away from it and not get caught. That doesn't mean these two aren't guilty of doing something society has really, really decided we don't want them to do, and that just because we haven't caught everyone involved doesn't make an iota of difference to the fact that we should punish the ones we have. That's the idea, remember - deterrence. Cuts down on the attraction of being the next pair of mules, because you pay for your stupidity. Again, worst case is it's two less mules that won't be a problem ever again - guaranteed.
The death penalty is inhumane.
The death penality is only invoked for the most serious of crimes, where society has decided that the criminal has impacted the lives of others in such a way that they don't deserve theirs any more. Or that they can't be trusted to ever be let loose again. These people knew full well that smuggling drugs carried the death penalty before they set out to do so, and yet they still chose to try voluntarily. What does that say about their attitude to the rest of society? They clearly don't care less, so what's an effective deterrent from ever stopping them from doing so again? The answer is that if the threat of death didn't stop them, then the only way of doing so in the future is to remove their ability to do so permanently.
They were young and stupid.
Yes, they were. But they were both adults, and in our society we convey certain rights at adulthood - the right to vote, get a licence and drive a car, purchase alcohol etc. These rights are granted because society thinks that adults are mature enough to make decisions with an awareness of the responsibilities and consequences that come with them, and that also means accepting the responsibility when you do stupid stuff like try to smuggle drugs.
As to youth - should we have a graduated system where you're only subject to the death penalty at 30, below that you're still criminally responsible but you just get locked up in something that looks like the set of Midnight Express for the rest of your life? Maybe below 25 you should get a smack on the botty, get told you're a naughty boy, and you don't get to play with the other children at lunch for the rest of the week.
Or we could accept that there has to be a cutoff point somewhere, and arguing that someone is just over is it bullshit, because there will always be someone just over it, and that with power to make decisions comes responsibility for actions.
Personally I'm really looking forward to reading in a week or so that they've been tidily shot. The rhetoric in the lefty press will last about a week, the speeches by politicians will last about the same length of time (so they can convince their marginalist pinko voters to keep their snouts in the trough at the next election), and then we can all go back to normal until the next moron bogan thinks she can get away with smuggling a few kees of weed into Indonesia in a fucking boogie
