The lifestyle of Vietnam’s nouveau riche elite was exposed during the devastating trial in Ho Chi Minh City that convicted Truong My La Lan of stripping the country’s biggest bank huge sums of money in a scam worth $44 billion. (…) She broke down in tears as she battled for her life before the sentence was announced. It was “due to my lack of understanding of legal matters,” she said, that she “did the wrong things.”
Watch me boombling and bamboozling my way around with my eyes closed and absolute zero awareness of my general environment as I accidentaly scam billions of dollars. Whoopsies.
To be fair I feel like Kevin O’Leary just used this excuse for trump. He essentially said we do it all the time you normies never say anything I don’t see the problem, I’m paraphrasing but here’s a Jon Stewart piece about it
The most difficult argument to argue against against the death penalty is that you cannot repair for the damages of executing a person you’ve wrongly convicted, if new evidence appears too late.
This doesn’t even mean there aren’t people who deserve to die, or who deserve suffering. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of the fallibility of human institutions.
That’s why death penalty shouldn’t exist for crimes like a wife killing a husband. You might be 99.9% sure she poisoned him, but you cannot know for sure.
However, a school shooter caught red handed shooting a school?
Some crimes and scenarios can warrant the death penalty in my mind
Next argument is “what if the government framed people to execute them?”
Why in the world would the government point out that they are executing someone?
If the government (the rich controlled government) wants you dead they would do it quietly.
Even something as simple as cutting your brake lines. You really think local police are going to figure out that the government had soldier 65478 tamper with your brake lines?
Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.
Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.
The same argument can be applied for free market capitalism: it’s too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence. The reality is that the big economies of the world lie somewhere in the middle.
But even if communism was an ideology and an unreachable standard that a community or country was striving to active, you would expect it to be harder to even become a millionaire
Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”
But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.
Socialism works. Workers can democratically direct production at scale. Communism is the goal, but Socialism isn’t some sacrifice to get through, it’s a marked improvement on Capitalism. Capitalism itself is the sacrifice.
That’s because communism was never supposed to be a thing you just implement and was never meant to exist alongside other ideologies.
Communism as first described by Marx and then later expanded upon by other theorists is merely the inevitable outcome of a global society that has overcome scarcity, moved away from late stage capitalism and values things like workers rights, equality and standards of living.
The biggest divide between communists is usually how we get to that end state. Do you try to ignite a global violent revolution against capitalism, seize the means of production by force and then use dictatorial power to try and force society towards it, like the Soviets did? Or should we make incremental changes over time though existing Democratic channels like democratic socialists? Or do you seize the power for yourself, run the country like a monarchy and claim you’ve achieved communism?
I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.
Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.
The entire point of socialism with Chinese characteristics was studying how to achieve post scarcity in a capitalist global economy without losing the leverage necessary for the government to eventually progress towards communism. It’s not like this is a unique train of thought.
Marx wrote assuming that revolution would happen in the advanced economies of Germany, France, England, and America. Instead, revolution happened in the agriculturally-dependent economies of Russia, China, and Vietnam.
They’re a market based mixed economy. Mixed means both socialist and capitalist (public and private ownership of the means of production).
It’s Communist in the sense that there’s only one political party, the communist party. And their goal is to move towards socialism.
The Đổi Mới economic reforms were initiated by the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1986 during the party’s 6th National Congress. These reforms introduced a greater role for market forces for the coordination of economic activity between enterprises and government agencies, and allowed for private ownership of small enterprises and the creation of a stock exchange for both state and non-state enterprises
The economic reforms aimed to restructure the Vietnamese economy away from Soviet-type central planning and towards a market-based mixed economy intended to be a transitional phase in the development of a socialist economy. The goal of this economic system is to improve the productive forces of the economy, developing a firm technical-material base for the foundation of socialism, and to enable Vietnam to better integrate with the world economy.
On the one hand, I feel somewhat strongly that the state shouldn’t execute criminals. On the other hand, it’s more important that billionaires face the consequences of their actions like normal people do.
I think the death penalty should really only be allowed for mass murder / enslavement.
However, I doubt any billionaires are innocent of enslaving people, even if it’s “I paid them ($0.07 / day, which is slave wages)!” So, fuck the ultra rich. They didn’t get there by hard work; they got there by exploiting people and the system. Finances are not unlimited, so funneling that much money to yourself means you are directly depriving whole communities of livelihood and, almost always, actual life.
My major issue with the death penalty is the very real chance of killing an innocent person. People have been wrongly arrested/convicted significant amount of times for mass murder situations, so while on principle I have no issues with the death penalty in mass murder cases… I can’t support it because of the chance of it being the wrong person.
With billionaires, it’s pretty easy to figure out exactly who is the billionaire out of a group of random people… Very hard to wrongfully convict someone of having over a billion dollars.
It’s pretty basic harm reduction. We support harm reduction. A terrible person being killed is harm reduction even if a terrible person being imprisoned and being rehabilitated if at all possible and made to be as productive of a member of society as possible in prison would be better harm reduction. The world is too big and too awful to look at everything in absolutes.
And it’s nice to see awful rich people actually get the real punishments they often deserve instead of poor people get those punishments that they often don’t deserve.
It’s a very easy argument for us both to have while dealing entirely in hypotheticals of how we feel about what other people are doing. I’m not executing anyone and I’m not in any position to do so I’m just enjoying watching bad things happen to bad people. The fact that I don’t trust anyone to be able to legally decide who deserves to be killed in cold blood doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate some real justice being done where it usually isn’t.
“She faced an array of charges along with her husband, Eric Chu Nap Kee, a billionaire Hong Kong real estate operator, and 85 co-conspirators, including lawyers and banking regulators from the capital of Hanoi, the seat of communist rule.”
So, she did bribe officials. Probably pissed off the wrong one, though.
On the one hand daily beast is calling it a show trial, not two sentences later they say the trial was devastating, and the rest of the article is mostly dedicated to explaining what she did and calling her and her ilk “cronies”. 🤦
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