Perhaps Refresh your link @Kopstar ? Beeb have now updated story, very sadly.
Some weird stuff going on in SA. Is it gang related?
The youngsters killed in a tavern a few weeks ago seems to be some sort of carbon monoxide poisoning (my feeling). They were packed into a tavern and simply… died.
This one is probably related to some sort of gang/taxi feud/rivalry amongst tavern owner. Fucked up.
… Taxi feud?
It’s a complicated issue that goes back decades. Taxis here are not like you think of London cab or the yellow ones etc. There are that type but the majority are 14-16 seaters that transport the bulk of the work force to and from the townships to cities, towns, mines etc. Without them, the country would grind to a standstill. These are privately owned and each route is controlled by the Taxi Association of that area and violence between feuding operators or associations over routes and whose taxis are allowed where is not uncommon and often results in collateral damage and seemingly indiscriminate shootings.
They are also fucking nuts. Don’t give a shit about rules of the road or safe occupancy levels.
But also fucking fun to ride when you have only a vague idea of where you are and where you want to go
I can’t be the only one who’s thinking that this whole situation is a complete tragedy, from victim to murderer?
The only tragedy I can see is the little cunt will be out in 13 years if he behaves inside.
I take it you’re a firm believer in the futility of rehabilitation?
He’s a little cunt who went into town armed with a knife and ended up stabbing a 12 year old girl to death. There’s fucking vermin like him everywhere now with no regard for human life. With a bit of luck he’ll do himself in at some point.
Alot of people, given a chance, will rehabilitate. However, the law needs to punish the crime to the degree the harm it caused to the victims. The girl will never be alive again and her family might never ever recover from it again. There is a reason why in Singapore, we support the death penalty for certain crimes like drug trafficking. Because the harm done to thousands of families from one drug trafficker, sometimes can never be undone ever again and as much as I believe that the punishment under the law needs to send a message of how much harm you have done. And yes if I am the family of the young boy, its a tragedy, you cannot deny that but the law needs to punish from a perspective of neutrality and punish the criminal for what the crime has caused to the victim. To me a murder has to be punished with death albeit with the exceptions made for juveniles in these cases but pushing for rehabilitation for all crimes like what some human rights group like to push for is seriously plunging another knife into the families who have been harmed.
@gasband I agree with your first sentence. Absolutely this is horrific and as a parent I think it would destroy me if this happened to one of my boys, but as @redalways says, I think it behooves us to think of the wider societal influences here - 12 and 14 year old kids shouldn’t be out at 10:30 at night and adolescent brains are very poorly equipped at the best of times - let alone in the case of those with mental health and personality issues - to deal with conflict without boundaries. Locking up perpetrators after the event is not enough we need to make changes so that this sort of thing becomes unheard of. @jaffod I do think there are objectively evil people out there but would generally be reluctant to label someone unredeemable based on an act as a 14 year old.
That’s the reason why I put the exceptions given to juveniles. Otherwise, I see absolutely no reason not to enforce the harshest of punishment for crimes like drug trafficking and murder.
Lot of the people caught in drug trafficking are paid mules or otherwise coerced. While it is necessary to stop drug trafficking , it’s also equally necessary to understand why people would risk their lives to traffic drugs and get to the guys who are actually manufacturing the drugs.
And quite a lot of drugs being trafficked into Singapore would be relatively harmless if allowed. Stuff like Marijuana for instance are allowed in quite a lot of countries for recreational use. Ban those and you will have people cooking up batches of drugs at their home which often becomes a lot more difficult to police.
We can do both. We can try to stop the source and punish the traffickers to the maximum. By the time you finish cutting the sources, and assuming we could, how many thousands of family would be destroyed? And Singapore was always upfront about the death penalty. People know but still they try, why, because it’s just too lucrative to stop. It’s not fair for other countries to ask Singapore to allow these traffickers to continue coming to harm our families when some of these countries are doing nothing to rid sources from within.
Sorry I might sound harsh or heartless but I have friends who were destroyed by drugs, both the hard ones and the soft ones. I had a friend who was hung at 21 because he couldn’t resist the money on offer.