Any society that feels it needs to publicly torture its citizens as punishment is simply barbarism.

Do you believe that locking people in a cage for years of their life, separating them from their families, and putting them in an environment where they must be afraid perpetually or hone criminal skills to protect themselves to be humane? Not being hyperbolic, just detailed.

Well crimes must have consequences, so we should compare different possibilities and see which has more benefits and less drawbacks.

I didn't frame my question as in opposition to your statement. Basically it boils down to "what else do you feel is barbaric?"

Some form of prison is necessary, and it serves three purposes:

- rehabilitation

- deterrence

- protecting society from the criminally inclined

Every society, including the most liberal, have found some type of prison to be necessary. It is not inherently barbaric, and it's the minimally barbaric option when dealing with a murdered for example. Public torture doesn't fulfill all three objectives, especially not the third, and is therefore a non-starter.

Note that this is distinct from claiming support for a specific instance of a prison in a specific country, which may well be barbaric.

Well, I disagree that some form of prison is necessary. Like I said earlier somewhere I'm here, my opinion is probably a very unpopular one. I believe that if we can create a set of laws with no victimless crimes (which are also barbaric) then the world would be better with 2 sets of punishments: fines and corporal punishment, so long as no maiming is allowed in corporal punishment. I believe such a system would be much less barbaric than any system based around incarceration, and I believe incarceration is ineffective as a deterrent, and as rehabilitation. As far as protecting society from the criminally inclined, you're basically saying some people must be removed from society, and I would agree on that, though I think not nearly as many as we think go into prison like that, but many more come out like that, and I can think of a more humane way to remove that element from society than locking them away for the rest of their days, if they're truly beyond rehabilitation.

For the small number of people that are truly beyond rehabilitation (say they have some compulsion to keep murdering people because of some problem with their brain), what do you propose if not some sort of confinement (i.e. prison)?

> Some form of prison is necessary, and it serves three purposes: > - rehabilitation

This is decidedly not true in the US where prison is about retribution.

I was making a normative statement, not a descriptive one (although I didn't communicate that effectively).

Those are the three valid purposes that prison should serve, whether or not that happens to be true for a specific instance of a prison system in a specific country.

I think that could be even further generalized to:

> Any society that feels it needs to torture is simply barbarism.

I wonder which country hasn’t had public executions in the last 250 years...

Why 250? It seems arbitrarily far in the past.

As a way to compare societies and their values, it seems to me best to exclude the distant past when everyone was basically unaware of their neighbors, and use something like "since tv in most homes", or better yet, "since internet available to most".

There's far less excuses in today's globalized world to justify cultural relativism.

> There's far less excuses in today's globalized world to justify cultural relativism.

I look forward to a rigorous justification from first principles for the moral values of Western secular humanism.

I will not entertain that

"no public execution > public executions", or

"no street gay flogging > street gay floggings",

need to be rigorously justified from first principle.

Aceh is different. They were fighting for independence from 1975 onwards. When the Tsunami end of 2004 it aceh the strongest (pretty bad), both sides compromised, allowing aceh to be the only region of Indonesia under sharia law.

What about Kalimantan? I've been to Kota Kinabalu (many years ago) and the social difference compared to Kuala Lumpur was striking. I assumed Kalimantan was socially more similar to its island neighbors. Official laws and social norms do not always align.

Actually I do not know. Kalimantan is the Indonesian part of Borneo, while Kota Kinabalu is on the Malaysian part of Borneo. Generally Malaysia is more conservative than indonesia. Even in KL Muslims are banned from buying alcohol, while in Indonesia that's not generally the case.

And of course no one would mention that the actual sharia law does not care about your sexual orientation

The one in Aceh actually contradict Muhammad's (pbuh) example

Giving you the benefit of doubt, but what do you mean by 'FY'? I do not think slightly outlining the political situation in a part of the world warrents an insult, or does it?

FTFY means "fixed that for you"

Yes, but "for" the OP is what was being questioned.

I got the impression OP might have thought it meant "fuck that, fuck you" or something like that

I am good. Just thought it meant something else.

Say what you will, this isn't too different to what ex-gay/re-education that is happening in a lot of western countries is doing to children on the behalf of evangelism/religion, they just don't bother hiding it.

I wonder about the amount of unrecorded cases though, that "3 since 2015" number seems a bit weird, but I'm not 100% knowledged about the social dynamics in Indonesia.

> this isn't too different to what ex-gay/re-education that is happening in a lot of western countries

Both are illiberal as they punish behavior between consenting adults but extreme corporal punishment is a different level in the spectrum, in my opinion. Singapore is an advanced nation state that canes criminals [1]. One does not have to be for illegal drug trafficking, for instance, to be against caning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I do believe that imprisonment is less humane than corporal punishment, so long as the corporal punishment does not maim, is in line with the crime, and there are no victimless crimes punished with corporal punishment. So for example, I'd be opposed to the death penalty for drug trafficking as it is in Singapore, or the removal of limbs for theft as it is in SA, or any punishment whatsoever for homosexuality, but putting someone in a cage for 10 years for selling crack, or even for armed robbery, separating them from their children who have to grow up without a parent, putting them into a dangerous environment made entirely up of criminals and having to adapt a perpetually criminal and defensive mindset, to me that is more barbaric than beating someone. It is a difficult thing to reason on but it is important to do so.

I think it should be a choice given to the convict. Imprisonment, maybe for months or years, or intense pain and life long scaring, but you get to go home at the end of the day and don't spend a significant fraction of your only life in a cell. Depending on the length of the prison sentence, I would opt for the caning.

> this isn't too different to what ex-gay/re-education that is happening in a lot of western countries is doing to children

It's significantly worse, and, besides, conversion "therapy" is not happening in a lot of western countries. Here in western Europe it's unheard of.

> Here in western Europe it's unheard of.

Completely untrue.

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/11/09/conversion-therapy-ban...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/graham-linehan-trans-ge...

You seriously compare severe physical punishment with voluntary courses and meetings?

I think he's seriously downplaying how awful the public canings are, but you're seriously downplaying how awful conversion therapy is.

It's like

    bad|-----caning------conversion_therapy-----|good

and you're making it sound like

    bad|-----caning----------conversion_therapy-|good

Which is total bullshit. Voluntary courses and meetings, my ass.

If you think that conversion therapy is voluntary in most cases, you're delusional.

There's a lot of outside pressure involved and often, you don't really have a chance but to give into that until you can leave your whole family and existing social infrastructure behind.

I think it's pointless to view it as some sort of competition of awfulness, but you should know that the worst of the conversion therapy places were way more evil than this jaunty characterization. Some of them were using their own invented version of "electro shock therapy" that functionally was just torturing kids.

Even the more mild places do things to kids that leads to life long mental health challenges. It shouldn't be trivialized away as all just being a friendly chat among consenting adults.

Shunning [1] can be devastating and is used as a powerful alternative to physical punishment in pacifist communities like Anabaptists (e.g. Mennonites and Amish). Shunning is like a chronic disease while caning is acute.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

People have the right to decide who they associate with. Communities and organizations have a right to decide who they allow into them.

Shunning is very effective in enforcing community standards and behavior. It is one of the fundamental mechanisms inherent to any and all communities. At your job you can get fired. If you contribute to a dev project you must abide the CoC, and if you're a member of some cult or some community like Amish you have to live by community standards or you can go live by whatever standards you want with people that want to live that way with you. It can be devastating, but it is not wrong.