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Comment by sradman | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia's Aceh flogs two men for having sex [1]:

> They were reported by neighbours back in November.

> The two men, aged 27 and 29, winced in pain as they were whipped by robed and masked enforcers who lashed the men on their backs with a rattan stick.

Perhaps "robed" was conflated with "robbed". Appalling nonetheless:

> This is believed to be the third time gay men have been caned in Aceh since Islamic laws outlawing homosexuality were introduced in 2015.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55846699

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

I think that could be even further generalized to:

> Any society that feels it needs to torture 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

> 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...

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