Ok some background before the OP
I know Vietnam is corrupt and has been corrupt even before France colonized it and made Thailand look virtuous
Even the natives are aware of this to the point that during the war it was assumed one set of crooks was just fighting another set of crooks …
Well apparently the latest chairman of vietnams communist government has gotten quite serious about it to the point that one CEO was given the death penalty recently hence this news story
What makes me pause is the comment section under the story where you get both sides of the political spectrum
making comments like: “.That’s how you take care of business, no appeals, no years wasted on the taxpayer dime, done and done.”
another: This is what we need for politicians who are caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Immediate hangings on public land for public display
“The United States Justice System should take notice of what just happened in Vietnam. There are a number of financial criminals in the USA for whom this punishment would be more than appropriate, such as Sam Bankman-Friedman”
a few of the ones that were racist seem to be removed as the ones advocating lynchings without trials here in America
but death for financial crimes? and some of them were " trials? we need no stinking trials just hang them all in the middle of Central Park live on TV… that’'ll learn em …
there’s a couple that say an equivalent of "yall insane and that’s not the way here "but they’re rounded out …
News website comment sections are a hive of scum and villainy the likes of which you will not find elsewhere in the galaxy. That’s been the case ever since the AOL days when any news article having to do with biology or paleontology would be chock full of creationists posting all-caps evangelism.
A nonzero and arguably meaningful fraction of comment-section thuggery is generated by foreign actors in service to regimes who have an interest in stoking division and anger in the American electorate. They aren’t expressing anything like a coherent ideology for propaganda purposes, they just want to push people into fighting with one another in hopes that the American experiment eventually fails.
The phenomenon of Internet Tough Guys has ramped up during the pandemic, exemplified by the Twitter warriors whose online bloodlust includes stumping for Nuremberg 2 tribunals to convict and execute people who inconvenienced them or supported Covid vaccines - including posting images of gallows.
Absolutely. Judging humanity by reading news comments is like judging humanity by hanging out in a fraternity. You’re generalizing based on a very small, specific, and especially loathsome sample.
God forbid you read YouTube comments for to get the pulse of society.
Agreed to all. The only comment sections still (usually) safe to click into are those following advice columns like Carolyn Hax in the WashPost, where most respondents provide thoughtful, often insightful discussions. Also some less than helpful stuff, but nowhere near as toxic as news commentary.
The internet provides boundless opportunities for cranks to be amplified and mutually supported. I wouldn’t worry too much about newspaper cesspools. A more live threat to democracy happens when they organize, eg at 4chan, twitterX, or Telegram.
Category Error: “Financial Crimes”
Also the death penalty for defrauding a country of 3% of its GDP doesn’t sound too harsh to me. The country may feel it lacks the capability of keeping someone like that safely bottled in prison. This might fall under something related to the Ceausescu exception - the death penalty could be justified in cases where the criminal poses an active threat to democracy. (Vietnam is not a democracy at all, but pulling in 3% of an authoritarian economy makes you a power broker, not a democratic capitalist financier.)
So I’m saying the death penalty is ok if it’s protecting a corrupt authoritarian regime? No: I’m making a comparison: this is a case of an authoritarian power struggle with one side losing. Not good, but that’s because dictatorship isn’t good.
Unfortunately, I think the opposite is often true - anonymous comment sections are often the way to see how people truly think.
A lot of “mundane, ordinary, average” people hold views that would be considered highly radical or disturbing - but the cover of anonymity lets them express it openly. I don’t think it’s a tiny minority, I think it’s close to a majority. Remember, Trump got 47% of the popular vote, and the Nazis and Hamas won democratic elections.
The reason I feel that way is because of how heavily upvoted many such comments are. It’s one thing for someone to make a frightening comment; it’s another for it to be the highest-upvoted in an entire thread.