It’s interesting to note that the details of a crime make a difference in how offended people are.
For example, I remember a case in California a few years ago where a guy robbed and murdered another guy, and then ate the picnic lunch the victim had packed.
Well, the murderer was executed a few years later (which is unusual for murderers in California), and a journalist pointed out that the guy was being executed for eating someone else’s lunch. (Should this circumstance have made a difference in the killer’s punishment?)
And I think it’s true that the circumstances of a crime make a big difference in how shocked the community is (for better or for worse).
When we hear that someone was killed over a fight over a parking spot, it’s more offensive than hearing that someone was killed in a fight over a girl. (Is either one any worse?)
Ask yourself why this particular story went out over the wires. I’m sure that people are murdered in Asia all the time, including some Americans.
Murder by any means is tragic. Murder driven by superstition, whether religious-based or not, seems especially tragic to me.
Combining this with the lunacy of participating in lotteries (sometimes called “an excise tax on stupidity”) makes this woman’s death seem as disgusting and pointless as any. Their “witch doctor”, “shaman”, or whatever he is called, convinced these people that a woman should be abducted and butchered so “the spirits” would grant them the wisdom/foresight to choose lottery numbers. I mean really, can the reasons for murdering someone really get any more silly and pointless? I guess so - just when I think the bar for despicable human behavior has been lowered enough, someone comes along and lowers it further. Sigh.
As disgusting as it sounds, not all murders are equally tragic or pointless. Some are at least “comprehensible” (please try to think of what I am saying before you flame me on this…) - a bar-room fight that goes wrong, something done in a flash of uncontrolled anger, a holdup gone horribly wrong and escalated. While some of them really boggle the imagination - like this one. Or like a 13-year old gang member who shoots a tourist in the head at a stop light because “they were white”.
For some reason, this really bothered me. Not to say I am not equally bothered by other events/crimes, but still…
Here’s what I don’t get (well, the whole murder-for-numbers is way out there, too, but this point in particular):
Aren’t there guidelines to sacrifice? I mean, you always hear the thing about “virgin-sacrifice” and all that so I guess I’m thinking that if these people believe they have to kill someone, there should be some sort of guidelines to it, not just “grab someone and cut’er up.”
Don’t get em wrong, I think these guys are totally fucked in the head, to use a technical term, but like I said, I guess I’m of the understanding that part of the ritual of sacrifice is to give up something that matters to the people performing the ritual. Just slaughtering someone or some animal you snatched from the market or the side of the road is not a sacrifice to you, you aren’t losing anything, you know? If this is the case, then these yahoos are worse than superstitious zealots, they are straight-up murdering religious-idiot-zealots. Hang’em by their toes, IMO.
Manda Jo, Yes, I got that you said you didn’t think murder was right, but this
made me think you were excusing the murder on cultural and economic grounds.
Anthracite
All murder is tragic and pointless. However, people, not even insane people, commit murders for no reason. Everybody has an excuse: “he was white”; “my dog told me to kill them”; “the waiter was screwing my ex-wife.” I understand why someone commits murder, but it in no way lessens my horror and disgust. The woman who drowned her children is an object of pity for many on this board, but all I can think of was her 7-year-old running from his mommy who was trying to kill him.
ENugent
You wrote
Yes, I have no sympathy for murder. The only possibly acceptable reason to kill is in self-defense or defending another person.
Tranquilis
You’re absolutely right, Malaysia is a pluralist nation. However, the bumis, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, seemed to me to be less than tolerant. Mind you, I only visited for 10 days, and my understanding is correspondingly shallow.
Anthracite Wether or not it is really tragic has nothing to do with the actual murder, but the after effects. Killing someone who has 2 days to live is less tragic than killing someone who has three days to live. Likewise people whom otherwise would not have lived do because someone else died makes the death less tragic. Death like that is pointless, but how you die is not very tragic because at the end you are dead.
Although I agree with IzzyR(gasp), it’s shit like this that is pushing me to abandon my liberal ways and embrace the death penalty.
Or maybe I’m just getting old and crotchity.
The story does not mention the financial state of alleged perp. For all we know, it was middle class people, or well off people wanting to be rich. Greed is not exclusive to the poor.
But then we get into ‘crimes of passion’ territory. When we hear people were killed over stupid things (i.e. Parking spots) then we are shocked over the triviality (is that a word?) of it all.
More people can relate to the feeling of losing their partner to another person tough, and can say ‘Well, I’d have hurt them too.’ and they accept in this day that people are psychos and are moe empathatic.
I’m not agreeing with any form of murder, be it sacrifice/revenge or anything. But the more rational it seems then the more acceptable it gets.
I was always careful to keep my statements conditional.
I think another factor in how horrific we find a murder is how much we can do to prevent it from happening to us. In many of the more “common” sort of murders, when we hear about them we assume they could never apply to us: we don’t sleep around, we didn’t marry someone who would be greedy enough to kill us for our insurance, we don’t sell drugs. This isn’t a matter of blaming the victem, but rather recognizing that there are “risk factors” for murder and that we (most of us) don’t have them. Undirected, unpredictable, uncoontrolable violence, like the man who shoots you over a parking place or the psycotic serial killer is much more threatening because there isn’t any reason why that isn’t you, and in fact there isn’t a damn thing you can do to limit the chances that that will be you. (Shades of Snopes here, obviously).
For what it’s worth, the current (June 25) Backstage at News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd claims that certain Cambodians show up at Pol Pot’s gravesite “to meditate, with the apparent dominant benefit of spiritually receiving winning lottery numbers wafting up from the great beyond.”
Less fatal than sacrificing random Americans, but no less bizarre.
