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View Full Version : getting back into the swing of things


implode
05-06-2005, 02:06 PM
okay. hi. i haven't written a stupid article in nearly 6 months, and i can't bear to see you people smiling about it anymore. so i've decided to institute an actual method to my nonsense - i will do one of these per week, regardless of how bad, and release them in here every friday. it is in this way that i hope to eventually alienate you all and live out the rest of my life in a studio apartment, arguing with my television and kidnapping neighborhood cats just to make other people feel as badly as i do, if only for just a moment.

this one is pretty bad, but i have an excuse - it's been so long, i've forgotten how to think. hopefully, i'll remember what it is to remember by next friday, and you'll have something worth stealing a quote or two from. but until then... you might want to look away.

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<center><u>drugs can't kill people if we kill them first</u></center>

<a href="
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050421/wl_asia_afp/indonesiaaustraliacrimedrugs_050421075430">link</a>

a beautiful australian lady looked on in awe this morning, as balinesian (that's right, BALINESIAN - we'll get to this later, once the macaws stop their infernal squaking) prosecutors translated their reccomended sentence for her misdoings from balinese to english to kangaroo: a life sentence in jail, accompanied by a $10,000 dollar fine, which will presumably be earned by escaping from jail at lights out, prostituting in front of the harbor, and sneaking back in before anyone notices that they're all a bunch of retards that fell asleep with their fingers in their noses.

her crime? supposedly smuggling in 9 pounds of marijuana to the tropical resort paradise/cannibalistic tribal drum circle. while nancy reagan's severed head looks on, casually thinking of new ways to retool "just say no" to apply to a generation skateboard carrying rebels, the country of bali has taken the "war on drugs" to disturbingly literal heights. 31 death sentences from drug trafficking offenses have been handed down by the tribal elders since 2000, a number that even the state of texas would be astounded by, were they capable of counting up to it. a particularly grisly example is painted by the description of two taiwanese men executed by firing squad last year, which, despite what they may have done, recalls too many scenes from clint eastwood movies to truly be taken seriously. thankfully for schepelle colby, the defendant in this case, death by sequencial rifle blasts to the face was not the suggested penalty in her case, as perhaps the thought of a beautiful lady being executed for trying to smuggle marijuana into a country that considers a firing squad to be a tool of justice may have even been too much for the prosecutor to handle.

look, bali. i don't care what side of the world you're on, and i don't care if you consider me to be an arrogant american for thinking this: you don't shoot people that wouldn't shoot you if they got the chance. i understand that when you're in a country the size of chicago, drugs ARE a bigger problem than they are in developed countries, since jay & silent bob could literally get everybody on the goddamned island high after a week of wacky vacation antics, but haven't you considered any options that aren't so goddamned insane? have you ever considered deportation? you know, the whole "i'll bet you don't drive this way in YOUR town" spiel the cop gives you before you have to offer him head to get out of a $300 ticket? or how about the slightly less insane, almost-cuddly-compared-to-this approach that singapore takes when dealing with petty criminals? 20 good whacks with a bamboo shoot will convince anyone who doesn't already think otherwise that bali is not the best place to try to awkwardly smuggle 9 pounds of marijuana into in a fucking handbag, you get the problem dealt with, and people gradually stop thinking that you'd just as soon kill them and put them in a stew before taking a logical approach to dealing with your problems.

i don't claim that colby is innocent - just beautiful, and just barely that. this woman tried to smuggle a bale of weed into a country with the unquestionably ballsy method of "putting it in her luggage", as if it never occured to her that this might be somewhere that customs agents would be looking. she claims that she was victimized by a group of organized criminals who used her as an unwilling courier for the drug, which is almost believeable, if you don't stop to think that people don't become "organized criminals" by shoving their drugs down their pants and trying to cross national borders. one tenet of organization is that you must be able to differentiate between good ideas and stealing a tourists bag, filling it with marijuana, and hoping they'll sell it above cost and mail the profits back to you. it's obvious that she's guilty - and if she isn't guilty, the people who actually are guilty are too busy trying to dislodge the loaded handgun from their commander's asshole after a smuggling demonstration. but that's not the point - the point is that if two wrongs don't make a right, two stupids certainly don't make a justice. a drug dealer is nothing more than misguided merchant, and despite the sanctity induced by visualizing your hands grasped tightly around ed-from-satelitte-promotions' neck, you'd never actually throw somebody in a hole for the rest of their life for trying to sell something worthless to your friends. the punishment must fit the crime, and EVEN if you're trying to make the point that drugs destroy lives, you don't make that point by destroying the lives before the drugs get a chance to.

the country of bali likes to consider themselves a tourist attraction, when they aren't busy digging up roots to throw in simmering cauldron, and they claim that this case has somehow distorted their image as a "holiday island" and caused mental anguish to their people. i don't know about the citizens of bali, but the idea that a platform of soldiers would have every right to shoot me in the face if one man gave them the word is FAR more disturbing than the idea of a chick selling weed could ever hope to be, if thoughts could hope. and i don't know what holidays they're talking about, since i'm not polynesian, but which one of them involves "erasing the concept of drug dealers from society", and why the hell hasn't america picked up on it yet? if there truly was a "what the hell are drugs?" ideal involved in any holiday, we'd have countless editorials about it by people that hate drugs so much that they just can't stop making a living by talking about them. but there aren't - holidays are about having a good time and celebrating, and apparently nobody ever explained to bali that drugs are designed to do exactly that. you want to sully your image as a "holiday island"? erect a giant statue of santa claus being scalped by warriors, or release a "22 ways to restrain and sodomize mohammed" educational video. simply knowing that somewhere on the island there might be someone willing to sell me a joint is not enough to even make me put my drink down while considering it, let alone put my drink down, set fire to a nearby stick, and chase said person through the town with it while shouting "up with hope! down with dope!"

in conclusion, bali is being ridiculous, and i'm telling. byevrybudy.

Ravenous Monkey
05-06-2005, 07:57 PM
Reminds me of Brokedown Palace (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120620/).

implode
05-06-2005, 08:03 PM
i'm glad i could remind you of the power of friendship, even if it took a joke about sodomizing mohammed.

töm
05-06-2005, 09:33 PM
she's <i>okay</i>. but i think she was throwing up all over herself during the trials and all. that could soil her public image.

i think bali is being a bit silly about this. but that's really the entire area around there. they like to cane people, and blindfold them and shoot them at dusk, and shoot exploding shells into people's heads... for petty crimes. it's wrong, all right. i'm not sure what can be done, though. bali isn't even a member of the united nations. calling them up would be like calling up a private country club. they don't have to do business with you, and they go by their own rules.

i'm not sure what you can do about that. over throw the country and set up an america-style democracy in which drug traffickers only serve slightly less absurd jail terms? (with the exception of las vegas, of course.)

other stuff:

Her lawyers say the marijuana was planted by baggage handlers in the eastern city of Brisbane, where she boarded the plane, and was meant to be removed by handlers in Sydney, where an unsuspecting Corby transferred to an Indonesia-bound flight. But the drugs were never removed, and Corby was left holding the bag, lawyers say.

John Ford - a prison inmate in the southern Victoria state - was flown under guard to Bali in March to provide key evidence in Corby's case. He testified that he had overhead two prisoners laughing about how a crime boss's shipment of marijuana had gone missing between Brisbane and Sydney last year. Ford said the drugs were owned by a Melbourne man, who later denied the allegation.

The prisoner's ex-wife, Rita, said yesterday that he had been stabbed in the back sometime last week, and had been placed in solitary confinement for his protection. She said he had been stabbed as a result of his cooperation in the Corby trial.

argonaut
05-06-2005, 10:02 PM
EVEN if you're trying to make the point that drugs destroy lives, you don't make that point by destroying the lives before the drugs get a chance to.
That was my favorite line, made moreso by the fact that I was mentally composing a 'but drugs destroy lives' counterpoint until I hit that like an unmarked speedbump at 3 AM.

I can only expand on Tom's point - that it can be a little hard to judge the judges in an area where they just don't think the same way we do. Keep in mind that the 20 lashes doled out by the Singaporons is done so for such atrocities as tagging a wall or spitting on the sidewalk. Drug dealing is a death sentence. I'm sure they look at the way we expedite our laws with equal astonishment. Except for Texas, anyway.

Nice bit of prose, as always. I'm tuning in next week. Hope the show isn't cancelled before the end of May sweeps.

MST3Kakalina
05-07-2005, 01:15 AM
I can only expand on Tom's point - that it can be a little hard to judge the judges in an area where they just don't think the same way we do. Keep in mind that the 20 lashes doled out by the Singaporons is done so for such atrocities as tagging a wall or spitting on the sidewalk. Drug dealing is a death sentence. I'm sure they look at the way we expedite our laws with equal astonishment. Except for Texas, anyway.

"Just because people disagree on something doesn't mean there's no right answer."

i'm not too fond of relativism. yes, there are a variety of different cultures out there, all with their own views on things, but that shouldn't excuse wacky things like shooting people in the face for drug charges or female genital mutilation (the thought of which would make me vomit if i had actually eaten in the last 26 hours).

i'm not trying to assert some "Western > everyone else, ever" thing. like, arranged marriages. we don't really practice them in the states--but something like 4% of them end in divorce. <b>4%</b>. the concept of being told who you're going to marry is uncomfortable for most of us, to say the least, but it seems to work well enough. a counterargument could be that if these girls are told who they're going to marry, they could be too intimidated to leave and perhaps not even legally allowed to initiate the divorce procedures (not to mention that divorce is still something of a shameful thing in the countries as well), but i don't know enough about the cultures where arranged marriages are practiced to say one way or the other on that.

Ravenous? :: bats her eyes ::

Dr. Badman
05-07-2005, 05:48 AM
This is a big story in AU. They didnt even translate her verbal testimony to the non-English speaking judges.

The whole thing doesnt make sense. You're supposed to get the mull there, THEN smuggle it back. Not the other way around.

She's either a total idiot, or she was framed.

And not many Australians are keen on going to Bali since the bombings.

argonaut
05-07-2005, 08:24 AM
Heh. I'm still getting over my last relativism debate.

I'm not trying to defend organized barbarism or anything. Some ideals - like the one that says justice shouldn't turn into vengeance - are more absolute than others. Relativism is it self relative *twitch*. Only that so often we react to stories we hear by saying 'How can such things happen?'. Such things happen because not everyone thinks the same way we do. If you come from a different environment, the same events will lead to much different reactions.

exemplary citizen
05-07-2005, 10:50 AM
Wasn't there some business in this case about a baggage handler that had indeed been caught tampering with her bag (as well as removing a mascot suit from somebody else's and fucking around with it) and was subsequently fired for it?

implode
05-07-2005, 11:14 AM
This is a big story in AU. They didnt even translate her verbal testimony to the non-English speaking judges.

The whole thing doesnt make sense. You're supposed to get the mull there, THEN smuggle it back. Not the other way around.

She's either a total idiot, or she was framed.

And not many Australians are keen on going to Bali since the bombings. i'm actually beginning to think that she must have been framed, if only for the fact that <i>no one</i> is stupid enough to try to smuggle 9 pounds of anything in their luggage. that'd be like trying to hide your kilo of coke in the glovebox. anyone who agrees to smuggle drugs already knows what the word "smuggling" means, and it certainly isn't what colby was doing. the baggage handler story is actually quite plausible - i mean, more plausible than any other option that's been presented. though that's still a very high-risk type of smuggling, it's really the only reasonable excuse for showing up at customs with a basketball-sized bag of weed in your suitcase.

töm
05-07-2005, 12:29 PM
putting your coke in your glovecompartment is an absolutely fine idea, as long as you don't get pulled over. at times like these, i like to refer to the wisdom of Indiana Jones:

"But Indy! Those snakes are poisonous!"
"<b>Only if you get bitten</b>."


I wasn't trying to defend the Balinesians through relativism. I'm just saying that there is little that can be done. It's their sovereign country. What they're doing is wrong, yeah, but there's little anything short of a Australian special ops team that could free her from her fate. Though of course, that's probably the best idea.

No one cares about Bali.

MST3Kakalina
05-07-2005, 01:41 PM
i'm actually beginning to think that she must have been framed, if only for the fact that <i>no one</i> is stupid enough to try to smuggle 9 pounds of anything in their luggage. that'd be like trying to hide your kilo of coke in the glovebox. anyone who agrees to smuggle drugs already knows what the word "smuggling" means, and it certainly isn't what colby was doing. the baggage handler story is actually quite plausible - i mean, more plausible than any other option that's been presented. though that's still a very high-risk type of smuggling, it's really the only reasonable excuse for showing up at customs with a basketball-sized bag of weed in your suitcase.
agreed. it doesn't sound <i>too</i> ridiculous to try to do, and if things fuck up, there's very obviously someone else to blame.

Ravenous Monkey
05-07-2005, 05:53 PM
"Just because people disagree on something doesn't mean there's no right answer."

i'm not too fond of relativism. yes, there are a variety of different cultures out there, all with their own views on things, but that shouldn't excuse wacky things like shooting people in the face for drug charges or female genital mutilation (the thought of which would make me vomit if i had actually eaten in the last 26 hours).

i'm not trying to assert some "Western > everyone else, ever" thing. like, arranged marriages. we don't really practice them in the states--but something like 4% of them end in divorce. <b>4%</b>. the concept of being told who you're going to marry is uncomfortable for most of us, to say the least, but it seems to work well enough. a counterargument could be that if these girls are told who they're going to marry, they could be too intimidated to leave and perhaps not even legally allowed to initiate the divorce procedures (not to mention that divorce is still something of a shameful thing in the countries as well), but i don't know enough about the cultures where arranged marriages are practiced to say one way or the other on that.

Ravenous? :: bats her eyes ::

Well...Indian culture is maddeningly conservative, though things are beginning to change now, but modern life still remains a twist of the old ways rather than a complete repudiation of them.

I don't like the "less divorces" way of justifying it, as it's more due to being looked down as a divorcee as you said than the arranged marriages being happy and successful.

Indian-American culture, rather than Indian culture, can be different depending on the type of family.

I guess this article says it well: http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/11621/

Anyway, I think happiness rather than rate of divorce should be the judge of the success of either the date-and-sort-out or arranged marriage system, of course this is before children appear.

Linzoy
05-08-2005, 05:17 AM
I don't think they're trying to make any sort of point about drugs. I think this is how america's veiw of the world is skewed. Americans think everyone does things based on principal because we're a country that's founded on an idea. Me and my mom where showing some friends from england around lexington and stuff, where the revolutionary war started, because we didn't have anything else to do. Most of the history was new to them. After a while the english man asked my mom, "So, why where the americans fighting in the first place?" My mom explained that they where being taxed unfairly and they wern't allowed to vote. It's like he didn't hear her. And he said, "Ok, but why did they do it?" He didn't sound offended or anything, just genuinely confused. I'm not saying he's stupid. He was just raised with a different frame of mind. Americans have this concept of individual rights that doesn't exist in most parts of the world. If you upset the government, they just want to get rid of you, and they don't need a reason to.

I just watched this movie called carandiru, about a prison riot that ended with the prisoners surrendering their weapons, and then the riot squad massacring most of them for no apparent reason. The ones that where left where ordered to strip naked and chat "long live the riot squad." This really happened. All because an election was coming up, and the governer didn't want to look bad. A prison riot would make it seem like things wern't under control. This seems like it might have something to do with the topic, but it really doesn’t. I don't think they're trying to make any sort of point about drugs. I think this is how america's veiw of the world is skewed. Americans think everyone does things based on principal because we're a country that's founded on an idea. Me and my mom where showing some friends from england around lexington and stuff, where the revolutionary war started, because we didn't have anything else to do. Most of the history was new to them. After a while the english man asked my mom, "So, why where the americans fighting in the first place?" My mom explained that they where being taxed unfairly and they weren’t allowed to vote. It's like he didn't hear her. And he said, "Ok, but why did they do it?" He didn't sound offended or anything, just confused. I'm not saying he's stupid. He was just raised with a different frame of mind. Americans have this concept of individual rights that doesn't exist in most parts of the world. If you upset the government, they just want to get rid of you, and they don't need a reason to.

I'm not trying to defend bali... I'm just saying that nobody is going to convince them to change their laws by explaining that drugs will kill the criminals eventually anyway. They need to be overthrown by a group of uncorrupt people like the americans.

I just watched this movie yesterday called carandiru, about a prison riot that ended with the prisoners surrendering their weapons, and then the riot squad massacring most of them for no apparent reason. The ones that where left where ordered to strip naked and chat "long live the riot squad." This really happened. All because an election was coming up, and the governor didn't want to look bad. A prison riot would make it seem like things weren’t under control. It seems terrible to us, but in brazil if you’re a criminal only other criminals are going to stick up for you.(edited for spelling)

Dr. Badman
05-08-2005, 06:30 AM
They need to be overthrown by a group of uncorrupt people like the americans.Hahahahah.

MST3Kakalina
05-08-2005, 06:47 AM
but the Revolutionary War is pretty much a passing note in British history. "oh, once upon a time America was a colony. then they formed their own country."

and i mean, there was "taxation without representation" and all of that, but we had the highest standard of living and lowest taxes in the world at the time. if i were British, i'd ask, "why?" too.

and you can't have a government without some level of corruption. that's just how it is. i guess you could make an argument that we're the LEAST corrupt, but i don't buy it.

Linzoy
05-09-2005, 08:09 AM
I wasn't being serious about that part, rest of the post was serious though.

Dr. Badman
05-29-2005, 03:41 AM
Conclusion: They decided not to execute her, but she's spending 20 years in a Balinese gaol. As a result, a majority of Australians have stopped donating to charities that are still aiding the tsunami incident, such as the Salvation Army.

I still have no idea whether she did it or not, but it's irrelevant now. There's just as many rumours that say she was framed by someone at either one of the airports by either a staff member or some jackass as there are rumours of there being a high demand for Aussie mull in Bali.

Either way I hate Bali because it has people in it.