So a swiss man walks into a train station...

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100625/singapore-caning-sentence-100625/

Thanks Oliver Fricker for the story, I'm now going to ridicule you.

So a swiss man walks into a train station... sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, and in part it kind of is. This man goes to Singapore with a friend and proceeds to vandalise a subway car. Here are a few snippets from the news article I need to post before proceeding.

"Singapore sentenced a Swiss man to three strokes of a cane and five months in prison..."

"...reinforcing the city-state's reputation for severely punishing minor crimes. "

"He feels the sentence is too high, and so do I," Kang told reporters."


Ok so my big problem with this situation is this. We have a guy that goes to a country. He either did 1 of 2 REALLY stupid things. He didn't check to see what the punishment for breaking a law like this is before performing the crime, OR he knew that Singapore is extremely hard on crime and decided to do it anyways.

Now my assumption in this situation is that we're dealing with the latter portion of this. He knew the country was hard of criminals, and just thought he'd ninja-grafiti a subway car and not get caught. But since he did, now he's whining that the laws are too strict and wants leniency.

No. This is ridiculous. First of all, you committed a crime, something which you knew was a crime, as I'm pretty sure there's no where on the planet that this would actually be legal. Second of all you did it in a country that's know for it's strict penaties on crime. Not only known for being strict, they're also knows for flipping other countries the bird when they ask them to play nice.

Singapore is it's own country, with it's own political system, and it's own set of laws. We should either respect how they handle affairs within their country, or dont visit. Another fairly obvious option would be if you dont want to get in trouble, dont break the law.

In closing, I completely agree with the punishment, those are their laws. The country worked hard to get where they are, so if you go and visit them, show them the respect they deserve.