Volunteering to watch an execution

[Dill]

(05-03-2017, 06:31 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: 1st world country is always a bit of a misleading title considering China and India are the 2nd and 6th largest countries in the world by GDP, respectively. Yet neither of them are "1st world" countries. Both of them have the death penalty.

So of the top 6 economic powers in the world, 50% of them have the death penalty.

Meanwhile in Norway, they don't even have life sentences... so in 2011 when that guy killed 77 people (the Norway-to-US population % equivalent of killing roughly 4,800 people here) he got 21 years in prison. Sorry, but those are the kinds of people who need to be gone.

What is misleading about the term "1st world country"?  It designates a country's level of development--social and political as well as economic, not size of GDP. And economic includes economic well being. (Check the per capita for India and China; are they in the top 6?) That is why economists usually measure GNI rather than GDP when assessing well being.

Regarding social/political development, India is a democracy of one billion people; 26 executions since 1991.  China is a dictatorship of 1.4 billion; thousands executed and no one has anyway of keeping track. Imagine Texas with a billion people and you get the idea.

According to Amnesty International, the "top five executioners" in the world are presently Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and China--all developing countries.  https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/04/china-must-come-clean-about-capital-punishment/  The US WAS among the top five until this year. That is not great company.  All of these countries would, by 1st-world standards, appear socially and politically underdeveloped, with smaller middle classes and partial democracy or none.

In China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq "that guy" would certainly be gone. I would rather live in Norway.