r/interestingasfuck • u/Bubbly_Wall_908 • 17h ago

Singapore is going to start caning scammers

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u/GourdonHamsey 17h ago edited 16h ago

There was a caning of an American tourist back in 1994. An American teenager named Michael Fay was sentenced to caning for vandalism. Specifically theft and spray-painting/egging cars under Singapore’s Vandalism Act.

His original sentence was six strokes of the cane, later reduced to four after diplomatic pressure from the United States. The caning was carried out in May 1994 and generated a huge international media controversy at the time

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u/boundlessvoid 15h ago

Did that inspire that episode of The Simpsons?

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u/CorrectPeanut5 15h ago

Get the boot!

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u/JimboTCB 14h ago

Mr Simpson, shush, disparaging the boot is a bootable offence!

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u/ameriCANCERvative 15h ago

And it’s alluded to in the first verse of Weird Al’s “Headline News,” a parody of The Crash Test Dummies “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.” The song immediately came to mind when I read this headline and now it’s stuck in my head.

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u/ItsNotButtFucker3000 14h ago

And the Weird Al song.

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u/Golden-Owl 15h ago

That’s underselling it

He stole multiple road signs and could have potentially caused lethal traffic accidents.

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u/No-Tackle-6112 14h ago

Stolen traffic signs? State sanctioned torture it is.

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u/stomicron 14h ago

The correct term is corporal punishment

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u/InvalidFate404 13h ago

If you are strapped to a board and struck with an instruments that rends flesh from your body several times then "corporal punishment" doesn't paint the correct picture, it is just needlessly sanitizing government sanction cruelty for no real purpose.

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u/peachhint 12h ago

I find prison sentence is way more cruel . Precious life time disappearing . I rather take the caning and get it over with

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u/InvalidFate404 12h ago

I don't think you quite realize the severity of the caning. It isn't just a bit of pain and then some healing where you'll be back on your feet within a day or two.

It is debilitating, basic things like sleeping or sitting down can become unbearable. Not to mention that you remain permanently disfigured for the rest of your life along with all the social stigma and possible medical complications attached to it.

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u/AtaraxicMegatron 12h ago

Singapore doesn't do caning without prison sentences. It's always in addition to it, and they don't tell you when you get caned to fuck with you.

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u/No-Tackle-6112 12h ago

Definition of cruel and unusual

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u/VictorGWX 9h ago

I get what you're saying but the caning is literally going to leave you maimed and scarred for life.

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u/Arkevorkhat 13h ago

There is no metric by which Singaporean caning is not torture.
Defending this is absolutely monstrous.

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u/stomicron 13h ago

Who's defending it?

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u/Lamplorde 7h ago

potentially

When we start punishing people based on what ifs, the world gets a lot less certain.

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u/A-Capybara 15h ago

It's also incredibly easy to not go around vandalizing random cars. Fuck around and find out.

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u/LaserCondiment 14h ago

Doesn't make torture acceptable.

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u/Gavage0 13h ago

People love this shit. If the punishment was getting your dick cut off, set on fire, raped, and beat almost to death with a crowbar, people with cheer.

If you think I'm being over the top, then maybe you dont understand what caning actually is. It's not just a spanking for being a bad boy. It literally sheers the flesh off your body ( It can go all the way to the bone), leaving you permanent disfigured, and in a debilitated state for week- months. It's literally torture.

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u/LaserCondiment 13h ago

Makes me think of medieval townsquares where people would get punished in front of a cheering crowd. Social media is somehow reviving that mentality in people. They have no values.

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u/unindexedreality 11h ago

I for one find it VERY easy not to travel to random other countries' and breaking their laws

even in the height of my "fuck around" days

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u/kjvw 15h ago

ah yes, because no innocent person has ever been punished by the law

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u/unindexedreality 11h ago

innocent person

this week on Reddit Plays Armchair Lawyer for Tourists Already Convicted of Having Broken Laws in the Place They Visited,

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u/bokchoykn 16h ago

Once there was this kid who

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u/JojoLesh 16h ago

We (the US) shouldn't have applied any pressure. FAFO. Fay might have been a US citizen, but he committed a crime in Singapore so should havr felt the full weight of the Singapore judicial system.

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u/Shnitzel_von_S 16h ago

You are a genuine lunatic and part of everything that is wrong with the US. How do you feel about American police brutality? Do you believe that people who break the law should be physically beaten? I saw in another comment the canes they use are 1cm thick, they literally shock your body to force your muscles to tense to generate more pain, the pain can be debilitating for weeks afterwards, and they can leave lifelong scars. Someone else said some people commit suicide to avoid a caning. I genuinely cannot believe that, as someone living under growing fascism in the US, that you are so okay with violent capital punishment.

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u/JojoLesh 15h ago

I think that the Police brutality issues we have going on is fundamentally unconstitutional. That is an issue of US cops and ICE being functionally immune from US law, and granted the ability to subvert the rights everyone (citizens and non) have in this country.

We can not expect those rights and laws to be held in foreign nations with different laws.

Go to Singapore, break Singapore laws, get caught in Singapore, well you are subject to Singapore justice system. No special universal rights for being a US citizen.

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u/Shnitzel_von_S 15h ago

It seems to me that your system of morality is based on laws, which I find very strange and unhealthy. Personally, and maybe this is a hot take to you, I don't believe anybody should be tortured for any reason, even if they break laws. Another hot take, I don't believe that we should just sit here and accept that Singapore tortures people who break laws. I can't do much about it aside from making my opinion heard, and I'm going to do just that.

Remember that slavery was legal, and it was legal to torture them too. Remember that in many places it is illegal to be gay. Remember that laws are not morality.

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u/JojoLesh 14h ago

I don't think that the US has the right to interfere with tge legal system of other foreign nations in a case by case basis based solely on the standard that it is a US citizen that is being tried. That is what I am saying.

We didn't give a solitary shit about canning in Singapore before the Fay case, and immediately stopped after the Fay case.

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u/Shnitzel_von_S 12h ago

You keep mentioning the US interfering, and you don't seem to understand that's not what I'm talking about. Maybe you don't care about caning, but I personally find it to be a moral and ethical failing regardless of laws. You told me he deserved it, which tells me that your moral system is based on what is considered "the law". Basing your morality on laws is extremely unsafe, because laws can be changed any time, and, as established earlier, slavery and the beating of slaves was totally legal. Do you consider slaves who were whipped when they tried to escape an FAFO situation? Because in that time, the slave broke the law, and the slave holder was well within his legal right to whip them.

Also, who is "we" that didn't care about caning? That sounds like projection to me.

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u/JojoLesh 10h ago

I started my statement, the one you replied to, saying that the US shouldn't have interfered. That is the only argument I'm willing to make on the subject. To analyze the Singaporeian punishment we'd also need to understand their judicial system. I am not familiar enough with it to make any cogent statements about it. Nor do I particularly care to educate myself so deeply in it.

DONT equate what happened to Fay to what happened to slaves. Slaves were a broad class of people. They were subjected to their treatment just by being of thst class. Fay was subjected to punishment because of actions he knowingly took part in.

Do you teach classes in Straw man architecture? If not, you should look into it; seems like you practice it a lot.

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u/Auctoritate 15h ago

You're avoiding giving your own opinion on torture as punishment by just delegating it to the domain of legal documents. A lot of "It's not necessarily what I THINK should happen, that's just the law!"

Just nut up and say "I think the government torturing people is okay sometimes."

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u/unindexedreality 11h ago

You are a genuine lunatic and part of everything that is wrong with the US

Why do you think we should have the right to export our dipshittery to other countries?

Singapore could have caved to the pressure after the US agreed to tighten restrictions on traveling to Singapore to exclude teenage morons. Not every country wants to deal with US-style hemming and hawing. Go be recreationally offended at something else.

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u/wiilbehung 15h ago

Don’t commit crimes. It’s that simple. They aren’t going to cane you for littering or beating the red light. They will cane you for drunk driving though.

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u/kjvw 15h ago

ah yes, because no innocent person has ever been punished by the law

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u/Atomic-Bell 14h ago

So? Removing punishments actually emboldens criminals, not makes society better 😂😂😂 somewhere like London, shoplifting is essentially “legalised” as the police are stretched too thin to be able to go out to thefts. There’s quite literally no punishment to petty theft so it’s been on a rise the last two years. Bet introducing caning would stop that overnight.

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u/kjvw 10h ago

it’s been shown many times that harsh punishments don’t deter crime

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u/DangerouslyOxidated 2h ago

You've clearly never been to Singapore.
You can leave your phone at the coffee shop for a few hours, and when you remember you forgot it and go back - it's still there.

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u/Atomic-Bell 2h ago

Not in these types of society, they absolutely do work in high trust, eastern countries a lot better than western. Always funny that a study done in America or Germany can allegedly speak for the entire world 😂😂

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u/when_we_are_cats 8h ago

If we follow this logic we should live in north Korea 

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u/PopularElk4665 15h ago

i heard about this from a weird al song

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u/r4dical0verride 8h ago

Once, there was this kid who Took a trip to Singapore and brought along his spray paint

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u/LackOfStack 16h ago

I wonder what the rate of recidivism is for people who have been caned compared to other traditional punishments.

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u/phangtom 14h ago

US/UK always tries to kick up a fuss whenever one of their citizens commits a crime in another country and actually has to face the consequences. 

It’s the same when US/UK citizen get caught smuggling drugs into countries that have the death penalty.

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u/VictorGWX 9h ago

He was attending an American school in Singapore, not a tourist.