Kostya

I quite agree with you that disincentive works, hence my comment: "Now, disincentive is all well and good" in my above post. However, as I also said, there ought to be a limiting provision that prevents punishments from becoming absurd. For instance, I think it quite true that few people if any stole bicycles in Mao's China, but I think that fact that people were probably executed for stealing bicycles is not worth the disincentive such measures created.
I think you would agree that it would be better for people to possibly have their bicycle stolen then for anyone to be hung by the neck until dead for stealing a bicycle.
So to reiterate my point, disincentive works quite well, but cannot be the only guide to how we ought to devise punishments since then it seems possible for laws to be made that are patently absurd and brutal.

This seems to me not a bad idea frankly, though I think fines do punish the financially disadvantaged more than the wealthy for similar crimes. That is to say that if two fellows both litter in the same place at the same time, and the fine 50% of one guy's weekly wage and 2% of the others, than the first fellow has suffered a great deal and the second not at all, though both are culpable of precisely the same disservice to society would you not agree?

Absolutely, I have little or no problem with responsible levels of well regulated police organisations, so long as the legal code by which they are policing is sane and consistent, and the police themselves are not, as they are in some places, merely state sponsored criminals, though in Singapore they are not. It not policing per se that I have a problem with in this particular case.

Well not quite, the crux of my argument as I stated above was that disincentive is not the only consideration when determining what is and is not a just punishment. So the question is not, does a higher penalty actually stop people doing things?
If this was the case, we could bring in the death penalty for all things that were illegal, most certainly this would massively increase the disincentive to commit even the most petty of crimes like illegal parking, but it is not a very good system since I do not think that a person ought to die for parking in front of a fire hydrant, despite the fact that the answer to the question: Does the death penalty stop people almost always from parking in front of hydrants? Is a resounding yes.
Do you see where my objection lies? It is that if you punish someone purely on disincentive, it is possible to introduce a penalty that is incredibly disproportionate to the actual infraction, in order to produce a certain degree of disincentive amongst the general populace.

Well no, I don't actually speed at all, so I don't take notice of anti-speeding ads, I am already convinced that it is a bad idea to speed unless you have a dying person in your car or some such. Again, there is no doubt that disincentive does work, it's merely that disincentive alone is not a good way of measuring justice.

Well, in terms of drug traffickers, I don't think the case is as you suggest here. Supposing there are 1000 men who might traffic drugs, and a drug baron needs ten guys to take the drugs. If after Nguyen dies, 500 decide not to do it, 10 will eventually be found to take the drugs. As I said before, I think less people might be inclined to do it, but there will always be some people for whom the incentive, whatever it may be, will outweigh the disincentive, all it means to me is that to get their product over the borders, drug barons will have less people to choose from, but certainly enough to get it done.

It is indeed a difficult notion. I imagine this would probably not solve the problem either though. The CIA gunned Pablo Escobar down in a gritty Medellin street, leaving his bullet ridden corpse in the mud, but people didn't stop taking cocaine by a long shot, the business just diffused into a less organised bunch of small operations. Similarly, despite all the people who've hanged for drug smuggling in Southeast Asia, the business hasn't faltered.
It's not an easy problem to address, and I'd like to see it being looked at in more multinational contexts and on all levels from the addict to the producer, from both a legal and a medical perspective. In all honestly, I don't think there is any more chance of it disappearing then cigarettes, alcohol or anything else really, the best we can hope for is to prevent endemic levels of drug abuse.
I submit to you that this goal is best served by reducing demand at home than supply from abroad.

I'm not advocating diplomatic silence on the issue. Far from it, I'd like to see it discussed.

Just because they are another country does not change the concept of justice. For instance, Apartheid happened to be in South Africa, but people opposed its manifest injust all over the world. I also oppose female circumcision, but who am I to tell those people how to run their villages? Frankly, I do not believe that justice is defined by borders, and this kind of sentiment owes its foundation to the belief that laws and justice are synonymous. If a law can be shown to be injust, then I oppose it, despite the fact that I might never go to that place.

I think you will agree that history has shown that it is entirely possible for people to be killed though they are innocent. Illinois tossed out the death penalty, after it was later shown through DNA that several people had been executed for crimes they did not commit.
Moreover, many as I understand it, the death penalty has done nothing to reduce the number of murders in many American states where it is currently instituted.