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Location: West Los Angeles and Rancho Palos Verdes
13,583 posts, read 15,649,867 times
Reputation: 14049
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It seems like a crazy urban legend: In China, drivers who have injured pedestrians will sometimes then try to kill them. And yet not only is it true, it’s fairly common; security cameras have regularly captured drivers driving back and forth on top of victims to make sure that they are dead. The Chinese language even has an adage for the phenomenon: “It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.”
Very disturbing, though it does not surprise me. It's a different world over there, and most of us take for granted the overall ethos of Western Civilization.
Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times—ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation.
I remember the case of the wealthy young man who stabbed a lady he hit with his car and he ended up getting executed. Probably if he had just ran over her he would have gotten a couple of years in prison at most. I guess stabbing her was just too blatant.
Life, especially of others, really is not as valued over there as it is here. Our inability to understand that difference is one of the bigger problems we have when we make foreign policy.
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Very disturbing, though it does not surprise me. It's a different world over there, and most of us take for granted the overall ethos of Western Civilization.
We really should make more of these people citizens..... As they're having babies here illegaly and we taxpayers are paying for it.
I read this article few days ago and was shocked at how complicit the entire system is.
I can't believe there's a calculated mindset to deliberately kill a human being instead of trying to help them after an accident, simply because of the potential responsibility of long term financial care for the injured. That, and the knowledge that authorities will either give you a slap on the wrist, or do nothing at all.
This article is written very amateurishly. As soon as I finished reading it I had a bad feeling about the worthiness of the content.
For one, you can't pick a handful of incidences in a massively populated country and try to link them all under a single unverifiable motive.
I did a tiny bit of snooping around and found this Snopes piece that explains why there is really no way of proving that this is an actual phenomenon with any traction. A couple of incidences reported in the OP's article are actually said to be misreported by Snopes, with one case not even taking place in China.
My favourite part:
"As well, even the viewable videos didn’t demonstrably depict heartless drivers murdering pedestrians solely to avoid hefty legal damages: viewers could only discern that they chronicled incidents of drivers’ striking pedestrians multiple times during the same accident, for reasons that could only be assumed or guessed. And even if the incidents depicted were proven to represent what was claimed in the Slate article, they would constitute six examples taking place over roughly the span of a decade, or less than one per year in a country with a population of 1.4 billion people — hardly what one would categorize as a “common” phenomenon."
I've often heard the same thing here in the states and while I've never had to act on it, I've been driving around for years knowing that if I were to have the misfortune of knocking someone over, I was totally prepared on finishing them off. I even keep a axe next to me on the passenger seat so that I can quickly end any suffering that I inadvertently may cause. Guess I'll put the axe back on the garage wall.
Location: West Los Angeles and Rancho Palos Verdes
13,583 posts, read 15,649,867 times
Reputation: 14049
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jesse44
This article is written very amateurishly. As soon as I finished reading it I had a bad feeling about the worthiness of the content.
For one, you can't pick a handful of incidences in a massively populated country and try to link them all under a single unverifiable motive.
I did a tiny bit of snooping around and found this Snopes piece that explains why there is really no way of proving that this is an actual phenomenon with any traction. A couple of incidences reported in the OP's article are actually said to be misreported by Snopes, with one case not even taking place in China.
My favourite part:
"As well, even the viewable videos didn’t demonstrably depict heartless drivers murdering pedestrians solely to avoid hefty legal damages: viewers could only discern that they chronicled incidents of drivers’ striking pedestrians multiple times during the same accident, for reasons that could only be assumed or guessed. And even if the incidents depicted were proven to represent what was claimed in the Slate article, they would constitute six examples taking place over roughly the span of a decade, or less than one per year in a country with a population of 1.4 billion people — hardly what one would categorize as a “common” phenomenon."
This article is written very amateurishly. As soon as I finished reading it I had a bad feeling about the worthiness of the content.
For one, you can't pick a handful of incidences in a massively populated country and try to link them all under a single unverifiable motive.
I did a tiny bit of snooping around and found this Snopes piece that explains why there is really no way of proving that this is an actual phenomenon with any traction. A couple of incidences reported in the OP's article are actually said to be misreported by Snopes, with one case not even taking place in China.
My favourite part:
"As well, even the viewable videos didn’t demonstrably depict heartless drivers murdering pedestrians solely to avoid hefty legal damages: viewers could only discern that they chronicled incidents of drivers’ striking pedestrians multiple times during the same accident, for reasons that could only be assumed or guessed. And even if the incidents depicted were proven to represent what was claimed in the Slate article, they would constitute six examples taking place over roughly the span of a decade, or less than one per year in a country with a population of 1.4 billion people — hardly what one would categorize as a “common” phenomenon."
It does seem though that some authorities are turning a blind eye in terms of punishing these types of crimes, if at all. That's hardly unique to China though.
It shouldn't be used to tarnish all of China, but if certain authorities are indeed minimizing these things, it isn't good.
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As they're having babies here illegaly and we taxpayers are paying for it. 
