To what extent do you feel sorry for people who make incredibly stupid decisions?

[Nemmerle]

I suspect the point was more that the punishment is excessive with relation to any possible harm that the offence could realistically be taken to cause to the person's peers save by further imposition of that harm by the state.

 

[Pseudonym]

I feel sorry for people who suffer disproportionate damage for a relatively minor slip up. And that qualifies for this guy. He did at least one monumentally stupid thing, going to North Korea, and possibly did a second monumentally stupid thing, broke the law in North Korea. But that doesn't add up to a 15 year sentence to hard labor that is likely to kill him.

This. While I find this less sad than people who get screwed by sheer bad luck (getting cancer or getting hit by a car or whatever) it still sucks that a guy has to do 15 years of hard labor in NK merely for being an idiot. There is somebody who said that stupidity is a crime, but I figure that luck has a lot to do with it as well. The guy could have gotten lucky and have gotten away with his theft. I would recommend to anybody who wanted my opinion on the matter that they stay the hell away from NK because of precisely these kind of stories. That doesn't mean I don't sympathise with them at least a little bit when they go there anyway and get screwed over.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Answer: Very sorry. The social and legal consequences for those bad decisions are mostly conjured up by people who believe in free will, unaware that no "decision" was made at all.

 

[Silvanus]

There are some countries in the world where a man can rape a woman and will not be punished. If that man were to come to your country and rape a woman and then get sent to prison would you have sympathy for him because the punishment is excessive compared to the judicial system he comes from?

Uhrm, well, no. Obviously not. Rape involves actual, severe harm, whereas damaging a banner doesn't.

It's perfectly reasonable to deem one excessive and the other not.