aha! someone's indulging in apple polishing.

Roland. Excellent post. Well written and well thought. An excellent example of how to properly post in a forum without name-calling or jumping to conclusions to the mindset of others. I and others can learn from your example. I certainly will attempt to follow your lead in the future. Cheers.

Valkyrie. It is your post which makes little sense, I believe. You state "we can only display our compassion towards the action of the poor little girl"... Why is that? Why are you incapable of displaying compassion for the innocent baby that was murdered? You can "ONLY" display compassion for the girl? Strange indeed. You also state "A thief steals because he was hungry? Now, where did you get such a preposterous idea?"... Preposterous? Most people steal to aquire items of value to sell for money which is used for food, clothing, drugs etc. etc. What is preposterous about that? Seems you live in some self-created isolation of the real world. People steal everyday for a variety of reasons including to have money to eat. Then you go on to state "The murderer kills kills because he was very angry and lost control. Haven't you heard of hired guns or even premeditated murder?" Whatever your point here is quite vague and doesn't come close to addressing my point that people commit crimes with "always some excuse" and we have to be careful when allowing such excuses to lead to leniency in the eyes of the law.

I suggest you take your own medicine first as you state "Read through what you always write before posting it. This will prevernt you from making a fool of yourself."

I do have some compassion for this girl. However, I have more compassion for the baby she murdered. Let me re-state for those that want to twist/distort my position. The girl should get counseling. She should also get an appropriate sentance in regards to her age. That will only be determined after all the facts have been aired in court.

Dear billjayman – while your argumentation has its points of value I think that primarily everything in life has two points of view – every object has a bright side and a side in the shadow.

While I (still) assume that this girl had nobody to turn to, you are assuming that she had. Right so. I am taking in consideration that every woman during her pregnancy has a vital bond with her unborn child and that mothers who are doing, what this girl did, must have been in an extremely deliberate mental stage. I am having ultimate sympathy for the killed baby too, but the point of discussion was particularly the girl for that matter. I believe that in Indonesia particularly people are jumping all too quickly and easy to final conclusions due to the taught behavior roles influenced by their (at times) excessively conservative environment with a particularly strong religious influx and the general “hush-hush” mentality, which lets everything quickly broom under the carpet what simply does not fit into their pious life. And exactly that again let people ignore with persistence the background completely which leads to certain crimes itself, as now for example the local education-board, which already talks all and mighty about “sanctions, without even considering that proper sex education might have stopped the crime before it ever happened.

You gave the example of a thief – I don’t think that the thief stealing a car or money for personal gain and the old woman who steals a bunch of bananas from a food estate should get the same judgment, whereas initially they did the same crime. But unfortunately this still happens within the legal system of Indonesia.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your opinion – it is always interesting to hear other people’s view on issues.

No matter how upright we may appear on the surface - or even in our minds - Machiavelli believed that we're all Machiavellian at heart.