By Grace Nearing of
ScriptoidsIf you haven't already read UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh's soul-chilling paean to the moral-clarifying and grief-cleansing attributes of retributive justice, check out his
original and
follow-up comments. In the meantime, here's a generous sample just to whip up your interest.
Something the Iranian Government and I Agree on: I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster (a serial killer); I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging.<SNIP>
Well, I am not going to get involved in this righteously outrageous debate. Greater minds and lesser souls already have had their say in blogtopia.
What I am going to address is the spectacularly lucrative aspect of ritualized blood lust overlooked by Volokh -- the almighty mass-marketing tie-in. After all, this is America:
nothing is anything without mass-marketing tie-ins. Wars, terrorist attacks, child molestation trials, shooting rampages, comatose patients -- you name it and we'll pin a color ribbon to it, process canned-ham news specials misreporting it, crank out tissue-thin op/ed pieces to launch turf wars over it, and cut and paste some bad books and equally bad movies based on it.
Is this a great country or what!
I'm talking professional torture franchises here. Gotta have action figures. The tortured-to-death by necessity will be rather generic looking, but inevitably some of the professional class torturers will emerge as superstars based on persona, technique, charisma, and good sound bite skills.
Other must-haves include. . . .
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