Thursday, April 21, 2011

Another country?

There is talk of calling our custom of taking the lives of others by judicial processing a "death penal-ty," yet mightn't this confuse people, if a penalty is an excise upon a breach of law, and many are spared extermination for the same offense? Some would like to refer to this as a "capital punishment," which it would be, if anyone were able to say it will be inflicted. It seems reasonable, then, to call our custom the thing it was this week, some 2 millennia ago: a murder by undue popular influence, sufficient to excite conformity to something extra-judicial that we somehow can't bring ourselves to confess.








i, another country



2 comments:

  1. Hello:
    Re: your reply to our comment of yesterday. We have now downloaded and read István Déak's essay in The New York Review of Books. A very depressing read confirming much of what we already know. Thank you.

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  2. Jane and Lance are referring to the previous posting, on which they offered the example of contemporary Hungary. It seems extremely daring, to me, to venture any comment from there, these days; and I urge readers to glance at the report they reference.

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