Scare the People!

Is "torture" the new "neocon"?:

“It really sounds like he was tortured to death,” said Jonathan Groner, associate professor of surgery at the Ohio State Medical School, a surgeon who opposes the death penalty and writes frequently about lethal injection.

Dying in pain != tortured to death. What we have here is the fraudulent use of language to evoke emotions instead of applying rational thought to the facts. I suppose I shouldn't expect any better than this from a professor who opposes the death penalty, but it's still chilling to see how much anti-intellectualism is concentrated in our professoriate.

"Torture" is that thing that Bush, Cheney, and the other Republinazis do; a "neocon" is similarly used pejoratively to insult someone who supports an interventionist foreign policy. Both terms are misused - a neocon is actually just a term for a Jew who was formerly liberal and changed ideology in the 1970s and 1980s (and many such shifts in ideology are traceable to the apologism of the Left for the Soviet Union, something that principled Jews on the Left found repugnant); torture is the intentional infliction of pain as punishment or to elicit a change in position (such as loosening the lips of a potential informant).

The infliction of pain on this man was unintentional. In fact, the whole point of this phony lethal injection crap is that the criminal will feel no pain at all as he dies. It is nonsense to want him to die painlessly - why should the worst of the worst (the death penalty only going out to the worst murderers, remember?) not suffer? Forgive me if I fail to shed any tears for this sorry sack of waste, and if my mind inevitably compares the modest pain we inflicted on him and the unending pain he's gone to now.

I think the lethal injection should be abolished. It's a misuse of the medical profession to have them intentionally killing someone. It's also a perversion of justice to want the worst punishment we have administered in a quasi-humane manner, like we're giving a vicious sociopath a nice overdose of palliatives so he can enter the afterlife peacefully. These viiiiile f***heads should enter the afterlife just as violently as their victims.

Did I mention that professors are idiots?

Dr. Nik Gravenstein, professor and chairman of anesthesiology at the University of Florida, said it is impossible to say how much pain the chemicals produce since inmates can’t be interviewed while being executed

Yeah, there is no way we can possibly understand what is going on in the brain. You'd need some special machines to do that (possibly ones that go "ping"), and since this is 1906, we don't have that technology yet.

Gimme a break. The freakin' chairman of anesthesiology doesn't know the first thing about how the brain interprets pain? Geez. At least Florida has a football team, I guess.

Go Gators!