comportment:

hasn't it always been obvious that the death penalty was in fact a form of public catharsis?

humans, for the most part, aren't rational or empirical. the rational and empirical are often not concordant with emotion and prejudice. what's rational and empirical is not directly and humanly intuitive. railing against it is not going to stop people from being human, from commiting crimes of passion or commiting thought-crimes of passion.

I have no idea why you single out Salentan in particular on this issue, when at least he has the balls to say it aloud. I'm sure a lot of people feel this way at some moment in their lives, and I imagine, for a lot of them, there is no immediate and successive voice in their head speaking in part for rationality, empiricism, and the greater part of justice and humanity.

to play devil's advocate, for those we deem to not be a part of human society, who predictably break the rules of our most basic moralities, if it doesn't make humane sense to simply kill them, does it make any more sense to pay for them to live out the rest of their lives in prison? is it rational to believe that we should keep them alive at all, just so we can save our sense of compassion? in opposition to the grist of your view, this other view is just as polar and just as much lacking complexity and nuance.

I totally disagree. The minituea of those visceral reactions are hardly disparate from what humanity is. They don't defy measurement, they are bluntly apparent. and if they weren't bluntly apparent, this wouldn't be a debate, this would be a foregone conclusion.

What the fuck are you trying to say?

It was a natural visceral reaction for alpha males in primitive proto-human societies to kill and eat the human offspring of potential rivals.

How about debating that?