remember when we were talking about

violent criminals, and how you thought that you would gladly dole out punishment in an equal manner to their initial violent act?

and i was trying to explain why someone shouldn't want to?

i briefly tried to find the thread where we talked about this...i know it started when you were saying that lei asked why capital punishment was wrong (or maybe it was some other kind of punishment) and you realized you couldn't think of a good reason. and i tried to give one...

well, (and geez, now that i've had to give this much backstory it hardly seems worth mentioning this...) but I was reading an article about the new season of 24 written by Stephen King. You know how 24 is big on torture, well Stephen King has this to say about it:

>>There's also a queasily gleeful subtext to 24 that suggests, ''If things are this bad, why, I guess we can torture anybody we want! In fact, we have an obligation to torture in order to protect the country! Hooray!'' Yet Jack Bauer's face — increasingly lined, increasingly haggard — suggests that extreme measures eventually catch up with the human soul.<<

the extreme measures catching up to the human soul is what i was trying to say. i wouldn't want to be the person dishing out torture or equivalent punishment to violent criminals, because eventually, they're no more dead in the end, your loved one isn't returned to you, and the person you're trying to punish gets to inflict damage on one more victim.