RE: The United States now enters the phase of mass executions.
October 23, 2022 at 1:06 pm
(This post was last modified: October 23, 2022 at 1:09 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(October 23, 2022 at 11:42 am)Jehanne Wrote:(October 23, 2022 at 9:15 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: No one is arguing for or against the policy of the death penalty. It's being pointed out that your exaggeration does your point no favors. Your title is a bit click-baity to me.
Right now there are approximately 2500 human beings on the various death rows across the United States, both at the state level with 50 or so individuals who are on federal and military death rows. Given the state of SCOTUS, there is nothing that is preventing these individuals from being executed, except, of course, time. I suppose that one could argue over the adjective "mass", but, to me, when a society is executing multiple individuals per day, such falls into the "mass executions" category. Unlike scales of obesity, I must admit that there is no universal standard that can be appealed to, except, to say, that of the several dozen or so Western-like democracies, only the United States & Japan are executing prisoners, and with Japan, they perform their hangings during the last week of the year, usually, a few days before New Year's Eve. But, as we are talking about living, sentient human beings, I believe the adjective in my OP to be an appropriate one. I think that it is disgusting to execute a human being, but to have more than one execution on the same day is even more despicable. I realize that the linguists at Merriam Webster may not agree with me on this one but the "special circumstances" makes the adjective, I believe, an appropriate one.
Then when you're using your personal definition of a word, perhaps you could give us a heads-up? Nonstandard usage causes communication problems. The cogent writer of polemic aims to deliver his or her point as clearly as possible precisely to avoid the distraction of miscommunication.
Do with that what you will.
