An Elephant of One's Own

 I don´t often write here these days, so let's get a few things out of the way: 1. The current Blogger interface sucks goat. Google, please change it back. I promise I'll blog more if you do. 2. I am not George Orwell. The title is a combination of laziness and a far-fetched random association of ideas I doubt I'll be successful at communicating, and may have forgotten about before I even get around to trying. If it helps, just ignore it. Now to business. The Death Penalty. What follows will be my answer to Mr Saad's article here . As is usual with this blog, in composing my answer I'll be ignoring every single one of the guidelines I regularly offer my students on "now to write an essay". In particular, I will not be writing from an outline, nor have I allowed myself any time to ponder what I am going to say or how I'm going to organise what I say. Who knows, in unguarded moments I may even cite Wikipedia. Nevertheless, I think I can give Mr Saad a ru...