I hate hypocrisy – my own as well as other people’s.  Today I choose to attack hypocrisy in progressive western democracies about the death penalty.

We are quite willing to bomb people whom we suspect of doing bad things, without any trial and in the knowledge that those bombs will kill, maim and dispossess people whom we suspect of nothing at all.  But we go bananas if some other country, after due judicial process in accordance with its own laws, dares to execute a convicted criminal.

I am thinking chiefly of the drug smugglers who were executed in Indonesia, over whom the Australian Government set fire to much of its political capital in that country.  That still makes me stroppy.