Outrage so muted I think it's perfectly silent

State v. Norman, 324 N.C. 253, 378 S.E.2d 8 (1989): 39 year-old woman suffers through 25 years of marital torment. Her husband beats her, chokes her, extinguishes cigarettes on her, forces her to prostitute herself at a truck to support them financially, verbally abuses her, forces her to eat pet food on the ground from a dog bowl, forces her to sleep on the floor, beats her, beats her, and beats her. She leaves the house one night with her grandchild--yes, at 39 she has a grandchild, which might tell you something about the circumstances of Judy and J.T. Norman--and then she gets a gun and shoots him while he's sleeping. N.C. Supreme court overturns appellate court's reversal of voluntary manslaughter conviction: she's guilty.

A note after the case in my casebook: this decision conforms to the law but not what is morally required. "These ignored facts have no place in the moral reasoning mandated by the traditional law of self-defense, yet they cause us to suffer moral disquiet with the result."

"Moral disquiet"?!! The Holocaust makes me suffer a frisson of moral disquiet as I eat Hot Pockets in front of my fifth episode of "Seinfeld" in a row. Thinking about the Killing Fields of Cambodia imbue me with a soupçon of moral disquiet. Pinochet? A pinch of moral disquiet.

Fuck the law! And fuck critics of the law!

Seriously, when the best you can do in expressing moral outrage is to whinge distractedly about "moral disquiet," what the fuck use are you? You see my point about how law really trims away the extremes until you are just a moderate walkie-talkie, a mannequin filled with high-falutin ideas about maintaining consistency and adhering to rules and no sense of how your own weak-kneed balancing act actually plays out. I think the proper response to Norman is FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PIG!