My sister is visiting, and that means I’m having a day of shopping and visiting beauty salons. Here are the magazines I bought to feed my magazine addiction:

So did you hear that Pistorius was found not guilty of murder?

Apparently, society’s approval of unhinged hysterics who claim to freak out over completely imaginary threats and slaughter innocent people is not an exclusively American thing.

I’m very intrigued by the magic powers of this “I felt threatened for absolutely no reason so I murdered people” defense. It seems to leave folks world over weak in the knees. Fear – no matter how ridiculous and irrational – justifies everything, even murder. Burly armed fellows kill kids, pregnant women, unarmed teenagers, then claim they were scared and everybody exclaims, “Oh well, in that case, the freak totally deserves this!”

Societies that would never even consider conceding everybody the right to laziness, weakness, incapacity to make money and a whole host of other pretty normal things easily grant the right to murder because of a psychological problem that is not in any way different. It’s beyond bizarre that while nobody would take seriously the defense of “I was lazy and bored so I killed an unarmed person in the toilet”, the defense of “I chose to be irrationally scared and committed murder” is constantly given so much weight.