Okay, so yesterday Eugene Volokh endorsed torturing condemned criminals, but now I know the world's flipped upside down, when dyed-in-the-wool liberal Matt Yglesias comes out in favor of public whippings:

I'm open to the possibility that for certain kinds of offenses, at least, it might make more sense to give somebody a few lashes rather than send them to prison. It would be cheaper than incareration, and the cruelty of the punishment would be under the direct control of the judge. Ten lashes is ten lashes, while the badness of a person's experience in prison depends, in part, on a lot factors other than the mere severity of the sentence. This might be the best way to deal with people who aren't menaces to society who we feel it's desperately important to "keep off the streets" but who are doing things we want to discourage with the threat (and reality) of sanctions. Or maybe that's crazy and wrong.

Gee, you think? Follow that last instinct there, Matt.

I expect these kinds of views from some of the people around here wearing CAT hats backwards and gulping their Lone Star's...but when law professors and bleeding-heart liberal Harvard grads are advocating public stabbings and whippings I've got to honestly wonder what the hell is going on.