What's wrong with the Meth Poop Lady? An investigation.

Art by Zachary Seigal

Conservative influencer Michelle Tandler, oddly, blocked me on social media after I dubbed her The Meth Poop lady.

Snowflake.

OK listen—I realize this is juvenile. BUT to my credit, Tandler, the scion of a banking empire and social media “influencer” helped propagate the myth that San Francisco is Thunderdome due to out-of-control progressive policy. She earned her nickname because she claimed that dogs all over the city were getting addicted to meth after eating homeless people’s feces laced with the drug. Dude, how dumb can you be? If people or dogs could get high on street feces laced with meth, we’d have an even more unpleasant drug crisis on our hands.

Anyway, my friend Meredith sent me this.

omfg HOW can you be undecided about state murder but “leaning” towards “No?” Then you’re like, “Well, this dictatorship says they don’t have overdose deaths, and I accept what they say with no skepticism, and they execute people, so maybe the death penalty is good???”

Hey you’re worried about drugs Meth Poop Lady? What about the fact that for a decade now, US states have been unable to procure the triple dose of lethal injection drugs that result in a (supposedly) “painless” (but not really) death? This is because Europe issued a ban on exporting death drugs. And, US pharmacists, understandably committed to saving, rather than murdering, people, stay out of the lethal injection drug business.

A wit once commented on one of my stories “Why don’t they just give them fentanyl? There’s no shortage of that!” That’s morbidly … true.

The death penalty is wrong. Period. There’s no place for the death penalty in contemporary life, unless a prisoner asks for it because they prefer it to life in prison, which is also totally insane and barbaric.

Let’s follow the Meth Poop Lady’s logic, but in a smart way that makes sense. In Norway, the longest sentence is 20-something years. That’s what Andres Brevik is sentenced to, after murdering children for the cause of Fascism. Let’s see… what’s their violent crime rate … “In 2018, Norway had a murder rate of 0.53 per 100,000 population. There were a total of 25 murders in Norway in 2018.”

“Among advanced developed countries, the United States has the highest homicide rate: 7.8 per 100,000 population in 2020. Most others, including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom, have homicide rates that are a fraction of this level (Figure 1).Feb 6, 2023”

USA!

As an American, Brevik’s relatively brief sentence makes me uncomfortable. I can’t help but think: “I mean, maybe the avowed Nazi who murdered dozens of children and says he’s not repentant and does the Hitler salute at his parole hearing should mayyyyybe get a bit more time behind bars?”

Obviously both the federal government and all US states would hand down the death penalty in a similar case. I’m pretty sure that Joe Biden, a Catholic, hasn’t taken any steps to abolish the federal death penalty because it would spare Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Tsarnaev took part in the Boston Marathon bombing as a teenager. It also seems pretty clear that his brother was the ringleader. During his sentencing, the stupid fucking media blasted out a picture of him flicking off the camera in his cell—it was presented as a sign that he was unrepentantly murderous. Extended footage showed a bored teenager in solitary messing around to entertain himself. Do you think that at 50-something, when he’s executed, he’ll be the same asshole teenaged former stoner led astray by his insane older brother who had the luck to die at the scene?

Why do we want to kill him so bad?