I have known a lot of people - both male and female - who have felt comfortable launching into passionate descriptions of horrific acts of violence that they wished to commit against hypothetical strangers. These fantasies varied in intensity, they varied in length, they varied in degree of realism or specificity, but, devoid of context, they were all quite horrifying. The key, though - the reason these descriptions were normal and acceptable, and not just the ravings of a dangerous psychopath - is that the people saying them were all parents, and they all prefaced their fantasies with the phrase "if someone ever hurt my kids".

And y'know what? I'm not going to try to claim they were wrong. Someone hurts or molests or kills your toddler, and you feel it's ethically okay to tape them to a chair in your basement and mess up their eyeballs with a red-hot steak knife? I'm not gonna argue that point. Go apeshit on them peepers, I doubt any jury would convict you.

I think maybe there should be a limit, though. Somewhere. There has to be a point where using insults, injuries, or even deaths of others as justification for your own actions is no longer unselfish, a point at which it's clearly about you and not about the victim you're avenging.

I've said before that Ellen is the superego of the group, but it's worth noting that the superego is not necessarily the same thing as the conscience, and not necessarily always right. She is usually right, though.