Blood Debts and Human Sacrifice:

Shorter me: the death penalty is human sacrifice. It's blood magic.

Longer me, amalgamated from a discussion elsewhere:

"It’s the persistence of blood magic, the ancient and nearly perennial belief that the spilling of blood expiates crime.

It’s literally magical thinking – that the past can be redeemed or altered, and that epiphenomena can be animated, by the doing of current deeds.

The death penalty is human sacrifice.

At the risk of reading as a broken record, it’s an attempt at blood expiation, at rewriting the unalterable past by way of present actions, at “righting the order of the world.” Perhaps the gods aren’t invoked as often, but the same “balance restoring” logic is still employed: if the Gods/State/Society aren't expiated with a blood offering, more bad people will [insert unexplained magical mechanism] arise.

People who believe that the social order depends upon this sacred or mystical balance, and also believe in the human sacrifice that is the death penalty (or, let’s be honest here, locking up pot growers for their productive adult lives), will go to great political lengths to preserve that order.

Are you a death penalty advocate? If so, you have to ignore the disconnect between the arguments about functionality/process/legal merit and the ineluctable fact that the executed person’s death does not and cannot alter the past. Human sacrifice might feel good (that’s the emotional point of vengeance and its lawyerly cousin, punishment – to feel good about hurting someone with the sanction of peers, to get away with violence against those who “deserve” it). It might allow the beneficiary of that violence, or the one committing it, to feel as if order is restored. But it doesn’t erase the actions which allegedly merit punishment. Because we cannot alter the past.

No debt is paid. No balance is restored. No past acts are eliminated or erased. It’s just another de-animated corpse where a person once was. Because, while the magical thinking is real, the magic itself is not."

Fuck if I know...

...why there's any reason to want the future. Perhaps there's no reason whatsoever. It looks bleak. An enfeebled triangulator in the White House, a true boy kingling, handing out chunks of the commonhold to very moneyed interests. Escalating wars. Conservatives gone so crazy that they make the triangulators of the other corporate party seem positively, well, positive. Israel's "leadership" hell bent on provoking conflagration. Real jobs lost. Health care reform that is in fact a great and audacious maskirovka, handing out mandatory payroll receipts to insurance combines under the cover of "universal health care."

Bleak, I tells ya.

But, still - we must choose our futures.

Strike that.

Each person must choose his or her own, to best of his or her ability. Must. He must do "what he must, and not just what he can."

Even in the face of injustice, disloyalty, betrayal, death.

Choose this. Choose this fate, and fight.

Amor Fati.