One thing that becomes immediately apparent when visiting the medieval witchcraft museum in Iceland[1] was how strategic the use of Witchcraft accusations were by the middling elite.
One cunning foreign family with ties to occupying Denmark was able to secure land hold rights for nearly an entire peninsula from local Icelanders on the northwest through the strategic use of witchcraft accusations. During this period of occupation nearly 120 trials occurred over a 60 year period[2].
The people weren’t superstitious - they were corrupt.
This is essentially the thesis of Silvia Federici’s tremendous book, “Caliban and the Witch.” Witch hunts were pursued to reorganize familial, gender, and labor relations to suit the needs of an emergent Capitalism:
>For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.
Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.
You're going to have a tough sell with that for folks who haven't read her work. I have, and it was more or less the first thing I thought of when I read the title of the article.
I mean, if "primitive accumulation" isn't a thing you're curious about, then her work is just gonna not make a lot of sense... but I personally find her ideas quite convincing. So I am not surprised when folks who aren't in that political discussion reject theses like those out of hand.
So, yeah, I think it's relevant. Sorry you got folks who don't seem familiar with the material responding as if they were.
I find that most people are amenable to a materialist conception of history if you just phrase it without the Marxist specific terminology. No need to go into primitive accumulation or explaining dialectics.
Wouldn't it be nice if history were actually this simple?
The idea here is that Romans, with their pater familias, or the Confucian Chinese, for whom the father was a mini-emperor, were just preparing the way for capitalism, 2000+ years before the fact?
Marriage and home-bound women were not an invention of the late medival world. Women may well have been more free in the preceding period, but that was the exception, not the norm.
Her’s is specifically that the conditions of European feudalism created an emergent communalism that was then subjugated through witch trials and their mythology in service to the new, Capitalist ordering.
She doesn’t argue that gendered forms of subjugation have no prior context in history. And whether or not the changes in women’s social/economic conditions were “temporary” depends on a rationalization of the violence that was used to reorder society and a fallacious appeal to nature that makes little sense in terms of how Capitalism otherwise radically transformed societies.
Witch trials were virtually non existent in post-reformation Catholic countries (e.h. Spain, Italy and France). I have never seen any source indicating that women were more free in these countries.
You might not expect them, but the Spanish Inquisition did also have witch trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Witchcraft.... And if you see witch trails as a way to get ride of and blame someone you could label as "different" then the difference become even smaller.
> It’s seems a rather peculiar definition of capitalism, if it emerged so late.
It's really not; historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers generally point to a few key features of capitalism, and can date it quite well. Federici draws from that argument.
But point is, that question is far from settled. Especially if you consider the key features being the free market and private property, then capitalism goes far into BCE.
The key feature of capitalism is the economy is defined by capital, i.e. money that makes money, preferably at scale. That didn't exist in any sustained, important way until the early modern period in Europe.
I was thinking of Roman moneylenders like Seneca as I wrote that. But they didn't lend money for "means of production" like steam engines etc. Everything was all slave power. But even if we allow Rome as capitalism (which I don't agree with, but fine) it still disappeared (again, at scale) for a millennium or two afterwards.
Well, I'd argue that slaves were the means of production.
But also things like olive oil presses. There's this example of an ancient Greek philosopher Thales essentially inventing the option derivative contract by buying the rights to use oil presses before the harvest for cheap, and charging a high price to use those presses once the harvest proved to be bountiful.[1]
The dip in banking during the Dark Ages in Europe is mostly the effect of Christianity banning usury. But globally the practices didn't stop.
I'm not sure, why it's important to show that capitalism a) equates to banking, and b) is some relatively late invention of the Western civilization. Because it's not in both cases.
> Well, I'd argue that slaves were the means of production.
This is not what "means of production" means in political economy.
>I'm not sure, why it's important to show that capitalism a) equates to banking, and b) is some relatively late invention of the Western civilization. Because it's not in both cases.
Capitalism does not equate to "banking", but it is, historically speaking, late in Western civilization.
I’m not sure what you mean exactly by “political economy”? In any case, what is excluded usually from definition of means of production is human capital. Slavery is decidedly not that. It is the ownership and dehumanization of people. There is no choice, no labour market. I don’t see a reason why it’s not a means of production other than “the textbook said so”.
—
What do you mean? It is a late phenomenon in the Western civilization or it is equatable to banking lately in the West?
>I’m not sure what you mean exactly by “political economy”?
Political economy is the predecessor to economics, and is (in some places) still alive today as modern/radical political economy.
> It is the ownership and dehumanization of people. There is no choice, no labour market.
"Human capital" is excluded precisely because it is "living labour" as opposed to "dead labour" (machinery etc.) and can therefore be exploited to extract more value than what was paid. This is the same principle with both slavery and wage labour - living labour.
Besides this, twe're talking beside the point. Capitalism is no more of an abstract transhistorical concept than "the Reformation" or "the medieval period" or "the Rennaisance" are; even if ancient Roman slavery had most of the features of capitalism, it would not constitute capitalism in the sense of the period of human history where these features reach their heights. For example, Marx points out that there was production and trade in commodities in non-capitalist societies, but only in capitalist society does trade in commodities become generalized and pervasive.
> Political economy is the predecessor to economics, and is (in some places) still alive today as modern/radical political economy.
I know that. What I still don't know, is whether you've meant Adam-Smith-proto-economics or LTV-inspired ideology. Because those things aren't interchangeable.
Not to mention why two schools of thought which are on their own obsolete at this point matter here.
> "Human capital" is excluded precisely because it is "living labour" as opposed to "dead labour" (machinery etc.) and can therefore be exploited to extract more value than what was paid. This is the same principle with both slavery and wage labour - living labour.
What about live stock? What about seed stock? What about IP? What about machinery that was bought under market price?
The only reason I can see why this separation might be important is if we remember that labour and employment affects aggregate demand through wages. Obviously that doesn't apply to slave labour.
> Besides this, twe're talking beside the point...
Glad you agree.
But if we redefine "capitalism" as "historic period" now, we might as well define it as a form of music and compare to Frank Zappa songs...
I mean, if we take the features of society which were dominant the most to define the historic period, we might as well call ourselves primitive humans, since out of our ca. 2 billion years of history, that was the most dominant features of our society.
All of this partitioning is arbitrary and has nothing to do with economics. It is more about setting a political narrative. But that isn't tethered to reality and we might as well be using astrology.
>Not to mention why two schools of thought which are on their own obsolete at this point matter here.
They're alive enough for heterodox economists and philosophers of economics, and I think that's quite important, in the same way nobody would like Google Chrome to be the only browser.
>What about live stock? What about seed stock? What about IP? What about machinery that was bought under market price?
These are complications (especially with regard to IP), but in the long run, things like buying machinery under the market price tend to even out, and there is no change in the economy as a whole, in which the capitalist's gain is the same as the machine vendor's loss. It doesn't explain the creation of new value.
>But if we redefine "capitalism" as "historic period" now, we might as well define it as a form of music and compare to Frank Zappa songs...
My point is that it's not a redefinition, that's literally the way it's defined by mainstream economists and everyone concerned in its study. It is specifically historical, not merely a set of abstract principles. Marx thought the same about communism, for that matter.
It has everything to do with economics - not only are trends and terms in economics defined and set by those looking to set a particular political narrative (accidentally or not), but political narratives are important. It's no less of a political narrative to say that ancient Roman society was "capitalist" to pull the favorite trick of the old political economists and indeed many of the neoclassicals - to convince us that capitalism really is a kind of human nature. You don't need a Marxist to claim otherwise, since there's lots of research on ancient society and their modes of production.
I think that an abstract ahistorical definition of capitalism is even less tied to reality than the anthropologist's one.
Agricultural Capitalism is listed as starting in 1350 by Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism But, it’s hard to pin down a date because individual ownership of the means of production is arguably the default state.
Tool use age by various animal species is generally used by the individuals that locate and or create the tools. Similarly the defense of hunting territory by individuals or families is another means of production. Complex social structures and collective ownership are very much the exception.
The witch hunt as a means of enforcing female subservience in the context of an emergent capitalism is a just-so story that is driven more by a desire to demonize capitalism than anything else.
Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history so it doesn't make sense to pin down witch paranoia on a changing of gender roles or attitudes that never changed in the first place.
The better explanation is the one offered by the OP, that a pre-existing desire by religious authorities to root out heresy found fertile ground in the fervor of the reformation era. The result was witch hysteria.
>Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history
I've generally heard the inverse statement. Compare the women in Chaucer to the women in Shakespeare, and you'll immediately notice a huge difference in behaviour.
Usually, people say that women's rights took a precipitous dive in the 1600s, with the invention of things like brutal punishments for 'nagging', and so on. Which would fit with the idea it was related to primitive accumulation.
I don't really agree with the grandparent thesis, but I think the chronology is correct.
In my reading of history, hysteria is often driven by plagues or famines. Look at the Mayan culture of human sacrifice. It's very similar to witch hunting. I think when a formerly thriving society is struck by a series of disasters that threaten the social order, false enemies get created as scapegoats. Either it's an angry god or a witch's curse.
I'm sympathetic to the foundation of the argument, about enclosure as the means by which capitalism became capitalism (and classical liberalism's invention of inherent property rights as the means by which this was justified.)
But for reasons others give here I think this is a rather weak analysis to explain the rise of the modern patriarchal family form. And in reality in working class homes women continued to work outside the home anyways, in factories and the like.
The ideological foundation for patriarchy runs much deeper, pre-capitalist, pre-feudal, and goes back to pre-Roman times, but in the context of later Europe it was accentuated by the early Christian church, which was positively _obsessed_ with issues like abortion, pre-marital sex, and women with any kind of power.
Frankly, seems rather far off. This is looking at the past through modern (or better, current news) eyes. The peaks of witch-hunting and capitalism are rather well spaced. And there was no need for patriarchy to do anything - they were firmly in control with zero contestants.
Women and men have significant biological differences, and from my understanding of our evolution, they've had these significant differences for a much longer time that capitalism has existed. Evolution suggests that these biological differences result from differences in selection criteria, which supports the idea that men and women have served different roles over the majority of human existence.
Very high mortality rates associated with child birth meant that ability to birth and care for children used to be a highly selective trait. It's modern medicine that has made child birth and caring for children a much easier and safer endeavor, and allowed women to prioritize other roles in their life.
There’s little uniformity in women’s social and economic roles across the entire spectrum of human civilization, cultures, and history. Women have been equal members of communal tribes, religious and political leaders, agricultural and industrial laborers, fully subjugated and fully autonomous. Any attempt to place the diversity of these experiences into narrow, erroneous appeals to nature is so reductive as to be almost meaningless.
I love that you're being downvoted for saying something so utterly non-controversial. It's almost as if the fact that there were large matriarchal societies inhabiting America for centuries (arguably millenia) before the first European man set foot on the continent has never been taught to the average HN reader..
"I know of many exceptions to your evolutionary argument, which makes it entirely worthless"
It's not controversial, but it's missing the point. Nobody is arguing that ever single woman in our history preceding capitalism had to prioritize child care over leadership or labor.
If you're talking about the role of women over time, you're talking about how it applies to averages. It'd be impossible to discuss this with any sort of scale if you had to reconcile every generality with it's various exceptions.
Those articles are more interesting than OP's article.
When I research a lot of wealthy families I frequently find their level of comfort not possible to replicate because it is something considered impropriety today. Taking advantage of an imbalance in the socioeconomic order that was promptly fixed as soon as anybody noticed.
The Cargill/McMillan family is probably the most famous of these in the US. They’ve kept their company private and have managed to stay under the radar fairly well considering their level of wealth.
They definitely do, and LEO knows. The schemes and cons, deflection... they’ve not changed.
Think about, this is only 3-4 generations back. What neuroscience is revealing about shared/inherited brain structures and limbic->cortex system algorithms, the habits of agency haven’t had that long to fade out, especially as we clung to tribal communities and abusive nuclear family silos.
But those families control LEO, so their mandate is to fight DVD player theft and smoking pot.
They again demonize our individual minor failings to control the greater human narrative, gift trillions to their buds while we fight over TP, face masks, and flat or skeuomorphic UI day to day. Doing the real important social work!
Western culture hasn’t really evolved it’s emotional organization habits all that much until recent times, say the last 20 years.
Now that the first generations raised primarily on science and a much less overt, yet still present, racism are coming into power, we’ll see.
Until the last generation though, most people in power were raised in “story mode”. “Be a godheaded manipulator, manage the masses effort and agency, for of course they’re idiots for not having your job of rich guy! If I can do it anyone can! Why they aren’t is their free will!”
India is supposed to be an example. Families with extensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagir holdings under the Mughals were apparently relatively easily convinced that their possibly de facto but definitely not de jure hereditary estates would be better protected under John Company, whose officers had grown up assuming de jure hereditary estate transmission.
I read the premise of that book and it doesn't square with what I know about rich people from personal experiences with them.
What I've learned is that money is a multiplier for personality and if you have a humble personality, then you'll stay humble while you're rich (with some caveats about people that are not truly humble).
I agree with you completely on the humility, that's the only ones I would best be involved with, but these are not the ones who make it into this kind of book.
The emphasis is on the extreme, privileged and over-the-top attitudes stereotypically encountered.
Fortunately, exclusive communities with these stereotypical aspirations are not as overwhelming as they could be.
It's a small book, largely true quotations, and I think worth reading as an entertaining way to refresh awareness of peculiarities that can arise as riches are struck or wealth is created or increased.
For example, the family that was able to exploit the socioeconomic order to pick up those land plots from people indicted for witchcraft probably still owns those land plots, but new people will not be able to use the same tactic to obtain land now.
This is more or less how the Israeli "settlements" work; land is taken for "security" reasons and given to someone else.
The Russian privatization post Communism also handed a large amount of state resources to the well connected, who are now in many ways more entrenched than they were under Communism.
Something something Manifest Destiny. Also, the Great Land Robbery (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-la...). The Western model of land ownership is perhaps necessary for our way of life, but is certainly at the root of any number of atrocities.
Much more. Even under the CPSU public opinion could change and you could be ousted. If you're an oligarch unless you die what you control, you control.
Except that the Israeli “settlements” are on previously annexed land from 1967. It is more like an eminent domain seizure. And it is quite reasonable in theory to exercise sovereign power for such purposes to improve the land’s cultivation, so long as compensation is awarded (not sure if Israel gives it to the Palestinians)
I was under the impression that it's illegal to settle on occupied land and what Israel is doing is hence illegal under international law. Am I somehow misinformed?
Are laws of men corruptible? Do you appeal to international law as the highest? Or do you submit to a higher perception?
I ask because your entire judgment is not based on anything consistent with civilization’s record with property claims and is really a 20th century phenomenon.
maybe not witchcraft accusations per se, but im quite unsure how you can be aware of events occuring in the world right now and think that exploiting the current socioeconomic order to gain land and wealth is not done.
Or any of the other modern topics people have mentioned. It'd need to be combined with having the ability and intent to acquire the property of the targeted people.
In the above example, being the people don't seem to really own much/any property anyway, maybe it's harder than it first looks?
Most likely that you had enough wealth and owned enough productive land or other capital to secure the lifestyle of your progeny for generations to come.
Probably, but he's far from alone. It's practically the definition of what the nobility and the gentry/bourgeoisie have in common.
In contrast, workers and professionals must sell their personal skills in the labor market to survive. Unless they are extremely lucky, opportunistic, and hardworking and doing so become part of the gentry, their children will have to do the same.
Do you have any sources relating to the foreign family you mention, and of them securing landholding rights? Based on what I've found, the man that was burned wasn't rich (his family does appear to have become moderately well off by the time's standards at a later date, however).
I haven't found any mention of foreigners. The lawyer in the matter was Icelandic.
The _elites_ weren't superstitious, but that doesn't mean noone was. Evil always needs useful idiots to grab power, a dynamic that's only accelerated with the move to democracies (though to be clear, this isn't a knock on a democracy: I'm with Churchill when he says democracy is the least bad of all the forms we've tried).
I have been reading a bit of local history, and I came across an interesting mail exchange in 1500-1600 between the church of Como (far north, large mountain territory, witch trials) and the central authorities of Rome. Basically Como was going "Please help! witches are taking over." and Rome was trying to do damage control by replying "You bunch of clowns cannot possibly believe that.". Of course in very polite and legalistic church Latin, but this was the gist of it.
Don't want to be political on HN but I see lot of parallels between now and then.
A plague effected region, ruled by conservative parties, opposing science and logic in the name of religion or freedom. persecution of people who either look or do something different from their own.
Printing press helped in spreading both lies and truth. Now a days, mainstream media and social media is being used to spread all kinds of gibberish.
I won't be surprised if our own version of witch hunts starts soon, either in the name of nationalism or something else.
Well you still can't fix stupid, and superstition has always been an indicator of stupid.
But a little superstition can be fun, after all my own grandmother was a fortune teller herself.
>As a historian who studies medieval magic, I’m fascinated by how a coterie of church and state authorities conspired to develop and promote this new concept of witchcraft for their own purposes.
The rest of us should pay more attention to other ways the church and state authorities still develop and promote other unsuitable concepts to the disadvantage of their subjects.
Authoritarianism can put a disadvantageous twist on just about anything it comes into contact with.
Blindly following authority for conformity's sake tends to perpetuate and amplify an authority's residual unresolved stupidity, which we all have at least a bit of even when it started out to be just a little fun or tradition in some way.
It's difficult enough to pass worthwhile findings of the millennia from one generation to the next, and one reason things should be continuously questioned is to focus on the difference between unsubstantiated superstition and merely outdated or historical concepts as the bulk of mankind's knowledge is stewarded into the future.
There's a lot of needles in that haystack.
The university is supposed to be the meeting place between the bulk of the traditional knowledge being passed on, and many new findings being validated and developed.
Other institutions do this too, sometimes on a larger scale with narrower focus. Some of these are more academically oriented and intersect with academia more than others.
Traditional knowledge should be (re)validated as you go along too.
It takes a lot of questioning to accurately identify the stupid stuff that should no longer be passed on as acceptable.
During those times when questioning is supressed, or development laboratories not available,
it would seem the most risky for human progress to be stalled or reversed.
Some people are anti-progress anyway, for both real and superstitious reasons.
In the painting of the 14th Century lecture hall at the University of Bologna, this does not look like the kind of environment where questions over unvalidatable teachings could be enthusiastically entertained.
Likely somewhat familiar with those who attend university far from Italy half a millennium later.
But at this time isn't this virtually indistinguishable from a religious teaching session where the intention was mastery of texts and concepts intended to never be questioned except under severe penalty?
Today's institutions, universities, and corporations are often still striving to be as legendary in the same traditional way, when they focus on eminence & authoritarianism over skepticism, with each elevation moving an individual one step further beyond doubts which could challenge the eminence hierarchy.
These are the ones more subject to actions or inactions based on unfounded superstition to some extent, and can not be easily corrected from one generation to the next.
And one of the reasons people still say you can't fix stupid.
If you don't constantly scrutinize authorities for harmful superstitions, you could eventually end up with a real witch hunt where some kind of heads do roll in some way.
>It's difficult enough to pass worthwhile findings of the millennia from one generation to the next,
This observation of yours is indeed a very astute one. I have come to the same conclusion. The underlying reason for this, as you rightly pointed out is stupidity. History repeats. Teaching history will not help.
>>persecution of people who either look or do something different from their own.
Who is being persecuted now?
The Cancel Culture is much more a modern corollary to witch hunts than anything conservatives are doing.
Conservatives exhibit witch-hunting tendencies to some extent, in relation to liberals, where they promote unhinged conspiracy theories about them trying to subjucate the masses.
But these conservatism inspired forms of persecution are much less pronounced than something like Cancel Culture, as they are not being perpetrated by people who control the commanding heights of the cultural landscape.
Is "cancel culture" new? What happened in the past to people who would say inconvenient things (swear words or blasfemies in TV, being homosexual, ...)?
Bigotry was always there. It's just that nowadays we have a different cultural majority.
What's irritating about the present situation is that nominally the current cultural majority was against the bigots of the past and yet is applying pressure against who thinks differently and thus becoming bigot themselves (bigotry: "intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself."). I'm sure people have opinions about whether the reasons to apply the corrective pressures are well founded or at least in good faith ( also have personal opinions about that) but that's not so important IMHO; people can be wrong: dogmas are dangerous; we should be able to have candid conversations about things.
That's said, I have the feeling that the critiques of "cancel culture" coming from the right are not based on the desire for an open dialogue but more a combination of whataboutism and playing victims to strengthen in-group bonds.
This is driving us apart even more. I want to know how do people who think differently than I do think.
>>Is "cancel culture" new? What happened in the past to people who would say inconvenient things (swear words or blasfemies in TV, being homosexual, ...)?
Ostracization/cancellation of the non-conforming doesn't seem to be new. My point is that this kind of behavior is the modern corollary to witch hunts.
The Left Wing manifestation of it seen in modern times is called Cancel Culture, but all of its forms, past and present, have beeh types of mob persection in my opinion.
Ascribing the status of a capital noun to “cancel culture” is something reactionaries have been doing to try to paint all of their (many) ideological foes into the same category. The use of this term is an effort to distract from the fact that the vast majority of the celebrities who have been “cancelled” have actually victimized others or in other ways taken actions that were offensive or worse. In short, the only people who believe in a monolithic “Cancel Culture” are those who have spent too much time absorbing right wing talking points.
Why would "reactionaries", which is a term very popular among Marxist types to describe those opposed to radical left causes, try to paint Cancel Culture in negative terms, if it did not have a heavy ideological slant?
>>The use of this term is an effort to distract from the fact that the vast majority of the celebrities who have been “cancelled” have actually victimized others or in other ways taken actions that were offensive or worse.
Criticizing Cancel Culture does not imply that one believes celebrities targeted by it haven't done bad things. It implies that the reaction is disproportionate and being pushed from a place of ideological extremism.
These unfair and disingenuous characterizations of critics is another characteristic of Cancel Culture. It has very hostile/sanctimonious ingroup/out-group dynamics, with a lot of conspiracy theories being attributed to the out-group.
The term reactionary dates to the French Revolution. You imputing Marxism to any skepticism of the existence of “Cancel Culture” is a typical straw man; I am no Marxist.
The only relevant conspiracy theory I’m aware of is the one being advanced by those pushing the “Cancel Culture” narrative. All it takes is a few minutes watching Tucker Carlson or his comrades in arms to hear them lay out their specious case that there is a unified effort to unfairly cancel innocent celebrities. (And it is nearly always celebrities. It amuses me that the right wing narrative at the present moment includes a tabloid-like fixation on the fate of anyone halfway famous.)
>>The term reactionary dates to the French Revolution
Yes, but associated mostly with Marxism. And the French Revolution, with its equality-inspired fanaticism, was the ideological forebearer of Marxist revolutions.
There are many similarities between the French Revolution and the communism inspired Cultural Revolution in China, for example.
>>All it takes is a few minutes watching Tucker Carlson or his comrades in arms to hear them lay out their specious case that there is a unified effort to unfairly cancel innocent celebrities.
I don't follow Tucker Carlson, so I'm not familiar with his narratives. But Cancel Culture refers to a culture, not a conspiracy, and clearly exists.
>>And it is nearly always celebrities. It amuses me that the right wing narrative at the present moment includes a tabloid-like fixation on the fate of anyone halfway famous
It's any one with influence, or in a position of power really. Your fixation on these peripheral points, like who Cancel Culture is affecting, and the fact that Conservatives care about the fate of celebrities, when the debate is about whether Cancel Culture exists, is petty.
What is often missed, the mix of sexes of murdered "witches" depends on the country. 20% of murdered victims were male, in some countries way above 50% (not to belittle female victims in any way).
As ironic as it may be, there are cases of "witchcraft" now in India. Just like in the Middle Ages, even now it is being used as an excuse to rob the land of the poor.
There are many videos and documentaries on YT on this.
There's a stereotype that witch hunts were “mass hysteria” (as Wikipedia calls them) affecting stupid backwards people (another common stereotype) or stupid believers (a stereotype with a militant atheism flavour). In these cases, we would see more witch hunts the earlier the age is or the stronger the church is. People weren't much more stupid than people today are. Moreover, it's a fairly recent era, I'd even say that the amount of significant differences between city dweller of that time and traditional peasant of that time might be bigger that between city dweller of that time and city dweller of today.
Witch hunts were guided by individuals feeling the opportunity, and, like in more recent purges, bureaucratic and societal structures were abused for some ends. Similarly, there was little resistance to the runaway machine because of the lack of alternative structures and ideas. In a way, they are early examples of dystopian stories realized.
Believing that nowadays we live in a different time and witch hunts are impossible is an extreme shortsightedness.
Why can't witch hunts be mass hysteria affecting stupid backwards people and be instigated by manipulative elites at the same time? Even mask wearing during a pandemic can be turned into a culture war.
That would boil everything down to pure power and fear of that power, which is an explanation a bit too simple. In countless other villages across the globe, an attempt of some official to try someone for being a witch would result in a good beating of that idiot (even if villagers did believe in witches in general). No, they went along that what was existing to be went along. People do generally stop on red light even if there is no policeman around, everyone expects a shop to sell goods instead of having a swimming pool and a giraffe inside (there is no one to force that), and witch trials were trials, not mere accusations.
Communism and socialism are still curse words among the right to this very day. The authoritarian left is a boogeyman; the libertarian left want nothing to do with that shit either but good luck convincing somebody that you're not a tankie.
And many of the ordinary people didn't go along because they were stupid. They knew full wel that not going along upped the risk of being accused of being a witch significantly.
The modern word is "moral panic", and it's used just as effectively to destroy rivals as it was in times of old. The only difference is that we don't kill the losers anymore, but rather imprison, harass, fire, and bankrupt them. Anytime there's a moral shift (good or bad), there's an opportunity to co-opt it in order to remove rivals, and it works very nicely because all you need to do is sow seeds of doubt about someone if they happen to be in a vulnerable group, and then let the mob do the rest:
- Witch trials
- Reign of Terror
- Utah
- Lynch Mobs
- Prohibition
- Kristallnacht
- Wartime relocations
- The red scare
- The Dungeons & Dragons scare
- The war on drugs
- The war on terror
- The pedophile scare
- #metoo
- BLM
It's unfortunate about the last two because a lot of good came of them, but one must not let a moral shift go to waste.
A more understated one was the lead up to the Iraq war where people were labeled “unpatriotic” for opposing the war (or scared of being labeled unpatriotic). For example, Dixie Chicks were blacklisted for being outspoken against the war. This would almost qualify as a “soft” witch hunt, but essentially the same strategy, a Scarlett letter of sorts.
The list is exhaustive (as you enumerated), and quite the recurring pattern. Unfortunately, at scale, it’s a super effective strategy with consequences only being realized way after the fact, by which point there is another wave already forming in another direction.
The thing about the last two is we are in the middle of them rather than being history. Every moral panic that descended into darkness started out in the light.
You were going so well until the last two, where you've ignored the very real problems that gave rise to them. There are very few examples of overreach compared to "underreach" there?
If it seemed that I'm lumping the last two together with the complete negativity of the others, that's not my intent.
These modern sudden positive moral shifts are new phenomena made possible by the internet (and so one would be hard pressed to come up with significant older examples besides the temperance movement), whereas the older (negative) shifts were all driven by fear. But it doesn't change the fact that opportunistic, unscrupulous people can and will take advantage of them in the same ways, and unlucky people will be trampled underfoot.
The mob effect is very hard to counter because the rules of evidence range from low to non-existent. It's a question of momentum; all you need is a catalyst to set things in motion (for good or bad).
Your lead paragraph omits anything about why they are included.
Anytime there's a moral shift (good or bad), there's an opportunity to co-opt it in order to remove rivals, and it works very nicely because all you need to do is sow seeds of doubt about someone if they happen to be in a vulnerable group, and then let the mob do the rest
That doesn't much address the dynamics of #metoo or Black Lives Matter.
What I mean by "moral shift" is a rapid change (as in over the course of months rather than decades) in what society considers morally correct and acceptable.
The dynamics of #metoo and BLM are different in that they are addressing longstanding attitudes and behaviors contributing to oppression or harassment of a minority group (I use the term "minority" very liberally considering that women make up 50% of the population).
We've also seen other moral shifts such as with homosexuality, although there was no "punishing wrongdoers" phase following that movement.
It's only when a punishing phase gets mixed in that you run the danger of mob justice, because there will likely at the time be either no laws covering the issue, or weakly enforced laws. Without clear leadership on what's right and wrong and the consequences, opportunists take it upon themselves to mete out punishment as they see fit. Sometimes it's for the better, but usually it gets out of hand pretty quickly.
Again, the "poster" incidents complained about under BLM and #metoo were already illegal, at least per the written law, which is why e.g. Bill Cosby went to prison. It was never legal for him to sexually assault his victims. It was just "de facto" legal because of the difficulty in prosecuting.
BLM and #metoo are driven by impunity: a crime is committed by people in a powerful position, and the normal justice process completely fails to deal with it until an overwhelming number of people come forward.
They are also driven by real incidents: No sane person alleges that George Floyd isn't dead, for example. Whereas with witchcraft and many of the others the alleged "harm" was vague, nonexistent, or impossible to link.
BLM and metoo are also bottom-up movements, whereas most of the others were either initiated from the authorities or were authoritarian responses to popular demands (Prohibition is probably the latter).
The paedophile scare is complicated. There do appear to be fantasists and "recovered memory" incidents, but there is also a lot of historic child abuse that was institutionalised. Magdalene laundries, for example.
Mob justice is the weapon of last resort. The best answer to mob justice is an official justice system where justice is seen to be done. This requires tackling prejudice about whose crimes are investigated, whose are exonerated, and whose evidence is taken more seriously. How many women's testimony equals one man's testimony, for example?
Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism. Or trying to publicly ruin private citizens for sharing forbidden thoughts among friends and even family. There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven. The climate we live in now is very similar to these previous purges. That you find yourself politically sympathetic to their cause only makes it easier for unscrupulous elites to use the mob to do their bidding.
You might think you're safe today, but you'd better hope that your moments of candor stay off camera, because no one lives life carefully enough to be immune to this angry mob.
> Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism
Such as?
> There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven
Such as?
Are we back to finding the worst possible examples of a cause on twitter and using it to discredit the whole cause, just like McCarthyism used one or two actual pro-Stalinists to demonise everyone asking for more equality?
There was a recent case of a Karen receiving mob justice to the point people began harassing the law firm her husband runs (granted she also works there), affecting their livelihood. We don’t want to get to a point in society where your character flaws destroy your life.
Just the other day, an out of context video embarrassed a supposed Karen on the front page of Reddit. We later learned the situation was more complex and didn’t have racial undertones. The mob still publicized a woman’s life.
#MeToo had several examples of people’s career being thrown out for offenses that were basically round objects being pushed into a square hole (Aziz Ansari, Al Franken, there were a few more).
I understand the need to use a chainsaw to cut a birthday cake, it highlights the desperation of the lack of tools to do a very basic thing. We now know, and quite frankly, we need to replace the chainsaw with a table knife sooner or later. Someone’s going to get hurt.
To keep the parallel, it’s important to see that the mob becomes the authority figure.
"There was a recent case of a Karen receiving mob justice to the point people began harassing the law firm her husband runs (granted she also works there), affecting their livelihood. We don’t want to get to a point in society where your character flaws destroy your life."
To be clear, this was after it was filmed that the couple was pointing guns at peaceful protestors who were protesting on the street. The woman in particular had her finger on the trigger and was pointing it at black people walking by. (EDIT: I don't know if you're familiar with gun handling, but this is considered extremely poor "trigger discipline", which is a term describing how to handle and hold a gun safely. This is comparable to driving drunk in its reckless endangerment. One should never point their gun at a person unless they intend to shoot that person. One should never put their finger on the trigger of their gun unless they intend to fire that gun. This woman, in violating both, is expressing her intent to shoot people.)
"#MeToo had several examples of people’s career being thrown out for offenses that were basically round objects being pushed into a square hole (Aziz Ansari, Al Franken, there were a few more)."
Aziz Ansari totally, 100% owned up to not recognizing how his fame affected the social dynamics in which he now functioned and how that in turn affects consent. He apologized and his career is ongoing.
Al Fraken took photos of himself groping a female soldier while she slept in her uniform, so there's definitive proof he was doing these things. He was in a position of power where he could access women and he chose to have photos taken of him groping people who are serving their country.
I see no round objects being pushed into square holes, here? What should be done with Al Franken, who groped soldiers in their sleep?
(EDIT: I should also note that character flaws ruin lives all the time. Someone who is more prone to recklessness or thrill seeking can get themselves or others killed. Someone who is more prone to addiction becomes addicted to a life-ruining dependency. Someone who is too arrogant can ruin their professional network. Someone who is too complacent in a setting where stuff can be made out of date quickly can swiftly find themselves out of work. I don't take it to be a large leap that someone with the character flaws of "threatens to kill innocent bystanders" and "gropes women in their sleep" might not also be negative in their lives.)
What she did was indefensible, but her husband and his business is also having to reconcile this.
I believe Al Franken took a juvenile photo of a reporter friend. I don’t think he was a senator at the time, I could be wrong.
I think we will enter ‘full blinders on’ mode if we accept that the axe being wielded is not a catch all. We have to accept that the axe came out of desperation, but we need to find the solution where the axe is no longer necessary.
If there’s anything to debate, it’s only how long the guillotine should be necessary. Certainly we can’t have the guillotine forever. The guillotine was used to make it pretty freaking clear things have changed, and don’t even try to think things will go backward. I understand and accept it as a necessary strategy.
You still have to create the post-guillotine society.
In poetic terms, Robespierre was given the guillotine he created. Things go too far, often.
There's no guillotine. Aziz Ansari's career is totally fine. The statute of limitations on rape and other sexual assault ranges from 3 to 30 years. It seems completely reasonable to me that Al Franken should continue to have consequences on whose lives he harmed via sexual assault years after doing it. The effects of trauma last a lifetime. I don't understand why we should be sympathetic to one man having his life ruined for credibly also ruining the lives of multiple others.
Regarding the Tamara Harrians situation I don't know anything about it, could you link to another media besides NYPost?
30 seconds of googling can get you the Tamara Harrrians link.
Look, patterns are important. The same way we failed in jailing people for modest drug possession, is the same way we are going to fail in measuring reciprocity, or more clearly, exact legal justice on sexual harassment, racial discrimination.
I’m interested in fixing patterns.
I’m not going to die on the Al Franken hill. Frat boy behavior in professional context is unacceptable, it will get you over time. In his particular case, I didn’t see any escalation into rape or abuse of power (fuck me or you won’t get this job or promotion - Harvey Weinstein).
We will be accurate in our words, accusation, and judgement, henceforth. We will cut cleanly and carefully, no more chainsaws, we will visit all crime sites, and assess. No more games.
It’s not reasonable to me for someone to suffer outsized social justice beyond the price paid at the moment of sentencing. You take someone like Louis CK, he paid the public shame, and career loss (financial loss). If the transgressions were beyond, such as underage sex (for example), I expect the law to quantify the retribution. Beyond that, I expect him to pay nothing more on a social level.
Name your price, I guess, and nothing more. Let it be paid, and move on. We are not gods that dole out eternal shame.
I don't think there's eternal shame to dole out. I think it's perfectly equivalent to say if you give someone lifelong trauma that the result should be lifelong consequences, including that people don't want to affiliate with you.
Restoration is a consequence. But additionally, I don't think anyone should be morally obliged to befriend someone who did something against their moral code. For example, if I had a friend who I understood to have committed CSA there is no timeline of which I would be okay with continuing to be their friend.
Again, if the regular legal system would get in gear and e.g. prosecute the police who killed Breonna Taylor, or routinely take sexual assault allegations seriously, we wouldn't be needing any of this.
The dysfunctionality of regular politics creates its own escalation. People are used to being given a sticky door, or a button that doesn't work. They're used to shoulder-charging the door of power being completely ineffective. So when it actually gives way it's a surprise to everyone.
I should remind you that a lot of revolutions had a noble goal. Russian Revolution was made by people with an enormous noble goal of freeing the whole world from oppression (and Soviet state has never disavowed World Revolution, future Communism, people's dictatorship, etc.). How it was twisted from the very beginning — even long before revolution itself, see Dostoevsky's “Demons” — is a different story. I think that “we had a noble goal, and accidentally ended up with a dead body” is an explanation only suitable for children. It is better to pay attention to the process, not its stated goals (even more so for broad and lofty causes), and judge whether it is fishy.
In fact, nothing that happens in America today comes as a surprise to people familiar with Soviet society:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-so...
It's a recent article, but I remember people commonly expressing similar sorrows years and even decades ago.
If you want to look deeper into the possible future of US, see “The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices” (University of California Press, 1999).
Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals. The rest were "the enemy is among us" fear based.
I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest.
It wasn't the Opium war (England wanting to keep cheap Opium supply from China), and it wasn't Nixon. Criminalization of drugs and declaring war on the cartels, whilst secretly supporting the cartels for their help in their fascist putsches. Civilized countries can fight the drug problem fine without declaring war, even if state actors are involved. (Eg Kosovo, ...)
Eliminating the scourge of drugs in America was Nancy Reagan's brainchild, and it was a very laudable goal. The fact that it was so ham-fistedly and wrongly implemented, and co-opted for repressive purposes doesn't diminish the nobility of the original goal that gave birth to such a monster.
Back in the 1970's it was plain to see that a Nixon initiative such as a drug war was not congruous with a free country in the same way that an absolute prohibition on alcohol was not.
The first Nixon election was actually the birth of the monster which enabled such a multi-generation debacle.
Regardless of how toxic and harmful alcohol and drugs have been for millennia.
Turns out Nixon was not only misinformed, he also had a crooked streak.
History shows that the Reagan mishandling of a free country occurred afterward.
I not only witnessed all of this first hand, it has been a painful experience.
You should have seen what a free country was like beforehand.
The war on drugs certainly did not have noble goals. It’s a matter of public record that the government used the drug war to target “free love” political radicals, and far worse happened than that.
"At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - Dan Baum, talking about John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon
Yes, this is exactly that hearsay. Not public record, but unauthorized quote published years after Ehrlichman's death. The authenticity of the quote is often disputed.
>Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals.
That distinction is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Some say McCarthy was vindicated with the release of the Venona papers and the declassification of documents from the Soviet Archives. Many of the accused were in fact spies for the Soviet. Also the stolen secrets for making the Atomic bomb almost brought the world to an end.
>I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest.
It's sad to see how you have to walk on egg-shells to placate the BLM zealots and still get downvoted and somebody is probably already combing through your post-history.
You don't have to placate the BLM zealots. You can say whatever you want. If people disagree, your comment gets a gray tinge. I don't understand the downvote animosity here.
I think the "stupid backwards people" refers to the people that went along with it. There might be people guiding others, but if nobody believed that witches exist then this wouldn't work. It's more a case of blind belief in authority figures.
For this same reason witch-hunts can easily happen today. The conservative kid that was smeared as a racist while standing around smiling, despite there being no proof, is an example of very similar behavior by people.
> but if nobody believed that witches exist then this wouldn't work.
I don't think that's right, you have to consider the possibility of widespread preference falsification. Namely people who do not believe in witches but do believe all their neighbors believe in witches.
This still happens, a recent case of satanic witchcraft trials (2020 Australia) -
At the time it was called as what it was by logical people, the exact same pattern of hysteria has been seen before, but they still had their lives ruined.
That has really piqued my interest. How did this happen? The article says charges were dropped, but does not explain the wider context or how these very serious charges got so far with no evidence.
I found some more information from an article[0] from 2018. The only evidence appears to have been the testimony of a young child. The disturbing allegations, like a needle in the eye and multiple rapes, would have presumably left physical evidence of injury.
That article I linked makes no update about the charges being dropped. That falsely accused family has been split up for two years because of this, yet their exoneration didn't seem to get much coverage at all.
I would really like to understand the sequence of events that initiated this. I find it unlikely that the kid came home one day and came up with this completely unprompted.
Do you know of any resources for gaining a better contextual understanding of this bizarre incident?
Surely somebody has written about this case, but I haven't found it yet. I'm torn between thanking you for pointing this out and cursing you because I'm not going to be able to think about anything else until I figure out how this went on for so long.
For specifics just keep Googling. But no media wants to pick the real story up. You will just have to piece it all together.
In general try watching "Capturing the Friedmans" for how this happens.
Satanic rituals hysteria was big in the 80s but no docos stand out. Try youtube.
Else it's familiar patterns meshed together.
It happened in a "small town" which seems to still matter.
This was a circus which has a story book gypsies feel even though that's stupid, since it wasn't even a traditional circus. But it kinda shows the medias roll since it's a good headline not good reality.
Some time ago, I read an article that the inquisition only really stopped when the economic incentive structure for the ones driving it was dismantled (funerals and fees paid by relatives of the accused). Unfortunately, I can't find it now...
p.s. if somebody is aware of the exact source, would appreciate it very much...
I don’t know how much the numbers we have today are accurate, but I would like to see the following stats:
1. Ratio between men and women executed for witchcraft.
2. Number of people executed for witchcraft by century.
3. Number of people executed for witchcraft by denomination (catholic, lutheran, calvinist, etc)
Witch hunts were largely a Northern European/Protestant phenomenon. The article doesn't say this explicitly, but in a roundabout way acknowledges this citing examples of how the Church largely saw witchcraft as superstition (which itself is a grave sin if done with full knowledge):
"Superstition of any description is a transgression of the First Commandment: "I am the Lord thy God,-- thou shalt not have strange gods before me. Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath . . . thou shalt not adore them nor serve them" (Exodus 20:2-5). It is also against the positive law of the Church, which visits the worst kinds of superstitions with severe punishments, and against the natural law inasmuch as it runs counter to the dictates of reason in the matter of man's relations to God. Such objective sinfulness is inherent in all superstitious practices from idolatry down to the vainest of vain observances, of course in very different degrees of gravity. With regard to the subjective guilt attaching to them it must be borne in mind that no sin is mortal unless committed with full knowledge of its grievous wickedness and with full deliberation and consent. Of these essential factors the first is often wanting entirely, and the second is only imperfectly present. The numerous cases in which the event seemed to justify the superstitious practice, and the universality of such incongruous beliefs and performances, though they may not always induce inculpable ignorance, may possibly obscure the knowledge and weaken the will to a point incompatible with mortal sin. As a matter of fact, many superstitions of our own day have been acts of genuine piety at other times, and may be so still in the hearts of simple folk." [1]
Aquinas also devotes question 92 of the Second Part of the Second Part of the Summa to supersition [0]. However, none of this denies the reality of the demonic.
> Universities were being founded, and scholars in Western Europe began to pore over ancient texts as well as learned writings from the Muslim world. Some of these presented complex systems of magic that claimed to draw on astral forces or conjure powerful spirits. Gradually, these ideas began to gain intellectual clout.
So could we say in other words, all that happened as a side effect of Education? Greater exposure of ideological minefields to people highly susceptible?
Reminds me of all the conspiracy videos on the internet you know. And people who spend an insane amount of hours pouring over those.
A parallel european change between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries was the nature of mounted tournaments. In the thirteenth century, tournaments were not far removed from wargames, occurred over the entire terrain between two villages, and were generally open to anyone who had the panoply and training. By the fifteenth century, tournaments were more of a spectacle, occurred in special jousting lists, and didn't admit participants outside a hereditary aristocracy.
I read a recent article about witchcraft and it said that women were also persecuted for being independent and to resist Alisa the traditional patriachy.
The current corona virus scare mongering can be considered to be in the same league of witch hunt.
It may not be identical but it has similar underpinnings:
-A seeming know demon: the virus,
- Somebody's rights are taken away: in this case it's the laymen, and small business owners etc.
- It keeps the peasants (the laymen) too engaged with the fear, and sufficiently distracted to not start revolting against their rulers.
AFAIK truly organized witchcraft, in the form of the Magickal Orders and Secret Societies that make up the majority of the study of Western Ceremonial Magick, is a fairly recent phenomenon, based on my (fairly thorough) research.
I love the study of modern occultism; and Ceremonial Magick, in particular.
Fun thought. What if in the future, witchcraft and sorcery and magic, is rediscovered. And it comes to rule the land, and the people.
But in actuality, sorcery is really just applied computer science.
Like, in the future, some engineer manages to tap into the quantum realm, which allows for all kinds of mystical apparitions to manifest, but instead, it’s really just another quantum artifact. But our limited understanding of the quantum probability reality, makes it seem like magic.
And all the hocus pocus incantations, are simply voice recognized commands, that triggers a quantum computer system, to activate some quantum subsystem functionality.
If you discard any quantum computing, this is similar to the plot to the series of novels starting with "Off to Be the Wizard" by Scott Meyer. A fun, quick little read about a person who discovers the source database of reality, and then promptly starts messing with it.
Bailey's book he mentions here is called 'Origins of the witches sabbath'.
The idea that satanic witchcraft was invented by mediaeval authorities is preposterous IMO. Occult practices go back to ancient Egypt and have been practiced in multiple civilizations as white, grey or black magic respectively. Black magic is what everyone obsesses over (attempts to use supernatural powers or magic for evil and selfish purposes). Grey and white are 'do no harm' or curative (health etc) efforts.
I think the mediaeval purges were largely political and cynical property grabs along with a desire for populations to conform to dogmatic religions and drop ancient customs and beliefs
How does an announcement of someone's death get off topic and start talking about how LaVey is a Zionist arms dealer and how frequently Ukraine comes up? What the hell is happening in that story?
It's definitely not just an announcement of someone's death...or the death of their 'Khat'... Steve Outtrim will provide you with the deepest rabbit holes, there are hours of video at the end of that post
Different curses can have different effects in different situations.
Even computers or equipment can seem possessed sometimes.
In the 90's all we had were IDE hard disk drives with their parallel connections made using ribbon cables. Floppies for backup booting were parallel too.
Over ten years ago the serial connections started to show up on HDDs which otherwise appeared no differently. USB flash drives for backup booting have always been serial as the name implies, besides being _universal_ (to boot :) years earlier.
Prayers failed to be answered when today it's more rare for average users to have removable backup boot media standing by, or easily and quickly whipped up when needed. Plus USB drives are less _universal_ than floppies and can not yet be expected to reliably even fundamentally boot on every PC as widely. Without warning they can easily give you the feeling they switch over to the dark side simply as a visible manifestation of evil that can remain lurking.
One day my buddy gets a new PC and wants to put his previous HDD in there as secondary storage.
So he opens it up and does not find the correct parallel connectors available, calls me up and says "Why is there SATA printed on the plugs of the power supply connectors?"
We could only both agree it was because there was not enough room for Satan's full name.
Numerous curses were employed afterward, all to no avail.
And don't get me started on ghost data, after all there's nothing to be afraid of.
Edit: An effective ritual is to actually zero your drive space appropriately, every time you get the chance as long as it makes sense. It's actually superstitious to think you never need to do this. Timely meditation, and prayer for a fortunate outcome during this period would not seem to be inappropriate, or even blessing of the device. Not a waste of time going back to the garden. It does seem to result in less chance of having it run completely astray and acting absolutely haunted.
I'm struck by how the description of witch conventions matches the description of "elite pedovores" that the Qanon conspiracy people promote:
"horrific assemblies where witches gathered and worshiped demons, had orgies, ate murdered babies and performed other abominable acts"
The Qanon people are laughably inept, gullible and the thought leaders are probably grifters, but still, remarkable convergence between the witch cons described above and "hollywood elite" that keep children in tunnels underneath central park, killing these "tunnel tots" in horrible ways to harvest adrenochrome for use as youth potionsl
> I'm struck by how the description of witch conventions matches the description of "elite pedovores" that the Qanon conspiracy people promote:
Both the medieval fear of witches and the modern fear of "Hollywood elites" have their roots in anti-semitism. There's a reason witches were often portrayed with giant hook noses, after all. Judaism has often been negatively correlated with occult elitism, academia (see the actual origins of the term "cultural marxism"), Hollywood and left-wing politics. Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of babies is just a modern retelling of the ancient belief that Jews secretly did the same.
By calling people suspicious of powerful individuals anti-semitic you are protecting those powerful individuals in a shroud of identity politics despite evidence and survivor testimony - while simultaneously lowering the reputation of an entire religion. Also the Hillary Clinton conspiracy theory [0][1] is not a modern retelling - she's not even Jewish. I'm not sure what your point is...
>By calling people suspicious of powerful individuals anti-semitic you are protecting those powerful individuals in a shroud of identity politics despite evidence and survivor testimony - while simultaneously lowering the reputation of an entire religion.
I'm doing no such thing. I'm referring to people who believe in the Pizzagate/QAnon conspiracy theory - these are not merely people who are "suspicious of powerful individuals." Plenty of people are suspicious of powerful individuals who don't buy into that nonsense.
They don't need to be antisemitic per se to buy into a conspiracy theory that is based on antisemitism. Many people who believe in cultural marxism likely aren't aware of the origins of that term either, but it remains the fact that antisemitism is the thematic root for fears of neo-marxist influence over academia. The association of New York and Hollywood with Jews leads to terms like "New York Liberal" and "Hollywood elite" becoming anti-semitic dogwhistles among the alt-right, while seeming perfectly benign in context. These things are so deeply baked into our politics and pop-culture that many people simply can't see the ingredients, but they're still there.
And as far as lowering the reputation of a particular religion, in this specific case, blame that on the communities that came up with these conspiracy theories to begin with, and that turned anti-semitism into a pop culture meme, and whose dialogue is replete with it.
>Also the Hillary Clinton conspiracy theory [0][1] is not a modern retelling - she's not even Jewish. I'm not sure what your point is...
You're being purposely obtuse. Hillary Clinton's actual religion doesn't matter - they draw from the same archetypes and cultural associations.
I don’t think this is coincidence. Even without invoking Jung, it’s easy to observe that the spiritual beliefs and cultural prejudices we have now are of one continuous piece with the notions people had centuries ago. This makes the QAnon promulgators even more sinister, because they are tapping into fables and dark legends in order to further a specific political agenda, and a destructive one at that.
It is evidence based, given the suppression of known information by china, and therefore reasonable.
China screwing up was really not a big point here but in trying to cover for them you're just going to provoke people into posting more about china's screwup and attract more attention to it, sort of streisand effect.
I'm not really trying to cover for them. I'm pointing out that it wouldn't have changed anything.
I remember very well how it was like back in January. People had so little trust in China (and frankly a lot of it was racism) that they saw Wuhan, a city the size of NYC, being locked down, and that was really bad for us.
As far as people being aware of the screw-up, as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing. What's important is that one knows that we're not where we are because of them. We're where we are because we fucked up, hard. The popular narrative right now is that if China didn't fuck up we wouldn't be in the mess we are right now, and that's false. We're in the mess we are right now 100% because we didn't take it seriously.
Perhaps. Justify that. I might even agree, but still, justify that.
> and frankly a lot of it was racism
It is not. Anti-chinese-government attitude is not related to anti-chinese-people racism. You're trying to comflate the two so you can dismiss it as just racism. It isn't.
> The popular narrative right now is that if China didn't fuck up we wouldn't be in the mess we are right now,
We'd possibly be in a similar mess from the stupidity in various western governments, inc. mine in the UK. See my past posts where I make this ever so plain, indeed using phrases like 'we fucked up'.
But that does not let the chinese gov't off the hook WRT their fuckups and armtwisting the WHO and general appalling behaviour. This does not let them off the hook in the same way it does not let eg. boris johnson off the hook, or trump, or bolsonaro.
The first Chinese doctor, that was censored, was in late December. Meanwhile, French doctors saw cases with ground-glass lung occlusions unexplained by other illnesses (in other words, exactly what was detected late December in Wuhan), in mid November : http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200520-scans-show-french-patie...
And old blood tests were found to be positive in France dating from December.
Since no doctor in China was able to detect this illness before late December, and it was without a shadow of a doubt in Europe by mid December and probably even by mid November, we know without a shadow of a doubt that not delaying the release of the info via censoring the doctor for over a week before receiving the sample from the national laboratory made absolutely no difference at all. Even if they completely shut their borders as soon as the doctors had even a hint of a new disease, we would have likely seen exactly the same result.
As far as I'm concerned, sure China made a mistake by temporarily covering up the disease. But that didn't matter, at that was likely part of the calculus by Chinese authorities - do we release the information now, and risk panic over what might not be a very contagious virus or even much of an issue at all, or do we let the doctor speak about it on social media? It is very likely that they thought that it would be too late if the disease was highly contagious, and if it was weakly contagious that the risk of a false positive warranted the possible lost time. Indeed, it's not like they muzzled the doctor then went to twiddle their thumbs, they were re-analyzing the pathogens and sending them to state labs then eventually took the decision to do a surprise lockdown.
Now, as a citizen I would always rather have the information and be free of censorship. But as far as it went, the muzzling in China was without much consequence. Because it did not and could not have consequences similar to the bad decisions made by our governments. And I don't mean just BoJo, Trump or Bolsonaro. Almost all Western countries were guilty of making irresponsible recommendations that went directly against observations in China. For example, the Canadian health ministry told us that there is almost no risk, that you should continue to use public transport without worrying, to hug people, and that masks are ineffective and will make you sicker even though we had evidence to the contrary for years. Unlike in China, there was no real doubt.
So no, China muzzling a doctor for a few weeks is absolutely not comparable to the failings of our government. It was inhumane, but it did not have bad consequences to an extent comparable to those of the vast majority of Western countries.
We should condemn it of course, but to paint it as equivalent to the very materially relevant catastrophies by our governments when the impact it had is completely negligible in comparison, and when they were much more understandable, is borderline politically motivated misdirection by politicians that want to deflect blame.
It's definitely not coincidence, because they don't come from the same place. Unless you're classifying Mexico (swine flu), China (SARS & Covid), DR Congo (Ebola) and Saudi Arabia (MERS) as the same place
This is not a list of pandemics, it's a list of individual cases in China of diseases that need to be reported to and monitored by the WHO because of possible epidemic risk. For the last seven years it's been exclusively Avian flu (still no sustained animal->human transmission yet). There are two pandemics (SARS and COVID) there.
One cunning foreign family with ties to occupying Denmark was able to secure land hold rights for nearly an entire peninsula from local Icelanders on the northwest through the strategic use of witchcraft accusations. During this period of occupation nearly 120 trials occurred over a 60 year period[2].
The people weren’t superstitious - they were corrupt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strandagaldur
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3n_R%C3%B6gnvaldsson