Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

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.

> that it wouldn't have changed anything

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.

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things should be continuously questioned is to focus on the difference between unsubstantiated superstition and merely outdated or historical concepts as the bulk of mankind's knowledge is stewarded into the future.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.

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.