Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism • Hacker News Board

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#191

Post by adrianN » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 4:35 AM UTC

achillesheels wrote: post #153

adrianN wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The matter is too complex for me to have a good judgement, I was just confused because your comment didn't seem consistent with what I thought I knew.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#192

Post by thundergolfer » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 5:33 AM UTC

zajio1am wrote: post #84

thundergolfer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What public record? AFAIK, the association between war on drugs and targeting radicals and black is mostly based on hearsay.

"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

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#193

Post by claudiawerner » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 11:48 AM UTC

jevgeni wrote: post #190

claudiawerner wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Weste…

>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.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#194

Post by zajio1am » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 12:21 PM UTC

thundergolfer wrote: post #192

zajio1am wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What public record? AFAIK, the association between war on drugs and targeting radicals and black is mostly based on hearsay.

"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 t…

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.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#195

Post by dennis_jeeves » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

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.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#196

Post by dennis_jeeves » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

praveen9920 wrote: post #89

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…

>Don't want to be political on HN but I see lot of parallels between now and then.

The things is that (unfortunately) even heath/medicine is very political, so it is fair to bring it up.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#197

Post by dennis_jeeves » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

ascotan wrote: post #111

praveen9920 wrote: post #89

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…

Witch hunts have never actually gone away they just changed form.

>Witch hunts have never actually gone away they just changed form.

You are bang on. Anybody who has observed/read past occurrences of similar phenomenon will tell you that this is a modern version of the witch hunt.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#198

Post by dennis_jeeves » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

fuzzfactor wrote: post #128

ascotan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Witch hunts have never actually gone away they just changed form.

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 attent…

>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.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#199

Post by dennis_jeeves » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

ogurechny wrote: post #68

runawaybottle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think he/she is wrong in saying they all employ the same strategy, where the last two being the only ones with a noble goal. It’s a powerful weapon, and can be dangerous if not used carefully.

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…

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Re: Invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was met with skepticism

#200

Post by krustyburger » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

CryptoPunk wrote: post #185

krustyburger wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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 wer…

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.)