" Three feminist campaigners in the Netherlands want to reclaim the insult “witch”
and recognise the innocent victims of Dutch witch-hunts from the 15th to the 17th centuries with a national monument.
Susan Smit, Bregje Hofstede and Manja Bedner, the chair and board members of the National Witches Monument foundation, have raised €35,000 (£29,000) for an official site of memory for about
70,000 people who died during a Satanic panic
that swept Europe and the Americas "
"It’s about creating more awareness around this history of, basically, femicide,” Hofstede said.
“To this day a witch is still a comic figure.
In the Netherlands, every year at the carnaval, people burn effigies of witches
… but there’s hardly any knowledge of the
actual history of
people being burned at the stake"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/04/dutch-feminists-campaign-for-national-monument-to-witches
“Maybe they were a bit different, maybe they didn’t take care of their surroundings,
maybe they had a very strong personality and stood up for themselves, or simply knew a lot about herbs and how to heal,”
she said, pointing out the witch-hunts still happening on modern social media"
____
"A witch-hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft.
Practicing evil spells or incantations was proscribed and punishable in early human civilizations in the Middle East..
In medieval Europe, witch-hunts often arose in connection to
charges of heresy from Christianity.
An intensive period of witch-hunts occurring in Early Modern Europe and to a smaller extent Colonial America, took place from about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Counter Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 executions."
"In current language, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with much publicity,
supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real purpose of harming opponents.
It can also involve elements of moral panic, as well as mass hysteria"
"The Hebrew Bible condemns sorcery. Deuteronomy 18:10–12 states: "No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one that casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord"; and Exodus 22:18 prescribes: "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live".
"Condemnations of witchcraft are nevertheless found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo and early theologians, who made little distinction between witchcraft and the practices of pagan religions.
Many believed witchcraft did not exist in a philosophical sense: Witchcraft was based on illusions and powers of evil, which Augustine likened to darkness, a non-entity representing the absence of light.
Augustine and his adherents like Saint Thomas Aquinas nevertheless promulgated elaborate demonologies, including the belief that humans could enter pacts with demons, which became the basis of future witch hunts.
Ironically, many clerics of the Middle Ages openly or covertly practiced goetia,
believing that as Christ granted his disciples power to command demons, to summon and control demons was not, therefore, a sin."
"As Renaissance occultism gained traction among the educated classes, the belief in witchcraft, which in the medieval period had been part of the folk religion of the uneducated rural population at best, was incorporated into an increasingly comprehensive theology of Satan as the ultimate source of all maleficium"
"In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued Summis desiderantes affectibus, a Papal bull authorizing the "correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising" of devil-worshippers who have "slain infants", among other crimes"
"In Europe, the witch-hunt craze was negligible in Spain, Poland, and Eastern Europe; conversely, it was intense in Germany, Switzerland, and France."
"What had previously been a belief that some people possessed supernatural abilities (which were sometimes used to protect the people), now became a sign of a pact between the people with supernatural abilities and the devil.
To justify the killings, some Christians of the time and their proxy secular institutions deemed witchcraft as being associated to wild Satanic ritual parties in which
there was naked dancing and cannibalistic infanticide.
It was also seen as heresy for going against the first of the Ten Commandments ("You shall have no other gods before me") or as violating majesty, in this case referring to the divine majesty, not the worldly.
Further scripture was also frequently cited, especially the Exodus decree that "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18), which many supported."
"The first major persecution in Europe, when witches were caught, tried, convicted, and burned in the imperial lordship of Wiesensteig in southwestern Germany, is recorded in 1563 in a pamphlet called "True and Horrifying Deeds of 63 Witches".
"Witchcraft persecution spread to all areas of Europe. Learned European ideas about witchcraft and demonological ideas, strongly influenced the hunt for witches in the North. "
"These witch-hunts were at least partly driven by economic factors since a significant relationship between economic pressure and witch hunting activity can be found for regions such as Bavaria and Scotland."
"In Denmark, the burning of witches increased following the reformation of 1536. Christian IV of Denmark, in particular, encouraged this practice, and hundreds of people were convicted of witchcraft and burnt"
"In England, witch-hunting would reach its apex in 1644 to 1647 due to the efforts of Puritan Matthew Hopkins. Although operating without an official Parliament commission, Hopkins (calling himself Witchfinder General) and his accomplices charged hefty fees to towns during the English Civil War.
Hopkins' witch-hunting spree was brief but significant: 300 convictions and deaths are attributed to his work."
'About eighty people throughout England's Massachusetts Bay Colony were accused of practicing witchcraft; thirteen women and two men were executed in a witch-hunt that occurred throughout New England and lasted from 1645 to 1663. The Salem witch trials followed in 1692–1693."
*
"According to Julian Goodare, in Europe, the overall proportion of women who were persecuted as witches was 80%, although there were countries and regions like Estonia, Normandy and Iceland, that targeted men more.
In Iceland 92% of the accused were men, in Estonia 60%, and in Moscow two-thirds of those accused were male. In Finland, a total of more than 100 death row inmates were roughly equal in both men and women, but all Ålanders sentenced to witchcraft were only women."
"The claim that "millions of witches" (often: "nine million witches") were killed in Europe is spurious, even though it is occasionally found in popular literature, and it is ultimately due to a 1791 pamphlet by Gottfried Christian Voigt."
Witchcraft or sorcery remains a criminal offense in Saudi Arabia, although the precise nature of the crime is undefined.[114]
The frequency of prosecutions for this in the country as whole is unknown. However, in November 2009, it was reported that 118 people had been arrested in the province of Makkah that year for practicing magic and "using the Book of Allah in a derogatory manner", 74% of them being female.[115] According to Human Rights Watch in 2009, prosecutions for witchcraft and sorcery are proliferating and "Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police."
"In 2006, an illiterate Saudi woman, Fawza Falih, was convicted of practising witchcraft, including casting an impotence spell, and sentenced to death by beheading, after allegedly being beaten and forced to fingerprint a false confession that had not been read to her."
"In 2007, Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian national, was executed, having been convicted of using sorcery in an attempt to separate a married couple, as well as of adultery and of desecrating the Quran.
Also in 2007, Abdul Hamid Bin Hussain Bin Moustafa al-Fakki, a Sudanese national, was sentenced to death after being convicted of producing a spell that would lead to the reconciliation of a divorced couple.
In 2009, Ali Sibat, a Lebanese television presenter who had been arrested whilst on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to death for witchcraft arising out of his fortune-telling on an Arab satellite channel. "
"On 12 December 2011, Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was beheaded in Al Jawf Province after being convicted of practicing witchcraft and sorcery.[124] Another very similar situation occurred to Muree bin Ali bin Issa al-Asiri and he was beheaded on 19 June 2012 in the Najran Province."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt
"Former US president Donald Trump frequently used the term on Twitter, referring to various investigations and the impeachment proceedings against him as
witch-hunts.
During his presidency
he used the phrase over 330 times
The National Rifle Association of America used the term in an unsuccessful bid to dismiss the New York attorney general's lawsuit against the organization for alleged fraud."
___
This election cycle, former President Donald Trump has made one campaign promise the most prominent:
Mass deportation. It is a long-standing vow.
In 2016, Trump said he would deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
Once in the White House, he ordered sweeping worksite raids,
enacted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries,
and deliberately separated migrant families,
many of whom have yet to be reunited."
____
"A , Donotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation.
A connotation is frequently described as either positive or negative, with regard to its pleasing or displeasing emotional connection
For example, a stubborn person may be described as being either strong-willed or pig-headed; although these have the same literal meaning (stubborn), strong-willed connotes admiration for the level of someone's will (a positive connotation), while pig-headed connotes frustration in dealing with someone (a negative connotation)."
"In logic and semantics, connotation is roughly synonymous with intension.
Connotation is often contrasted with denotation, which is more or less synonymous with extension. Alternatively, the connotation of the word may be thought of as the set of all its possible referents (as opposed to merely the actual ones"
"In any communication, in any medium or format, "subtext" is the underlying or implicit meaning that, while not explicitly stated, is understood by an audience."
"When it is an attempt to win favor by exploiting the audience's preexisting spite or disdain for something else, it is called guilt by association or an appeal to spite (Latin: argumentum ad odium).
Guilt by association is similar to ad hominem arguments
which attack the speaker rather than addressing the claims, but in this case
the ill feeling is not created by the argument;
it already exists."
*
"A form of the association fallacy often used by those denying a well-established scientific or historical proposition is the so-called Galileo gambit or Galileo fallacy.
The argument runs thus: Galileo was ridiculed in his time for his scientific observations, but was later acknowledged to be right; the proponent argues that since their non-mainstream views are provoking ridicule and rejection from other scientists, they will later be recognized as correct, like Galileo.
The gambit is flawed in that being ridiculed does not necessarily correlate with being right and that many people who have been ridiculed in history were, in fact, wrong.
Similarly, Carl Sagan has stated that people laughed at geniuses such as Christopher Columbus and the Wright brothers, but "they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".
It is often committed by those whose theories reject common scientific consensus"
*
"Propaganda techniques are methods used in propaganda to convince an audience to believe what the propagandist wants them to believe.
Many propaganda techniques are based on socio-psychological research. Many of these same techniques can be classified as logical fallacies or abusive power and control tactics."
"Manipulation can be organized or unorganized, conscious or unconscious, politically or socially motivated. The concept reaches from systematic state propaganda to manipulate public opinion (Edward Bernays) to
"sociological propaganda" (propaganda of integration), where
the unconscious desire to be manipulated and self manipulation
leads the individual to adapt to the
socially expected thoughts and behaviours
(Jacques Ellul)."
"Some techniques are categorized, analyzed and interpreted psychologically, within political psychology, especially mass psychology, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, which includes the study of cognitive distortions.
With regard to political and military conflicts, propaganda is seen as part of psychological warfare and information warfare, which gain particular importance in the era of hybrid warfare and cyberwarfare. "
"Some techniques are classified as logical fallacies, because
propaganda uses arguments which may have psychological effects
but which are logically invalid.
In rhetoric and dialectic, they are viewed as sophisms, ruses, and eristic stratagems."
"In the dialogue Euthydemus, Plato satirizes eristic. It is more than persuasion, and it is more than discourse.
It is a combination that wins an argument without regard to truth.
Plato believed that the eristic style "did not constitute a method of argument" because to argue eristically is to consciously use fallacious arguments, which therefore weakens one's position."
"According to Schopenhauer, Eristic Dialectic is mainly concerned to tabulate and analyze dishonest stratagems,
so that they may at once be recognized and defeated, in order to continue with a productive dialectic debate.
It is for this very reason that Eristic Dialectic must admittedly take victory, and not objective truth, for its selfish aim and purpose."
___
Exported gas produces far worse emissions than coal, major study finds
Research challenges idea that sending liquefied natural gas around the world is cleaner alternative to burning coal
"Drilling, moving, cooling and shipping gas from one country to another uses so much energy
that the actual final burning of gas in people’s homes and businesses
only accounts for
about a third of the total emissions
from this process, the research finds."
"Howarth’s paper finds that as much as 3.5% of the gas delivered to customers leaks to the atmosphere unburned, much more than previously assumed.
Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,
even though it persists for less time in the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that rising global methane emissions risk blowing apart agreed-upon climate goals."
"...it is supercooled to -162C (-260F) to become a liquid, which is loaded into huge storage containers on tankers. The tankers then travel long distances to deliver the product to client countries, where it is turned back into a gas and then burned.
“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal,” said Howarth.
“The science is pretty clear here: it’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions..”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/04/exported-liquefied-natural-gas-coal-study
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