Yet another abandoned blog

I can’t help but feel that the news media sometimes chooses to focus on the wrong thing when reporting crimes. I just read an article about a guy convicted of a series of robbery-related murders that kept weirdly emphasising the “strangers” part of “killing strangers for money”, and I’m like… would it have been less bad if he’d been killing people he knew for money?

(Warning: mild conspiracy thinking ahead.)

I suspect the reporter was pushing the "Stranger Danger" narrative. Statistically most perpetrators of violent crime know their victims, at least casually. However, Our Corporate Masters want us to fear strangers, outsiders, and (by extension) foreigners and minorities. Why?

As "everybody" "knows", Those People do Bad Things. They're always in the news doing Bad Things. Whereas People Like Us hardly ever do Bad Things, otherwise they'd be in the news more often. So you can trust People Like Us to protect you against People Like Them.

Do the rich think the stones assemble themselves? With the donors' names engraved on them?

Or does the thought of giving money to The Pöor -- any money, for any reason -- horrify them so much?

Do it for your foremothers that never got the chance.

Translation: America can’t celebrate 100 years of female suffrage until 2065

a saboteur

revolt against the modern world

I always forget how fucking wild pangolins are

If yall could stop lumping Dia de Muertos in your little Halloween events and shit that'd be great cause like...its not Halloween. It's not Mexican/"ethnique" Halloween it's not some cute little Halloween after party, it is its own thing.

Edit: yes you can reblog this

Pickman’s Model is literally the best Lovecraft story  this guy found himself some ghouls who were nice and friendly enough to model for him it’s just the whole thing’s being told by a narrator who’s freaked out by the ghouls.

So many of Lovecraft’s best stories as just ‘people living peacefully with monsters, witnessed by somebody who is freaked the fuck out by the whole notion’. Take a look at The Festival for another example.

The thing that gets me about the whole “I don’t want my tax dollars being used to subsidise other people’s problems” business is that literally every form of public policy it’s used to argue against directly and materially benefits me even if I never avail myself of their services. Comprehensive health care means I’m less likely to contract some bizarre disease from casual contact with a complete stranger. Good schools mean my stuff is less likely to be vandalised by bored teenagers. The existence of these programs confers immediate and measurable benefits to me, personally. Like, I don’t need to give a shit about other people – even pure self-interest argues in their favour!

I'd settle for incarcerated.

Heck, I'd settled for bankrupted by fines.

speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.

The biggest points against the hat hypothesis:

You know what kind of hat does closely fit?

The hat in this painting (“Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren Edward and Elizabeth Bagot” by J.M. Wright; circa 1675) was “a type worn by affluent women throughout Britain at this date”. Look at that hat. Any modern viewer looking at this painting might think it was supposed to be a character created by J.K. Rowling.

It’s a match in design, gender, region, and most importantly, time period: by the time that pointed witch hats started to appear in artwork in England and English colonies, this style of hat would have been associated in the cultural consciousness with elderly women, especially those who were clinging to decades-old fashions.

The easy, simple answer to where the witch hat came from: it’s exactly what a woman with all the stereotypical qualities of a witch would have worn in the first place, in the time and place the trope originated. 

Old-fashioned but not by several centuries, severe and somber, and popular with a class of women that people would have spread nasty rumors about in the first place (so many accusations of witchcraft were directed specifically at women who were independently well-off, whether out of simple envy or else scheming).

Seemed like about time to bring this back up.

Another very obvious and often explicitly stated basis for the CLOTHING of the cartoon witch is Puritan costume from the 18th century… seeing as Puritans were famous for their witch trials. The green skin, curly hair, big nose, warts etc are all definitely at least racialized things. Though big nose and warts are associated with age the combined picture is pretty much just a racial caricature.

The green skin is a product of old makeup practices. To make something look extra-pale on black & white film, you didn’t use white, because the monochrome film was blue-sensitive:

This is why so many classic movie monsters were rendered as green—because public appearances and the rare color image of he actors in full makeup would be a blueish-green. Filming for black & white even affected the props and scenery. This is what the Addams Family’s house really looked like:

Important input on the witchy costume debate, from a Jewish person who’s clearly done a bit of homework on the origins of pointy hats and green makeup. (And who also seems to be a pretty cool person into the bargain.)

@ayellowbirds - Thank you for this! :)

I’ve reblogged this before, but it’s got new info, which is great

I’d also argue that, though certain aspects of the stereotypical witch align with antisemitic tropes, it’s far more likely that witches’ stereotypical looks actually emerged by being the polar opposite of what the beautiful, and therefore ideal, 17th century woman looked like. This was to emphasize that a witch was the OPPOSITE of an ideal woman, and she could thus be placed in opposition to the beautiful, ideal heroine.

Where beauty (according to 17th century standards) was young, witches were old. Where beauty had fine, delicate features, witches had exaggerated, rough features. Where beauty was relatively unmarred (a rarity in pre-vaccination days), witches had moles and other marks. Where beauty had silky blonde hair (a treasured prize in Renaissance times, to the point that women falsely lightened their hair or wore wigs), witches had rough black hair.

As I said, some of these line up with antisemitic tropes. However, I’d argue that associating Jews with these tropes was a result of already-established patriarchal beauty tropes that had been ingrained in northern Europe for centuries. The fact that the stereotypical Jewish woman happened to defy the beauty ideals of northern Europe was used as an excuse to further oppress Jewish people, not the other way around.

In other words, I’d guess that it went like this:

“Ugliness/evil looks like this” -> “Some Jewish women (who we hate) look like this” -> “here’s proof that Jewish women are ugly and evil”

Rather than:

“Jewish women look like this” -> “we hate Jewish people” -> “Ugliness and evil looks like this”

Of course, once both tropes (ugly witches, ugly Jews) were established, I imagine that they fed into one another, but I’m dubious of the claim that the source of the ugly witch was the Jewish woman, especially since northern European ideas of beauty and fears of malevolent witches seem to go back further than northern European stereotypes of the ugly Jewish woman.

Augh, and COMPLETELY forgot to talk about this, but the stereotypical witch outfit? It comes from traditional English brewsters/alewives, aka, female beer-brewers.

Who used brooms mounted above the door as a way to signal their trade to passerby: 

And who made their trade making strange concoctions in cauldrons: 

And who happened to wear hats just like this:

Brewsters/alewives used to have a monopoly on beer-making. They handed down brewing secrets from mother to daughter and basically controlled the alcohol market. And men weren’t terribly keen on that - they wanted in on this immensely lucrative, influential field. There were some male brewsters, but the trade was overwhelmingly female, to the point that even male brewsters were still called brewsters - a female noun. 

So what do men do when they want to push women out of a trade? They demonise them. 

Suddenly the broom isn’t just a business sign, it’s a tool for going to meet the devil. The cauldron isn’t just a tool, it’s a place to create evil. The hat isn’t just a trade uniform, it’s a mark of malevolent intent and arcane knowledge. 

Coincidentally, many women who became brewsters/alewives became independently wealthy and quite powerful locally. They didn’t need to marry and could provide for their entire households with their trade. They could grow old without marrying, or they could stay unmarried after their first husband dies rather than remarrying. They could also pull strings and influence things in their favour, making local politics ‘mysteriously’ go their way.

And so the stereotype of the ugly spinster brewster-witch is born.

And, as I’ve said above, ugly women look a certain way: harsh, marred features, dark, tangled hair, and above all, old.

Note old Mother Louse up there. She was a well-respected brewster in her town, with plenty of influence, but here she is already being portrayed with stereotypical witch features: a big, hooked nose, and a pointy chin, hollow eyes, sharp cheekbones (not a good thing in premordern times - beauties had rounder faces, as sharp cheekbones were a sign of hunger or oldness). Mother Louse isn’t being portrayed as Jewish, but as an elderly, ugly spinster, who engages in the lucrative, powerful - but suspect - business of brewing.

Know who else this happened to? Midwives. Another female trade, passed down from woman to woman, dealing in business secrets from which men were barred - and this in regard to the most mysterious power of all: the power to bring life into the world. And midwives do pretty well for themselves, too: plenty of families are willing to pay a bundle to make sure their babies are delivered safe and sound in a world with high infant mortality. Just like male physicians, midwives knew how to create tinctures and mix herbs, but now, once again, rudimentary chemistry and herb-lore become demonised when women are the ones doing it. Now, if your baby is born sick, deformed, or dead, it’s clearly the spinster midwife’s doing, full of spite because she has no children of her own.

Anyway, there’s your witch history for the day. The hooked nose and black hair are already something of a stretch, but the claim that the typical witch hat is somehow linked to anti-semitism and not brewsters is totally ahistorical.

Witches that’s some handy information right there

This is what I’ve been saying.

A useful map to send to your racist uncles.