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Doug McGrave

@dougmccrae.bsky.social

"European Witch Trials" flair on r/AskHistorians. Also interested in old superhero comics, comedy, horror, and ttrpgs.

3520 Posts900 Follower638 Folgt
Doug McGrave@dougmccrae.bsky.social · 2d ago

Silver Age Superman comics are simultaneously conservative and subversive. There are constant antitheses, reversals, transformations, and disguises. This panel is from Action Comics #264 (May 1960).

Comic panel. Supergirl is putting on a Superman costume -- "stilt legs... muscle-padding... a plastic head mask" -- so she can go into action without revealing her existence to the world.
jenny tightpants@jtp.bsky.social · 4w ago

"the author of that harry potter story leads an insane cult that's captured much of the media in this country" is a different person if you're in the UK or the US

Doug McGrave@dougmccrae.bsky.social · last mo.

This is awful. A long derelict building in Possil, Glasgow being renovated to provide social housing has been deliberately torched. In July and August the development was the target of anti-immigrant protests based on the false claim that it would house migrants. #Glasgow

Police probe deliberate fire at Glasgow tenement amid asylum seeker rumours

The building in Stonyhurst Street, Possilpark - which has been derelict for 20 years - had received £3m to be renovated as affordable homes.

bbc.co.uk

Doug McGrave@dougmccrae.bsky.social · last mo.

In colonial Salem, Superman wants Batman to be burned for witchcraft. But Benjamin Franklin shows up with a protest petition signed by the Founding Fathers. World's Finest Comics #187 (1969).

Four panel comics page. Batman is in the stocks. Superman says that he has "been found guilty of witchcraft... the law must take its course... Batman must be destroyed by fire!" In the last panel Batman is tied to a stake. Benjamin Franklin appears. He says that "witches and sorcerers don't exist, except in superstitious minds!" He has a petition with the names of the "signers of the Declaration of Independence protesting such barbaric punishment!"
Doug McGrave@dougmccrae.bsky.social · last mo.

Have been enjoying reading some absolutely ridiculous superhero comics from the early 60s this evening. I love how gleeful and cocky Paste-Pot Pete is about his paste, which, on the face of it, is not a particularly potent weapon. "Anyone who tries to stop me will get a taste of paste!"

Two comics panels featuring Paste-Pot Pete, a supervillain who wears a purple beret. Some ordinary citizens try to capture him but he glues their feet to the ground, proclaiming "Paste is the supreme weapon!"Paste-Pot Pete uses his paste on some soldiers. As he does so he laughs and says "Anyone who tries to stop me will get a taste of paste!"Paste-Pot Pete again, firing his paste gun and saying "Here's a nice sticky present for you, Torch!" The gun looks somewhat phallic suggesting a double meaning.
Doug McGrave@dougmccrae.bsky.social · last mo.

Looks like William Blatty used the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) as a source for a passage in The Exorcist about a midwife in Switzerland who murdered "thirty or forty babies". The first two excerpts are from Blatty, the third from Montague Summers' translation of the Malleus.

“Well, I really don’t know about ritual murder,” said Karras. “I don’t. But a midwife in Switzerland once confessed to the murder of thirty or forty babies foruse at Black Mass. Oh, well, maybe she was tortured,” he amended. “Who knows? But she certainly told a convincing story. She said she'd hide a long, thin needle up her sleeve, so that when she was delivering the baby, she’d slip out the needle and stick it through the crown of the baby’s head, and then hide the needle again. No marks,” he said, glancing at Kinderman. “The baby looked stillborn. You've heard of the prejudice European Catholics used to have against midwives? Well, that’s how it started.”Moreover (as was said in the First Part of the work), it was shown by the confession of the servant, who was brought to judgement at Breisach, that the greatest injuries to the Faith as regards the heresy of witches are done by midwives; and this is made clearer than daylight itself by the confessions of some who were afterwards burned. For in the diocese of Basel at the town of Dann, a witch who was burned confessed that she had killed more than forty children, by sticking a needle through the crowns of their heads into their brains, as they came out from the womb.
Doug McGrave@dougmccrae.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A valuable piece of writing, dispelling many popular myths about the witch trials. It's from H. C. Erik Midelfort's Witchcraft entry in "Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World" Vol 6 (2004).

Witchcraft. Despite a generation of excellent research, the history of witchcraft remains bedeviled by a host of misperceptions. Ordinary readers often assume that the major witch-hunts occurred in the Middle Ages, that they were conducted by the Catholic Church, and that they reflected the prescientific notions and sexual fantasies of fanatics and neurotics. Elsewhere one can read that huge chain reaction witch trials constituted a ‘‘women’s holocaust’’ accounting for millions of deaths, and that the witch-hunters especially targeted midwives and female healers. All of these conclusions are both wrong and misleading. The great age of witchcraft trials came after 1430, and primarily after 1570. The prosecuting magistrates were almost always secular officials, imbued with the best thinking of prominent theologians, philosophers, and even scientists. The numbers of those executed have often been exaggerated by a factor of one or two hundred. Men made up perhaps a quarter of those executed, and there is little evidence that midwives or healers were singled out for suspicion anywhere. But historical prejudices are hard to uproot.
James Hell Brooks@kleinman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Every hour there's a story of like a Norwegian death metal guy saying hey I never met Dolly Parton but she sent me a handwritten note saying she loved our song Corpse in the Copse and to keep speaking our truth

Peter@notalawyer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“if we don’t stand up for the free speech of racists, it puts everyone’s free speech in danger.” - guy who only ever talks about free speech when it’s racism

Anil Dash@anildash.com · 2mo ago

So, it’s not a conspiracy, and you are not imagining it. The biggest and wealthiest tech leaders are genuine fascists. They are leading an active and intentional systematic attack on labor. And they have radicalized each other while sidelining or removing the remaining decent execs in the industry.