Originally published at: Connecticut pardons the "witches" it executed centuries ago | Boing Boing
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The terrifying part is there’s still morons who believe in witchcraft and would happily execute anyone accused as such.
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I’m from Windsor. Up until now, we took these events as a point of pride. Now, we have nothing. 
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I was just up in Mystic, Conn. over the weekend where witches can still be seen enjoying the outdoors.
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Seems a little bit late, and honestly surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
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Case in point:
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That they were witches and that as such were a danger to society? Yeah, I think we dare. You fucking asshole you.
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The “They’d never overturn Roe v. Wade” to " no fault divorce is a misandrist conspiracy" to “maybe we should be holding witch trials” timeline is moving WAY faster that dystopian fiction can even keep up with.
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He said it was arrogant of lawmakers to think they know better than those at other times of history, without being presented the same set of facts.
It sounds like someone missed out on the whole Enlightenment thing.
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Rome went from being a republic to not being able to imagine any alternative to having an emperor, even after Caligula, in 70 years.
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Yeah, fat lot of good it’s doing me now!
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We are regressing (as a whole).
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I like how “I wasn’t there, I don’t know” is a fine excuse for Republicans to use when defending certain misogyny, but not other, more modern misogyny they weren’t there to witness personally, which they’re just fine offering their opinions about.
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You still got the Shad Derby, right?
Oh. Maybe that’s nothing to be proud of.
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it’s nice they can have it both ways.
And if you needed further proof that Alito is pure evil and wants to take the U.S. back to a time when women’s bodies were property for men to control, know that one of the people he cited in his opinion was an English jurist who defended marital rape and had women executed for “witchcraft.”…. Yes, Alito literally quoted [Hale], who was born in 1609
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The “presuming that it might be possible to know better is so arrogant” line of argument is more of a post-enlightenment reactionary thing than a missed-the-enlightenment one.
It’s sort of a weird crossover favorite: you can get it from really lefty postmodern and postcolonial critiques of enlightenment universalism, the scientific method, etc. as basically just being the epistemological wing of the European imperialist project, brutally deployed against assorted indigenous ways of knowing; but it has also been picked up opportunistically by all sorts of people who have a position of local strength but look really shabby from outside in order to argue that any interference with their little fiefdom is the real oppression. Common among fundies covering for their little cult’s particularly absurd claims; unpleasant dictatorships claiming that appeals to universal human rights are a brutal neo-imperialist pretext for meddling in their internal affairs, that sort of thing.
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I know that it’s just silly fiction, but I didn’t really like that in the WandaVision show (and, I assume, also the comics?) Marvel seemed to imply that the witches in 17th century Massachusetts were guilty as charged. That’s not a helpful idea to have in our pop culture.
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In comics, magic is real. Witches are real. So this makes sense in that universe. Ours is not that universe. These guys are morons. Period.
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Yeah, but there are plenty of other not-our-universe stories that can cause real harm to or at the very least disrespect to real people in this universe when they portray real victims as villians. Stories have power.
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So so much this. The argument from anti-science types (from both ends of politics) that always leaves me speechless boils down to it being arrogant to assume we can know anything for sure (or with high confidence). They use more obfuscating flowery language, but it always boils down to “nothing can be known, thus all opinions are valid”. How do you even debate that level of cultural relativism run amok?
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