imagine being the first amish bitch in your village to like get your body done like ass shots titties done and like beat face contoured… and then you walked into like the saloon or whatever amish people have and everyone dropped their irish fiddles and was shookedt? like everyone churning butter was just in shock and you walked across the artisanal wood floors in your wantmylook.com thigh high lace up heeled boots like your life depended on it… yes god
(via federalbureauofislam)
Paris Hilton posted a Snapchat of herself yelling “fuck you” at coyotes while listening to Tik Tok by Kesha.
me DAY 1 as president
I can’t believe
you know why american liberal politicians are so fucking sinister? because they’re actually competent at their jobs. they’re technocrats. a politician like hillary clinton gets her hands on the levers of power and she actually knows how to use them in a way other than sending everything full-throttle into screaming oblivion
the republicans, you see, prefer optics. they tend to be satisfied with inflammatory rhetoric backed up by only the most hamfisted applications of state-backed violence (they never really liked the federal government anyway, and they don’t have a taste for its nuance). they’re good at getting to be in charge - for half a century now they’ve been continuously one step ahead of the democrats in manipulating the masses - but once they’re there they act like looters, not fiduciaries
it took nixon to propose the idea of the drug war. it took reagan to turn it into a bonafide national hysteria. but through the 1980s this was primarily a phenomenon of mass psychology, not a hegemonic new system of racial oppression with a firm base of material exploitation. it took clintonian political maneuvering to actually build the new prisons required to hold a significant fraction of the black and latino population. it took clintonian bipartisanship to actually put military-grade weapons in the hands of police. bill clinton’s major accomplishment was taking a blitz offensive launched against people of color by american conservatives and making its gains sustainable. this is something competent, consolidating leaders do. in america, liberal politicians are those leaders
obama, by the same token, acted as a consolidator for all the advances of capital during the bush years. bush spoke of an eternal ‘war on terror’, but could only make clumsy, brute-force efforts at getting us there - the strategy of making it a literal war requiring the commitment of hundreds of thousands of troops was falling apart long before he was out of office. it took obama - a technocrat, a bipartisan, a political maneuverer par excellence - to bring to reality the vision of a forever war constituted by drone warfare and black-ops ‘surgical strikes’
the contemporary wave of anti-immigrant sentiment in the united states arose in earnest under bush (although it should be noted, of course, that much of the actual influx was prompted by clinton’s free-trade policies). bush and his advisors exploited and amplified anti-immigrant rhetoric for political gain, but their proposed answers to the ‘problem’ had all the crude inadequacy typical of american conservative policies: build a wall (largely an excuse to funnel tax money to contractors) and hire tens of thousand of border-patrol agents. competent politician barack obama entered office, inherited a crumbling and unsustainable border infrastructure, and set about elevating anti-immigrant persecution to the status of hegemony. it is obama’s competence that allowed him to deport more immigrants than any other president in history. it is obama’s competence that allowed him to leverage clintonian mass incarceration to turn ICE into an effective and deeply entrenched institution
to describe hillary as a ‘competent’ or ‘qualified’ presidential candidate is firmly the most damning thing you can say about her
Go ahead and have a fucking sip babes
(Source: sissy-elliot, via diaz-devan)
(Source: captincannabiscrunch-blog, via capacity)
Anonymous asked: Hey, I just wanted to ask you if you had any good reading recommendations for witchcraft/magic? You seem like the kind of person who would, and I'm just fascinated by the topics but overwhelmed by the lit. xx
Hello. So, brace yourself: this is going to be a very long post, though I hope it covers a good range of academic writing, fiction and other forms of literature, not to mention a wide variety of genres.
Theories of Magic.
Owen Davies’ Magic: A Very Short Introduction (x) is brief and broad but it points outward in many directions depending on your area of interest.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic” (x) and Tambiah’s “Magic, Science and Religion (x), both try to draw lines of division between different kinds of “theoretical” or “ideal” belief & practice.
Alan Moore theorises about magic as language / linguistic art.
Histories of Magic & Witchcraft.
If you’re looking for historical inspiration or in-depth exploration of magical beliefs and folklore and practices and the shifting concept of magic in the cultural imagination, you could look at:-
- Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (pdf): brilliant wide-ranging exploration of books of spells and how their writings interweave magic and religion, particularly extra-biblical magic (e.g. The American “hex murders” of the early twentieth century, citing malevolent use of the seventh book of mosses to murder unwanted spouses, or a cabal of sorcerers trying to assassinate Louis XIV).
- Ogden’s Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (pdf) deals in ancient sorcerers (male and female), shamans and evocators, witches, ghosts and necromancy and the undead, binding spells and curses, erotic magic, kolossoi (Greek equivalent of voodoo dolls), &c.
- Kieckhefer’s Magic in the Middle Ages (pdf) and Forbidden Rites: a Necromancer’s Manual of The Fifteenth Century are both excellent.
- Kors & Peters, Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: the demonisation of folklore and the growing perception that sorcery & witchcraft were the single greatest threat to medieval Christian Europe.
- Frances Yates on renaissance hermeticism—The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (pdf) is wonderful.
- “Witchcraft and Magic”, a video lecture about belief and superstition and persecution in Tudor & Stuart England; “Science, Magic, and Religion”, a video lecture series.
- Tangentially, Carlo Ginsburg’s The Night Battles is about a cult of Benandanti in 16th century Italy who claimed to do spiritual battle with witches at night and it’s completely fascinating.
- Yvonne Chireau’s Black Magic: about the conjuring tradition amongst African Americans, the power & stigma attached to its practitioners, its fraught relation to Christian belief.
- Ozark Magic and Folklore (pdf): an incredible document of disappearing beliefs in witchcraft and folk magic and monsters and charms and omens.
- There are dozens of books on the Salem witch trials; the most evocative and detailed I’ve read are Frances Hill’s A Delusion of Satan and A Storm of Witchcraft.
- There’s also the infamous fifteenth century text on witch-hunting, Malleus Maleficarum (the hammer of the witches), pivotal in shaping the modern image of witches and driving hysteria.
Cornell university has a digital witchcraft collection focused on witchcraft as a matter of theology & religious heresy, e.g. manuscripts and books on demonology, the inquisition, court records of witch-trials, depositions from suspected witches given after imprisonment & torture.
For gender and witchcraft, there’s Diane Purkiss’s The Witch in History (pdf), exploring the changing image of English witches between the Tudor/Stuart age and the twentieth century, and Breuer’s Crafting the Witch.