wwiitchcraft

[wwiitchcraft]

[wwiitchcraft]

before spotify wrapped comes out i just want to let everyone know that i am very very very normal and sane and happy person

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[wwiitchcraft]

There were a duo of murderers in 1800s Scotland named Burke and Hare who killed at least 16 people for the sake of selling them to anatomists for dissection. After they were caught, Burke was sentenced to be hanged, and at the time the judge said:

"Your body should be publicly dissected and anatomized. And I trust, that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes"

And indeed both of those things they did do to his corpse afterward. His corpse was dissected publicly at the University of Edinburgh. A minor riot broke out because more students wanted to get inside than tickets were available. His skeleton was preserved. You can still see it at the Edinburgh Medical School. That's not all that was done though. During the dissection, the professor performing it wrote a message with Burke's blood, and supposedly his skin was used to bind a book and create a calling card.

At the time, the bodies of murderers were actually the only ones legal to use for dissection. However, the Burke and Hare murders (and similar murders afterward) sparked a law 2 years after Burke was put to death that finally allowed the donating of bodies, but also disallowed the practice of using murderer's corpses. So Burke's big public dissection almost becomes ironic in a way.

I suppose all that happened to his body after his death was considered retribution for his crime, but can you really call it retribution when done to a dead man? He certainly is unaffected by it. His and his partner's crimes sent a shockwave of fear through everyone who heard about what they'd been doing. Could it have been considered an act of closure for a scared public? Did any of that actually make anyone feel better? I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

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Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.

“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”

From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.

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Go off, king

Pull the trigger

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vehicular manslaughter chappell roan be like you can hit a hundred boys with cars

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Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi

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worst part about getting angry is how much it makes you want to be mean

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favorite pokemon

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my god you're fucked: the lady at the help desk just went to ask someone else for help with your issue and everyone's got a confused look on

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valjean: come to that, can you be sure that i am not your man?

the dubious inspector javert:

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sorry i was passionate & intense & insane. it will happen again

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[wwiitchcraft]

think of all the horrors that i promised you i’d bring

[ more mouthwashing x the amazing devil art ]