Doug McCrae
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dougmccrae.bsky.social
Doug McCrae
@dougmccrae.bsky.social
670 followers 660 following 2.1K posts
C15–C18 European witch trials; superhero comics (old); ttrpgs; horror movies
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Reposted by Doug McCrae
irhottakes.bsky.social
This is actually a weirdly boring time to specialize in International Relations because there's no actual intellectual substance to any of this. Like, yeah, man. Shit's fucked. Fucker's nutso. That sort of insight is why I'm a fancy-pants political scientist you should all respect and consult.
January 21, 2026 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
indianawalsh.bsky.social
Gary Larson: In my cartoon I invented Cow Tools as a cautionary tale

Cows: At long last, we have created the Cow Tools from classic newspaper comic Cow Tools
January 19, 2026 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
drkyliesmith.bsky.social
I am pleased to be doing an AMA on r/AskHistorians @askhistorians.bsky.social today, you can ask me anything (within reason!) about my new book "Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South" )published by @uncpress.bsky.social) here: www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...
From the AskHistorians community on Reddit: I'm Dr. Kylie Smith, a professor at Emory University, and I'm here to talk about my new book "Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the Ame...
Explore this post and more from the AskHistorians community
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January 14, 2026 at 1:41 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
America's current form of government predicted by a science fiction story from 1940: Robert Leitfred's "Seven Seconds of Eternity" in Weird Tales.
The President, and the nine men who now run our government in place of the antiquated Congress and Senate, are more concerned over this national catastrophe than they're willing to admit. As a matter of fact, Langham, they're downright frightened. Right?
January 12, 2026 at 12:08 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
drdragases.bsky.social
January 12, 2026 at 8:03 AM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
georgy-k-zhukov.bsky.social
2025 is wrapped up, so as always, I'm revisiting what I wrote on @askhistorians.bsky.social last year:

One of the more timely questions, and one of my favorite answers, was whether people thought Hitler was 'stupid', to which I took a generous interpretation: www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...
Did Germans think that Hitler was stupid?
www.reddit.com
January 11, 2026 at 2:14 AM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
nytpitchbot.bsky.social
As a principled libertarian, I believe that anyone who doesn't immediately do what ICE says should be shot dead. And as a principled states' rights advocate, I believe that the federal government should not allow states to prosecute these shootings.
January 9, 2026 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
ryanlcooper.com
"The U.S. oil industry needs Trump to swoop in and add another few million barrels a day of production like it needs a hole in the head." prospect.org/2026/01/06/t...
Trump’s Cargo Cult Imperialism in Venezuela - The American Prospect
Stealing Venezuela's oil is lunacy, but that won’t stop Donald Trump from trying.
prospect.org
January 6, 2026 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
joegross.bsky.social
Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago
January 4, 2026 at 6:49 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
Last paragraph of Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay, "The End of History?":
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care-taking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.
December 18, 2025 at 1:39 AM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
If you see this, re-post with your model of positive masculinity.
Postmodern superhero, Flex Mentallo.
December 17, 2025 at 1:43 AM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
Artistic works depicting the removal of a cranial object that impedes intellectual capacity:

1) Pieter Huys, "Excising the Stone of Folly" (1561).
2) The Simpsons, Season 12 Episode 9, "HOMR" (Jan 7, 2001).
Dutch painting depicting a surgeon making an incision in a patient's forehead. X-Ray of Homer Simpson's head indicating the presence of a crayon in his brain.
December 16, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
tylerhuckabee.bsky.social
this is not behavior becoming of a FIFA Peace Prize recipient.
December 15, 2025 at 8:18 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
I answered a question on #askhistorians about why witches were mostly male in places such as Iceland, Russia, and Normandy. #witches #witchtrials

www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...
DougMcCrae's comment on "Why were male witches more common in some parts of Europe during the witch trials?"
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December 15, 2025 at 2:54 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
This form of magic, found in the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri, sounds like it was the inspiration for the magic in Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea books.
As for speech, it relied on an idiosyncratic and eclectic repertoire of artificial names of power, known collectively as voces magicae or nomina barbara, which, according to the practitioners, were the secret, authentic names of the deities and demons addressed. None have meaning in any human language, yet many derive etymologically from divine epithets and set phrases in Egyptian and Semitic. Garbled in Greek transcription, they were esteemed as a speech register that transcends human language.
December 14, 2025 at 2:11 AM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
drnaomibaker.bsky.social
I’m currently answering questions about Voices of Thunder on the thread below - ask away, if you have any questions! #earlymodern
December 12, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
erikahall.bsky.social
It's so fucked up to have been a kid during the D&D is the devil freakout and the Tipper Gore dirty lyrics freakout and live to see the teen suicide machine get such a pass.
December 12, 2025 at 5:40 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
What the fuck?!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_of...
Wire of Death - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
December 11, 2025 at 12:57 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
Nostalgia for the Edwardian period in Kenneth Allsop's "The Angry Decade" (1958). I've noticed something similar in episodes of "The Twilight Zone" (1959–1964) where the idyll is typically a small town, circa 1900.
It is difficult to prove this sort of statement, but I personally have, and I believe a great many men and women in my age group have, an intense nostalgic longing for the security and the innocence that seems to have been present in Britain before the 1914 war. It has become almost a tribal ancestral memory. While being aware that I am romantically glossing it all over into a sunny simplicity, for me that period is a montage of striped blazers and parasols in Henley punts, tea on the lawn with spotted flycatchers hawking from the tennis net, and Ernest A. Shepard London squares with autumn fires glinting on the brass fenders in the drawing rooms. I know that there was grinding poverty, and hideous living conditions too, yet I am sure that the Victorians and Edwardians had an inner confidence that we shall never know.
December 10, 2025 at 2:56 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
That's crazy. Imagine continuing to believe that WWI was a futile waste of life even though leading military historian, John Terraine, has carefully explained that there was simply no other option than to deliberately kill millions of people.
On the script writing team were the two leading military historical iconoclasts of the 1960s, Correlli Barnett and John Terraine. Both held views on the First World War that were sharply at odds with prevailing wisdom. Haig, according to Terraine, pursued a strategy of attrition - the only possible strategy, he argued, given the circumstances - which wore down the German army, and prepared it for the coup de grace delivered by the Allies in 1918. His fundamental thesis, although frequently assailed over the last forty years, has yet to have been demolished. The BBC television series seemed to have matched the man with the hour; here, at last, was a golden opportunity to present an alternative viewpoint to a mass audience. John Terraine wrote the scripts for the all-important programmes covering the battles of the Somme and Third Ypres. Yet his viewpoint was ignored, or at least not understood, by the audience; instead, the series ended up reinforcing the existing perception of the war as a futile waste of life. In the case of the Passchendaele episode, entitled 'Surely We have Perished, it seems that Terraine's revisionism was overwhelmed by extracts from the poetry of Sassoon and Owen. The public reaction to the Great War series suggests that programmes do not have to carry an explicitly anti-war message to build up negative images in viewers minds: all they need to do is to show scenes of carnage.
December 9, 2025 at 12:03 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
We should look into the possibility of Angelo being Scottish.
When, in 1526, a servant boy called Angelo was reported in Toledo for saying ‘I deny God and Our Fucking Lady, the whore of the cuckolded arsehole’, he probably (as he protested) had no intention of propounding a complex theology based upon the non-existence of God and the sexual activity of Mary.
December 7, 2025 at 2:57 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
cooperlund.online
The way to understand the second Trump administration is as a content generation machine. They aren’t implementing fascism, they’re creating fascism-flavored content. They aren’t implementing real policy, they’re signing executive orders to post about them. Anything that gets attention is the goal.
gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social · Dec 6
I don't really know what the administration hopes to gain by picking fights with the most well-liked pop artists in the United States. You're just generating backlash for no discernible reason outside of owning the libs.
annabower.bsky.social Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · Dec 6
Sabrina Carpenter ratioed the White House after it used her song in an ICE video.

The WH deleted the post…but now it’s back with a new ICE video, this time using an altered clip from Carpenter’s SNL monologue.
December 6, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Doug McCrae
vituperativeerb.bsky.social
It feels like a large part of both culture and politics these days is people wondering “why don’t I feel the way I did when I was 12”
December 3, 2025 at 5:01 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
In 1573, however, the Parlement issued a regulation permitting the people to be armed in certain areas of the county, not as a defensive strategy against wolves but as an offensive aimed at the increasing number of humans magically transformed into wolves: ... this court has permitted and permits the residents and inhabitants of the named localities and others, irrespective of the hunting statutes to assemble armed with clubs, halberds, pikes, arquebuses and other cudgels and without fear of punishment to hunt down the named werewolves wherever they might find, catch, shoot or kill them. In 1632 the ‘Parlement’ in Dôle renewed the edict on organized wolf and werewolf hunts for large areas of Franche-Comté after hearing reports of wolf attacks on people and livestock. In fact, the authorities went even further this time and ordered paid hunters to be appointed. When wolves were sighted near a village, the church bells were to be rung and the villagers were to assemble and be counted. This way, thus the reasoning of the jurists, it would be easier to identify any absentees as werewolves.
November 28, 2025 at 2:03 PM
dougmccrae.bsky.social
Really enjoying Pluribus, a TV show about one woman's fight against a hive mind. Her main personality trait is that she hates hive minds. They will probably reveal that it's because both her parents were murdered by a hive mind when she was a child. #Pluribus #hivemind
November 28, 2025 at 1:07 AM