Foucault!!

This was, by far, my favorite book of the quarter.  I read it twice, and enjoyed it both times. One of the things that got me thinking the most was the idea of normality and abnormality.  Although I suppose I knew this in the back of my mind, I never thought about how society determines what is normal by first determining what is not normal, and that it needs abnormality for normality to exist. 

I also have conflicting ideas about how Foucault thought that one needed to have a good background in philosophy to understand his work.  While I do think that is is good to have knowledge, even a little bit of knowledge, about everything, I do think that if you read or learn something you are not prepared for, you can misunderstand it and make a whole bunch of mistakes.  Your limited background knowledge could lead you to wildly misinterpret the work, and then you go spouting it off to other people, so then they misunderstand it, and it is a big giant cycle of misinformation.

Beccaria

I was having difficulties understanding the text, and then I came across these questions:

"Is the punishment of death really useful, or necessary for the safety or good order of society? Are tortures and torments consistent with justice, or do they answer the end proposed by the laws? Which is the best method of preventing crimes? Are the same punishments equally useful at all times?"

These are the same questions I have been asking myself when reading about all the torture and death going on in all of the readings.  Obviously, a lot of the punishments the governments came up with were not working, because people would continue to commit the crimes.  Sometimes, such as in the case of infanticide, the punishment was one of the causes of the crime.  If only people in power has thought of this more, a lot of lives could have been saved.  Later, as I was still mulling over these questions, I came about this statement:

"Yet another method of preventing crimes is, to reward virtue"

What a brilliant idea!  I had read this once before (it was a children's book, but the idea was still there) and forgotten about it, but as I read this simple statement, it reminded me of the sheer genius of the idea.  If you train dogs with positive reinforcement, why not use the same concept with humans?

the end of Kunze

alrighty then.  Once again, I was very, very disturbed by all the torture going on.  Is it really necessary to torture the condemned before they die?  Doesn't that make you just as bad as the people you have sentenced to death? A lot of the things they did were so horrific to me that I could barely read it, such as the red hot pincers and forcing the child to watch.  The thing that got me through was thinking about The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Whenever I think of burning witches, I think of Quasimodo saving Esmerelda, and that helps me to get through it.  But... speaking of the Hunchback, and Frollo, how did the officials justify this?  Didn't someone, anyone raise any objections to this?

Women as Witches, Men as Witches

I admit that I do not know a lot about real witchcraft - well, not real witchcraft, but more real than Disney movies.  However, I though I knew a fair amount about the basic lore, but I have never heard anything about using children's hands for magic.  And now that I do know, the thought disturbs me.  A lot.  Cutting off children's hands, and especially the hands of aborted babies, really makes my stomach turn.  It kind if makes me wonder about the people who came up with these ideas.  What was going through their heads when they made these accusations?  Another thing I decided I should have thought of was the Devil persuading witches to commit crimes.  Even though I have read things about warlocks and magicians using spirits to commit magic, for some reason I never made the connection between the Devil and witches before now.

Enlightenment Theory and Criminal Justice

Ahh, the old vinegar lady.  The whole situation surrounding her creeped me out a little bit.  Poisonous vinegar.  I found it funny how she was simply selling poison as a magic potion to people to kill their enemies and they decided she was a witch.  Anyone else with her powers of observation could have done the same thing and made a profit off of it.  Also, I found it quite entertaining that the reading mentioned how poison was how a woman killed, since Erin, Krista, and I have a joke about how poison is the weak person's way out and that it is only for prissy women.

Infanticide - Unwed Mothers Replace Witches

In a way, I feel bad for the mothers who were driven to commit infanticide.  No matter what they did, they would be punished.  If they revealed the pregnancy, they were punished.  If they killed the baby, they were punished.  If they concealed the baby, they were punished.  If the baby simply died, they were punished.  They really had no options available to them.  Sure, they probably shouldn't have been sleeping around in the first place, but in many cases the mom was probably promised marriage, only to have her whole world ripped out from underneath her.  I'm sure the officials meant well with all their rules and regulations, but in reality they pretty much caused more trouble than they saved.

European Witch Hunt - Witches Replace Jews

I must admit, I found this reading hard to follow and hard to get through.  I had difficulty following the author's train of though, and I would constantly get lost and have no idea what I had just read.  However, the one thing I did understand with complete (well, probably not complete, but pretty good) clarity was how the little boy was tortured so often.  It still disturbs me that humans can be so cruel as to torture a little boy, even though they did think he was party to horrific crimes, and then return him to his mother, only to torture him again.  To me, that is more awful than anything the family could have done.