Communist witch hunt

Witch-hunt

Beginning two years ago, the US Dept of Health and Human Services began "special reviews" of all current research grants that involved harm reduction, sex and drugs, and continues its ban on funding of needle exchange. With Bush's second term, the campaign was extended to all US funded international programs that dealt with these issues and populations. And, most recently, the US has again unde...

The public man confronts a McCarthy era witch-hunt.

The Witch Hunt as a Structure of Argumentation

the concept of a witch hunt is frequently invoked, in recent times, to describe a kind of procedure for deciding the guilt of a person against whom an accusation has been made. But what exactly is a witch hunt? In this paper, ten conditions are formulated as a cluster of properties characterizing the witch hunt as a framework in which arguments are used: (1) pressure of social forces, (2) stigm...

Europe's inner demons. An enquiry inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt

many of the books on medicine published at this time, dealing particularly with their advice on the handling of psychiatric disease. The practitioners, many of them para-medical or empirics and quacks, are considered, with some of the therapeutic procedures detailed. Exorcism is of particular interest in view of the recent attention being paid to this type of therapy. In the seventeenth century...

Salem Witch Trials: The Fungus Theory Witch or Psychedelic Trip?

During the winter of 1692 eight girls came down with a mysterious and terrifying illness in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts. They vomited, screamed incomprehensibly, claimed to see things that weren’t there, felt the crawling and pricking of invisible needles against their skin, and convulsed and contorted into impossible positions. Physicians were called to examine the girls, but the...