Stuff & Furries

BearPC cd-rom

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The first dirty pictures I got a hold of were from Usenet. I had to save 4-5 text posts to the local directory in UNIX, then edit out everything but the text, which was UUencoded. After creation one file with the text from each of those posts, I could finally UUdecode it and see the dirty picture. And I'd have no idea up until that moment what the picture was going to be of.

When really it is "I find it unnerving how fast people make fun of physical disability and equate it to moral goodness when you make it slightly ok to do so in context."

Well, you see, I'm talking about them as real historical people with real disabilities and not the Targaryens.

However, there's so much going on with that approach to it, so here are my thoughts in no particular order:

This idea presumes so much choice that just did not realistically exist for so many people. Archdukes and Archduchesses more often than not had no say in their marriage partner, because marriage wasn't about what they wanted. You, woman in this family, have to marry your cousin because it's what is best politically, and how you feel about the concept doesn't matter one way or another. This happens to men too, though less so, but off the top of my head you can look at Crown Prince Rudolph's marriage being more or less decided over his head. So, preference to marry a cousin you barely know really isn't factored in at all. You're lucky if your parent cares about you being happy in the marriage.

It's not about purity, it's about politics. The rule isn't that you had to marry a relative, it's that you had to marry a Catholic from a ruling dynasty. Add in the idea that this was chosen for you from a set of politically advantageous matches, because daughters and sons are assets to be used strategically, and you get a lot of marriages into the same set of families. As crass as it is, letting your children marry downward is wasting a bargaining tool. For the Habsburgs, the religious bar is also important and pretty constraining, especially when they aren't on good political terms with the other major Catholic powers (France and Spain) so you get Italian state and Bavarian marriages. If you keep reinforcing those alliances through marriage, that also means you're probably marrying a relative. Look at how quickly they leap at having new options when Belgium is established as a friendly Catholic state.

The above problem is complicated when someone in your family becomes Grandmother of Europe. Maria Theresa's extensive marriage politics means that a lot of the possible marriage candidates are almost certainly related. This is also, by the way, how we get Victoria's hemophilia being so widespread in the Courts her children married into, and everyone seemingly being cousins by World War I.

There is a lot of "might" going on with how disability works here. Ferdinand I's Wikipedia page ("citation needed" all over the place by the way) is littered with how his disabilities "might" be caused by heredity. But they could also be caused or compounded by many of the other things that caused birth complications or disability to be more common historically, like insufficient medical knowledge about prenatal care, insufficient maternal nutrition, or infections during pregnancy or after birth. Epilepsy certainly isn't constrained to just when your parents are related to each other.

Look me in the eyes and tell me that historians routinely acting like this man (who actually functioned pretty well in a world without anti-seizure medications) had no sentience because he had a disability from birth is schadenfreude.

The Egyptian Pharaonic Dynasties were also famous for marrying even siblings to each other, for instance. As was said about smaller human settlements and communities at large, mobility for most of history was fairly limited - especially the farther inland one lived.

I’d be willing to wager that much of the focus on the Habsburgs and their in-breeding has a lot to do with 1) the likelihood that many of the people who learn about the Habsburgs in school or via cultural osmosis are from cultures that actively disliked them and their countries (as OP mentioned, they were not generally well-liked), 2) the existence of somewhat realistic portraiture in the lifetime of the most famous Habsburgs - nobody looks at contemporaneous depictions of King Tutankhamen and thinks about his club foot or fused spine because realism was not the style but everyone knows what the Habsburg Chin looked like, and 3) modern concepts of disability as a “separate” “class” of people to be diagnosed and endlessly medicalized, a society tarnished by the ubiquity of Ugly Laws and Eugenics.

Also, while “horror” as in scary stories or stories about monsters or demons have always existed, much of modern Horror is rooted in medicine, more specifically in advances in medicine that allowed soldiers to come home from war disfigured and/or disabled en masse rather than just in a box. There’s a reason silent film featured “monsters” like the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, and Nosferatu. Even before that - consider how embalming during and after the Civil War meant that relatives could actually see the bodies of soldiers who had died hundreds or thousands of miles away after having received musket blows to the face.

what would you do for a Klondike bar???