Is he hoping for a presidential pardon??

How Black Women Were Whitewashed by Art

Clash of the Titans was one of the most popular films of 1981. Its glittering retinue of Hollywood stars told the story of Perseus, the demigod from Greek mythology who kills a sea monster and saves the beautiful princess Andromeda from being said monster’s lunch. Such was the film’s popularity that it was remade in 2010; the film managed a rather disparaging 26% on the Rotten Tomatoes site. How many of those rating the film had a classical education is unclear, but perhaps it would have performed better had its producers done their research. As according to British art historian Elizabeth McGrath’s 1992 article The Black Andromeda, Andromeda was, indeed, originally depicted as a black princess from Ethiopia.

Anyone who watched either of the two Clash of the Titans films will know that Judi Bowker and Alexa Devalos are both white women, and anyone who has seen Andromeda in a painting – perhaps Titian’s or Poynter’s – will believe she is white too. But McGrath’s article was definitive in addressing three things: that all the Greek mythographers placed Andromeda as a princess of Ethiopia, that Ovid specifically refers to her dark skin and that artists throughout Western art history frequently omitted to depict her blackness because Andromeda was supposed to be beautiful, and blackness and beauty – for many of them – was dichotomous. There is no doubt about Andromena’s race, according to Professor McGrath.

Yet Renaissance art repeatedly depicts Andromeda as white. In Piero di Cosimo’s Perseus Freeing Andromeda from the 1510s she is actually whiter than all the figures around her, including a black musician and her parents, who are considerably darker and in exotic costume. We do know that there was active debate about her skin colour, a debate that would certainly seem racist to modern eyes. McGrath references Francisco Pacheco, a Spanish artist and writer, who asks in one passage of his book Arte de la Pintura why Andromeda is so often painted as white-skinned when several of the sources say she is black.

“He obviously got a terrible shock that Ovid could be talking about a woman as beautiful but black,” McGrath tells BBC Culture, almost three decades after the publication of her article. Books such as Pacheco’s were used as reference guides for painters on how to paint who and what – so it’s easy to see how his views could have spread. Black Andromedas were few and far between – and images like Bernard Picart’s print of Perseus (1731) and Andromeda by Abraham van Diepenbeeck (1655) appear to show a woman with stereotypical white features and hair, but with dark skin.



http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190114-how-black-women-were-whitewashed-by-art

You mean this can actually be done?? Who knew???

Broken white men and the racist media that fuels their terrorism

At 1.40pm local time, a man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant burst into a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and possibly another, shooting and killing upwards of dozens of panicked and huddled Muslim worshippers at point-blank range shortly before Friday prayers began, laughing insanely as he carried out what can only be described as IS-level violence.

We know this much because the Australian gunman live-streamed his grotesque terrorist attack to his Facebook account.

What we do know about Tarrant, however, at least based on his social media accounts, is his profile reads as the sum total of every counter-terrorism practitioner's and academic's fear, one that law-enforcement agencies throughout the Western hemisphere have long warned to be the No. 1 terror threat: right-wing extremism.

More specifically, Tarrant represents the dangerous convergence between broken white men and extreme right-wing media, bearing in mind that 100 per cent of all terrorist attacks carried out on US soil in 2018 were carried out by right-wing extremists, with the Southern Poverty Law Centre crediting a “toxic combination of political polarisation, anti-immigrant sentiment and modern technologies that help spread propaganda online”.

These kind of attacks are being carried out in increased frequency and ferocity in mosques, synagogues, and black churches throughout the Western world, with a notable common denominator: the gunmen are always white, male and fuelled by consumption of right-wing media.

“Well, it's time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post. I will carry out an attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack via Facebook link,” Tarrant warned on the far-right online forum 8Chan on Thursday, which included links to what he called his “writings”.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/white-broken-men-the-20190315-p514ml.html

'The most dishonest thing would be to say that I'm shocked'

Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre

On Friday, March 15th, one or more gunmen opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. As I write this, three men and one woman have been taken into custody by local law enforcement. It is unclear to what extent they were all involved. The only thing we know is that one of the shooters went by the name Brenton Tarrant on Twitter. He posted pictures of the murder weapons there two days before the rampage. Said weapons are clearly visible in the video of the spree he livestreamed to Facebook.

Shortly after the spree ended, New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush confirmed that several improvised explosive devices had been disarmed by authorities. If those devices were meant as some kind of booby trap, they were not the only trap “Brenton” left behind. Immediately before carrying out his spree, he posted links to a manifesto on Twitter:

In “The Great Replacement” repeats a variety of “white genocide” talking points, and claims his murder of several dozen Muslims is because they are “invaders” outbreeding the white race. All the evidence we have suggests these are, more or less, the shooter’s beliefs.

But this manifesto is a trap itself, laid for journalists searching for the meaning behind this horrific crime. There is truth in there, and valuable clues to the shooter’s radicalization, but it is buried beneath a great deal of, for lack of a better word, “shitposting”.

Shitposting is the act of throwing out huge amounts of content, most of it ironic, low-quality trolling, for the purpose of provoking an emotional reaction in less Internet-savvy viewers. The ultimate goal is to derail productive discussion and distract readers. “The Great Replacement” is a clear and brutally obvious example of this technique.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2019/03/15/shitposting-inspirational-terrorism-and-the-christchurch-mosque-massacre/

Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre

On Friday, March 15th, one or more gunmen opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. As I write this, three men and one woman have been taken into custody by local law enforcement. It is unclear to what extent they were all involved. The only thing we know is that one of the shooters went by the name Brenton Tarrant on Twitter. He posted pictures of the murder weapons there two days before the rampage. Said weapons are clearly visible in the video of the spree he livestreamed to Facebook.

Shortly after the spree ended, New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush confirmed that several improvised explosive devices had been disarmed by authorities. If those devices were meant as some kind of booby trap, they were not the only trap “Brenton” left behind. Immediately before carrying out his spree, he posted links to a manifesto on Twitter:

In “The Great Replacement” repeats a variety of “white genocide” talking points, and claims his murder of several dozen Muslims is because they are “invaders” outbreeding the white race. All the evidence we have suggests these are, more or less, the shooter’s beliefs.

But this manifesto is a trap itself, laid for journalists searching for the meaning behind this horrific crime. There is truth in there, and valuable clues to the shooter’s radicalization, but it is buried beneath a great deal of, for lack of a better word, “shitposting”.

Shitposting is the act of throwing out huge amounts of content, most of it ironic, low-quality trolling, for the purpose of provoking an emotional reaction in less Internet-savvy viewers. The ultimate goal is to derail productive discussion and distract readers. “The Great Replacement” is a clear and brutally obvious example of this technique.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2019/03/15/shitposting-inspirational-terrorism-and-the-christchurch-mosque-massacre/

"Our gun laws will change. Now is the time for change."

This is how a leader reacts when there's no NRA or Fox News to scream "THIS ISN'T THE RIGHT TIME TO TALK ABOUT GUN CONTROL" on a continuous loop before the bodies even turn cold...

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1106656140312535040

As predictable as the fucking sunrise...

The wheel of karma moves slow, but it's never not accurate