bettyfer > Recent Status Updates

hit a small roadblock in the form of an unwieldy chapter but ur girl is powering through

the only man who deserves rights

i've said this before but it's SO refreshing to read someone so smart writing with their own words, not just the chatgpt formulation of someone's opinion. i see you, mr. just-casually-dropped-the-word-suzerainty-instead-of-sovereignty!!! 🤩

this much Said in one day?? 😱 about to make it into the morning news bulletin

introduction DOWN!! dare i say? this is more readable than the last? dare i hope??

favourite annunciation SO FAR is by carlo crivelli (1486), followed by fra filippo lippi (1450-3).

favourite virign and child ALSO by carlo crivelli (dated after 1490) — la madonna della rondine. followed by gentile da fabriano, the quaratesi madonna, 1425.

honourary mention to whatever the fuck was going on in "richard II presented to the virgin and child", 1395-6.

have to keep myself honest so i make sure i finish this. started it on the plane but was too exhausted to keep up with it during my museum military camp

having spent a week in london visiting a museum a day, i opened this picture book on the plane in an attempt to understand all the artwork i gorged myself on

having been RELEASED 🇪🇸 from world cup PRISON 📦 i can finally resume my meditations on the holy texts

you 🫵🏻 try reading Said while the World Cup is on. i 👈🏻 did. report: today, the colonizers won. tomorrow? who can say

a good 50 or so pages of this is just endnotes, so i'm more than halfway through at least 🎉

the ending of the camus chapter left me more confused than anything. i need mr Said to explain this to me again like i'm an adhd child

"i write essays —" you click the link and it's a bunch of AI-generated images and text 🙄 social media is truly just going to be bots talking to each other, isn't it? i guarantee you that no one who is authentically interested in reading will want to discuss your clanker-begotten "analysis". WE CAN TELL

"Even oppositional thinkers like Marx and Engels were no less capable of such pronouncements [...]. [They] relied on colonial documents, the fully encoded discourse of Orientalism [...]. [When] Engels spoke of the Moors of Algeria [...] he was merely quoting French colonial theory."

was not expecting this!!! shots fired!! 🍿

"[...] to interpret the events of history from the viewpoint if the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the wounded child, the exile and the fugitive."

hah. what a perspective. if only.

"The construction of a world in a state of perpetual conflict is an evil and must be named for what it is. [...] grace does not magically eliminate conflict, but instead it inspires active resistance to evil and an astonishing creativity in doing good."

"Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral, for they can either foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion. For this reason, they must be evaluated by asking a crucial question: Do they truly help individuals and peoples to become more human and fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations?"

finally a sane take on AI

i know it seems like i'm trudging along this book with my clown self logging in every 10-page progress but it's substantially more enjoyable than i originally thought. the reality is that i am simply not a fast reader.

anyway, i did not know the great game and the white man's burden were concepts coined by rudyard kipling. the invention of tradition. huh. man sure was busy.

"BP's ideas about 'boyology' fed these images directly into a grand scheme of imperial authority culminating in the great Boy Scout structure 'fortifying the wall of empire', which confirmed this inventive conjunction of fun and service in row after row of bright-eyed, eager and resourceful little middle-class servants of empire."

savage takedown of the boy scouts by mr said

'Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love.'

the shareholders will have a fit when they find out

'And it is certainly true that many great aesthetic objects if empire are remembered and admired without the baggage of domination that they carried through the process from gestation to production. Yet the empire remains, in inflection and traces, to be read, seen, and heard.'

bars!!

me reading about aida while having never seen or heard aida

i had never really considered anthropology and geography as imperialist sciences. one of those commentaries that in hindsight are fairly obvious, but someone has to point them out first

my office desk book

'It is perhaps embarrassing that sectors of the metropolitan cultures that have since become vanguards in the social contests of our time were uncomplaining members of this imperial consensus. With a few exceptions, the women's as well as the working-class movement was pro-empire.' 🏴‍☠️

--- and we are done with chapter one!

teach me, edward