La Necia.

“...and either I'm nobody or I'm a nation.” -Derek Walcott, The Schooner Flight | Marxista | Always reading something | Indifference is the deadweight of history.

[thecrownedgoddess]

I welcome every opinion based on scientific criticism. As to the prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine; 'Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti [Go on your way, and let the people talk].'

Karl Marx, Preface to the First Edition of Capital Volume 1 (p. 93)

[thecrownedgoddess]

Mind-body, brain-body, however we do it, we do it to get to wellness, vitality, beauty—not in pursuit of vanity but for holistic reasons. Sexual fitness inevitably follows. “Why Are Israelis So Sexy?” reads a headline in the Times of Israel, published almost two years into the genocide. We start off strong, with farmers in South Africa. We learn about another love child, the zorse, from “the conjugals” of a zebra and horse, an animal that has “hybrid vigour.” So it goes for the Israelis, although there is more “to this sexiness than just the healthy cross-pollination of our genomic ingathering.” There are layers beyond eugenics: For example, Israelis “know how to get their hands dirty, do the hard work—clean the house, fix their own stuff, pull together as a unit, function in community. They help each other. This is native to the culture.” What else is “native” to the settler nation? Well, before they gave us the normalization of genocide, took pictures of themselves posing for dating apps next to lingerie, in the homes of women they displaced, there was a need to “direct all this sexiness somewhere.” So, the “Israelis basically birthed the trance music scene in the late 1980s in Goa, and it spread like oil on a suntanned back, the world over. They made the world party, and party hard.” Goa is in India. We already talked about how Israelis got there. When they went back, they felt and looked good. Look at those Arabs, emaciated, mutilated. And now look at Israelis—if God controls the world, and the people of Israel are strong, beautiful, glowing, it must be that God made them so. Which means God is on Israel’s side. Basking in God’s favor, Israel ranks amongst the happiest countries in the world, according to the World Happiness Report. Still, even here it is difficult to feel happy all the time. Sometimes, things happen that make you feel less happy, less good. Things like Gaza—the settler soldier’s euphemism for what they did there.

Mary Turfah, Warrior Pose

[thecrownedgoddess]

Israel, one story goes, emerged through the darkness of the Nazi Holocaust; its people promised they would never again be perceived as weak. The nation of soldiers believed that there was blame to be placed on European Jewry themselves, for their failure to resist the Nazi death camps. Weakness—in mind or body—was not simply a physiological state; it would become a moral failing. Israel would be different, through its exercise of something called “muscular Judaism.” Current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently argued, in a televised speech, that “Jesus had no advantage over Genghis Khan.” He’s been going at this for a while; in 2018 he tweeted, “the weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.” Strength starts with the body. Today, Israel is known for its wellness culture. Enjoy its “Mediterranean” cuisine, among the healthiest in the world. Float in the Dead Sea or exfoliate and detoxify your skin with one of the many lines of scrubs made from the stolen minerals. Yoga, hike, spa, sun. There’s something here for everyone. For some, yoga is too flimsy. For the already-mentally strong, the fintechs and Netanyahus, Israel has something adjacent to yoga called the Feldenkrais Method, developed by an Israeli physicist and judo expert, that addresses not the mind but the nervous system. Between 1951 and 1953, Moshe Feldenkrais led the Israeli Army Department of Electronics. He played sports and suffered chronic knee pain; he found, one story goes, a way to avoid surgery—by controlling his brain. After his military service, he committed himself to developing his Method, to help others heal as he did. In 1957, he started giving lessons to Israel’s first prime and defense minister, David Ben Gurion, eventually teaching the founder of the Zionist state to, at age seventy, stand on his head. According to the Feldenkrais website, the practice is “based on principles of physics, biomechanics, and an empirical understanding of learning and human development.” Less east, more facts. All vibes. Someone on the website calls it “movement medicine”—a borrowing of medical language, for legitimacy and originality. The Method is like if “exercise and meditation had a love child.” What could be more Israeli?

Mary Turfah, Warrior Pose

[sab3rtooth]

kind of love that the entire internet is under the impression that tumblr is dead. it’s like being part of a secret society

[saywasp]

love herrrrrrr

[henk-heijmans]

A world of washing, Samtsche-Dzjavacheti, Georgia - by Natela Grigalashvili (1965), Georgian

[phlegmaphoto]

[themusicdirectory]

Visit Original Link

Is It A Crime - Sade

[Follow MD for more.]

[thecrownedgoddess]

In 1921 the South American Cup was played in Buenos Aires. The president of Brazil, Epitácio Pessoa, issued a decree: for reasons of patriotic prestige there would be no brown skin on Brazil's national team. Of the three matches they played, the white team lost two. Friedenreich did not play in that championship. Back then, to be black in Brazilian football was simply impossible, and being mulatto was a trial. Friedenreich always started late because it took him half an hour to iron his hair in the dressing room. The only mulatto player on Fluminense, Carlos Alberto, used to whiten his face with rice powder. Later on, despite the owners of power, things began to change. With the passage of time, the old football mutilated by racism gave way to a football of multicoloured splendour. After so many years it is obvious that Brazil's best players, from Friendenreich to Romário, by way of Domingos da Guia, Leônidas, Zizinho, Garrincha, Didi and Pelé, have been blacks and mulattos. All of them came up from poverty, and some of them returned to it. By contrast, there have never been blacks or mulattos among Brazil's car-racing champions, which like tennis requires money. In the global social pyramid, blacks are at the bottom and whites are at the top. In Brazil this is called 'racial democracy', but football is one of very few democratic venues where people of colour can compete on an equal footing – up to a point. Even in football some are more equal than others. They all have the same rights, but the player who grew up hungry and the athlete who never missed a meal do not really compete on a level playing field. At least football offers a shot at social mobility for a poor child, usually black or mulatto, who had no other toy but a ball. The ball is the only fairy godmother he can believe in. Maybe she will feed him, maybe she will make him a hero, maybe even a god. Misery trains him for football or for crime. From the moment of birth, that child is forced to turn his disadvantage into a weapon, and before long he learns to dribble around the rules of order that deny him a place. He learns the tricks of every trade and he becomes an expert in the art of pretending, surprising, breaking through where least expected, and throwing off an enemy with a hip feint or some other tune from the rascal's songbook.

Eduardo Galeano, Football in Sun and Shadow (p. 41-43)

[thecrownedgoddess]

Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. At Wembley shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953, when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo's Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan football. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil's 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom for half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghost of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich's Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.

Eduardo Galeano, Football in Sun and Shadow (p. 18-19)

[thecrownedgoddess]

I had a massive football induced teenage crush on Claudio Marchisio – I looked him up and nobody told me he's got even better looking with age, good God.

Please, no one tell me about his political beliefs or any controversies I do not know about, don't ruin this moment for me lol.

[thecrownedgoddess]

Those World Cup graphics are so fucking ugly, get America's grubby imperialist hands off of the world's proletarian sport of my god.

[thecrownedgoddess]

My girl Tinashe has done it again. Too Easy has been stuck in my head on a loop for days now. I've loved her since Aquarius so I'm happy to see her get more love and support nowadays.

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Che Guevara! (June 14, 1928)

One of the 20th Century's most impactful revolutionaries, Ernesto "Che" Guevara grew up in a well-off family with left-wing sympathies in Argentina. As a young medical student, Guevara embarked on a trek across Latin America which would change him forever, as he came to see the plight of the poor and destitute firsthand. He was further radicalized by his experiences in Guatemala, where he witnessed the coup carried out by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company against progressive President Jacobo Arbenz. This event galvanized Guevara's view of the United States as the world's foremost imperial power, one which had to be opposed and fought to achieve economic and social freedom for Latin America, and cemented his commitment to armed revolution as a force for social change. To this end, he joined the forces of Fidel and Raul Castro, and became a leading figure in the Cuban Revolution. During the revolution Guevara helped to established schools and medical facilities for campesinos, and helped lead the revolutionaries to victory in the Battle of Santa Clara. After the revolution, Guevara played a major role in the new Cuban government, overseeing land reform and literacy campaigns. However, he soon felt a desire to continue his revolutionary activities, traveling abroad to support revolutionary movements in Africa and South America. While in Bolivia leading the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla, he was captured and executed by the Bolivian government.

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."

[thecrownedgoddess]

I'm going to launch a hot take here that may not land well with everyone but let me land:

I was watching some Sade performances just now and I was thinking about how, when I was a little girl, her energy and vibe (and Monica Bellucci, Halle Berry) was what I thought the pinnacle of being a grown woman was. Like they come across as so comfortable in their skin and confident and sensual without doing too much. And I have to wonder when the pop culture standard of womanhood became the ‘I’m just a girl’ girls like Sabrina Carpenter, Ariana Grande, that Tate Mcsomething girl…the girls that do a lot and very much want to project small, fragile girlhood, being small and doll-like…a ‘sexy baby’ if you will, rather than being a grown woman with agency and control and so on. I don’t get it if I’m honest. Even the biggest pop star on the planet (Taylor Swift) is still trying to pretend she’s a little girl in high school who is always the victim of meanies rather than a grown woman, a billionaire, one of the most powerful people in the entire music industry whose fans still believe is the underdog because that's the message she's sending.

Isn’t it much more empowering to claim your womanhood, your adulthood; your decisions and your mistakes; your loves and joys and sorrows and despairs? Idk maybe that’s why I love listening to Etta James and Nina Simone and Billie Holiday because…while many of these women had tragic ends, they seemed to fully and wholly claim themselves, to be grown women, to be a little fucked up maybe, but it was their life and they went through hell and back and they had talent and grit and something to say. They weren’t sexy babies or claiming ‘I’m just a girl’. They were grown ass fucking women and they stood on that. Like Nina Simone said: “We never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl's talk.” Bring that back!!!!!!  

[thecrownedgoddess]

Thinking about Sade's sequin Gioia Meller Marcovicz set – the cropped v-neck top and the pencil skirt. Need.

[thecrownedgoddess]