Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
On Beyoncé and Moonlight
D. Scott Miller, author of the “Afrosurreal Manifesto” claims that Afro-Surrealists “transform how [they] see things now, how [they] look at what happened then, and what [they] can expect to see in the future.” They “distort reality for emotional impact” in order to tap into the surreal experiences of reality. Scholar Ytasha Womack deems this bending of time in the Afrosurreal aesthetic as constructing “little difference between the dream world and the waking one.” The atmospheric settings of [the movie] Moonlight and [Beyoncé’s] Lemonade do just that — they make traumatic events of the character’s present experience appear to be visually magical.
