It’s easy to lose sight of some of life’s simple pleasures when you’re mired in the politics of a land you’re forbidden to enter. But every now and again we deserve to be reminded of just how beautifully the sea sparkles in the Gaza Strip, or just how high the rainbows over the West Bank’s grassy hills can go, or just how easy it is to visualize the earthy way of life in villages wiped away in 1948. 

Source: Sixteen Minutes to Palestine

This feels like a really silly thing have to post but it has become quite clear to me that an awful lot of people I encounter online do not know this (or are at least pretending they don’t) so I’m going to spell it out as if we’re all five.

People seem to treat veganism as some sort of exclusive choice that means you don’t choose anything else. ‘Eating local is much more sustainable than eating vegan!’ This isn’t true, but even if it were, how is this an argument against veganism?

Think of it like this - a checklist where you can select more than one option. Ticking ‘go vegan’ doesn’t magically grey out all of the other options. You can both wear vegan clothes and avoid plastic, you can eat vegan food and support local farmers, you can be vegan and support Fairtrade.  We don’t all have the same options available to us, but choosing one doesn’t take away any of the others. I can’t afford to buy all organic or local, for example, but I can afford to be vegan and buy at least mostly Fairtrade coffee, chocolate and fruit.

You need to all stop pretending that being vegan means you’re buying ‘child slave quinoa’ (again, not even true), or that it means you’re wearing plastic jackets, or that all your food is imported. These are lazy, fallacious, intellectually dishonest false dilemmas that don’t serve your argument and do absolutely nothing to help workers, animals or the planet.

Fuck Israel and fuck everyone who still wants to pretend this is confusing or complicated. Is it really that hard to point out the "bad people" in a scenario where a multi-billion military apparatus is handcuffing and killing children and medical staff inside a fucking hospital?

At this point there is absolutely no room for pretending to be gullible about the genocide in Gaza. This wilful ignorance is equivalent to evil, if not even worse since it's concealed as "~unawareness~" but has the ultimate ability to sustain this bloodbath. On top of publicly declaring yourself an outright idiot, you've also got a lot of blood on your hands. What a shameful state to be in.

btw if any of y’all are following me and you’re a Zionist get the fuck off my follow list!!!!!!!!!

I actually lost followers but I do not give a shit because I do not want people who approve of genocide following me

As always don't forget about eSims

After losing everything, I started to feel happy to receive a food carton ..

Today I walked for two hours to get it to provide food for my parents 🥲

Please help me cover the travel costs for me and my family. War life is very tiring especially for my parents who is suffering everyday because lack of food, medicine and hospitals 😢

Please keep sharing and donatind as much as you can, every 5$ can help us to escape to a safe place and start a new life 🙏

Please keep sharing and donating my friends

The conditions here become harder and harder every day and my parents are in danger 😭😭

What the everliving hell?

Your not friendly reminder that cops stole more monetary value then all burglaries in 2020, and that is only dwarfed by time theft by American businesses.

morning reblog! I appreciate reblogs to reach a bigger sample size, and any extra information in replies or tags! thank you everyone :D

i love big shoulders and small/nonexistent trans boobies....

pre hrt girlies hiiiiiii hru, me 2 ur still a gorgeous girl

In Yemen the death count stagnated at 15,000 until the war ended and the people were able to count their dead. Today, it's commonly accepted that over 300,000 Yemenis have been killed by war and famine. We will see a similar situation in Gaza after a ceasefire.

Ralph Nader estimated in December of 2023 that the real death toll was closer to 200,000 Palestinians but was being hidden or poorly estimated by local authorities for propaganda purposes or due to the lack of infrastructure. We are in May of 2024, 5 months later and we're talking about a city that hasn't had access to food, water, stable shelter, medicine, medical services, or electricity, heating, nor air conditioning. Most of you can't imagine spending 1 week of your lives without 1 of these things missing, let alone all of them. We have no idea what the scale of this accelerated genocide is right now, 8 months into it.

hey fellow Europeans (EU), just a friendly and mildly concerned reminder that in less than a month, the European elections are taking place. it's an election with a historically low turnout, but one that is just as important as any other, if not more. the composition of the EU parliament determines the political direction of the EU, and has an impact on all 27 countries through directives and regulations that get voted.

we cannot let far right extremist parties get an even bigger stronghold there than they already do. sadly, there are very significant threats of exactly that happening from many countries.

so please, if you are an EU citizen living in the EU and are of voting age, check the modalities to vote in your country of residence, and make sure to make your voice heard.

i do not verify fundraisers.

Guys. How many times do I have to say don't bother other Palestinians with fundraiser vetting unless they've specifically indicated that was an activity they are willing to do. How many times have I recommended that you guys direct those questions towards ME rather than other Palestinians. How. Many. Times. Have we repeated that we are not tools, we are all individual people who do different things who specialize in different activities and have taken on different roles. Why. Are. There. Still. People. Who. Don't. Understand. This.

Olly doesn't do fundraiser verifications. Send them my way. Stop bothering. Other Palestinians about it.

Another thing... about 70% of the time y'all send them fundraisers that are already on my list. And they just check my list to answer you. They are answering questions for you that you can literally check for yourself. There is a reason I have centralized all the information on my pinned post. Why are people allergic to clicking links, they're not even external links that take forever to load, they're all tumblr posts.

I will be honest guys, the Red portrait of king Charles is gorgeous asdfghjkl

it's a bad portrait. Like. Objectively. It does the opposite of what's intended. It looks like the painter is insulting him. If it was in a contemporary gallery with no context you would see it immediately as the ambivalent criticism of Charles's reign, how he fades into the overwhelming red background as a tiny little figure, small and insignificant, insufficient for the clothes he's wearing. It reminds my of Goya's portraits, how they were so 'realistic' that they ended up making these great figures look pathetic to the viewer. So these are our rulers?

the sheer novelty. the surprise and shock, the kinda cunt it's serving for no reason. I. I love it. It's an incredible portrait by Jonathan Yeo. By the sheer fact that Charles, the man, is impossible to portray as greater than man because he's just such a nothingburger of a dude. So a portrait made to make him look huge and interesting made him be swallowed in red brushstrokes. The butterfly, that reminded me immediately of " we will all laugh at guilded butterflies", draws more attention than him. It looks like an omen. It looks like a warning in all this red. Something is not right here.

This is the best royal portrait ever 10/10

This is a painting of a monarch whose individual personality and even bodily presence are a mere footnote within the legacy of bloodshed that built the throne he occupies. This is the only way it's possible to depict him. It's a photograph of his soul

And I think all of that is entirely deliberate!

I think Jonathan Yeo meant this portrait to be absolutely all of those things, he just can't be very vocal about the paintings true meaning. Yet.

I've done this on another post, but let's compare that portrait up there to some other portraits Yeo's done.

Here's actor and activist Idris Elba, whom colleagues have described as warm and friendly, open-hearted, with an emotional intelligence that makes him capable of being very honest and vulnerable with the character he's playing:

Here's Jony Ive - who founded Apple with Steve Jobs and was chief design officer responsible for some of the more popular artistic choices, who recently left the company because the culture had gotten so toxic and shitty. He now works more in private design, so he has more artistic freedom and he can be less in the public eye:

Yeo's even previously painted British heads of state. Here's the phenomenal Baroness Doreen Lawrence of the labour party, a Jamaican immigrant who turned the tragic murder of her son into a lifelong campaign of quietly and steadily dismantling systemic racism:

To me, all these portraits are deeply personal, conveying the sitter's character with empathy and quiet dignity.

Elba is leaning forward in an intimate friendly gesture. He makes eye contact with the viewer but his face is turned slightly to the side, inviting but not confrontational, his brows slightly drawn together thoughtfully. His hands are natural and relaxed. He's shirtless - not to be a beefcake thirst trap (okay maybe just a tiny little bit), but to convey how emotionally naked he's willing to be.

Ives is literally putting a lens between himself and the viewer - we have to look closer to see his face, but when we do we see his eyes crinkled with a hint of good humor. The perspectives are all distorted, but the main thing we see is the hands that have physically built so much of the technology we use. And even outside the phone screen he's still enased by a circular frame within a frame, indicating yet another layer of separation between the subject and the viewer.

Lawrence is radiant, proudly upright and implacable as a mountain, her head held high and her hands folded before her with a self-contained air of calm determination. And even though the background is a chaotic sea of looming shapes and quick brush strokes, her eyes keep us grounded, even pinned in place. We're the viewer, but she is studying us.

And then, on the other end of the personality spectrum, here's noted asshole Damien Hirst, who frequently makes the news for being racist and sexist and just generally a really slimy piece of shit. His most famous works are the animal carcasses suspended in resin-

-yeah, that. That guy. He's made all the money in the goddamn world three times over for pieces like that, and he still seems like he's on a personal mission to make everyone around him as miserable as possible.

Here's Yeo's portrait of him, seated on a leather throne, dick bulge at eye level, contained in one of his own tanks:

Here's the droopy and melancholic portrait of the famously pompous and insufferable John Cooper Clarke, self-described "original punk poet", who was recently booed off stage for making super transphobic remarks, and whose most famous quote is "I read Kerouac at 12 and decided I could do better":

And, most notably for the argument I'm making here, here's D-Day veteran Sgt Geoffrey Pattinson, and see if you can spot the extremely subtle use of color theory here:

My conclusion: Jonathan Yeo paints very good portraits, and sometimes his subjects are very bad people.

And I think he brings absolutely all of his artistic talent to the Charles portrait.

@chromegnomes is absolutely right; it is the only possible way to depict him. It is a photograph of his soul.

And that's precisely why it's so ugly and uncomfortable to look at.

People have said that Charles has a "complicated legacy", which is what people say when someone has an objectively horrible legacy that they are still personally benefiting from. But the people who still tolerate his extravagant gilded existence to "honor historical tradition" will find absolutely nothing to like in this portrait. All the gold and brass and pomp of his uniform, all the military accolades for his colonial warmongering, all the fabulous ostentatious wealth he was born into and has spent every second of his life surrounded by - which would have been rendered with glittering precision and care in a traditional royal portrait - they're all dingy and washed out and already fading. The medals aren't even clearly marked enough to really know what they are; it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The butterfly that was included as a nod to his honestly extensive conservation work (because let's give the little bit of credit where credit is actually due) stands out as the one bright point of beauty and authenticity - but it's dwarfed by the only other visible object, the sword, and it's being swallowed up by that lurid, putrid background that seems to seep out of Charles' uniform. The dark tips of its wings are the most high-contrast part of the painting except for Charles' black hollow eyes that stare into nothing. And, most significantly in my opinion, the butterfly isn't actually touching him, or connected to him in any way. It just exists alongside him, but it doesn't need him.

His face is painted in such a way to detail absolutely every wrinkle without ever being able to completely cover up the blood red background, and below the sunken shark-like eyes, the artist has included that vapidly pleasant plastered-on smile with nothing behind it that is practically the royal uniform by now. I think the angle is also deliberately chosen to be unsettling: many portraits are traditionally done either head-on, 3/4 profile, or full profile. Charles is none of these - his head is tilted juuust a few degrees off kilter. It's not quite right. And he's looking off to the side very slightly; his thousand-yard-stare is kind of drifting over the viewers shoulder. He can't look us in the eye.

And there is no way, there is absolutely no possible way that an artist who is smart enough and skilled enough to imbue all his other portraits with so much meaning and symbolism and indicators of the subject's character - there's no way that's not intentional.

But... Yeo lives in London. He's still working on other royal and aristocratic portraits. He still has to live in that society, and he still has to get paid.

So of course he has to toe the line, at least until Charles dies, and say that the vivid blood-soaked red is to symbolize the """vibrancy""" of this terminally ill octogenarian, to bring a """modern contemporary feel""" to this 19th century colonizer.

Yeo knows exactly what he's doing.

Here's an excerpt about it from Smithsonian magazine:

Listen, I work in memory care and end-of-life care, and we only say someone "seems to be smiling approvingly" to comfort the family when someone is so far gone they clearly don't know where they are anymore. His ex-wife Camilla, who probably has more good reasons to hate him than any other single human being alive, looked at this haunting vision of hell and was like YES PERFECT.

This is all completely intentional. We are all picking up on exactly the message the artist was trying to convey. Yeo is trying to tell us, loud and clear, that something is not right here. It is absolutely an omen.

Op is right; it is insulting him. And it is supposed to make us look at this pathetic villain, who is currently toddling through the final days of his unfairly long and lavishly useless life, and think "these are our rulers?"

Small correction that Camilla is actually his current wife, which makes her response even funnier

just wanna say as someone who's Aboriginal that I think First Nations peoples have every right to be a little angry at white leftists (NOT Palestinians, people blaming Palestinians stfu) who ignored our anti-colonial movements for years but are now supporting the Free Palestine movement. If you, someone living in the US, Canada or Australia or Aotearoa, are serious about the liberation of Palestine then you NEED to be just as serious about justice and liberation for the First Nations peoples' who's stolen and colonised land YOU live on. If you're not serious about where YOU fit in the paradigm of anti-colonial work, fix it. Here's a good place to start: if you're a person living on occupied Indigenous lands, learn who's land it really is, and how you can help them as an ally.