Koen Brandt

*1961 Regisseur, producer, componist

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Koen Brandt @Koen_Brandt]

@Strandjunker Correct.

[Koen Brandt @Koen_Brandt]

@logictemplates_ E# ?

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

@BernieSanders Fuckin crazy. I love it.

[Koen Brandt @Koen_Brandt]

@CSMFHT I for one thought you made a clever observation and it put a smile on my face. That should count for something 🤓

[Koen Brandt @Koen_Brandt]

@BatyraRetro @CintanyaMediaku 😂

[Koen Brandt @Koen_Brandt]

@BillWhiteUSA Oh America… 10 years already in this mess. What a waste. Please stop tweeting nonsense Bill, frankly, it’s embarrassing.

[It’s Antonio to you @tonyretardio_]

@BillWhiteUSA You bought your Ambassadorship. Suggest you sit this one out.

[Filip Reyntjens @freyntje]

@BillWhiteUSA When will @BillWhiteUSA start minding his own business and stop violating the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations? Unlike the #USA, #Belgium adheres to the rule of law and respects the separation of powers.

[Kathleen Van Brempt @kvanbrempt]

Appeasement only makes the bully bolder. It is not our duty to please Trump. Our duty is to protect the interests of European workers and businesses. That is exactly why we added the safeguards to Parliament's position on #Turnberry. And that is the standard against which we will assess the outcome of the negotiations with the Council and the Commission.

[Kathleen Van Brempt @kvanbrempt]

Trump voert een economische oorlog tegen Europa, onze bedrijven en onze werknemers. Wanneer gaan Commissie en Raad eindelijk onze economie, onze bedrijven en de miljoenen jobs van onze mensen beschermen?

“Keer op keer bewijst Donald Trump dat hij en zijn tarievenbeleid niet te vertrouwen zijn. Dreigen met nieuwe tariefverhogingen tenzij Europese autobouwers hun productie verplaatsen naar de Verenigde Staten is een zoveelste steenhard bewijs van de economische dwang die hij hanteert tegenover Europa en andere landen wereldwijd.

Het is volstrekt onbegrijpelijk dat de Europese Commissie en de regeringsleiders blijven weigeren om het anti-dwanginstrument in te zetten. Dit is exact waarom we dat instrument ontworpen hebben. Wanneer Trump een economische oorlog tegen ons voert, moeten wij onze economie, onze bedrijven en de jobs van onze werknemers beschermen. Niet morgen. Vandaag.

Europa heeft de instrumenten om terug te duwen. Maar dan moeten we ze ook durven gebruiken.

[Koen Brandt @Koen_Brandt]

@Osint613 Oh America…

[Kathleen Van Brempt @kvanbrempt]

Time to act, @EU_Commission.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us.

Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

Thank goodness for the ceasefire with Iran. Firstly on behalf of the entire civilisation of Iran. And secondly because now there’s surely no reason not to release the rest of the Epstein Files? Including *those* ones. Otherwise it might look like some kind of desperate cover-up.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

There should be a strong online norm against speaking ill of children online. Does not matter if they're wearing a funny outfit or a MAGA hat or acting "gay." Being a kid can be tough and using them as fodder for jokes or clicks online, esp if you're adult, is loser behavior.

[Ben Stiller @BenStiller]

Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Netanyahu wanted billions to flatten Gaza. He got it.

Netanyahu wanted war with Iran. Trump just gave it to him.

American foreign and military policy must be determined by the American people.

Not the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government.

[Koen Brandt @Koen_Brandt]

@BillWhiteUSA @POTUS @realDonaldTrump @JDVance @VP @SecRubio @StateSEAS @DeputySecState Dear Bill,
Sod off.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.