This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
## Censorship Baked into Your Software
I am a paying user of Adobe, which costs me 67 euros per month. But I regularly get warnings that I am creating content that “violates the content policy,” such as the image I was working on last night, which is about Hypatia:
The problem is often the nudity, which nowadays is not even allowed in art anymore and is baked into the software to frustrate us users. Whatever I tried, it was not allowed to create ‘extra space’ around this image; I broke rules if I wanted to add some extra seawater.
I did not create this image directly in Adobe— they would never generate something like this due to the strict content policy. No, I still use Leonardo and edit the details in Photoshop, but they make it as difficult as possible. This is not smart of Adobe; they will quickly lose customers. Yesterday, I locally installed the Flux1 dev version. Yes, open source, and it works, although the generation speed is abysmal. An hour’s wait for a result, but at least without any censorship, you hope.
Back to Hypatia. A Greek intellectual, who might be called a ‘paganist.’ But let me first explain why I object to that word: it is a distortion of ‘page,’ of pawn, of a submissive. Black magic encapsulated in language. Hypatia was a mathematician and public intellectual. She lived in the third century and was popular among both the ‘paganists’ and the Christian part of the population in Alexandria where she lived.
She was murdered on the orders of Cyril. Cyril was quite an unpleasant figure who was also involved in a pogrom against the Jews. His involvement in the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria and the violent suppression of the Novatian heretics are often cited as examples of his willingness to use violence in religious disputes.
However, he is revered by the church as a ‘saint.’ A strange kind of saint, who rather resembled Pol Pot. What exactly happened to Hypatia? One day she was returning from her university where she had just given a lecture, and a procession of Christian monks led by ‘Peter the Reader’ stopped her carriage. They dragged her out of her carriage and began tearing her clothes, dragging her by her hair through the streets of the city. The group then dragged her into a nearby church where they stripped her naked and used whatever they could find to destroy her. In this case, it was the tiles and oyster shells lying around the newly constructed building. They tore the flesh from her body with these, skinning her alive in the name of Christianity. Her remains were then torn apart and burned on the altar. The University of Alexandria, where she and her father Theon taught, was burned to the ground as a sign of intolerance. In the aftermath of her death, there was a mass exodus of intellectuals and artists who feared for their own safety.
And why is this inhuman being revered as a ‘saint’? Because during theological discussions he had the brilliant idea that Mary was the Mother of God and not just the Mother of Jesus, obviously a great achievement. How gigantic must your brain be to juggle such enormous abstract truths?
One of the arch-patriarchs of Christianity has thus reduced a university to ashes. Earlier this week I already spoke about another saint, Saint Jerome, who notably always carried a red hat, which he preferably placed next to him on the forest floor. Jerome had a particular fondness for caves and self-flagellation, as is also evident in this painting by Joachim Patinir, photographed by me in the Franchetti collection in Venice.
Again the red cloak and hat, and our church saint in some kind of cave.
