You Think I Don’t Ship This?

Images work a powerful effect on the mind. If we question in our hearts who we are, our minds throw up to our vision an image of ourselves. We seek a picture, a word, a name. We feel we do not know our own feelings unless they are named. And we inherit through culture the very names we give to feelings.

This power of culture over our lives is a power we study and recognize. Kenneth Boulding, a philosopher in the sociology of knowledge, writes: "persons themselves are to a considerable extent what their images make them." And he follows this with another insight, which should be terrifying when we consider the images of men and women in pornography and in the pornographic sensibility. He writes: "people tend to remake themselves in the image which other people have of them."

The philosopher of language Wittgenstein gives us a similar insight. He writes: "The child learns to believe a host of things, i.e., it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around."

This relationship between culture and event has tragic consequences in our lives. In 1972, for example, the surgeon general's report on images of violence on television suggested that a causal relationship exists between an exposure to television violence and a child's participation in more aggressive behavior. For culture and event become one another. In the early twentieth century, a magazine publishes a photograph of a real event, a photograph of a woman political activist being tortured by the czarist police. Now this event, through its publication as a photograph, has become culture. And a young man buys this photograph. He stares at it. He becomes obsessed with it. Later he imagines that he is torturing a woman who has rejected him in the same fashion as this photograph depicts. Finally he actuates these fantasies in ritual tortures as a sadomasochist. (We read of his life after he becomes a patient of Wilhelm Stekel.) He makes culture actual.

By this transformation from image to act and act to image, we become imprisoned in a world of mirrors. For we cease to be able to tell illusion from actuality or to distinguish our own natures from the nature we are imagined to have. Thus if we are unhappy, we can find no way out of our dilemma, no door leading us into another world than this world of mirrors. In one mirror we see a photograph of a woman who is tortured. This may be a fictional pose. Or it may be a newspaper reporting an actual event. Or we may witness this event in our own lives. So, gradually, we cease to be able to imagine ourselves as otherwise. Every reflection we see tells us that only cruelty is possi-ble. That violence is inevitable. We are trapped by our own minds.

In this way culture becomes like a web that is invisible to our eyes, made up strand by strand of image and word, each strand becoming more powerful through the existence of the other strands. But we do not see any of the strands. We do not examine our assumptions, our choices, our decisions: Rather, they fade into the background for us. And we confuse them with ourselves and with nature.

So if an image turns into an act, we do not perceive this transformation as having taken place. Rather, we say to ourselves that the image has accurately predicted the future. And if a pornographic fantasy becomes an event, we say that pornography has truthfully portrayed sexuality. And finally, when we read that a man is convicted of kidnapping and "brutally" murdering an adolescent girl "to fulfill a bizarre sexual fantasy," we do not come to understand that the pornographic imagination can lead to actual murder. We do not suspect, as we ought to suspect, that pornography endangers our lives.

-Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature

this magnificent artist ... @sunnnliwx is their @ on most things I believe . please show your support because this is absolutely beautiful .

44-45 minutes?!!! That's it?! That's how long the moon knight finale will be?! What the actual fuck, they gonna show anything at all or what? We need a fucking movie for finale!

WE’RE THE MILLERS (2013) dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber

Overly Honest Methods in science.

Taxes. EVERY rich person hoarding money in banks and as assets is not paying tax properly. That kind of ideal sudden is fucking hypocritical. Secondly the taxes go to govt. who uses it for public but remember, not every govt focuses on individual survivals in their nation. They work on plans that will yield back too be it politically or in terms of capital simply. People in power have their own agendas. Simply speaking taxes, investment banks etc. will not help those with survival battles. I am not saying that people with money should just give away everything, nor am i being judgemental about it. What i mean to say is that, those who sit at the top and earn a huge chunk every minute of the day by average even when they are sitting in the comfort of their homes or offices because those under them are still working to earn the next pay, need to realise they are exploiting way more than they deserve because they have a leg up.

If you have billions of dollars it shouldn’t be a crime to steal from you. You’ve got enough money that your security should be your own responsibility and anyone who manages to swipe from your hoard deserves applause for besting a supervillain

new lestat edit, i love this diva

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It's almost time for dinner. I have peace at home, on my street, in my corner of this world. But in Iran, who has? In uncountable corners of this world someone is being hurt, being murdered, harassed, tortured, beaten- and the highest probability is of them being a woman, a transgender person, a black person, a economically weak person, a mentally or physically disabled person and the likes of such.

When will it stop?! This relative brutality, this harmful tradition of controlling lives that those in power believe to be less worthy of theirs- when all of us "unworthy ones" die?

PRISON ISN'T FOR CITIZENS WITH UN-HARMING SELF EXPRESSION, IT'S FOR THE LIKES OF MORAL POLICE!!!

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