Fincher's Tattoo

David Fincher's new film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo expresses a profound sense of female competence. Not only does Lisbeth Salander transform victimization she embodies the greatest virtues of the dark pathos of feminine power. If you haven't seen it you should go now. @brightabyss

#thegirlwiththedragontattoo

dispossessed

via Ashley Wood 

atmospheres unknown

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.”

- Henry David Thoreau

Letter From Orwell

A letter from George Orwell to his publisher as he was finishing 1984:

h/t mishearance

War Is a Racket

In 1935 retired U.S Army General Smedley D. Butler published a book entitled ‘War Is A Racket’ in which he lays bare the economic profiteering and commercial nature of publicly funded state warfare. In the book Butler was shockingly frank about his experience as a career military officer in the midst of a frenzy of wealthy elites clamoring to make profit from all sides of some of the earths most devastating conflicts.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

In an often cited quote from the book Butler says:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Butler then summarizes the main points of his book in the following key passage:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

read the entire book: Here

Daniel Dennett - The Evolution of Purposes

Intro:

Before there was life on Earth, there were no purposes, no reasons. Things just happened. How could purposes emerge from such purposeless conditions? Looking back at the evolution of life on the planet, we can now see - if only dimly - the patterns that led to the exquisite functional organisations of matter that living forms exhibit. We human beings are the only living things that can represent these reasons, and comprehend them, but that does not make them illusory.

Recorded at the Carillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne on 15 November 2011:

Ted Bundy 1989

One of the reasons this website has been 'dark' for weeks now is I have started a new project in my professional life related to psychiatric institutions and the policies and practices that animate them. As a result of this new challenge I have returned to the writings of Foucault, Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, but also to media and more popular writings on madness, abnormality and so-called psychotic individuals. I find my best work is done when it is informed by my indirect curiosities. Right now I'm trying to think the relations between flesh, fantasy, deviance, desire, compulsion, moral schema and social influence - and how these mix with institutional efforts to control and regulate the affairs of human life.

Below is an interview with Ted Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell, 1946-1989) the day before his execution on the electric chair, January 23, 1989, for the multiple kidnappings, rapes and murders of young women in the 1970s. Bundy was interviewed by (the self-righteous) Christian apologetic Dr. James Dobson from Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida.

Here Bundy talks at length of the influence of pornography, violent media and images on the evolution of his most deviant desires and murderous behaviours. It is a fascinating confession of a man who came to self-interprete his life through the lens of what seems to be a heightened moral sensibility.