if you're on the water, take care

[veeranger]

i simply cannot vibe with any media that comes out with the message “to hurt each other is mankind’s base nature” because it really literally is not. you just think that because your perception of reality has been poisoned by the cruelty and desperation forced upon us by an capitalist society run by people who REJECT their human nature, not those who embrace it. 

the idea that man itself is a cruel hateful animal is simply wrong and serves nobody except people who are so skeptical of everything they get a twisted sense of satisfaction at thinking that the human heart is evil and seeing things that “prove” them right. the same kind of people who think shit like the stanford prison experiment is a snapshot of how any human being would act in that situation when it factually is not. evil is created situationally, nobody is born evil like it doesn’t work like that. to look at examples of heinousness in people and say “this is what man truly is” is such a disgustingly bleak outlook on life.

when you tell my friends you love them, when you give money to someone struggling, when you go out of your way to help a stranger, when you give back to your community, THOSE are the things that make you human. kindness, love, compassion, goodwill towards others, that’s what humanity is for, not hatred and destruction. it helps nobody to think otherwise

[thisaccisdead]

“I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.” –Ross Gay, The Sanctity of Trains

[ailithnight]

Y’all know how humans became the dominant species on the planet?

We took care of each other. We grouped up in little packs, called it a family, and said “Family takes care of each other.” Small families grouped together with other families and made tribes, clans, villages; then towns, then cities, the nations. 

When there came storms and tsunamis and fires and earthquakes; we banded together and took care of each other and survived. When brother broke his leg, we took care of him until he healed. In basically every other land species, a broken leg is a death sentence because you can’t go get food or water or run from threats. We survive death sentences, and we do it by caring for each other.

So ingrained is our desire to care that we care for other animals. We care for plants. We give names to dirt and stones and stars and we care for them too. 

So intense is our need to love and be loved that isolation wrecks havoc on our mental health. There is no pain worse than the simple thought that one is truly and utterly alone. 

Human Nature is Love. Human Nature has always been Love. It is the defining feature of our species. We evolved to Care and that made us strong.

[dailymarx]

“But capital produces no value. Labour is, besides the earth, the only source of wealth; capital itself is nothing but the stored-up produce of labour.”

— Engels - A Fair Day’s Wage 1881

[thehappinessmachine]

god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do

like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.

but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror. 

it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”

or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”

like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:

“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.

and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.

anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.

that’s horror, to me.

[moresmartoxlahun-blog-deactivat]

@admiraloblivious

[oh-my-hubris-deactivated2024082]

This is amazing

[eliciaforever-deactivated201906]

This post makes me think of Klaus Pinter’s work:

The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.

I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.

Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. <3

[alex-plante]

This is how I feel about wind turbines (I tried to walk up to one once and felt the most inexplicable terror I’ve ever felt in my life), or most things that are ridiculously large, for that matter. Ships fascinate me but make me feel very uneasy. Certain buildings, especially if they look old-timey in any way kind of freak me out. 

Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit. Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.

[thehappinessmachine]

WHAT AMAZING ADDITIONS TO THIS POST, thank you! I didn’t know of Kalus Pinter’s work and now I REALLY want to see it for myself, goodness.

Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.

Overall, THIS HORROR IS WIDELY UNDERUSED IN FICTION and I’m so glad to see so many examples of it posted here!!

[cadimonsignal]

I feel this way about kangaroos. If you really look at a kangaroo for a minute it’s deeply unsettling, they’re bipedal and they have insane abs and they move wrong, it’s too human and I get that creeping horror that this thing exists. If I look at kangaroos too long I feel like I’m going insane

[aworldfullyalive]

Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures did this to me, a bit. It was less the shape than the form–the lumpiness, the uneven shine–but mostly it was the scale. Most of these examples of horror don’t feel quite so wrong when they’re at a scale we can look “down” on. But when they overshadow us, or at least when they overshadow our general certainty of control, even for just a moment, the disorientation can slip suddenly into horror.

[specimen-jar]

consider the Gelitin collective’s enormous pink rabbit left to rot in the Italian alps for the next 10 years

[tyrelpinnegar]

Eoin Mc Hugh - The Ground Itself is Kind,  Black Butter, 2014

[salticid]

Kiki Smith’s lilith sculpture is more humanoid but i feel like it belongs on this post because walking into the stairwell in the met and seeing this fucking thing was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life

[funereal-disease]

If “the horror of wrongness” makes your soul sing as it does mine, read literally anything by Robert Aickman. My favorite is “The Hospice”.

[milfkarlmarx-deactivated2021081]

jonathan sims saw this post and invented The Stranger

[kazoracht]

Summer body goals

[vfollia]

“We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail. […] We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

— Umberto Eco, from a SPIEGEL interview conducted by Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, 11 November 2009

[thewickedwilds]

Witches take their names from places, for places are what give them their strength. The place need not be beautiful, or habitable, or even green. Sand and salt, so much the better. Scrub pine, plumberry, and brambles, better still. From every bitter thing, after all, something hardy will surely grow. From every difficulty, the seed that’s sewn is that much stronger. Ruin is the milk all witches must drink; it’s the lesson they learn and the diet they’re fed upon.

Alice Hoffman, Blackbird House

[luxlightly]

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a thousand more times: No piece of dystopian fiction has ever been a prediction of the future. They are observations and criticisms of the present. 

[luxlightly]

“Wooow! How did Orwell predict the surveillance state so well in 1984??” 

He didn’t. He was making an observation of the surveillance state that already existed in his present, and exaggerated it to make the metaphor obvious.

Learning and discussing these works in terms of them being predictions and having test questions like “do you think his prediction came true?” is not only pointless, but actively counterintuitive. When you frame these works as being ‘people from the past knew that the future would be terrible’ you shift the entire perspective to one of some kind of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. 

These author’s aren’t oracles. They’re satirists. Their predictions ‘come true’ because they were already true when they wrote them. 

[nietp]

Ultimately the most efficient thing you can do to fight pseudoscientific, “alternative” medicine and quackery is to realize that a lot of people turn to it because they have been constantly misdiagnosed, dismissed, ridiculed and abused by actual doctors and healthcare professionals, and what alternative medicines actually provide is a seemingly compassionate environment were they feel heard, validated and respected. As long as people with chronic pain, for example, are told by doctors for years that they’re liars and fakers, there’s a good chance they’ll be tempted to look for something else: in one case they get no efficient medical treatment and are treated horribly, in the other they get no efficient medical treatment and are listened to and told their pain is real. As long as doctors continue to behave like this they’re in no position to criticize how gullible people are.

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

scientific institutions aren’t “corrupted” by racism or sexism, they developed specifically in the context of white and male supremacy. modern medicine developed, in part, to provide a biological basis for oppression and to pathologize the vast majority of the world’s population, all women and all “nonwhite” people. not only that, but many of the major developments in medicine have directly been at the expense of marginalized people. oppressive regimes also often rely on scientific institutions to further subjugate the population.

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

some sources to further read if anyone’s interested!

medicine and imperialism:

colonizing the body, chapter 5, david arnold

curing their ills, chapter 5, meghan vaughan

toward an anthropology of immunology: the body as a nation-state, emily martin

ethical variability: drug development and globalizing clinical trials, adriana petryna

science and authoritarianism/imperialism:

japanese doctors’ experimentation in wartime china, jing bao nie

administering colonial science: nutrition research and human biomedical experimentation in aboriginal communities and residential schools, 1942-1952

the humanitarian impact and implications of nuclear test explosions in the pacific region

medicine, misogyny, and racism:

interrogating bodies: medico-racial knowledge, politics, and the study of a disease, melbourne tapper

the woman in the body, chapter 7: premenstrual syndrome, work discipline, and anger, emily martin

the growth of medical authority: technology and morals in turn-of-the-century obstetrics, judith walzer leavitt

“scenes of an indelicate character”: the medical “treatment” of victorian women, mary poovey

[holdoncallfailed]

ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to deny location sharing and turn off personalized ads and reject all non-essential cookies and not set up siri and face ID

[argyrocratie]

"Globalization has neither brought prosperity, nor harmony between countries. In this early 21st century, the earth is a multipolar planet where imperialist blocs (the US, China, Russia, Europe as a big market that lacks political unity and military power) face each other, no one knowing who might eventually be allied with whom. In domestic policy, phenomena such as Brexit, the socialists’ ever more determined swing to the right, and the rise of so-called populism are symptoms of imminent upheavals that call for political reshuffling. With the climate catastrophe on top of that, socialist dissidents like Mélenchon were hoping that such unstable times would be propitious for change, opening the door to newcomers on the reformist stage.

(...)

What’s missing? One key factor.

In-depth reform implies a social background of mass strikes and crowds demonstrating in the streets. In contrast, what has been happening since the 1980s is the failure of social movements to do more than try and resist factory closures, casualization, and attacks on welfare. To give just one recent example, in France, a succession of demonstrations against the new pension law (increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64) only succeeded as an exercise in damage limitation. Overall, the bourgeois are winning and the proletarians are fighting back in retreat. Capital is mobile, labor is not—unless it is rootless labor imported by “rich” countries (North America and Western Europe) from the “poor” countries (Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa). This prevents parties like LFI from achieving what social-democracy, French and Italian CPs, and British Labour managed to do in the past, when they were well entrenched in workplaces, rooted in local communities, and where family and neighborhood ties contributed to solidarity and unionization.

Reformers now find themselves in the situation of actors out of role, either in France or abroad. Portrayed by The Economist as an outdated reincarnation of Lenin, Jeremy Corbyn has now been safely sidelined, and a Blairite PM is now in office. Spanish Podemos once offered a far-reaching political platform to be put into effect by a broad alliance that inevitably watered down such a program. In Greece, ex-political disruptor Syriza hoped to replace the PASOK as the new mainstream center-left party, until it plummeted in the polls. Die Linke has proved de-radicalized enough to be accepted in coalitions with the socialists and the Greens in several Länder. Bernie Sanders embodied a leftward shift in the Democratic Party, before he realized he could not be nominated for the presidential election and chose to fully support Hillary Clinton. It bears repeating that lesser evilism only succeeds (if it does) by giving up on even mild change and siding with moderate politics that not only achieve nothing, but in fact increase the public appeal of “evil” politics.

Sanders’ program had been compared to Roosevelt’s, but therein lies the problem; the New Deal was backed by wildcat strikes and the CIO’s novel unionization drive of unskilled laborers.

(...)

However bleak the picture, there is no need to prophesize doom. In any case, nearly two hundred years after Marx and Engels’ Manifesto, communist theory has still not been validated by history—there has been ample time to give up on revolution. Indeed quite a few have.

Proletarians have experienced more counter-revolutions than revolutionary attempts and, possibly worse, they have led themselves into many a political deadlock. Two centuries of capitalism have shown us that utter misery does not automatically pave the way to revolution. Neither does the failure of reform.

There are now more large-scale and lengthy strikes than the bourgeois press cares to report (“bourgeois” sounds old-fashioned, but we do not live in a classless age, especially when 90% of French mainstream daily papers are owned or controlled by millionaires), and not all labor conflicts end in defeat. After a nearly two-year strike in 2019-21, Paris hotel cleaners (mostly women) won a substantial pay rise and better workplace conditions. In the rest of Europe and elsewhere, notably in Asia, struggles go on, and the writers as well as the readers of this text obviously take part when we can—otherwise our communist perspective would only be words, words, words. But we also know that revolution is more than a continuation of the ongoing tug-of-war that capital/labor confrontations happen to be most of the time.

The future will not play to any preordained scenario.

No doubt the “realist” school of politics will dismiss our point of view as uselessly negative: “So what do you propose other than a critique of everyone and everything?!”

In the endless “revolution vs. reform” debate, we can only say that pragmatic reform has failed to prevent war (world wars included), that it has proved incapable since the 1980s of countering anti-welfare policies, that it now cannot put an end to the far-right wave currently sweeping a lot of the Western world, not to mention its helplessness in front of the accelerating catastrophic climate crisis. So, who is a dreamer? Who is a realist?

Expect the worst, prepare for the possible best.

-Gilles Dauvé, "Tales from the (French) Far Left" (June 2025)

[thoughtcascades]

i think being too understanding has wasted more of my time than being angry ever did

[dahlia-coccinea]

Illustrations by Charles Keeping for Wuthering Heights

Row 1: Catherine’s interment in a corner of the kirkyard - Penistone Crags and the setting sun

Row 2: Catherine kissed Linton fervently - Catherine galloped home from Wuthering Heights

Row 3: Heathcliff at Catherine’s grave - Ghosts

[boytoymaker]

frank brunner capturimg that specific travelling brand of loneliness immsooooo oh my god

[ivytea]

requiem for vanished birdsong

[ferrantte]

akindofhome 🪿

[phantomrose96]

Living alone by choice is funny because you're like "I wish I had someone to come back to who added light and warmth and companionship to my home, even distantly" but also if anyone else touches your kitchen you'll explode so you can't have that

[phantomrose96]

"The winter sunset is so early and the home is so lonely" *remembers the roommate who never ever even once took the trash out* "and it's staying that way no one is allowed the fuck inside"

[chavdog]

everyone is like. its been a horrible year!!! WHY has this year felt so bad and gruelling??

it's the genocide and ethnic cleansing, the fever pitch hatred of migrants, women, and lgbt people allowing for the prospective abandonment of international human rights law. it's the various modes by which late capitalism and the fascist state is brutalising you and everyone around you. it's trauma. you can do a lot to decide the terms on your own life, but we are all connected to each other and there's a lot to feel and bear witness to and to resist, and that IS a gruelling responsibility.

whatever this year has looked like for you personally, it has been immeasurably traumatic for the global working class. and we should all feel connected to that.

anyway. like rosa said, the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.